through a glass darkly
by
Douglas Messerli
Pierre Huyghe Pierre Huyghe exhibition, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, November 23, 2014-February 22, 2015
Pierre Huyghe Pierre Huyghe exhibition, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, November 23, 2014-February 22, 2015
On the surface, the new show by French artist Pierre Huyghe at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a retrospective, the artist’s first in the United States, which, as the press information notes, brings together about 60 works from the past few years. That, by itself, might represent a grand project worthy of our attention. But Huyghe’s new show is not simply a complex installation of various live situations, objects, films, and drawings—all of which are presented here—but comes together as a vast single work that simultaneously suggests a cabinet of curiosities (a kunstkammer) while taking its viewers down a kind of rabbit’s hole, like that in Alice in Wonderland, in which we experience a Madhatter-like tea party (sans teacups or liquid libations). In visiting this show one also is face with sense of being swallowed up by Dorothy’s tornado in The Wizard of Oz, only here we observe not ruby slippers, but golden ones, hinting perhaps of the golden state in which the Los Angeles museum sits, Huyghe’s show interplaying with the very landscape of the museum in which the exhibition is housed.
For example, what to make of the large
aquarium at the center of the occasionally enlightened space? The aquarium (Nymphéas Transplant), a real-life eco
system with swimming fish, appears brown and bracken-coated, reminding one a
bit of the often polluted waters one observes in older, dilapidated Chinese
restaurants which once served live fish. Are these water-bound denizens
left-overs, one asks onself? Even if fish survive in this setting (we are told
in informational materials that it is a safely filtrated space), we see them as
the remnants of a once freshwater system. Tiny plants seem to be growing out of
vents in the floor, as if nature lives on only in remnants, appearing through
the cracks of this clearly post-apocalyptic world.
Nearby are several videos and films, one
concerning identity and hinting at issues of power, sexuality, violence, and
play (“The Host and the Cloud”), in which—following the logic of Alice in Wonderland, some individuals
are declared King, while others dress up like Ronald McDonald; black and white
rabbits play near a cereal box. In another nearby film (“Human Mask”) images of
what appear to be houses, moved by the earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan,
are depicted as part of a world in which all human spaces have been reclaimed by
a 
natural force
that has equally destroyed
any remnants of nature itself; the half-humans who
survive seem to have been transformed into werewolves, with hairy arms and
hands. Insects crawl over everything. Moving into another space, one observes
sculptural objects that may remind one of stalagmites, as if one has suddenly
entered a cave.
Furs are tossed into several corners,
hinting perhaps that those who once wore the skins of animals are no longer
present, yet reminding us that we once chose to kill animals for them. In what
struck me as a humorous aside, museum information suggests they are posted
throughout the rooms as spaces where Human, the dog, can comfortably curl up.
When one finally stumbles back into
daylight at the end of these various darkly lit entrances and exits—wherein
exist, incidentally, numerous other objects, films, and events that I have not
described above—we perceive that we are back into a territory within the
confines of a yet larger kunstkammer,
the museum itself, where Huyghe wittily puns on LACMA’s large sculptural
installation of Levitated Mass by
placing his Precambrian Explosion, a
large mass of stone hovering within a marine landscape before the back window
view of the Michael Heizer work. On a nearby sidewall is large annotated Silent Score, a musical composition that
exists only in its visual manifestation, another example of a repurposing of
objects and events. To the right of the Precambrian
Explosion lies Huyghe’s vast L’Expédition,
Acte 3, a broken black ice rink with bubble-like features that can only
remind Angelinos of the nearby La Brea tar pits, almost a prediction of the
possibility that the nearby buildings themselves might someday be replaced by a
vast stilted amoeboid structure referencing the tar pits.
Just beyond the far doors lies a final logical conclusion what we have witnessed within, that in this post-apocalyptic world, nature may take over the art itself, as it apparently has the Untitled sculptured nude, whose head has been swallowed up by an active beehive. Nearby sits a pile of what appears to be salt, implying perhaps, that it is dangerous to turn back upon the past, or even to what we have just “come through” as D. H. Lawrence might have described the visual and psychologically complex experience the attentive viewer has just encountered.
Just beyond the far doors lies a final logical conclusion what we have witnessed within, that in this post-apocalyptic world, nature may take over the art itself, as it apparently has the Untitled sculptured nude, whose head has been swallowed up by an active beehive. Nearby sits a pile of what appears to be salt, implying perhaps, that it is dangerous to turn back upon the past, or even to what we have just “come through” as D. H. Lawrence might have described the visual and psychologically complex experience the attentive viewer has just encountered.
Certainly I intend to re-visit this
exhibition again and again, certain that I shall discover new meanings each
time my name is called and I agree to click my golden shoes in order to squeeze
down that irresistible rabbit hole.
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