Pierre Huyghe; Surrealism and the object

exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre, Paris

Seeing these exhibitions one after the other made me see really sharply how fluid the status of the art object is, how malleable its place in the relationship between creator and viewer.  I just want to clock this for the moment as something to explore (1st essay?)

Briefly, Huyghe's show presents a number of installations and artefacts that are self-contained systems in a dystopian environment, like Zoodram 4 (2011) a glass tank of water containing spider crabs and large crab in a painted shell.

 L'Expedition Scintillante, 2002. Acte 1: Untitled (Weather Score)

Zoodram 4, 2011

Untitled (liegende Frauenakt) 2012

Made Ecosystem (Centre Pompidou) 2013

L'Expedition Scintillante, 2002. Acte 2: Untitled (Light Box)

The exhibition guide says: 'The exhibition is a self-generating world that varies in time and space, indifferent to our presence.'  The weight in the artist-object-viewer triad is on the object. And yet. . . it required an artist to set up that world, and viewers to validate it.  

By contrast, the exhibition of surrealist objects throws the emphasis on the artist (the 'object raised to the dignity if a work if art by the artist's will alone' - Duchamp) or the viewer ('Objects with a symbolic function leave no place at all for formal preoccupations.  They depend only on the amorous imagination of each person, and are extraplastic.' - Dali)  And yet. . . the object does it exist, it does have formal properties. . .

I want to explore and draw out the implications of these two approaches, in part to be clearer about what I am doing in my own work.

Ed Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Pierre Huyghe (Skira 2004)

1990s shift in focus from univ truths to everyday particulars, stories not History, narrative and story-telling

Doesn’t want audience to be passive when viewing his videos. ‘He did so by keeping the audience alert and active, rendering manifest the process of vision and perception itself.  The purpose was to make the space of the spectacle not less but even more apparent, blurring linear time through both anticipation and recognition.’  ‘a theatrical space and a space of reality’

Every event singular and in flux.

‘the unthinkable nature of the image, which nonetheless initiates thought’