Pierre Huyghe’s A.I. Art Monster Takes Over a Night Club in Berlin
In the far corner of the Halle, there’s a dim glow. Your job, you realize, is to grope your way toward that light, which reveals itself to be a projector beam hitting a colossal screen, almost nine hundred square feet. This is the centerpiece of “Liminals”: a fifty-minute film on loop. A few other tweaks have been made to the Halle—an aperture in the wall, a couple of benches to sit on—but the art work is really the film, as exhibited in a highly unusual, cold, and brutal environment.
The film is about a humanlike figure whose face has been scooped out of its head. The figure is naked, with short brown hair, breasts, and female genitals; its skin is pale, with some mysterious bruising and what looks like a Cesarean scar. Its dilemma seems to be that it is abandoned, alone, and unsure of how to exist in a vast, empty scrubland, which sits at the edge of a void. Sometimes the figure tries and fails to stand up, slapping itself with floppy, almost boneless limbs. Other times it squats like an ape, or plugs a finger into the dirt as if preparing it for a seed. Its most disturbing action is when it inserts a projection of rock into the hole in the middle of its head, repeatedly, to explore the sensation of cranial impalement.
Why is this so terrifying? Well, first of all, there’s the missing face. Monsters are usually beings of excess, with too many eyeballs or nostrils, but Huyghe has created one by subtraction: hollowed out, diminished, fallen, helpless. Whether the creature is pecking at the ground or slumped over, unable to hold up the weight of its own body, all its gestures amount to Sisyphean false starts. Sometimes it just crawls to the edge of the abyss, and the abyss howls back, the entire Halle trembling with vibrations. You’ll notice that the hole in the creature’s head has the same crescent curve as the wasteland’s edge, that the figure is not only looking into the void but is it. An existentialist peers into the abyss and feels a shiver of possibility, the freedom to be anything. For Huyghe’s creature, there’s only infinite death. It is bound to fail.
There was a shift in Huyghe’s work about a decade ago. While his early films were about becoming human again, about using the fiction of cinema to make someone more real, his recent work has tacked in the opposite direction—intensifying alienation to such an extent that the human disappears. This kind of inquiry began with “Human Mask,” from 2014. The film is set in Fukushima Prefecture, after the nuclear meltdown in 2011. A camera, mounted on a drone, floats through an abandoned town, with broken windows and tumbledown buildings. Then we enter a former sake house. From behind, we see a girl with long brown hair, but she’s covered in fur, and is wearing a creepy mask. As it turns out, the girl is a monkey. The monkey was once an employee of the sake house, where it was trained to serve customers. (This is true, by the way.) The film follows the monkey as it goes about its routine, scampering from the bar to the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, standing in front of the microwave, or just sitting on the floor and fiddling with its wig. None of its actions serve a purpose any longer, but it keeps doing them, like a broken machine.
“Human Mask” is basically the inverse of “Liminals.” One creature is given a face; the other has one taken away. The subjectivity of the former has been gutted by its rote actions; the latter is trying to gain subjectivity through repeated movement. While one film uses a documentary style to show artifice, the other uses artificial intelligence to show something viscerally real. Although “Liminals” was shot with a camera in a warehouse, the wasteland was patched in digitally, as was the principal character. Where it gets more complicated is that the figure’s movements are not its own. Huyghe fed images and videos, including those of Butoh performers and his own daughter, into an A.I. program that produced gestures he could apply to his creature. In other words, it’s like us: a composite of other human beings.
