LIMINAL is an art exhibition by Pierre Huyghe for the Pinault Collection at Punta della Dogana, in collaboration with 2024 Venice Biennale. Curated by Anne Stenne, the exhibition closes on 24 November 2024.
Johannes Scott - August 2024.
The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin famously asserted that the image of man is intrinsically chronotopic. Borrowing the term ‘chronotope’ from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Bakhtin illustrated how the artistic fusion of time (chronos) and space (topos) creates contiguous scenarios that model social reality, for the movement of time and plot in narratives.
In theoretical psychoanalysis, our social reality can be viewed as a form of chronotopia, where the intersection of symbolic systems and imaginary constructs shapes our image and experience of self. In this sense, chronotopes function like cultural icons or monuments, treasured by communities for their symbolic significance. These not only shape identity within the social fabric but also configure symbolic roles within the community.
No chronotope is universal since different structures and orders operate within their own worlds. For example, fish, primates, the stock exchange and our galaxy all exist in different realms of time and space. Additionally, the human individual passes through different chronotopes in its psychical life, such as from adolescence to adulthood. Moreover, the socialised individual often faces impasse when caught in the threshold between different worlds of self, such as social expectations for alternating symbolic roles.
The threshold between different realms or chronotopes is, in theoretical psychoanalyses, known as liminal states. For example, in transitioning from puberty to adulthood, between an imaginary and a symbolic way of structuring identity and place in community, the individual passes through a threshold. The liminal state is one of uncertainty and disorientation, and being trapped within this disorientation between time spaces is known as a schizochronotopic state. The artistic application of chronotopological dimensions has an aesthetic function; it can slow down autonomic reception by making the artwork seem unfamiliar or uncanny and thereby prolong and intensify intellectual contemplation.
Pierre Huyghe’s art installation LIMINAL is curated as chronotopological arrangement of aesthetic scenarios, intended to coordinate the time-space difference between artwork and viewer. The work engages the anthropocentric image of man against a backdrop of chronotopological scenarios that exist outside the margins of our social reality. The exhibition challenges our collective imagination of the real and invites visitors to reimagine being in context to other worlds beyond our experience of time and space. This context, the curatorial guide informs us, brings into question the relation between the human and the non-human. The work is conceived from an inhuman perspective and created as speculative fiction.
The curation is an immersive theatrical environment consisting of nine dark, interlinked halls, named ‘rooms’, within which visibility and action are coordinated by artificial intelligence. The rooms, comprising installations and video performances, present the viewer with nine scenarios of story formation. The polysemic narrative is directed, in real time, by responsive artificial intelligence integrated to the movement and sound of viewers, visiting the rooms. No scenario is repeated, as artificial intelligence continuously learns and edits itself from every preceding integration – a plotless play, without beginning nor end. Meaning resides entirely with the viewer’s liminal experience, acting as connective tissue between nine random chronotopes.
The first scenario, titled Liminal, is a gigantic, real-time video simulation projected onto a porous canvas membrane, from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. It shows an alternating male and female hominid body, moving gently around in an infinite, primal void. Instead of a face, the hominid has a gaping black hole to which, unquestionably, the viewer’s focus gravitates. The gestural movement of the hominid, or inhuman entity, is directed by data it receives from a circuit of artificial intelligence, which in turn, receives stimuli from the presence and movement of viewers in the hall. At times, it seems as if the figure waits and searches for stimuli, like an empty vessel yearning to be filled with meaning. Undoubtably, this dark scenario reminds of the biblical story of genesis, but the moment before the beginning, before the word. Prototype man, before symbolic enchantment, incomplete and immersed in emptiness.
The last scenario, titled Camata, presents the viewer with a cinematic scene where a robotic entity, similarly, moves and reacts to external stimuli received via artificial intelligence. The scenario is that of a robot reminiscent of Mars explorations, examining a found object on a deserted stretch of terrain. In fact, the originally filmed sequence takes place in the Atacama Desert in Chile, where astronomers practice unmanned explorations to exoplanets. It is here, the oldest and most arid desert on earth, that this ancient, unburied skeleton was recently discovered – filmed in this scenario. The scene immerses the viewer in a futuristic, apocalypse where human time and space had ended, as if a robot examines the object of study like we do with dinosaur fossils – figuring out what they were all about.
Estelarium is a lone static object cast in basalt, placed in an empty room on a floor covered in black gravel. It is a positive cast of the internal cavity of a human pregnant abdomen, just before giving birth to the developed embryo. While the cast is highly detailed, it is unlike those cold, lifeless representations one finds in medical school. Instead, the color tinted cast comes across like those movie-props one would see in the film Alien. As if it is an impregnated sac-like-thing, petrified, and waiting to be set alive. The scenario presents the viewer with a fascinating anamorphic thing that escapes symbolisation.
In the adjacent room is De-extinction, a 12-minute film navigating through an amber stone and zooming in on a situation frozen in time. The film, shot with macroscopic and microscopic cameras, focusses on two petrified insects mating, fossilised millions of years ago by tree resin. Two adjacent rooms have several aquariums fitted with black switchable glass to protect, amongst others, tetra fish that lost their vision after living for millions of years in the darkness of Mexican underwater caves. The switchable glass, opaque and transparent, is triggered by an algorithm receiving circumstantial data from the surrounding environment, allowing visitors brief moments to view these creatures.
Cambrian Explosion 19 is one particularly large vitrine containing a gigantic, pumice-like rock; submerged, but incongruously defying gravity by floating, point down, just two centimeters above the floor of the aquarium. It is in this danger zone gap that two Arrow Crabs, upside-down on the down-pointing rock, seem to have found a playing ground – oblivious that they could be obliterated if the rock loses its buoyancy and crashes down. This ancient species has lived unchanged since the Cambrian Explosion, the point of beginning for most living organisms – living fossils whose instinctual behaviors have repeated for 540 million years.
Human Mask is a 19-minute film that opens with drone footage of deserted Fukushima, shortly after the 2011 nuclear catastrophe. The film transitions to an abandoned restaurant, where the ‘story’ unfolds. Huyghe filmed a trained monkey repeatedly performing the task of a waitress in this empty setting. The monkey, dressed in a waitress uniform and apron, wears a neutral Noh mask, often used by traditional Japanese theatrical performers. The film shifts from brief gestures of instructed performance to endless moments of waiting, capturing the monkey in primal reverie – aimlessly adrift in its primordial quietude.
For Human Mask, the image of man can be found only in our fantasy world of social reality. This imaginary space is where we engage with others in role play, construct our self-image, and identify others – a scenario where we learn and practice to sustain our desire for symbolic unity. Furthermore, Human Mask evokes not only the gaps of emptiness within our social reality, void of symbolic meaning, but also our vulnerability to the cataclysmic real that can obliterate the image of man in an instant – into oblivion.
In all these scenarios, creatures captured in their own time and space, a sense of loneliness prevails – a sense of desire for human signification. Or, conversely, for the human visitor, the scenarios evoke a desire for unity with the real, natural world. LIMINAL represents unattainable desire, and the different artistic chronotopes sustain that desire.
Johannes Scott received the BA degree in English and Theory of Literature at UNISA in 2011; postgraduate studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), Critical Theory (2015); and with specialisation in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics.