Pierre Huyghe has long loved “Locus Solus,” Raymond Roussel’s 1914 novel about an inventor who invites friends to a secluded estate to show off his creations, one of which is a tank filled with cadavers that re-enact the most important moments of their former lives, animated by a miraculous substance called resurrectine.
When more than two decades of Mr. Huyghe’s art heads west for his highly anticipated American retrospective, opening Nov. 23 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it’s not clear which of his works-in-progress will be fully incubated, in part because of their sheer experimental complexity.
There is, for example, his butterfly project, a collaboration with a Rockefeller University scientist to engineer living examples of the fictional butterflies (one with checkerboard wings) that Vladimir Nabokov, an obsessive lepidopterist, sketched for his wife, Vera.
A new piece is involving a pill camera, a swallowable video capsule used by doctors to inspect digestive tracts; Mr. Huyghe is harnessing one for more ethereal ends, as illustrated by pictures on the wall showing the grottolike contours of a human interior, topped by the craggy head of Willem Dafoe. “Maybe, I will ask him to be a part of it, to swallow one,” Mr. Huyghe explained.
As the above might suggest, Mr. Huyghe’s art — which takes the form of film, performance, sculpture, puppetry, menagerie and biology lab — fits into the tidy mold of a museum retrospective about as comfortably as a monkey fits into a dress.
He emerged in the 1990s as part of a wave of second-generation Conceptualists who came to be grouped together in a movement called relational aesthetics, an approach to art making that emphasizes participation, social interaction and chance. His work, which seeks a high degree of control over the viewer’s experience, was always an odd fit in the movement. It drew just as heavily, and dauntingly, on postmodern philosophy, but it waded deep into pop culture and could be — especially for art with late Marxist leanings — beautifully poetic and even quite a bit of fun.
Conceptualists in the 1960s tried to liberate art making from Romantic notions by turning to rigid plans and systems. “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” as Sol LeWitt memorably put it. Mr. Huyghe can also seem to be running things through machines to see what comes out. But his machines are highly complex and unstable ones: movies, music, novels (besides Roussel, he loves Poe and Borges) and, lately — nudging him into Dr. Moreau territory — biological phenomena.
Mr. Huyghe has long played anarchically with the idea of roles — in the movies, in society, in the art world, and in nature — and when he was approached a few years ago about being the subject of a retrospective, he wasn’t sure it was a role he had any interest in playing.
“When I do something, I’m always happy to put it into friction with other minds,” he said during one of two long mornings of interviews in his office-studio. “But if you domesticate that friction — if you say, ‘I’m going to give you this thing to read, you will need to understand this history, this thing will happen at precisely this time every day’ — then you don’t have real friction anymore.” Too many contemporary-art retrospectives, he said, have begun to feel “like ‘Groundhog Day’ with Bill Murray.”
What began to interest him, was the idea of making an exhibition that felt like some kind of foreign body lodged in a museum, as if by accident. “Art objects are hysteric objects,” he said. “They need the gaze. I wanted to try to make a place where things somehow seemed indifferent to you.”
Besides dispensing with labels and chronological organization, one way he went about this was using living flora and fauna, borrowing from work he had done in 2012 for the sprawling Documenta 13 exhibition in Kassel, Germany. He turned a park’s compost yard there into a kind of feral art garden. Poisonous and psychotropic plants were growing; a reclining nude sculpture sported a beehive for a head, swarmed with bees; a white Ibizan hound, one of its forelegs dyed surreally hot-pink with food coloring, wandered the grounds, tended by its owner, who served as a kind of gardener.
The dog’s painted leg, he said, “breaks the form of ‘dog,’ makes you look at it as something else.” The color was chosen for more personal reasons:
“It makes me think of the Sex Pistols. It’s very punk, that color.”
today not today 