The Rooftop Garden Commission: Pierre Huyghes at the MET

Conceptual artist Pierre Huyghes was selected for The Rooftop Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His installation gives visitors food for thought about art in time and art in the urban context.
Pierre Huyghe is a French conceptual artist and author of “Untilled”, one of the most widely acclaimed artworks of Documenta13: the Ibizan Hound whose leg has been painted pink, the beehive-headed statue, a compost heap in the middle of Karlsaue park in Kassel, and he is also the creator of “The Rooftop Garden Commission” at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The installation commission was initiated by Sheena Wagstaff, the Met's chairman of modern and contemporary art and organised by associate curator Ian Alteveer with Meredith Browne, and it coincides with a looping projection in the museum's Gallery 918 of Huyghe's 2014 film Untitled (Human Mask).

The film was shot in Fukushima, and explores the conflicted merger of technology and natural forces, and while the two are thematically related, the press has described Met's rooftop installation as “primordial drama”. Here, the artist prised up some of the rooftop's paving stones and stacked them next to the hollows that filled with water and resemble shallow tidal pools and life itself on the top of the museum. The water appears to come from a leaking aquarium on the terrace. The sand and buoyant porous lava boulder in the tank is home to some unusual occupants: small creatures, which have existed on Earth at least since the late Carboniferous period, 300 million years ago!

And this is the source of the compositional tension of Huyghe's work, because he establishes a sense of the great distances of time which is pulled together in the contrast between those primordial occupants of the aquarium and its ultra high-tech features, where liquid crystals infused in the walls are charged so the glass turns completely opaque at regular intervals.

Which of course leads to some questions - what do we see when we look? What we want to see? What others let us see? While our survival instincts will stop us from falling into the holes Huyghes has created as long as we're not too distracted, he makes us realise that even in a rarefied environment like the Met rooftop “there is a crack in everything. that's how the light gets in”, as Leonard Cohen says.

Christiane Bürklein

Project: Pierre Huyghes
Location: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Year: 2015
Images: Courtesy of Met - Photography by Hyla Skopitz, The Photograph Studio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Copyright 2015.
Open from May until 1 November 2015, weather conditions permitting
More information: http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2015/pierre-huyghe