Pierre Huyghe is to contemporary art what Stanley Kubrick is to cinema. A searching head, a perfectionist, a searching spirit who seeks to express in his works, strangely fascinating by their beauty and their black echo, the very quest of man springing from the cosmos. In Liminal, from his naked woman, a creature of artificial intelligence, who walks on the edges of worlds, to the real skeleton which poses the story of man facing robots, the French artist, adored by institutions, well deserves his title of living enigma of art. Meeting with a cerebral artist who should make a name for himself during the 60th Venice Biennale, inaugurated on April 20.
LE FIGARO. – How to approach your planet between art and science fiction?
Pierre HUYGHE. - In Liminal’s first film installation (real-time simulation, sound, sensors, 2024) at Pointe de la Douane, a naked, faceless woman walks in a desert. I wanted to question what is humanly impossible. Clearly, that’s what interests me: inhumane conditions and a non-existent being. What we see in the image is a body that we recognize as human. But this human body has no face, no brain, no connections. This woman is without a world since she walks on a plate bordered by nothingness, to the right and to the left. For me, it becomes like a documentary about an inhumane condition.
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Why care about an inhumane condition?
In the 1950s, ethnographic cinema was interested in a plane of reality. The gaze then tried to shift. But it remained a white gaze focused on others, on our former colonies, how their inhabitants live there, etc. The idea of studying this “other” from our point of view reigned. Then this look came home. We began to be interested in the grandmother in Ardèche, in family histories and in our societies. Only one plan, always the human plan. I sought to express another point of view, that of the inhuman. To put ourselves outside of what constituted us, to place ourselves outside of our domestication.
That is to say, to look at oneself as a species, an organism?
Yes, to look at ourselves from the outside as a species, and to see what constitutes us, to study the architecture of our constitution, the only thing that allows us to transform ourselves.
In your film Untitled (Human Mask), 2014, it’s the opposite, it’s a monkey who wears a human mask and who wanders around the devastated site of Fukushima…
They are two slightly damaged, wobbly creatures left behind waiting, although they have some movement ability. They are very linked. The first is an entity with weak existence, in a very weak state of learning.
Is it a metaphysical question about where consciousness begins, where life begins?
“Consciousness”, the word is perhaps too strong. This exhibition is the constitution of subjectivities which are other. I am interested in a certain degree of will that precedes consciousness.
We are at the beginning of 2001, Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey (1968), with the monkeys around the philosopher’s stone? It’s a film that carried a generation with its mysticism and its enigma…
Yes, of course (laughs). There is something of this order, perhaps more in Camata, 2024 (robotics powered by machine learning, self-directed film, edited in real time by artificial intelligence, sound, sensors). We see this skeleton found in the Atacama Desert. I wanted, through my film, to give it existence. Around him come alive a set of machines which perform configurations of objects, found on site or manufactured. This machine which takes this body as a measure, which dances, which learns with capture tools like the camera, the wind, is also emerging. It is not just a funeral ritual. It’s an enigma. There is a sphere in the room which is sensitive to what is alive, which captures everything through its sensors (technological equipment which makes it possible to detect a thing) and which directly influences the film which “self-edits”. It is like a self-presentation of the entity: it thus reveals how it wants to be shown.
Have you always had a strong interest in archaeology, a discipline that would bring soul and life to the sciences?
Archaeology, like any factual modality, has a limit for me. To go beyond this, we enter sensitive, philosophical, spiritual zones, troubled, ineffable zones.
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Is this not the reversal of the spirit of the 19th century which wanted to classify everything into categories in order to master reality?
Yes of course. Human Mask, the monkey with a human mask, allows us to show that we have our limit, that of our own senses, and that we measure the world from our limit. We understand that there was the need for the Enlightenment at a given moment, then the excesses that resulted from it. We put little stickers on our world to tame it. It’s reassuring. We domesticate ourselves and our environment. And our vision is said to be objective. Poetics and mysticism allow us to poke holes in this certainty. All this knowledge, this technological progress forms a construction in which man feels protected. Let’s say I break this construction a little. Doubts and states of perplexity require re-attention to the world, shake us up and make us come alive.
Where does this propensity to explore chaos come from?
I have always been afraid of banality, of everyday life, of the norm that cuts off thought. Thought cannot be fixed, it must always be reborn. I see banality as a monster.
“Pierre Huyghe. Liminal”, project designed by the artist in collaboration with curator Anne Stenne, until November 24 at Pointe de la Douane, Venice.
