Pierre Huyghe (October Files)

The first collection of critical writings on the work of the influential contemporary French artist Pierre Huyghe.

Influenced by wide-ranging ideas from land art and institutional critique to experimental cinematic practices and narrative film, the groundbreaking work of Pierre Huyghe since the early 1990s has arguably, even indelibly, altered the landscape of contemporary art. The French artist works at the beguiling intersection of fiction and reality, representation and performance, spectacle and memory, chance and agency, living organisms and technological entities. As formats and discourses of cinema (be it Godard or Lumet) and architecture, holidays (invented or existing) and games, (puppet) theater and opera, fairy tales and (travel) literature, museology and computer technology, life sciences and popular culture (like manga comics or Disney movies) are renegotiated in Huyghe’s variegated projects, the methods and modalities of producing, exposing, and experiencing art, in turn, come under both critical scrutiny and allegorical speculation.

Essays and interviews by preeminent scholars, critics, and curators—including Benjamin Buchloh, David Joselit, and Molly Nesbit—trace the trajectory of Huyghe’s practice over the last three decades. You’ll find writing about the artist’s early engagement with the built environment, the temporalities of cinema and television, the customs of social communities, volatile property relations in global media culture, and his most recent and much-discussed ecological redefinitions of the objects and sites of art. These texts explore the far-reaching implications of Huyghe’s many seminal artworks for the history, theory, and ontology of art in the twenty-first century.

André Rottmann is a Berlin-based art historian and Professor for Art and Media Theory at Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. He is the editor of John Knight (MIT Press) and author of Isa Genzken (Afterall/MIT Press).