"Pierre Huyghe’s contribution to dOCUMENTA (13) required some effort in order to be discovered at all. It was not just that Huyghe had chosen a decidedly decentered exhibition site: a composting facility located in the Aue-Park. Even after one had located the site, it was anything but obvious that it was art. Visitors found themselves in a kind of overgrown vacant lot: a pile of compost, sprouting growth, through which a walkway led, at times really just a beaten path, with algae-covered puddles. The hills were overgrown with plants and weeds. Off to one side, paving slabs were stacked; nearby, a mound of black chippings. An ant colony had formed at the foot of an oak. Even on closer inspection, it was unclear what had been altered artistically and what hadn’t, where the composting facility ended and the work of art began.
"There was something like a center of the work: a reclining concrete figure placed in an open space in the middle of the lot—a replica of a work by the sculptor Max Weber from the 1930s, which on its shoulders had, in lieu of a head, a beehive populated by a trembling, buzzing swarm of bees. And there was the elegant white female greyhound, Human, which, with its pink leg, became a trademark of this documenta. Other elements of the work became apparent over time: the compost hills were planted with psychotropic, medical, and aphrodisiacal plants such as deadly nightshade and angel’s trumpets. Cannabis was also there, as well as rye, which is itself a completely harmless grain but is particularly likely to harbor ergot, a fungus that can be used to synthesize LSD. At some point, visitors began to sense that the stacked sidewalk slabs were arranged in a particular way, as was the surrounding basin, in which tadpoles splashed. Huyghe had collected several artifacts—he calls them “markers”—from various times and contexts. The stacked sidewalk slabs, for example, recalled the form and materials of Minimal Art, while a felled tree alluded to Robert Smithson’s Dead Tree of 1969. A bench, tipped over and resting between the stone slabs, was part of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation at Documenta11 and a small, desiccated oak lying around was part of Joseph Beuys 7000 Eichen (7,000 Oaks), his contribution to documenta 7 (1982). Some of these markers were more obvious; others were, if it all, recognizable as such only with the help of a drawing by the artist published in the short guide. The latter included various physical adaptations of functional elements from literary texts. Supposedly, there was a turtle walking around the composting facility that was borrowed from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (Against the Grain). And the young man who was nearly always present, in order to take care of the dog and the plants, personified with his constantly repeated, always identical actions a reference to the living dead in the garden of Raymond Roussel’s fantastic novel Locus Solus."
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yousharknotpass
baratheonpilled
kaledo-art
