Pierre Huyghe (born 11 September 1962) is a French artist who works in a variety of media from films and sculptures to public interventions and living systems.
You don't just find an empty museum and say, "I should do something here. " I was looking for another kind of venue or exhibition format. I was trying to find a site where something could happen over a long period of time - something that could slowly transform itself and the place as it went. And I was also trying to stand out of the art-world system. Strangely enough, I stumbled on vacant museum.
I'm not sure that is correct but I love that interpretation - that we artists never go out of self-portrait.
I had the chance to play with a ghost of the museum. The function and the institution are gone - it's closed - but there is still the building. I was looking for something between an experiment and an extended ritual. I asked 15 actors to be in this museum and take the position of the museum's personnel. I put this small group under certain conditions and influences, interpreted by another group of actors or by real professional performers, like a magician, a psychic, a model, a hypnotist, a singer, a psycho-dramaturge.
Fear comes from the unknown. Once you know, then, whatever.
When I know who is speaking, I see that there is a commitment. I need to know there is some commitment. I need to find an author. "I" can also be polyphonic, fictional, inhabited by a multitude of characters, be right or wrong or at fault or corrupted. But that's more "the self" than "me, me, me. " It's problematic. There are times to say "we. "
With the garden I planted for the Reina Sofia, each plant related to different celebrations along the calendar - Christmas with evergreen trees, Valentine's Day with roses, Halloween with pumpkins. All these symbols are so culturally loaded, but they are organic living entities - just like the fish in the tanks. They grow on their own. The symbolic ecosystem is growing without a narrative anymore. It's a physical and mental landscape.
I'm more interested in the diversity of people in New York. I like to be lost. I like to feel like a foreigner. I like not to know everything. I'm trying not to burn the whole city. I try to consume it in slow motion.
I don't want to exhibit something to someone anymore. I want to do the reverse: I want to exhibit someone to something.
I put an octopus in aquarium, and it would eat the others. But if you put an octopus in with a school of tiny fish, he might not be able to catch them. That's an archetypal structure: a powerful individual versus the multitude, the crowd. You can relate to that.
You can go to a psychoanalyst one day and then go the next day and something else will come out. So, yes, there was some preparation. But still, when a person gets hypnotized, you don't really know what the outcome will be.
People who are under certain stress have aquariums. Aquariums are classically either a reproduction of nature or a decorative element, like the ones you can see in big hotels.
New York is like traveling without actually moving.