Pierre Huyghe Thought as a Metastasis
Pierre Huyghe’s After UUmwelt is presented until October 31st, 2021 in the Grande Halle of the LUMA Foundation in Arles. It was only natural that Emanuele Coccia, author of The Life of Plants, a Metaphysics of Mixture (2016), should take an interest in the artist and analyse this work, locating it on a path that tends towards the creation of “sites of conscious existence”.
The space is dark. On five screens forms seem to follow one another as if wanting to collapse into one another. They resemble the images that populate our minds just before we fall asleep, or accelerated dreams. They show the world in its most disparate texture. When one lingers and observes these screens and their dance of metamorphoses, one can make out the silhouettes of various biological entities, works of art, prehistoric tools. But none of them seem to want to represent these objects: each image is on the run, as if it were busy transforming the caterpillar of the one preceding it into the butterfly of the one following it. More than a series of images, we are faced with five large laboratories of an unbridled imagination, free of any goal, as if it had decided to exist in a gaseous state in order to be open to the greatest number of forms.These
Human Mask. 2014. Film, couleur, son. 19 min. (Court. Anna Lena Films, Paris) laboratories draw five cosmologies which, rather than being presented in the ordered form of a treatise, unfold the five parallel lives of the cosmos or, to put it better, its five simultaneous streams of consciousness. These aren’t the mise-en-scènes, the stagings of five human observers: it is the consciousness of the matter of the world itself, flowing like a river, or a stream, in a seemingly unstoppable flux.
MENTAL IMAGES
These five screens take pride of place in an industrial space in the Parc des Ateliers of the Luma Foundation in Arles, a space that saw the birth of locomotives for over a century. Where people used to try to build machines to free human bodies from any attachment to a place, Huyghe has installed machines that allow thought to free itself from any relationship with the subjects that house it, by lending it the speed of light. These are, in fact, mental images that once belonged to a human subject who had been asked to concentrate on one or another object in the world. A functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner has scanned these thoughts and a deep neural network is reproducing them.
In their traditional use, these devices serve to reduce the matter of thought to the most accurate and powerful form of subjectivity. Under the acronym AI, a vast and contradictory programme has attempted to develop higher forms of rational control of reality. The aim was to imitate human computational and reasoning processes, to refine and radicalise them in order to make non-human subjects capable of performing the most complex tasks of governance. Cybernetics, in fact, was never just the project of extending human thought to machines or artefacts—which, however, made it one of the most powerful reservoirs of an all-Western form of radically modern animism, against all that a certain anthropology continues to repeat, and, for the same reasons, also transformed it into a field often frequented by art. The cybernetic project was actually based on the presupposition, more than questionable, that animating an artefact would mean lending it not thought, but that set of capacities that allow a subject to remove all chance and contingency from their life—literally to govern it. This is why what claimed to be the science of thought was able to take the name of the Greek word for ship’s pilot, and thus of the action of thought that aims exclusively to govern and direct.
CONTAGION OF THOUGHT
In Huyghe’s work on the other hand, machines imitate the thoughts of humans, but in order to better expose the life of images to contingency and chance encounters with other realities. Art seizes upon technology to free thought from all forms of government and subjectivity. Thus, thanks to these de
vices, human consciousness leaves the impermeable, opaque chamber of the brain and unfolds in the open air, in non-anatomical but also non-cybernetic bodies—impossible to predict, to direct, to govern. Consciousness ceases to be human and begins to circulate from body to body, without much concern for whether the body in which it transits is alive or not. Thus, the machine is no longer an improved duplicate of a subject asserting itself against others, but a “steering wheel” that allows the forms of thought to be exposed to the most different random encounters. The contagion of thought—which spreads to everything it encounters—follows a double movement. On the one hand, it is a question of making these images sensitive to what surrounds them, of enabling them to perceive the surrounding world. The five currents of consciousness that work simultaneously and in parallel have therefore been made sensitive to the faces of visitors, to the life of ants that wander around inside this space, to bacteria, to atmospheric variations. Their lives are also punctuated by a cancer cell incubator that houses eternal cell lines, the same type as those present in any laboratory on the planet, and named after the African-American woman Henriette Lack, from whom they originate. But the reverse is also true: the surrounding world has been made capable of perceiving these mental images and modifying its life according to their presence. It is thanks to this ambient perception, moreover, that these mental images have been able to migrate into another medium of existence, inside artefacts
constructed of biological and synthetic material that also react to climatic and environmental variations.
The whole that is produced is thus constituted by the sole perceptive continuity of all the elements present: space itself becomes the result of this diffuse perception that animates the smallest portion of matter. Conversely, immersed in this environment, thought ceases to be the faculty of representation of the world, to become that which allows any form to be affected and, therefore, modified, transformed by any other form. If art is to animate matter by lending it thought, it is no longer to immunise it against change and chance, but to intensify the possibility that everything, within a space, is affected by everything, and thus unified by that sensation that runs through bodies without regard to the difference in their nature.
THE EXHIBITION AS A WORKSHOP After UUmwelt is the culmination of a journey that began with The Host and the Cloud in 2009-10, and was marked by the 2018-19 exhibition UUmwelt at the Serpentine Gallery, where the artist first used the device of “liberating” mental images. Moving away from the traditional idea of a constructed object that would be made by the artist and exhibited, Huyghe began to imagine the exhibition itself as a workshop that would make the work to be perceived aesthetically. It was a double short-circuit: between the object and the exhibition—that is, between the perceived reality and the medium that makes it perceivable—but also between the exhibition and the process of generating the work—that is, between perception and creation. The Host and the Cloud attempted to accomplish this dual “mortal leap” through a fine protocol of actions, drawn mainly from Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus Solus (1914), entrusted to actor-performers, and through the insertion of animals, both biological and virtual. Over time, a double intuition developed. On the one hand, Huyghe understands that if the exhibition must house living beings in order to coincide with the creative process, as in Umwelt (2011), where specimens of ants of the species Polyrhachis are released into the gallery, it is because the exhibition itself is a living entity. “The exhibition as a living entity,” he says in conversation with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “is something that could evolve, be sentient, be ill [...]. Something close to a materialist animism.“(1)
On another level it becomes clear that if the exhibition is a living being, a specimen of what we call life, then life is not a biological entity but an originally aesthetic fact. It is because of the capacity to perceive and be perceived that a portion of matter begins to live, regardless of its nature, regardless of whether it is an animal, a plant or an artefact. And if perception, or consciousness, is the most universal property of life, it is because it allows any object to encounter others, and to be influenced by them without determination. It is through perception, in fact, that something can open its life to an infinite number of accidents. And the accident is what allows “something to escape from a feedback system and trigger an epicycle”, an exception. Perception is, from this point of view, what tears matter away from a pre-established destiny and opens it up to an unpredictable game, and the exhibition becomes “a quasi-subject, an entity with unknown modes of existence, made up of matter with a consciousness”.
From this dual intuition, Huyghe had developed his two successive projects presented in Germany, Untilled (2012) at Documenta in Cassel and After Alife Ahead (2017) at Skulptur Projekte Münster. In both cases, the exhibition involved a complex array of living beings (a turtle, bees, ants, bacteria) and artefacts, often from other artworks (a sculpture by Max Weber, a bench by Dominique Gonzalez-Forster) or hybrids (a remnant of the 7,000 oak trees planted by Joseph Beuys, a dog with a neon-pink leg). And yet these “orchestras” still seemed to be based on a still too “naturalistic” understanding of that life of which the exhibition is the most intense embodiment.
SITES OF CONSCIOUS EXISTENCE For this reason, Huyghe’s art has been mistakenly linked to the wave of ecological art that is sweeping the planet. Huyghe himself admitted that these projects were a first step, and that a further step was needed: “to give an entity its own rights, an artificial personality, not in the form of an anthropomorphic otherness like Prometheus, Frankenstein or an android [...], but rather as a site of conscious existence.” After UUmwelt makes art the divinatory technique for constructing these sites of conscious existence, which gather within it the most diverse elements of reality in order to liberate them. As such, an exhibition is both the opposite of an ecosystem and the opposite of a landscape. The term ecosystem, which we often consider unproblematic, is in fact the result of a violent polemic that exploded at the beginning of the 20th century with the intention of understanding the collective life of living beings that share the same territory. The term, introduced in 1935 by the British botanist Arthur Tansley in a landmark article, (2) was intended to signify the fact that a group of living beings follows a predictable and predetermined evolution as a function of the interactions of the individuals that make up the community, but above all of the action of inorganic factors, such as humidity, soil pH, light, etc. Indeed, as Tansley writes, “In an ecosystem, organisms and inorganic factors are components that are in a relatively stable dynamic equilibrium”. Basically, the notion of an ecosystem serves to think of any member of the community as excluded and protected from any accident and, therefore, from any contingency. An exhibition, as a site of conscious existence, must open the way to accidents for any element, by opening the door to perception.
ANTI-LANDSCAPE
The attempt to think of the environment beyond the idea of the ecosystem itself is evident in the subsequent development of the concept of ‘Umwelt’ in the three works ( Umwelt, UUmwelt and After UUmwelt). In the first, by releasing living beings into the gallery, the idea was to think of the artwork as the privileged living environment—as if to emphasise that our world has an aesthetic and not a biological texture—, in the second work, the idea was to recognise that this environment has a capacity to think; in Arles, the environment becomes not only a sensitive subject, but also the force that circulates thought like a metastasis that never ceases to incorporate and excorporate itself fleetingly into all the bodies present.
It is for a similar reason that in Huyghe’s hands the exhibition is the construction of an anti-landscape. Every landscape is in fact merely the hostage-taking of a set of living beings in order to make possible the illusion of a sensitive contemplation of the totality of nature, supposed to be impossible in modernity due to the development of science and industry. The pines, the ibexes, the deer are not members of a vital whole, they are elements of a trompe-l’oeil, of a tableau vivant that should suggest the idea of a non-human living in perpetual harmony. By mixing conscious machines, animals and artefacts, After UUmwelt doesn’t want to suggest immersion in nature. On the contrary, the work in the LUMA Foundation’s Parc des Ateliers seems to demonstrate that life has nothing to do with what we have called nature. That is why its science coincides with art.
Translation: Chloé Baker
1 For all quotations, Natalia Grabowska, Melissa Larner and Rebecca Lewin (eds.), Pierre Huyghe at the Serpentine, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2019. 2 Arthur G. Tansley, ‘The use and abuse of vegetational concepts and terms’, Ecology, 16, 1935.
Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher. He has just published Philosophie de la maison (Payot & Rivages). He is also the author of Metamorphoses (2020) and The Life of Plants, a Metaphysics of Mixture (2016).