Pierre Huyghe
1962, Antony, France. Lives in Santiago, Chile and New York, USA
If René Descartes defines man as the animal that thinks, and Henry More – his constant challenger – prefers the animal that laughs, then we could say that Pierre Huyghe sees man as the animal that pretends. Simulation, imitation and fiction are key themes in Huyghe's installations, films and sculptures. In A Forest of Lines (2008), Huyghe inserts some woodland inside the Opera House in Sydney, Australia. Over the course of 24 hours, the vegetation eroded the limits of the theatre, voiding the line between the place of the spectator and the place of the spectacle. More than an opposition between nature and culture, the artist is questioning the paradox between reality and fiction. The artwork makes it clear that “nature” is a cultural invention; otherwise that opposition would not exist. The public walks around the woods, surrounded by mist, without an established path to follow, only guided by a recorded voice that indicates the exit. Many of Huyghe's key narratives are encapsulated in the film The Host and The Cloud (2009-2010). This time the site is another place of theatre: the museum. The film shows the unfolding of a social pantomime: judgements, coronations, fashion shows, birthday cakes and orgies, in a game where masks, puppets and shadows come and go across the frontier between what is real and what is acted. In some scenes, animals appear without knowing they had been turned into characters in the farce, such as Human, the pink-legged dog known for the installation Untilled (2011-2012) at Documenta 13, in Kassel, Germany. Something similar happens in the video Untitled (Human Mask) (2014). Huyghe hired a Japanese restaurant, in which the main attraction is a monkey that can follow basic instructions and acts as a waitress, often wearing a woman's mask. After swapping the original mask with a more inexpressive one, the artist recorded a day in the empty restaurant, leaving the monkey free, without having to complete any tasks. The result has a strong impact as it questions our capacity to see and imagine, as even though we can see a monkey, we imagine a girl, revealing the inherent difficulty human animals have in removing the mask to see reality. De-Extinction (2014) is a video shot using special lenses that take extreme close-ups. At the beginning, the images appear to be of planets and stars in an intergalactic future. However, we slowly realise that we are viewing a drop of resin thousands of years old. In a journey through the layers of resin, we see several insects, the great-grandparents of many of today's mosquitos, until we get to two that were caught exactly at the moment of mating, that is, the moment of reproduction of a species that is today extinct. At the 32nd Bienal, the video, which is being projected on a large screen for the first time, makes the viewer feel small in relation to the insects shown. From the projection room, viewers are led to another room with insects flying around and a view of the park, bringing them back into their time. ——Julia Buenaventura
A Forest of Lines, 2008. Installation view at Sydney Opera House (2008).