Imagine an exhibition like a waking dream, peopled with fleeting apparitions and visions — a pink-pawed dog who has escaped from a psychedelic Flemish painting, or an ice skater who traces circles on the ground like mystical writings. French-born, New York-based artist Pierre Huyghe has lived up to his reputation. For him, every show is a chance for a new experience, and in this retrospective, which opened on Wednesday at the Pompidou Center and runs through January 6, he has transformed the galleries into a landscape that changes shape as it is explored. The artist’s works reveal themselves in the guise of reminiscences. And the visitor, entirely enveloped in a floating world on the threshold of the real, has a hard time extracting herself.

Nothing is fixed in place. Living beings have infiltrated the temple (or some would say the cemetery) of the museum. Bees, ants, spider crabs, human beings…art, it seems, can actually still push the boundaries, and Huyghe believes in his own magical powers.

Upon entering the show, we see a sculpture by Parvine Curie, one which was created in 1975 as a public commission and installed in Huyghe’s junior high school. Having remained there throughout his school years, it was later relegated to an unused part of the building. Now fragmentary, this contemporary ruin, which Huyghe has “saved” from oblivion, testifies to his artistic ideal by its presence alone — his faith in art’s vitality and its effects. Later, like an additional symbol, Brancusi’s polished bronze head “Muse Endormie” becomes a shell for a live hermit crab (“Zoodram 4”).

Pierre Huyghe, This Is Not a Time for Dreaming, 2–4
photo lightsgoingon.com

Not only is Huyghe’s show peopled with the living, it acts like a living organism; or like a community of living beings, an ecosystem. The artworks are not arranged in linear fashion like an inventory, as is typical of retrospectives, but form a larger and interdependent whole. These both dialogue with each other and with visitors, such as the hanging grid “Atari Light,” which lights up following people’s movements. The walls allow you to hear music from another room (Kate Bush’s famous hit from the film “The Host and the Cloud,” for example). Signs of openness and porosity are at their max. There are no clear contours, just like Huyghe’s pile of pink sand that continues to spread, or his female sculpture “Untilled” (created for the most recent edition of Documenta) whose shape changes according to the back-and-forth movement of the bees that live in it.

Zoodram 4, 2011
photo blouinartinfo.com

Time itself is elastic. The exhibition has a present, but also a past. Huyghe has kept the picture rails from the Pompidou’s previous show, of works by Mike Kelley. Traces of labels are visible here and there on the walls. The artist even scratched one of these walls to reveal the various layers of paint. Green wall color from a show of Guy de Cointet has morphed into an abstract landscape, and on the floor, the leftover pigments lie in a satiny powder that you’d like to roll around in.

photo spectacles.carrefour.fr

What makes this show so unusual is the state it induces in visitors. Like a hypnosis session, our level of consciousness is slightly altered. The result is a new sensorial acuteness (in other words, Huyghe puts us to sleep in order to wake us up). The living elements (first and foremost, the dog) are not merely there to enchant and surprise viewers. They’re not just tricks — they create something unpredictable, a particular layout, a rhythm. This rhythm creates an unfettered perception of time and space, one which draws you in and leaves you lost in a dream.

photo collectortribune.com

photo gogoparis.com

photo gogoparis.com

 

Pierre Huyghe, une exposition au Centre… de centrepompidou

via blouinartinfo.com