This month marks the opening of the first major Australian solo exhibition of Pierre Huyghe’s work at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, so today we revisit this review by Alex Bigman, who assesses the humor and mythology of Huyghe’s retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This article was originally published on January 21, 2015.
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Pierre Huyghe. Zoodram 5 (After ‘Sleeping Muse’ by Constantin Brancusi), 2011; glass tank, filtration system, resin mask, hermit crab, arrow crabs, and basalt rock. © Pierre Huyghe. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.
There is a scene in Pierre Huyghe’s shadowy, dreamlike film The Host and the Cloud (2010) in which a woman produces a black rabbit from an unmarked box. No magician, she handles the unexpected animal with a mixture of bewilderment and acute apprehension. Later in the film, she confronts the event during hypnotherapy; then, in a key conversion, she watches her own analysis session performed by shadow puppets in a theater. This sublimation of trauma into spectacle is no doubt the real magic trick—one lurking around every corner in the artist’s impressive retrospective of sleek films, technologically sophisticated objects, and living creatures, currently installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Unbridled by chronology and injected with several unpredictable elements, the exhibition, like Huyghe’s more recent work, is an ambitious update to surrealism, and it is spellbinding. There is, however, a question that critical viewers will be bound to raise: whether Huyghe’s work is perhaps too at home in the 21st century to achieve the uncanny—the lynchpin of surrealism as we have traditionally understood it.
Three films form the backbone of the exhibition: The Host and the Cloud, mentioned above, captures a group of people’s unscripted responses to “live situations” that unfold in an abandoned ethnographic museum; A Way in Untilled (2012) zooms in to the levels of animal, insect, and bacterial life at a former compost of a city park, modified by Huyghe for Documenta 13; and A Journey That Wasn’t (2005) weaves together footage from a trip to Antarctica and an “orchestral event”/laser show produced by the artist in New York’s Central Park. As art films, each takes the license to eschew conventional narrative and redirect focus on the sensuousness of sounds, images, and ideas. The Host and the Cloud, however, also veers effortlessly into the cinematic. Despite the supposedly unstaged nature of the film’s content, Huyghe’s smart use of editing, lighting, and score sustains gripping drama over a two-hour duration. Indeed, long stretches of the film could be compared to the more adventurous work of director David Lynch. Notably, Huyghe, like the Hollywood director, seems to select only actors who are extraordinarily beautiful.
Yet Huyghe is clearly interested in a drama more expansive than what cinema alone can provide. In this retrospective, he displays his films alongside other works that are sure to inflect, even disrupt, what is on screen, thereby ensuring that the films become inextricable from a larger, artfully arranged milieu. Flanking The Host and the Cloud, for example, are Zoodram 5, an aquarium with a giant hermit crab that has made its home in a resin mask inspired by a work of Constantin Brancusi; De Hory Modigliani, a painting by the famous forger purchased by Huyghe in 2007; and RSI, Un Bout de Réel, a sculpture of tangled neon rings, suspended from the ceiling, that turn on at seemingly key moments to bathe the otherwise darkened room in harsh light. The latter effectively censor what is onscreen while revealing other objects in the room that may have escaped notice, such as a fur coat laid out in the corner—bedding, we will see, for another live character. A Journey That Wasn’t shares its pitch-black box with L’Expedition Scintillante, Acte 2 (Light Box), an entrancing contraption that, as soon as its neighboring film ends, begins a smoke-mediated light show set to a composition by Erik Satie. Acts 1 and 3—weather machines producing snow, rain, and fog, and a broken rink of black ice, respectively—are installed nearby.
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Pierre Huyghe. Untitled (Human Mask), 2014; film. Courtesy of the Artist; Hauser and Wirth, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Anna Lena, Paris. © Pierre Huyghe.
Huyghe’s predilection for theatricality becomes obvious at the very threshold of the exhibition, where one encounters Name Announcer (2011), a tuxedoed man who announces the name of each visitor to enter. (The work is on loan from a private collection, whatever that means.) Inside, soaring temporary walls—shipped to Los Angeles from France, where they performed the same role in the retrospective’s debut at Centre Pompidou this past fall, so as to “embed the exhibition’s own history within its current presentation”—cut LACMA’s spacious Resnick Pavilion at angles reminiscent of an expressionist film set, in which complete darkness may be preserved in one area, variable fluorescent illumination in another, raking sunlight somewhere else. The galleries are supposedly even perfumed with a scent titled Paris, 1738, though the effect was apparently too subtle for my nose. Then there are the appearances by characters from the films. A creepy, LED-masked player from The Host and the Cloud stalked through my peripheral vision once and only once during my several-hour visit, while “Human,” the exquisitely odd-looking Ibizan hound featured in A Way in Untilled, clearly ruled the roost, leisurely interacting with visitors or making herself comfortable upon the opulent fur coats laid out for her. Perhaps the most arresting apparition of all, however, was Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt), a statue of a reclining figure wearing a live beehive for a mask, first encountered in the film Untilled, then seen on a terrace behind doors marked “live beehive: enter at your own risk.” At once beautiful and unsettling, the work transfixes or threatens, depending on which side of the glass the viewer stands.
For modernist critics like Michael Fried, theatricality in art is objectionable. But today, too, some viewers will probably bristle at Huyghe’s showy scenes, perhaps with the less well-theorized term “spectacle” in mind (or perhaps not, this being Los Angeles, after all). Indeed, with many guests flocking from “situation” to “situation” rather than engaging in prolonged contemplation, viewing works more as curiosities than art (“It’s real ice!” confirmed one man, running his finger along the surface of L’Expedition Scintillante, Acte 3), the galleries in places come to resemble an immersive theater event more than hallowed museum halls. Before making hasty condemnations, however, it bears recalling that spectacle has always had its place in the surrealist tradition. Indeed, one need look no further than the canonical Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme of 1938, in which coffee was brewed to perfume the darkened galleries, and visitors were given flashlights with which to throw startlingly sudden light on works by the likes of Dalí, Oppenheim, and Duchamp.
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Pierre Huyghe. Untitled (Human Mask), 2014; film. Courtesy of the Artist; Hauser and Wirth, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Anna Lena, Paris. © Pierre Huyghe.
Others may find noxious another element that pervades the bulk of Huyghe’s recent works: money, or at least its image in the form of beautiful people onscreen, with sleek and technologically sophisticated objects in the wings. Indeed, many of Huyghe’s recent works require substantial underwriting and special expertise. Trips to Antarctica aren’t cheap; maintaining an 850-square-foot rink of black ice in Los Angeles, probably less so. For better or for worse, people have by now become accustomed to blockbuster Pop art exhibitions (see: Koons, Murakami)—so much so that the very idea of a contemporary work of Pop not involving a village of studio assistants and plastic fabricators seems downright quaint. Is Huyghe a harbinger of blockbuster surrealism? One may argue that it does not matter; good art is good art, and to be sure, this exhibition is a treasure trove of exceptionally intelligent, complex, and engrossing objects. On the other hand, this retrospective makes clear the repercussions of ever-expanding budgets. The artist’s more modest pieces from the 1990s appear dull, even throwaway, by comparison, and are installed as such in a vestibular gallery that mostly urges the viewer to move on. Surely the early pieces have intelligences of their own, but the further one moves into the exhibition, the harder they are to see.
Marking the transition point between the artist’s early and mature career is No Ghost Just a Shell. In this project, orchestrated between 2000 and 2002, Huyghe bought the copyrights to a manga character named Annlee, freeing fellow artists to use her in their work and thus allowing her to “exist independently of the culture industry,” then transferred the copyrights to Annlee association, an entity legally owned by Annlee herself, in order to ensure that “her rights would be her own,” effectively “liberating her from the realm of representation altogether.” At once conceptual, absurd, and legally very real, the project helped to launch Huyghe’s career as an artist with a singular wit and a rare grip on contemporaneity. In this retrospective, four Annlee-related works, including the legal copyright transfer, hang in a sidelined alcove that is almost sure to be overlooked. The contemporary, one may infer, has moved into still more dazzlingly surreal dimensions, and Huyghe has moved agilely with it.