The Abject Decadence of Pierre Huyghe

or Backwards With Pierre Huyghe

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This is a story about time travel. It is about my own journeys back and forth in that do-we-even-know-if-it-exists dimension we call time. It is my attempt to see the Pierre Huyghe survey at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, but somehow seeming to do it all in the wrong order. In a similar vein, I was in the middle of reading Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe quartet of novels in reverse order, starting with the most recent Let Me Be Frank With You, when he begins to ponder dementia, and working backwards to the first volume when Frank is in his more youthful thirties with a son who has died and a wife who has divorced him. The modern classic of this reverse time travel is Martin Amis’s dark novella Time’s Arrow where smoke billows backwards down the chimneys of Auschwitz, bodies grow from the ashes, and humans walk backwards out of the camp and home to their ghettoes.

Before Huyghe’s artworks had even been installed, I had previewed the show for another magazine, but I had not actually seen the work. I had seen other exhibitions of Huyghe’s overseas, so I knew about his use of spiders and insects crawling though gallery spaces (which they do here), and I knew how he had once injected a gallery dealer with a flu virus, to be passed on ad hoc to those coming into contact with him. I knew about his trip to Antarctica (A Journey that Wasn’t, 2005) to find a mythical penguin on a newly discovered island. I knew about his swarm of bees rather decadently veiling a statue in an abject landscape, and—more recently—of that... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Untilled, 2011–12. Alive entities and inanimate things, made and not made. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris; Esther Schipper, Berlin. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan.

Pierre Huyghe: TarraWarra International 2015, installation view. TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Australia, 2015. Photograph Andrew Curtis.