French video artist Pierre Huyghe’s first solo show at Hauser & Wirth, London, is a phantasmagoria of inanimate objects possessed of weird life, living things that aren’t what they first seem, and entities that entirely resist being named
Three cubic tanks, filled with reddish-brown water, dominate the gallery floor at Hauser & Wirth London. On their surface, an inch or so exposed to air, is a thick layer of coral-pink scurf and muck, pollution-filth, and something that looks like a fragment of crab’s spiky armour. You bend down and peer into brumous water, through which the light periodically swells, and try to work out what those long dark rootlike shoots are: vegetation? The feelers of some bottomdwelling crustacean, reaching to the light? Then, a shock: movement: a pair of tiny fish swim up the glass, eyeballing you right back, then vanish back into red murk. A vestigial hand – salamander, or something superevolving, or devolving? – presses against the glass. For Nymphéas Transplant, Pierre Huyghe has found in water collected from the ponds Monet painted in Water Lilies a very different sort of beauty: a post-human kind, the beauty that will endure when no-one is around to paint the lilies any more.
Similar cataclysms, unacknowledged, seem to lie in the background of the other works in this solo show. La déraison comprises a replica of a vast concrete caryatid-like figure, in which a heating system has been placed. The stone body is as warm to the touch as the human body: round the pools of moisture that have collected in its crevices, plant life is starting to grow. Unattended, the same fate will befall all our monuments.
Huyghe’s piece reveals not life but death: these are creatures preserved in amber, smashed or distorted in death, reduced to metallic crumbs and fragments
The macro-camerawork in the video piece De-extinction is familiar from nature programmes in which the baroque lifeforms of the microcosmic world are revealed: bugs and microbes prettily ornamented, the minute veins of their wings, the cilia bristling from hooked limbs. Unlike the creatures in these shows (or, indeed, any number of early 2000s music videos in which abstract cellular patterns inevitably resolved themselves into foetal forms), Huyghe’s piece reveals not life but death: these are creatures preserved in amber, smashed or distorted in death, reduced to metallic crumbs and fragments, detached limbs, strewn wings. The camera – the eye that roves at random, without apparent consciousness behind it – looms in to investigate a fly’s eyebulb, miraculously intact, examining in extraordinary detail the scales that make it up; then smears the sharp pattern across the screen as horror-movie music shrieks (inevitably, you think of HR Giger’s designs for Alien). The still point at the centre of the film shows two insects transfixed by the amber in the act of reproduction: Et in Arcadia ego.
Only two creatures, alive this time, appear in Human Mask. In earthquake-struck Fukushima, the camera seeks out what seems to be the last inhabited building, an abandoned local restaurant in which a short figure with an impassive expression waits out the devastation. The face – as the title gives away – is a mask, a noh girl with long reddish hair, but that hand that comes up to play with the tresses is greyish and furred.
What is under there: it must be a monkey – or maybe a lemur? Even a sloth? Is it all an elaborate piece of CGI?
You spend some of the time trying to work out what is under there: it must be a monkey – or maybe a lemur? Even a sloth? Is it all an elaborate piece of CGI? Trapped in the building, she roams to and fro, pulling open defunct refrigerators, cowering from the sound of heavy rainfall or, in the oddest scenes, tapping a prehensile foot on the floor, non-stop, restless or (so the unmoving mask suggests) catatonic. In some scenes, a cat watches her, quite still, and marvellously unimpressed; for her part, the monkey doesn’t seem to notice the cat at all. A Lucky Cat statuette still waving on a countertop – as if the last human being has just flicked its ceramic paw before vanishing forever – seems ultimately to possess as much life or agency as either of the animals: one faceless and agitated, the other silently serene. Life goes on, seems to be the message of this transporting, eerie, haunting show – but it won’t be the sort of life you’re accustomed to, or to which you’d expect to apply the word. C
IN.BORDER.DEEP is at Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET until 1 November 2014
020-7287 2300; hauserwirth.com
