Non-human living sculptures by Hans Haacke and Pierre Huyghe

In the form of the domes­ti­cated and isolated goat, Haacke defended art’s freedom against a foun­da­tion that was only char­i­table at first sight and had been set up by gallery owner Aimé Maeght. And Haacke went even further, as he crit­i­cized the role of artists as “working animals” within art insti­tu­tions and the powerful art market system. On that same occa­sion, during the exhi­bi­tion opening he let ten tortoises he had bought in a pet shop free. During this period in his oeuvre, he also proceeded to create several arti­fi­cial micro­cli­mates with water, rain, snow, ice and water vapor – a “demon­stra­tion” of insti­tu­tion critique by showing how art can generate its own, inde­pen­dent climate. His “Fran­ciscan series” thus ques­tions not only the limits of a work of art in rela­tion to its surround­ings, the pieces in ques­tion also explore the lines dividing culture and nature, which is why the series has such a bearing on contem­po­rary artistic prac­tice.

He struc­tured the hilly area by heaping up piles of sand as well as humus, frag­ments of asphalt, cube-shaped cobble stones, and ground slabs he layered in stacks. More­over, he then planted psychotropic and aphro­disi­acal species by way of new vege­ta­tion. In a concrete pond filled with water, tadpoles thrived and grew into frogs. “Markers of history, and markers that I am marked, affected and influ­enced by”, as Huyghe himself said, were distrib­uted throughout: There was a dead tree in remi­nis­cence of Robert Smithson’s “Dead Tree” (1969), a concrete bench with a pink seat tipped on its side and bringing to mind Dominique Gonzalez-Foer­ster’s “A Plan for Escape” from docu­menta 11 (2002), an uprooted oak with a piece of basalt recalling Joseph Beuys’ “7,000 oaks – urban forestry not urban plan­ning” at Docu­menta 7 (1982), not to mention a replica in concrete of a 1930s female nude by Max Weber, whose head shrouded in a beehive. Then there was ‘Human’, a white female grey­hound with a pink leg, and a brown-and-white whelp with a simi­larly colored paw, who both roamed the grounds accom­pa­nied by a dog-keeper.

What Huyghe showed viewers eagerly wandering about trying to find the artwork was in fact nature in various stages of emer­gence and decay so that one was inclined to ask what had been there before or rather where exactly Huyghe had inter­vened? Some of what was happening would have occurred in a similar way without the artist. Ants distrib­uted seeds, put the remains of plants and dead crea­tures to their own uses; compost waste rotted to form humus, decom­posed by beetles and worms; bees polli­nated blos­soms. The vege­ta­tion changed over the 100 days during which the show ran; animal protag­o­nists entered the zone while others left the area, which was not enclosed by a fence. “Untilled” thus repre­sented a “sculp­tural situ­a­tion” in which the artist created the precon­di­tions for the overall setting but largely left these actors to their own devices in their partic­ular spaces. As had been the case in Haacke’s work, here sculp­ture evolves into a situ­a­tion in which it arises through inter­ac­tion with hetero­ge­neous objects and actors.