Pierre Huyghe’s Met Garden Rooftop Commission melds magic and science, ecology and archaeology (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

PIERRE HUYGHE: THE ROOF GARDEN COMMISSION
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Daily through November 1, recommended admission $12-$25
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org
rooftop slideshow

Native Parisian Pierre Huyghe is having quite a summer, with installations and films on view at both MoMA and the Met. Through November 1, his site-specific Roof Garden Commission at the latter will slowly devolve, affecting the surrounding cement slabs and dirt underneath it. A curious aquarium that seems to leak water, the piece resembles an architectural dig of sorts, an intervention on the popular Met roof that offers spectacular vistas and in past years has featured works by Jeff Koons, Ellsworth Kelly, Roxy Paine, and Dan Graham. Inside the aquarium, the 2002 Hugo Boss Prize winner has placed a large boulder of Manhattan schist that somehow is floating (perhaps referencing Koons’s basketballs?) along with some living lamprey and tadpole shrimp. Meanwhile, creatures are turning up in the mini-swamps that spring up amid the dirt and water around the central fixture as the paving stones are upended because of the evolving damage. (The water is not actually leaking from the fish tank but dripping separately.) Huyghe also works in some additional magic into his science-and-art environment; the aquarium occasionally clouds up so visitors can temporarily not see inside it. The ecological, archaeological work feels right at home amid the views of Central Park; as Huyghe notes in the small exhibition catalog, “Walking through Central Park, you realize that all events there — the stone, the frozen lake, the plane overhead, the maintenance worker — are equally necessary. The important thing is not necessarily the big event. There is an ecology in the broadest sense of the word; different states of life, each element playing a role — even sometimes antagonistically.”

Pierre Huyghe, video still, HUMAN MASK, 2014 (photo courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, London, and Anna Lena Films, Paris)

UNTITLED (HUMAN MASK) (Pierre Huyghe, 2014)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 916
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Daily through August 9, recommended admission $12-$25
www.metmuseum.org

Inside the Met, in Gallery 916, Huyghe’s intriguing nineteen-minute Untitled (Human Mask) is screening through August 9. The 2014 film follows what appears to at first to be a young girl as she wanders through an abandoned restaurant in Japan. However, the star is in fact a macaque monkey in a wig and a smooth, expressionless Noh-like white mask, inspired by the YouTube clip “Fuku-chan Monkey in wig, mask, works Restaurant!” Huyghe, who has worked with animals in masks before, shot the film in Fukushima shortly after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The monkey, one of the actual waitresses from the Kayabuki sake house in the viral video, makes her way through the restaurant as if wandering in a postapocalyptic landscape, evoking evolution and what humanity hath wrought on the earth. Despite the mask covering her face, she appears filled with emotion as she looks out the window and dreams of a green forest. It’s an eerie, affecting film that serves as a fascinating companion piece to Huyghe’s rooftop installation. On July 24, MetFridays — Conversation with an Educator will delve deeper into the work in an interactive dialogue with museum education assistant Marianna Siciliano.

Pierre Huyghe, “Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt) [Reclining female nude],” concrete with beehive structure, wax, and live bee colony, 2012 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © 2015 Pierre Huyghe)

PIERRE HUYGHE: “UNTILLED (LIEGENDER FRAUENAKT)”
Museum of Modern Art
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through August 15, $25 (including admission to galleries and film screenings)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Meanwhile, over at MoMA, another outdoor sculpture incorporating living creatures and an indoor film by Huyghe are being highlighted. MoMA is unveiling its recent acquisition, Huyghe’s 2012 “Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt),” through August 15 in the Sculpture Garden, a reclining female nude whose head is a live bee colony. The work references classical Greek statuary (although it was actually cast from a bronze by Max Weber) as well as such concepts as the hive mentality and the controversy over the importance of the survival of the bees in relation to the future of the planet. The Italian honeybees have been overseen by Manhattan beekeeper Andrew Cote since April, and they’ve been getting busy under a shady tree in the garden. Cote and MoMA expect the colony to reach as many as 75,000 bees at its densest point, meaning they might provide a little extra buzz to the upcoming Summergarden: New Music for New York concerts in the Sculpture Garden on July 19 & 26.

Pierre Huyghe’s 2009–10 THE HOST AND THE CLOUD will be shown at MoMA July 14 & 16 (photo courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York)

MOMA PRESENTS: PIERRE HUYGHE’S THE HOST AND THE CLOUD
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
4 West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday, July 14, and Thursday, July 16, 7:00
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk and online beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

The very welcome Huyghe infestation continues with two screenings of his rather cerebral 2009–10 film, The Host and the Cloud, on July 14 and 16 at 7:00 in the research and education building. The two-hour depiction of a controlled experiment is set in the abandoned Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, focusing on the Day of the Dead, Valentine’s Day, and May Day, as different forms of entertainment, ritual, and political actions are performed over the course of one year by characters wearing LED masks. As always, Huyghe melds fiction and reality as he explores ethnographic representation. The official description notes, “Navigating through history within the museum, a group of people is exposed to influence, live situations that appear accidentally, simultaneously, or without any sense of order in the building. Nothing that takes place is staged. People can imitate, repeat, or transform these situations endlessly to variable intensity.” The July 14 show will be introduced by MoMA curators Stuart Comer (Department of Media and Performance Art) and Laura Hoptman (Department of Painting and Sculpture), while the July 16 screening will be introduced by Artist’s Institute director and curator Jenny Jaskey.