The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Pierre Huyghe, the artist’s first retrospective in the United States, bringing together approximately 60 works from the past 25 years. Huyghe’s diverse practice includes live situations, exhibitions, films, objects, and drawings. Huyghe often collaborates with specialists in other fields such as science, literature, film, music, and architecture.
In search of what the artist has termed a “non-knowledge zone,” Huyghe approaches an existing system—such as an institution, a situation, or an area of knowledge—and creates a speculative proposition: a “what could be.” Influences and role-playing are the materials with which Huyghe works. Taking the exhibition and its rituals as an object in itself, Huyghe explores the possibilities of this dynamic experience and the mise-en-scène of its boundaries. To that end, he has constructed time-based situations, where live events unfold according to a program or score. Most recently, his projects take the form of a self-generating network in which emergences and rhythms are indeterminate and exist beyond our presence.
The exhibition emphasizes the living dimension of Huyghe’s propositions, which envision the space as a world, evolving according to its own rhythms. Rather than displaying a selection of objects, the exhibition explores the porosities and the intensities that arise between elements. The encounters that occur in Pierre Huyghe are not choreographed but unplanned; in what he refers to as an “auto-generative system,” the artist constructs a set of conditions and allows events to unfold following their own course. Exemplifying Huyghe’s unique methodology, multiple elements from his 2012 installation at dOCUMENTA (13) will have their U.S. debut in this exhibition, including Human, a white Ibizan hound, and the film A Way in Untilled, which was filmed on site in Kassel, Germany. In addition, the exhibition will include the world premiere of a new aquarium and the U.S. premiere of the film Untitled (Human Mask).
