MONSTER MASH

Pierre Huyghe brings his art to Berghain.

- ZACHARY FINE

My preparation for “Liminals,” an art work by Pierre Huyghe showing in Berlin, at Halle am Berghain, involved a small suitcase of books and articles about quantum physics, the science of sound, post-1968 France, relational aesthetics, and the sociology of techno. In the end, none of them proved useful. Among the heady possibilities dangled by the press release was an environment that would feature video, sound, light, and dust; exist outside of space and time; and operate in a state of quantum flux where “every moment is a maybe.” The release also said that Huyghe had enlisted the services of the physicist Tommaso Calarco and the philosopher Tobias Rees. The LAS Art Foundation, which organized the show, chose not to mention that the installation is situated in the same building as the most famous night club in Europe. Or that “Liminals” is, for better or worse, an absolutely terrifying work of art.

Since the nineteen-nineties, Huyghe has been a fixture on the international art circuit, with commissions at the Met, the Whitney, and the Venice Biennale, and retrospectives at LACMA and the Centre Pompidou, in his native Paris. He’s known as a kind of technological monk, oscillating between prankster and doomsayer. Huyghe has directed a puppet opera, created a pirate television station, orchestrated a fireworks display, scanned the surface of an entire island, built an animatronic penguin, and worked with cancer cells, copper, bees, the sex pheromones of brown rats, and mud from Monet’s garden. The medium he’s returned to more than any other, though, is film.