Post on 07-Apr-2020
Press Release
PIERRE HUYGHE UUmwelt 3 October 2018 – 10 February 2019 Serpentine Gallery Sponsored by LUMA Foundation
Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press
‘I don’t want to exhibit something to someone, but rather the reverse: to exhibit someone to something.’ Pierre Huyghe Pierre Huyghe, one of the world’s leading conceptual artists, known for creating complex immersive ecosystems, presents a major new exhibition at the Serpentine this autumn. The Gallery becomes a porous and contingent environment, housing different forms of cognition, emerging intelligence, biological reproduction and instinctual behaviours. Throughout the Gallery, large LED screens present images which began in the mind of a human. The brain activity is captured as a person imagines a specific situation that the subject has been prompted to think of. One by one, each thought is reconstructed by a deep neural network and the images created are exhibited in the Gallery, where they will be in a constant process of reconstruction, endlessly modified by external factors – light, temperature and humidity levels, the presence of insects, and the gaze of visitors. The Serpentine Gallery building is subtly altered, affecting the conditions of the exhibition’s environment. Sanding the walls, dust from the paint of previous exhibitions lies on the floor. The central Gallery, transformed into
an incubator, is birthing thousands of flies that migrate towards the centre of the dome. Born in Paris in 1962 and based in New York, Pierre Huyghe works on situations that are often based on speculative models. The environments he creates are complex systems in which interdependent agents, biotic and abiotic, real and symbolic, are self-organising, co-evolving in a dynamic and unstable mesh. Crucially, the different modes of existence and intelligence involved are often imperceptible to the visitors who encounter them. This new exhibition for the Serpentine follows Huyghe’s recent acclaimed projects, including After ALife Ahead for Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2017; Untilled at dOCUMENTA(13), 2012; and The Host and the Cloud in 2010. Technology has been a growing focus of the Serpentine programme in recent seasons across exhibitions, digital commissions and live programmes. Artificial intelligence was a core theme of the Guest, Ghost, Host Machine: Marathon in 2017, while spring 2018 saw exhibitions by artists Sondra Perry, exploring blackness as a technology, and Ian Cheng, who birthed a new AI artwork called BOB that evolved in real time during its Serpentine stay. ‘When what is made is not necessarily due to the artist as the only operator, the only one generating intentions and that instead it’s an ensemble of intelligences, of entities biotic or abiotic, beyond human reach, and that the present situation has no duration, is not addressed to anyone, is indifferent, at that moment perhaps the ritual of the exhibition can self-present.’ Pierre Huyghe in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2018 ‘[Huyghe] is not interested in creating fictions, but new realities; the realities he has created have proved unsettlingly visionary.’ ArtReview Autumn at the Serpentine continues with Atelier E.B’s exhibition Passer-by at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery (3 October to 6 January), the closing weeks of the 2018 Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Frida Escobedo and open until 7 October. The second part of the Serpentine’s durational symposium, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, returns to ZSL London Zoo in November/December.
For press information contact: Rose Dempsey, rosed@serpentinegalleries.org, + 44 (0)20 7298 1520 V Martin, v@serpentinegalleries.org, +44 (0)20 7298 1519 Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA Serpentine Sackler Gallery, West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, London W2 2AR Join the discussion about the exhibition online at: Twitter @serpentineUK Instagram @serpentineUK Facebook /Serpentine Galleries Discover more about Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition after its opening through new audio, video and text content on the digital Mobile Tour, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and accessible and free for all at sgtours.org Image Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries; © Kamitani Lab / Kyoto University and ATR.
NOTES FOR EDITORS About Pierre Huyghe Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris) lives in New York. His exhibitions are complex systems in which interdependent agents, biotic and abiotic, real and symbolic, are self-organising and co-evolving in a dynamic and unstable mesh. Huyghe is the recipient of the Nasher Prize (2017), Kurt Schwitters Prize (2015), Roswitha Haftmann Prize (2013), Contemporary Artist Award, Smithsonian American Art Museum (2010), Hugo Boss Prize (2002), and Special Jury Prize at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001). Selected exhibitions include Skulptur Projekte 2017, Munster, Germany (2017), Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2016), The Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission, New York, USA (2015), LACMA, Los Angeles, USA and Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany (both 2014), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2013), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2012), Museo de Arte Contemporanea Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2010), Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2008), Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (2006), Wollman Ice Rink, Central Park, New York, USA (2005).
PIERRE HUYGHE UUmwelt
Lord and Lady Foster
Sarah ArisonEleanor and Bobby Cayre
3 October 2018 – 10 February 2019
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Pierre Huyghe is one of the world’s leading artists. He creates porous and contingent environments, complex systems in which biotic and abiotic, real and symbolic agents evolve. Although Huyghe intentionally alters the sites in which he works, events and growth are often encouraged to occur without his control. The exhibition is therefore changed irrevocably and unpredictably over the course of the time in which it exists.
For his exhibition at the Serpentine, Huyghe thought of a project that would only exist in the mind of a subject and the result of that imagination would be exhibited, without having to decide on the outcome or means of artistic expression. Huyghe began with a speculative situation and selected a set of elementary components for its construction. These mental components are building blocks for young animals, children and intelligent machines to mentally play with, and communicate only using their minds.
To start this project, Huyghe gave these components to be imagined by a subject. The person’s brain activity was captured as they imagined the elements they were prompted to think of. These thoughts, or ‘mental images’ have been reconstructed by a deep neural network.
This series of mental images, here in process of formation, are now presented on large LED screens distributed throughout the gallery and are endlessly modified by external conditions: light, temperature and humidity levels, the presence of insects, and the gaze of visitors.
The instability of the images displayed on the screens is matched by the exhibition’s inability to resolve itself as existing in the present or the past, even as it evolves towards a future version of itself. A community of flies living in the central gallery create patterns on the domed ceiling as they hatch, grow and learn to fly; areas of the gallery walls have been sanded down, and the dust from the paint of previous exhibitions laying on the floor is tracked across the floor as visitors enter and depart.
Together, these elements make up an ecosystem that loops together human, animal and technological players. The movement of the flies and the presence of visitors detected by sensors affect the conditions of the exhibition, and modify the presentation of the mental images. Just like the dust that may leave the gallery with them, the presence of visitors within the gallery may affect what becomes visible after they leave.
Exhibition curated by: Rebecca Lewin, Curator Natalia Grabowska, Assistant Curator
2018 – ongoing Deep image reconstruction, sensors, sound, scent, incubator, flies, sanded wall, dust
Special thanks to: Hauser & Wirth, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Taro Nasu and Kamitani Lab / Kyoto University and ATR
Anne Stenne, Sara Simon, Laura McAdams, Andy Slemenda, Anne-Sophie Tisseyre, Jennifer Cohen Luxloop (Mandy Mandelstein, Ivaylo Getov), Robin Meier
Photography permitted Share your photos @SerpentineUK A guide of the exhibition is available to purchase from the front desk.
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Dorothea von Hantelmann
Situated Cosmo-Technologies
Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled and After ALife Ahead
Untilled (2012)
Two of Pierre Huyghe’s recent works have attained an iconic status within and beyond their
exhibition contexts: Untilled, the inscrutable, complex space without categorical separations
of nature and culture, of animate and inanimate material realised at documenta 13 in Kassel,
2012, and After ALife Ahead, his speculative environment at Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017.
Both are key artworks of our time, not only because of the eco-political themes they
implemented, such as exchange processes between nature and culture and interspecies
relations, issues to which the 2012 edition of documenta was specifically dedicated. What
makes these works stand out is the way in which the incorporation of these topics brings
Huyghe to radically redefine the question of art and that of the exhibition.
For Untilled, Huyghe chose an unusual and decidedly decentralised venue: the compost
facility located in the back of the Karlsaue park, a kind of overgrown vacant lot with a
walkway leading through it, at times really just a beaten path with algae-covered puddles.
Tyre tracks testified to human presence; the hills were overgrown with plants and weeds.
Paving slabs lay stacked on the edge of the path. There was a pile of black chippings, and an
ant colony had formed at the foot of an oak.
Towards the middle of the vacant lot, a reclining concrete figure was positioned – a replica of
a work by the sculptor Max Weber from the 1930s. On its shoulders, the figure bore a beehive
populated by a trembling, buzzing swarm of bees in lieu of a head. And there was a dog – the
elegant white female greyhound, Human, who, with her pink leg, would become the
trademark of that documenta. At some point, one began to sense that the stacked slabs were
arranged in some way, as was the nearby basin, replete with splashing tadpoles. The compost
hills were planted with psychotropic, medical and aphrodisiacal plants such as digitalis,
deadly nightshade and angel’s trumpets. Cannabis was also there, as well as rye, which is
itself a completely harmless grain but is particularly likely to harbour ergot, a fungus that can
be used to synthesise LSD.
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Huyghe had collected several artefacts – he calls them ‘markers’ – from various times and
contexts. The stacked slabs recalled the forms and materials of Minimal Art, while a felled
tree alluded to Robert Smithson’s Dead Tree of 1969. An overturned bench resting between
the stone slabs was part of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation at documenta 11, and
a small, desiccated oak was part of 7000 Eichen (7,000 Oaks) by Joseph Beuys. Some of
these markers were more obvious; others were only recognisable as such, if at all, with the
help of a drawing by the artist published in the short guide. The latter included various
adaptations of functional elements from literary texts. A turtle wandering around the
composting facility was borrowed from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (Against the
Grain). And the young man who was nearly always present in order to take care of the dogs –
apart from Human there was also a puppy – personified, with his constantly repeated, always
identical actions, a reference to the living dead in the garden of Raymond Roussel’s fantastic
fiction Locus Solus.
There were, however, aspects of the work that remain open. Even today, I do not know
whether Huyghe was the one who formed the hills or whether they were already there,
whether he made the path, which of the plants were already growing at the site and which he
planted. The beehive, anthill, water basin and piles of stones were arranged. But what about
the ecosystems located at the edge of visibility, like the tadpoles? Were they part of the work?
Even on closer inspection, it was unclear what had been artistically altered and what hadn’t,
where the composting facility ended and the work of art began. An interplay of composition
and uncomposed-ness characterised the site and made it seem awkwardly charged. Although
the artistic work invested in the composition of the site was palpable, it wasn’t possible to
completely itemise what exactly this composition entailed.
Untilled realised itself as a complex heterogeneous system in which organic, biological and
mineralogical elements played just as big a part as human and industrial products (the paving
slabs, for example). There were individual and collective organisms (human beings, bee hive
and ant colony), each with its own forms of division of labour, social organisation and
intelligence. All these elements were connected to one another via biological or social
processes; all were integrated into different processes in relation to reproduction,
dissemination and decay. Art also formed part of this system. It became manifest in the
female figure, a typical park sculpture with fertility motif that the bees transformed into a kind
of surreal image, while nonetheless initiating very real fertilisation processes. Art was also
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present as references to documenta (7000 Eichen) and to various artists with whom Huyghe
has engaged in an intense artistic dialogue (Robert Smithson) or who are also friends
(Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster). None of these markers was ‘exhibited’ or appropriated in the
sense of postmodern citations. None of the elements received a prominent or overriding
position. They were all simply there – the bench as bench, the oak as oak – as components of
an organism that encompassed human (art, industry) and non-human production forms and
products, which were non-hierarchically arranged and enmeshed with each other in both
artificial and biological formation processes.
Because Huyghe integrated plant and animal forms into the creation of his work, it was
subject to constant changes that occurred independently of both the artist and the visitors.
Untilled’s realisation was based on processes and events that were initiated by the artist but
then continued to organise themselves independently and irrespectively of the initial form.
The dissemination of plant seeds by the bees and ants was part of the artwork's conception,
but the way in which this occurred could not be planned. The bees lent the sculpture a surreal
touch, but they also spread pollen and catalysed formation processes that were more organic
and biological than artistically determined. And these bees not only disseminated the seeds,
but they also reproduced – so much so that the head of the sculpture grew constantly and was
monstrously swollen after several months. One found oneself amidst a process that seemed to
generate itself out of contingency. The site of the work was a site of becoming.
Huyghe speaks of ‘habitats’ and of objects as ‘ecosystems’, thus explicating the relational
style of thinking by which his works are informed. ‘In any kind of museum’, he says,
‘whether art, anthropological, or natural history, objects have been separated from context,
from history, from narratives, objectified, categorized.’1 Huyghe, in contrast, conceives of
objects as things-in-relation, or better, as being relations: determined by their relationships to
their inner worlds and exterior environments. The core visual trope that translates his
relational thinking into the realm of the aesthetic is that of the object becoming ‘porous’ and
‘leaking’ into its environment. He doesn’t mean that metaphorically, but rather in the sense of
creating dissonances between the physical and the symbolic, so that a symbolic meaning
‘leaks out’ of its physical shape. ‘I’m interested in the vitality of the image’, he says, ‘in the
1 Pierre Huyghe in conversation with Dorothea von Hantelmann, in Dorothea von Hantelmann and Asad Raza (ed.), Décor, (Brussels: The Boghossian Foundation, 2016), p. 30.
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way an idea, an artifact, leaks into a biological or mineral reality.’2 An imaginary, mental
image obtains a material support and, in a sense, steps into the world. The dog is such a
‘leaking’, living image, a kind of real fiction – a mental and yet a real image, a moment of
artificialisation.
We know from neurobiology and epigenetics that the symbolic, the act of giving
meaning, of interpretation, is not external to biology, but forms an internal part of material life
and its processes. Huyghe’s objects are porous because there is no such thing as a distinct,
autonomous object, just as there is no clear-cut separation between matter and meaning,
between objects and their environment. Our bodies contain only 10 percent human cells and
that the remaining 90 percent are bacteria of all kinds on which we depend to survive. We are
connected to everything and everything is connected to us. This is the cosmology to which
Huyghe is attached, with his objects that are interdependent, constantly and endlessly forming
and being formed, triggering and receiving, affecting and being affected, acting and reacting.
‘Each one is self-organized, and at the same time needs the others’,3 as he puts it, taking his
cues from, among others, the social anthropologist Tim Ingold and Jakob von Uexküll, who,
in the early twentieth century coined the notion of Umwelt and is seen as the founder of
biosemiotics. Every cell and every living being, according to Uexküll, is an agent, creating its
individual environment. Umwelt is thus never objectively given but always exists as a
plurality of subjectively meaningful Um-Welten that are constituted by a series of elements.
Agamben, influenced by Uexküll, paraphrases these as ‘carriers of significance’ or ‘marks’.4
The idea to create a plurality of environments in which all elements exist and act as subjects,
perceiving and reacting to sensory data as signs, is essential for Huyghe’s projects in Kassel
and Münster. Humans form part but not the centre of this heterogeneous yet comprehensive
cosmology, where everything is included and everything is related.
Alongside Untilled, there is a partly-published corpus of drawings containing both
visual elements and written notes that is helpful to understanding the works’ conceptual
layers. Referring to the specific properties of the composting site, these drawings thematise
various and distinct kinds of transformation processes: things and bodies, fragmented and
decomposed, that are in the process of being constructed and deconstructed; phenomena of
2 Sky Godden, ‘Pierre Huyghe Explains His Buzzy Documenta 13 Installation and Why His Work is Not Performance Art’, Artinfo Canada, 30 August 2012. http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/822127/pierre-huyghe-explains-his-buzzy-documenta-13-installation-and-why-his-work-is-not-performance-art [August 2018] 3 Pierre Huyghe in conversation with Dorothea von Hantelmann, p. 29. 4 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 39.
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instability and contingency that emerge; and processes of self-transformation, for example as
an effect of consuming hallucinogenic plants. On one of the drawings is written: ‘The …
complex coexistence between the biological plants and living entities and the cemetery of
cultural fragments could metabolize though entropy into new soil.’
In the following, I’ll elaborate on some aspects of Untilled that also manifest in the
piece for Münster discussed later on. This includes the relational thought style that underlies
both projects as well as the question of art and the exhibition. I’d like to start, however, where
the work themselves start: their situatedness within the given conditions of a concrete
environment.
The Situated Artwork
Since the 1960s, Daniel Buren’s in situ works have been characterised by the suspension of
the boundaries between work, carrier, frame and place. The place where the work is
developed becomes an integral part of the work itself, which is situated in a constant interplay
between the site and its artistic transformation. Because the artistic forms and media that
Buren uses stem from painting, however, this does not lead to the total interpenetration of
natural processes that characterise Untilled. This interpenetration can more readily be found
in the work of Robert Smithson, who, in order to realise an idea of art that integrates ‘nature’
in all its discursive and material permeability, moved out of the cities and worked instead with
deserts and salt lakes, which he called ‘sites’, so that his works could enter a total connection
with the environment. For Huyghe, ‘situated’ does not mean site-specific, in the sense of how
these forerunners would create site-specific works. His connection to a site is neither
painterly/conceptual (as for Buren), nor is it necessarily removed from civilisation (as for
Smithson). ‘Situated’, as Huyghe puts it, ‘means inside an array of dynamic forces and scales
that also go beyond human subject perception and are indifferent to its presence.’5 Site-
specificity is not sufficient, because it alone does not take the artwork beyond
anthropocentricity.
In 2010, two years prior to the realisation of Untilled, Huyghe produced the film The
Host and the Cloud, which was set in a former ethnographic museum located on the outskirts
of Paris in a 150 year-old park that comprised a zoo, exhibition sites and an amusement park.
5 Pierre Huyghe in conversation with Dorothea von Hantelmann, p. 31.
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The film is based on a sequence of social gatherings that loosely allude to rituals, such as a
legal trial, a coronation, a hypnosis session and an orgy, that were witnessed by invited
guests. These situations were initiated within certain parameters and arrangements that
Huyghe had set beforehand, but subsequently unfolded according to their own dynamics, or,
to use his terminology, began to ‘leak into contingency’. This was the start of his experiments
with the idea of an auto-generating system, a set of operations that then generates its own
reality. At the end of this experiment, however, he realised that there had already been living
beings like ants and insects in the disused museum spaces.6 The place was a habitat, not
simply a container, as evidenced by a sequence in the film where an actor observes a worm
that he holds in his hand. From this point on, situating a work in a habitat, blending into this
habitat and connecting to it in multiple ways – to its physicality, its social or historical
meaning, to economic factors, to the weather and so on – became a decisive criterion for
Huyghe. And to accept that not all aspects of this connection are controllable or
apprehensible. Some are actual, some are virtual. Some are artistically composed and
arranged, others proceed without Huyghe’s influence and even remain invisible, taking place
on microbiological and bacterial levels.
Comparing Untilled with Earth Art works such as Walter De Maria’s famous Earth Room
(1977) makes the specificity of Huyghe’s approach clearer: De Maria brings earth into a
gallery space in New York, but both remain entirely disconnected from each other. While De
Maria adds to a context, Huyghe’s work essentially ‘grows’ out of its context. Each work
begins with an inventory of what is already there; the starting point is the given situation with
which the work forms a bond. This conjunction can start with a museum’s roofing (as in his
work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York), with the plants on site (as in Kassel), or
even with the water dripping from the ventilation system (as in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris).
Complexity then emerges from the interdependence between what is already there and what
Huyghe brings in, which also changes with each new manifestation of a work. While Untilled
incorporated works from the history of documenta in Kassel, Huyghe recently realised the
work in Japan with a Japanese sculpture. It almost goes without saying that the selection of
the site is a crucial process for Huyghe, precisely because its properties become an active,
even generative component of the work.
6 Van Hoorn, Allard, ‘Pierre Huyghe: the moment of suspension’, in Domus Magazine, October 2011. https://www.domusweb.it/en/art/2011/10/18/pierre-huyghe-the-moment-of-suspension.html [August 2018]
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There is a certain affinity between Huyghe’s practice and Donna Haraway’s formulation of
‘situated knowledge’, which was developed as early as 1988 and has since advanced to a
central topos of science studies. With this concept, Haraway criticises the notion of an
abstract, absolute, autonomous and universally valid knowledge. Against such a disembodied
notion of objectivity, she advances particularity and embodiment. ‘You don't think with the
mind’, as the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti has said, ‘You think with the entire fleshed
existence [...] You don't think in a mind that fantasises a relation between being and knowing;
the reference for thinking is the body immersed in radically immanent relations [...] You
cannot step outside the slab of matter that you inhabit.’7 Situated knowledge is embodied,
embedded and inserted in language, cultures and traditions; it is always local, limited and
thought from one’s own contemporary situation; it is always based in experience and
experimental.
Untilled is Huyghe’s first work to formulate this approach as both a method, a practice and an
attitude, while also integrating it into the artwork’s ontological status in the sense of a work
that was situated in its environment, woven into its context, that took root and continued to
take root in its environment with every moment of its existence. Having neither beginning nor
end, it remained indeterminate even in its topographical structure and was suffused with
contingency to its very core because the materials and processes of the specific site were
constitutively integrated into the work.
A Relational Thinking beyond the Anthropos
In Le rêve de d’Alembert (D’Alembert’s Dream), Denis Diderot’s main exposition of his
materialist theories, he develops his theory of a universal matter, arguing that sensitivity is an
inherent general property of all matter. He goes on to define all forms in nature, from the
stone to the human being, on this basis. In the first of the three dialogues, Diderot argues with
his friend d’Alembert, a mathematician, physicist and co-publisher of the Encyclopédie, who
questions Diderot’s theory of the sensitivity of matter, replying incredulously, ‘then stone
must be sensitive’. Diderot demonstrates how stone can undergo a series of transformative
processes during which its sensitivity changes. ‘When the marble block is reduced to the
7 Rosi Braidotti, Timotheus Vermeulen (Interview), ‘Borrowed Energy’, in Frieze, August 2014, https://frieze.com/article/borrowed-energy [August 2018]
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finest powder’, Diderot says, ‘I mix this powder with humus or compost, work them well
together, water the mixture, let it rot for a year, two years, a century, for I am not concerned
with time. When the whole has turned into a more or less homogenous substance – into
humus – do you know what I do?’ ‘I am sure you don’t eat it’, his friend replies. And Diderot
answers: ‘No, but there is a way of uniting that humus with myself, of appropriating it, a
latus, as the chemists would call it. […] I sow peas, beans, cabbages and other leguminous
plants. The plants feed on the earth and I feed on the plants.’ ‘I like this transition from
marble to humus, from humus to vegetable matter and from vegetable matter to anima, to
flesh’ D’Alembert responds.8
Later, Diderot takes the metaphor of a swarm of bees forming a cluster to illustrate his theory
of the unity of the organism, which is derived from a multiplicity of ‘sensitive and living’
molecules. The cluster, he claims, resembles a single creature with innumerable heads and
wings:
Have you ever seen a swarm of bees leaving their hive? … The world, or the
general mass of matter, is the great hive […] This cluster is a being, an
individual, a kind of living creature [...] If one of those bees decides to pinch in
some way the bee it is hanging on to, what do you think will happen? [The
Philosopher] will tell you that this second bee will pinch its neighbor, and that
throughout the cluster as many individual sensations will be provoked as
there are little creatures, and that the whole cluster will stir, move, change
position and shape, that a noise will be heard, the sound of their little cries,
and that a person who had never seen such a cluster form would be tempted
to take it for a single creature with five or six hundred heads and a thousand
or twelve hundred wings.9
When Haraway speaks of the ethical and practical task of ‘reworlding’ landscapes,
technologies and species without adopting the consoling premise of ‘human
8 Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 151–2. 9 Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 168.
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exceptionalism’,10 she refers back to Alfred North Whitehead, who developed an ontology
that is not based on the perceiving subject.11 Whitehead was influenced not only by Einstein’s
theory of relativity, but also, and above all, by the evolutionary biology of Charles Darwin
and his theories about the significance of chance and the interlinking of living creatures and
ways of living. Whitehead’s project was to develop a metaphysics that could stand up to the
theories of Einstein and Darwin. He thus came to focus on live processes, on processes in
general and on overcoming anthropocentricity. Whitehead countered the modern bifurcation
into nature and culture with gradual distinctions that were no longer categorical. For example,
instead of distinguishing categorically between the modalities of a stone, an animal and a
human being, he instead placed them on different points of a scale.12
In the wake of Whitehead, an intellectual tendency has been established in recent years where
the relational has come to replace substance-oriented thought, at least as it has been passed
down to us since antiquity. Here, the concept of the relation in a sense undermines the concept
of substance, which itself becomes a unit of relations. A key idea is that in their unfolding,
relations continually give rise to the beings they join. Such an affirmation of the multiplicity
of relations that situate us in the world can be found in many non-European cultures, as
demonstrated in the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold, who writes: ‘Your relations with
others get inside you and make you the being you are. And they get inside the others as
well.’13 And further: ‘Beings do not so much interact as intra-act; they are inside the
action.’14 What these distinct philosophical tendencies share is an attempt to overcome
Immanuel Kant’s legacy, or more specifically his metaphysics, which is a metaphysics of
boundaries that constantly refer to the subject and are established by the subject. The
problematics of this direction of thought consist in increasing the separation between humans
and the world, while the transcendental subject increasingly takes centre stage. In the context
of non-anthropocentric thinking, the neologism ‘correlationism’ functions as a generic term
for all the ways of thinking that ultimately belong to the Kantian tradition, with its emphasis
on the perceiving subject. Thinking is always related to the world, just as the world always
10 Donna J. Haraway, When species meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2008); Gane, Nicholas, ‘“When We Have Never Been Human, What Is To Be Done?” Interview with Donna Haraway’, in Theory, Culture & Society, 23 (2006), S. 138–58. 11 See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology [1929], (ed.) (New York: Free Press 1979); Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature [1920] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 12 Ibid., The Concept of Nature, p. 166. 13 Tim Ingold, Anthropology. Why It Matters (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), p. 103. 14 Ibid (emphasis in the original).
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appears to a thinking subject. One alternative to this tradition, in which Huyghe is also
interested, attempts to speculate on something beyond this correlation.
Art, as we came to understand it in modernity, is defined in fundamentally anthropocentric
terms. Its paradigm is one of autonomy and expressly not of interdependence. The exhibited
object is first and foremost ex-hibited, i.e. a physical object that is extracted from its contexts
and relations. This object encounters an observer likewise removed from her bodily
entwinement with the world and mostly reduced to her sense of vision, precisely the sense
that serves as the primary vehicle for our cognitive and rational understanding of the world. It
seems hardly a coincidence that the format of the exhibition developed around roughly the
same time as Kant’s thought. This opposition between subject and object that lies at the heart
of the exhibitionary dispositif has been structured in profoundly correlationist terms. The
roots of the exhibition format are related to liberalism, to its catchwords of individual freedom
and autonomy, and to what constitutes the foundation of this liberalism: a thinking in regimes
of separation. Practices of separation that form the fundamental attitude of a western
modernity have proved extremely productive: leading politically to liberation from the
stringent social ties of feudal societies; in terms of the history of ideas, driving the movement
toward an enlightened, modern rationality, and economically allowing humans to separate
themselves from nature and look at it as a kind of repository of resources. Within a western
modernity, museums and exhibitions became ritual places where this separation mentality is
cultivated: in the exhibited artwork as an object, that, being taken out of its pre-existing
networks of meaning or use has internalised acts of separation; in the sensorial regimes
installed by the museum that prioritise visuality, which, according to Simmel and others, is a
distancing sense, and finally also in the space itself. More than anything, the white cube is a
flexible, disconnected kind of Cartesian space, a cleared space freed of real-world influences
where all natural processes and vibrations – temperature, light, acoustics – are regulated and
in which the objects can be presented in new, ever-changing contexts. In the same way, the
modern individual does not exist in stable social relations but only in multiple and persistently
mutable ones.
I’m setting out this historical-cultural background in order to emphasise two points: first,
Huyghe’s practice of situating, of connecting to a site, is not about cultivating connectivity
per se, which seems important to point out in regard to today’s ubiquitous necessities and
demand to connect. Connection, as I see it in Huyghe’s work, is addressed on a much more
11
profound ontological level. It refers to a conception of the world and to a way of conceiving
one’s own way of being in that world. Ontologically and, if you will, spiritually, the idea of
separation and autonomy is a fiction, an ideology. Indeed, processes of separation appear
frequently in Huyghe’s work in relation to fictionalisation and artificialisation, such as in the
dog with the pink leg who is ‘separated from herself’, as Huyghe writes in his notes, or in the
bees that ‘colonise’ the head of the female figure.
Second, precisely because the exhibition format’s paradigm is one of autonomy and expressly
not of interdependence, the relational ontology of Untilled is realised in persistent opposition
to the gravitational forces of a context, which is bound to the opposite thought style. Seen in
this way, Untilled can be understood as a kind of antithesis to the artwork and the exhibition.
Much like in exhibitions, one has to explore and walk around Huyghe’s site in order to
appreciate its individual elements. Unlike the exhibition, however, these elements are
interrelated, interdependent, constantly affecting and transforming each other. The concept of
the boundary loses its rigidity as everything finds itself in an enduring process of
transformation and blending. ‘The compost is the place where you throw things that you don’t
need, that are dead’, according to Huyghe. ‘You don’t display things. You don’t make a mise-
en-scène, you don’t design things, you just drop them.’15 In contrast to the idea of an artwork
entirely addressed to the human gaze, Huyghe’s objects incessantly form and transform
themselves, independently of whether they are being observed or not. ‘And when someone
enters that site, things are in themselves, they don’t have a dependence on the person. They
are indifferent to the public. You are in a place of indifference. Each thing, a bee, an ant, a
plant, a rock, keeps growing or changing.’16 Instead of the artwork’s product form – which
stands opposed to and separate from the processes that have given rise to it – processes
present themselves as an interplay between composition and its perpetually realised de-
composition, with the help of microbes, bacteria and a host of other invisible agents. In order
to make these invisible agents in the work somehow available to experience, however, the
notes, drawings and commentary need to form a constitutive part of the work. Here, the
conceptual, non-retinal aspect of the work comes into play, which takes places as much in the
imagination as it does in the world.
15 Cited from ‘Christopher Mooney on Pierre Huyghe’, in Art Review, 10 (2013), p. 97. 16 Ibid.
12
The Question of Art
Huyghe has said that three works in particular informed Untilled, and these seem crucial to
his approach to art in general: Duchamp’s Large Glass (Untilled was conceived like the Large
Glass, but living and out of earth), Étant Donné and Mallarmé’s Le Livre.
Le Livre is Mallarmé’s incomplete magnum opus, with which the poet was occupied for the
last three decades of his life. The project was based on the concept of an absolute, cosmic
book whose text could be endlessly generated, freed of the author’s subjectivity. Mallarmé
originally wrote of it as a book, but from about 1855 onwards, he also contemplated its
performance as a drama or public ritual. The pages were intended to be left unbound so that
the order in which Le Livre would be read would be subject to constant permutation. Each
reading would be a performance in which the text – like a pre-digital hypertext – would adapt
to the situation. For example, the number of pages in each volume of the Livre would vary
according to the number of operators and auditors present at each ‘séance’.
The Large Glass – an expression of Duchamp’s desire for a fourth dimension that refers to a
sphere beyond experience – essentially prefigures the idea of a porous artwork in the way
Huyghe envisions it. By placing the various figures, forms and machines on a sheet of glass
instead of opaque canvas, Duchamp makes the imaginary space of representation on the
surface permeable to the real space of the viewer. When looking up and through the glass
sheet, the static perspectival space in the bottom half mixes with the three-dimensional spatial
continuum behind the glass wall, which constantly changes as visitors come and go. In this
way, viewers become real, mobile components of the image on both sides of the plane, which
has become porous, losing its boundaries in a sense.
What connects Huyghe to Mallarmé and Duchamp is the cosmological aspiration that they
share. Albeit in different ways, they all envision a kind of individual cosmology that is not
tied to the subjectivity of the artist. Duchamp’s desire to integrate a fourth dimension is more
transcendental, more oriented towards an ‘higher’ sphere than Huyghe’s quest to integrate the
non-human, yet both sensorially manifest a certain conception of the world. And for both, this
implies the development of new aesthetic strategies and new forms of imagery. For Duchamp,
visual thinking had ceased to be a static image and was more a ‘work in progress’. In order to
accomplish an irreducible and essential indeterminacy in the work, it became necessary for
him to go beyond the boundaries of the image and supplement the work with a literary
13
dimension. This was not with the idea that the one would explain the other, but aimed towards
keeping both in an open and indeterminate relation. The readymade was for Duchamp a
conscious choice to achieve indeterminacy. He once described its selection process as the
‘rational expression of avoiding the control of your mind’.17 Huyghe’s rationale for selecting
a particular site could be described in similar terms. Also for him, turning contingency and
indeterminacy into fruitful parameters necessitated the development of new aesthetic
strategies. Just ‘dropping’ things instead of displaying them, or letting things ‘exist in
indifference’ is such a strategy – an aesthetic strategy, even a contemporary form of sculptural
practice, that Huyghe employs in order to erase himself. From this perspective, the
‘indifference’ of his objects and agents – the fact that these plants, animals, microorganisms
etc are not there ‘for us’ – represents a cosmological statement as much as being the result of
an aesthetic method.
After ALife Ahead
Huyghe’s contribution to the 2017 edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster took place in a
closed-down ice-skating rink some distance from the town’s centre. The benches were still in
place – Huyghe situates and reflects on art in its relation to a situation of display. The work’s
realisation began with Huyghe digging into the ground – again a principle that reoccurs in
several of his situated works – thereby slicing the rink’s concrete flooring into prismatic
forms. The overall floor pattern was based on the Stomachion, the world’s oldest known
mathematical puzzle game, developed more than 2,000 years ago by the Greek polymath Ar-
chimedes. In this dissection puzzle, a spatial form is fragmented and then reconstituted in var-
ying permutations, much like a tangram (and we recall that Untilled also worked with pro-
cesses of dissection, separation and deconstruction). Huyghe cut concrete and dug until he
reached groundwater, clay and sand. The material was carved into small hills, groundwater
began accumulating between them, and the pit was transformed into a terraformed space. Ac-
cording to Huyghe, traces of the region’s last glaciers were found in the sand. The work’s
very construction thus revealed the anthropocenic disposition in which nature and culture, the
prehistoric and the artificial, and with it, modernity’s ‘great divides’ are literally layered on
top of each other.
17 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1979), p. 53.
14
The excavated clay was formed into anthropomorphically shaped sculptures that towered
above the pit. They contained sensors that recorded the activities of a bee population living
inside of them. Altogether, sensors played a key role in this work: they registered the vitality
of all human and non-human lifeforms in the hall. During the exhibition’s first days, these in-
cluded two chimera peacocks – peacocks whose feather colours and patterns were unusual as
a result of a gene mutation,18 which strutted through the facility. The movements were trans-
lated into data and algorithms and transferred via subterranean cables to a hi-tech box posi-
tioned outside of the pit that turned out to be an incubator for cancer cells containing immortal
HeLa cell lines.19 The development of the incubated human cancer cells reacted to the algo-
rithms, which accelerated or retarded their division depending on the vital changes in the
space. Neither the individual elements in the work nor their interactions could be immediately
discerned. The scenery in the hall was visually and spatially overwhelming, but the complex-
ity of the processes inscribed within it could only be vaguely felt at best. Much like in Un-
tilled, different modes of existence interrelated, some of which were actual while others re-
mained virtual.
The visitors could download an augmented-reality app on their phones or tablets, and follow
computer-generated pyramidal shapes moving in space on their screens. The shapes appeared
above the cancer-cells incubator and were triggered according to a threshold in the amount of
cells generated. Merging, duplicating and multiplying the real-world environment, aligning
real and virtual objects, the pyramidal shapes seamlessly interwove the virtual and physical
worlds. Here, the work’s relational – or as we’ve said in relation to Untilled, osmotic, permea-
ble – structure continued to operate. In the context of Untilled, we spoke of objects as ecosys-
tems, growing and taking root, endlessly forming and transforming themselves. After ALife
Ahead extended this approach into the arena of technologically generated images, which cir-
culate, pass from hand to hand and in a certain sense live their own lives.
18 A chimera is a single organism composed of cells with at least two genetically distinct genotypes; a condition that occurs when two fertilised eggs fuse together to create one organism with two different sets of DNA. 19 HeLa are the first human cells grown in a lab that were naturally ‘immortal’, meaning that they do not die after a set number of cell divisions. The line was derived from cervical cancer cells taken from Henrietta Lacks in 1951, after whose initials it is named. In 1953, HeLa cells were the first human cells successfully cloned. In the following years and decades there were mass replicated, commercially distributed and used widely in scientific research. The fact that thecells were taken without Henrietta Lacks’ knowledge or consent caused a worldwide debate among scientists and bioethnicists.
15
Near the approximate centre of the pit, there stood an aquarium. As a site of accumulation and
separation – the accumulation of different species into a system from which humans remain
separated – the aquarium, for Huyghe, bears certain similarities to a museum.20 In the aquar-
ium was a sea snail (Conus textile), whose shell is covered with a pattern of many white and
brown outlined triangles. Huyghe scanned this pattern and turned it into a score, which trans-
lated into a brief drone sound. In reaction to this score and at regular intervals, the aquarium
glasses darkened or became transparent again, whereupon large inverted pyramid-shaped
openings in the ceiling spectacularly opened and closed in turn. According to the weather
conditions, sunlight and rain entered the terra-engineered space through these openings, af-
fecting the ecosystem inside. Over the course of the exhibition, waterholes dried out, new
ones emerged, algae began to grow and in turn became a food source for other micro-organ-
isms.
For After ALife Ahead, Huyghe arranged a multitude of heterogeneous systems of animate and
inanimate, organic and mechanical, biotic and abiotic elements, which were all interdepend-
ent, reacting to and interacting with each other. Some of these agents were perceptible, others
remained invisible, at least to the human eye; some were actual, others virtual. Interactions
were triggered by internal factors, such as vital signs (like the patterns on the sea snail or cell
division), and vital dynamics (human and non-human vitality) and by external factors like the
weather. Many things came to influence the system and its internal relations without one di-
rectly noticing. Much like in Untilled, unintentionality, indifference and indeterminacy were
incorporated as fruitful elements of anti-control. Visitors ‘participated’, albeit unconsciously
and unwittingly. In comparison with the work in Kassel, Huyghe delegated the interactions
and processes in Münster more clearly to matter and technology. In this way, he in a sense
perfected the self-organisation of the heterogenous system that the artwork proved itself to be.
We might even say that the object’s perfection as an artwork was realised in the development
of its internal and external relations.
After ALife Ahead in Münster can be seen as an extension of Untilled. The basic structure
was similar, but the conditions were different and the spectrum of the constructed ecosys-
tem in Münster embraced a wider diversity of things and modes of intelligence, which makes
the work more heterogeneous and more complex. In Untilled, technology was involved on
20 Allard Van Hoorn, ‘Pierre Huyghe: the moment of suspension’, in: Domus Magazine, Oct. 2011. https://www.domusweb.it/en/art/2011/10/18/pierre-huyghe-the-moment-of-suspension.html [August 2018]
16
the level of techne, as poiesis, as a modality of bringing something forth through technologi-
cal activities that include art making. The Münster project included a broader range of exten-
sions of the naturally given means; technology was at work as mechanics (the opening of the
ceiling), as the digital (augmented reality) and as bio-technology (the artificially grown im-
mortal cell line). With the intrusion of the digital into the web of relations, After ALife Ahead
mobilised a different set of references: data economies and the politics of technology, for ex-
ample, which not only enable interactions between humans and the electronic systems net-
worked on a supra-individual level, but also interactions between the systems themselves.
When Donna Haraway coined the dictum that ‘the cyborg is our ontology’,21 she was re-
sponding to the informational or cyborg turn, which has subverted the difference between or-
ganic and technological flesh. This turn is not only connected with the development of new
technologies in the biological sciences, but also expresses how, since the 1960s, mathematical
information theory and communication theory alongside computer technology have increas-
ingly come to influence our understanding of what constitutes an organism and how it repro-
duces. This turn is inscribed in Huyghe’s work in many ways. The decorative pattern on the
shell of the Conus textile is often cited as being similar to the mechanics of cellular automata.
How does such a pattern come about? How do the individual cells know how to connect into
such a network of lines? The pattern arises from reciprocal interactions between individual
atoms and molecules, and their immediate neighbours. These reciprocal reactions produce
regular arrangements of cells that are described as cellular automata. Computer technology
was especially interested in these processes during the 1960s with respect to the question of
how an initial configuration of binary states can develop in discrete steps. Analogies were
drawn between computers and the laws of nature, or more specifically natural process like the
self-organisation and self-reproduction of cell populations were simulated. The Stomachion
was originally ignored, or dismissed for a long time, since the original manuscript was lost
and the puzzle only survived in the form of a tenth-century copy that a monk had overwritten
with religious songs. It was only recently rediscovered and reappraised as a treatise on geo-
metric combinatorics far ahead of its time, a field that did not come into its own until the rise
of computer science.
21 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 150.
17
After ALife Ahead realises itself as a complex interplay of heterogenous biological and tech-
nological systems, a diverse mesh of relationships all dependent on each other through vari-
ous reciprocal interactions. Just like Untilled, it manifests ecology as a practice of cohabita-
tion, joining up multitudes, heterogeneous causalities and non-intentional creations of mean-
ing. In the era of the Anthropocene and digitalisation, however, a situation where the earth
and cosmos have been transformed into a gigantic technological system, any relational cos-
mology can only be understood as cosmo-technological.22 After ALife Ahead – as the discord-
ant pre- and post-temporalities of its title suggest – thus also constitutes a palimpsest of differ-
ent temporalities, a sedimentation of diverse technic systems, which span from a 2,000-year-
old thought experiment in combinatorics to contemporary augmented-reality computer tech-
nologies.
To conclude, I would like to come back to Duchamp, whose central endeavor was the re-
definition of what he called the “creative act”, as the question of the generative seems to also
mark a core of Huyghe’s work. It figures as a kind of leitmotiv in the two works discussed
and appears in various biological and technological forms: as division, generation, procreation
and reproduction – from the dog and the puppy (Huyghe originally wanted a dog giving birth
in the project), to the immortal HeLa cell line and the auto-generated augmented reality
shapes. How can we think creation beyond the modern subject that conceives of the world as
primarily a stock of resources and that possesses freedom and agency exclusively, in contrast
to the inorganic materials that surround it, in order to transform its natural environment? How
can we create something that exists and remains without becoming rigid, without participating
in the (predominantly modern, male and white) idea of art as permanent, non-transformable
and independent? Something that continues to be alive, heterogeneous, porous and connected
to its environment?
Just as Duchamp reached out to scientific-philosophical insights of his time to arrive at a new
pictorial language, so Huyghe relates to scientific-philosophical ideas of the present time that
for him are metaphors or tools for a different understanding of the generative. We mentioned
epigenetics earlier, the scientific discipline that deals with the question of which factors influ-
ence and determine the activity of a gene and thus the development of a cell. For a long time,
22 On the concept of cosmotechnics see Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016).
18
genetics was seen as a deterministic science that conceives of the living being as a pro-
gramme, a pre-written, non-transformable and thus rigid genetic code that is inaccessible to
experience. Only recently was it discovered that there are vast regions that are not coded by
genetic programmes, genetic deserts so to speak. This brings into focus the field of epigenet-
ics, which studies the relation between the genetic code (the genotype), and the individual (the
phenotype) that it steers. Interestingly, the passage from the one to the other, from genotype to
phenotype, cannot be reduced to the expression of a pre-determined score. It depends upon
experience and is influenced by the environment. It includes interpretation, so to speak. The
drivers behind these epigenetic processes include many agents, such as viruses, bacteria, pes-
ticides, hormones and nutrients, which generate changes in the phenotype without transfor-
mations of the genotype, the DNA. Why is this important? Because, as Catherine Malabou
writes in her fascinating book on the subject, epigenetics shows us that the act of interpreta-
tion, of symbolisation is not something outside of or external to material life.23 It is at work
right from the beginning, as an internal part of this structure. There is space for symbolisation
in life itself. Malabou consequently places the development of all living beings in an interme-
diary space between biology and history or culture – which is exactly the space in which Huy-
ghe’s works exist and the field in which he situates any creative, generative practice: in the
hinge between the symbolic and the biological.
23 Catherine Malabou, Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).