Pierre Huyghe. Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt). 2012. Concrete with beehive structure, wax, and live bee colony; figure 29 1/2 × 57 1/16 × 17 11/16" (75 × 145 × 45 cm), base 11 13/16 × 57 1/16 × 21 5/8" (30 × 145 × 55 cm), beehive dimensions variable. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Painting and Sculpture Funds

“I’m more interested in looking for something transitory than in producing a conclusion.”

Pierre Huyghe

“I’m interested in contingency,” the French artist Pierre Huyghe has said. “Of what is not predictable. Of what is unknown. I think that has somehow been a core of my work.”1 Pursuing interests in contingency and unpredictability, Huyghe creates art forms that incorporate living organisms, such as dogs, turtles, spiders, peacocks, ants, and bees. Over the course of an exhibition, his living works of art grow, decay, and die. Huyghe said, “They are not made for us. They are not made to be looked at. They exist in themselves.”2

Throughout his career, Huyghe has experimented with many mediums and technologies, including film, sculpture, photography, music, and living ecosystems. At the outset of his career, Huyghe collaborated with artists whose work explored human relations and their social context; to describe their interests, the curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term Relational Aesthetics. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Huyghe’s works often reenacted notable artworks or popular footage from mass media. In Silence Score (English Version), a musical notation of John Cage’s pivotal composition 4'33", he created a readable score for the silent piece using a computer algorithm.

In 1997, with artists Charles de Meaux, Philippe Parreno, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and curators Xavier Douroux and Franck Gautherot, Huyghe cofounded a film production company called Anna Sanders Films. They named the company after a fictional character first developed in a magazine released in 1997. Blanche-Neige Lucie, the company’s first film, stars Lucie Doléne, the voice actor who dubbed the Disney character Snow White in French, and who won a lawsuit against the Walt Disney Corporation for the rights to the reproduction of her voice. The film features Doléne humming the melody of “Someday My Prince Will Come” in an empty film studio, facing the camera, while her story is told through the subtitles. The work explores how a voice can be used to create a character, and who then owns that product.

The Host and The Cloud fuses scripted action and improvised narratives generated by the actors. The yearlong project records theatrical events that took place in an abandoned museum in Paris on three holidays: the Day of the Dead, Valentine’s Day, and May Day. In a variety of fictional settings, 15 actors clad in LED masks perform alongside puppets and animation. These spontaneous elements reflect Huyghe’s interest in contingency and adding dynamic layers to his storylines.

Originally created for Documenta 13 in 2012, Huyghe’s Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt) is a reclining female nude whose head is covered by a live beehive. The work was part of an entire ecological system the artist created in a composting area in Karlsaue Park in Kassel, Germany. In a video Huyghe filmed during the exhibition, his camera captured a wide range of beings at different scales, including minute species that are barely visible to the naked eye. Huyghe aims to “intensify the presence of things, to find its own particular presentation, its own appearance and its own life, rather than subjecting it to pre-established models.”3 With interest in “the transitory state, in the in-between,” his complex worlds blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the physical and the virtual, and the real and the fictional.4 In 2015 and again in 2023, the statue found itself in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden, placed in a new context and in conversation with other works of art. During the summer, the bees travel in and out of the garden to pollinate and build their hive.

Huyghe’s artistic practice reflects his belief that life is in constant flux, and that all beings exist beyond the perceivable realm of human senses and knowledge. By engaging with unconventional materials and technologies, he provides us with a way to see, feel, and experience the wild, untilled world we are living in.

Note: Opening quote is from Aitken, Doug, and Pierre Huyghe. “Pierre Huyghe by Doug Aitken.” BOMB Magazine, October 1, 2004. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/pierre-huyghe/.

Eana Kim, Marica and Jan Vilcek Fellow, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2023

  1. Pierre Huyghe, “Pierre Huyghe: I’m Not Interested in Binarity.” interview by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen in Kistefos Museum, Norway, Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, June 2022, video, 19:29, https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/pierre-huyghe-im-not-interested-in-binarity.

  2. Pierre Huyghe, interview by the author, August 11, 2023.

  3. “Pierre Huyghe,” Centre Pompidou, accessed August 15, 2023, https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/program/calendar/event/cRLyK4B.

  4. Aldo Buscalferri and Dominika Hadelova, “The Exhibition Is Not a Hysteric Object: Pierre Huyghe,” MATTO, no. 5, 2021.

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Pierre Huyghe (born 11 September 1962) is a French contemporary artist, who works in a variety of media from films and sculptures to public interventions and living systems. He lives and works in Paris and New York.
Wikidata
Q1370630
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
Huyghe's films and videos critique American cinema and media in general. He works in various modes including the creation of installations involving live animals, light, fog, or ice. He was the subject of a traveling retrospective in 2014.
Nationality
French
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Conceptual Artist, Video Artist
Name
Pierre Huyghe
Ulan
500116146
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

11 works online

Exhibitions

Publications

  • MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art Flexibound, 408 pages
  • MoMA Now: Highlights from The Museum of Modern Art—Ninetieth Anniversary Edition Hardcover, 424 pages
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