A WAY IN UNTILLED | PIERRE HUYGHE

A dog, whose name is Human, moves inside a park that has the appearance of a wild environment, almost a forest in which human intervention is not yet definable: the observer, following this guide with a pink paw, is led to discover the different interventions that the artist Pierre Huyghe has created within this artistic intervention whose contours are not easily definable within individual languages. A Way in Untilled is a video from 2012, the result of a documentation of the artist’s intervention in the Karlsaue park in Kassel on the occasion of Documenta 13. Huyghe, having available this space, intervened on several levels by putting together a real and own puzzle of materials, languages and citations. A Way in Untilled is the site specific project in which the artist investigates the collaboration between human and natural, rediscovering the degree of symbiosis that can be created between different living organisms.

Inside this video the gaze narrows to dwell on every detail, on the changes that over time take place within this new ecosystem: the dog guides us and in some way its movement makes possible the construction of a narrative in which the individual elements find their linearity and coherence. The plants continue to grow, the native ones and those inserted by the artist, like a cannabis plant, but also one of the plants that Joseph Beuys had brought to Kassel on the occasion of Documenta 7. Then the movement continues and the eye meets the sculpture , a replica of a work by Max Weber dating back to the early decades of the twentieth century, in which bees have slowly built their hive: a perfect collaboration between the work of man and animal in which the artist’s skills and creativity meet with those of the bee. Finally, Human’s gaze makes us look towards the sky or the earth that are part of the park and that circumscribe his and therefore our movement.

The video becomes a true representation of the different organic processes that took place in the Kassel park and are still ongoing: with a radical change of gaze, the artist was able to focus attention on something that has always been there, which has always been repeated for millennia. Probably the bees are still building their hive and the plants sown by Huyghe are still growing: art is made to enter and coincide with reality, but in its most natural and organic aspect in which there are no distinctions of gender or role . The dog is the artist who is in turn a bee and a tree at the same time. Growth, movement and meeting seem to be the key elements of the artist’s intervention who no longer lives in a defined space or in a precise time but expands into different languages and dimensions.

Pierre Huyghe,
A Way in Untilled, 2012
Film, HD video, color, sounds, 14min
Courtesy of the artist ©Pierre Huyghe / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022

28/05/2022