Pierre Huyghe: El día del ojo

Taking shape from four of Huyghe's personal experiences in Mexico, an exhibition at the newly re-opened Museo Tamayo connects a series of natural and cultural phenomena on various levels.

In El día del ojo ('The day of the eye'), a three-part exhibition in the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Pierre Huyghe connects a series of natural and cultural phenomena on various levels, as he has done in much of his other recent work. El día del ojo consists of sculpture integrated into the architecture of the museum, a pool of blind fish and floating volcanic stones, a set of sculptures from the collection of the Tamayo Museum of Prehispanic Art in Oaxaca, and a publication.

The diverse references linked together by the different elements of this work defy any excessively anthropocentric or hierarchical classification of the information they convey. Natural and cultural phenomena that are shielded from view take on particular relevance, with their subterranean, inaccessible, mythical or ignored nature possibly enabling useless classifications to be broken down between reality and fantasy, which in this case are of equal significance in the process of understanding and creating the world. However, just because they cannot be categorised does not mean they do not have a materiality of their own, which underpins the various elements of this project. The subterranean world, to which people have had relatively little access, but which has inspired narratives in literary, scientific, religious and science fiction, provides several of the material and conceptual elements that serve as a basis for understanding this work. For example, its depth, in my point of view, is not comparable with an idea of ontological or spiritual arrogance, but instead underlies a visceral sensation of voluntary blindness allowing access to other ways of understanding the material world.

Top: Blind fish. Courtesy of Museo Tamayo. Above: Pierre Huyghe, <em>El día del ojo</em> ("The day of the eye"), installation view of the three-part exhibition in the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. Photo by Melissa Dubbin — Top: Blind fish. Courtesy of Museo Tamayo. Above: Pierre Huyghe, *El día del ojo* ("The day of the eye"), installation view of the three-part exhibition in the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. Photo by Melissa Dubbin

The aquatic sculpture in the sculpture courtyard is a reverse unveiling in which the situation to be viewed is first created before being covered and then suspended in its invisibility and an ambiguous material existence beyond the institutionally-defined lifetime of the exhibition. Of indeterminate depth, the sensation it creates is of an infinite hole populated with life, giving the feeling of uncertainty of throwing yourself into a cenote (limestone sinkhole), which is one of the inspirations that Huyghe cites. The blind fish that inhabit it, and which also inhabit the cenotes of Yucatán, evoke a sense of contradiction between the relative utility of sight in certain survival circumstances (these fish lost their eyes as they adapted to a world without light) and the real observational experience of the cultural being that, in this work, is unfolded several times.

Pierre Huyghe, <em>El día del ojo</em> ("The day of the eye"), installation view of the three-part exhibition in the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. Photo by Sergio Heredia, Curaduría Digital, Museo Tamayo — Pierre Huyghe, *El día del ojo* ("The day of the eye"), installation view of the three-part exhibition in the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. Photo by Sergio Heredia, Curaduría Digital, Museo Tamayo

El día del ojo took shape from four of Huyghe's personal experiences in Mexico. Aside from his 2010 trip to the previously-mentioned cenotes in Yucatán and visits to the excavation of the Templo Mayor in the centre of Mexico City and the Cárcamo de Chapultepec, Huyghe's first visit to Mexico was in 1987, when he used a Super 8 camera to film a sculpture exhibition in the inner courtyard of the Tamayo Museum, catching some visitors in the act of observation. He also undertook an expedition in 2009 to the Naica mines in Chihuahua, which create a backdrop that, while almost sublime (in the most Kantian sense), strikes us as almost familiar, as reflected in project curator Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy's comments: "Fictitious crystalline locations [the set of the 1978 Superman film or the illustrations from Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth] have now become reality with the recent discovery of the monumental selenite crystals in the caves of Naica…". This kind of materialisation, which predates the cinematographic or literary image but only becomes visible to humans afterwards, perfectly exemplifies the complex unfolding of the act of seeing and understanding in El día del ojo.

El día del ojo could fall into two common but also loaded categories of contemporary art: site-specificity and participation. However, the way in which it operates goes far beyond the most simplistic definitions of both of these terms. Its site-specificity consists of the interweaving of personal experience, the materiality of the building and its institutional history and character

The sculptures in the Tamayo today, which have been arranged according to a particular logic based on how light enters the museum at certain times of the day and its effect on illuminating the sculpture area in the artificial cenote — yet again interlinking natural and cultural phenomena — do not reproduce the exhibition that the artist saw in 1987, but rather repeat the observation of a remembered observation, an image that serves no documentary function yet clearly shows the multiplicity of witnesses in a non-linear space-time arrangement. The selection of the sculptures, which are undated, makes any historicist classification or stylistic consideration impossible, while preserving the uniqueness of each piece and revalidating it within this new arrangement.

Lastly, the publication takes account of this variety of different references, rituals for entering the subterranean world alluded to by El día del ojo, without in any way being an explanatory or didactic tool to limit the various levels on which this work can be read.

Pierre Huyghe, <em>El día del ojo</em> ("The day of the eye"), installation view of the three-part exhibition in the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. Photo by Melissa Dubbin — Pierre Huyghe, *El día del ojo* ("The day of the eye"), installation view of the three-part exhibition in the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. Photo by Melissa Dubbin

El día del ojo could fall into two common but also loaded categories of contemporary art: site-specificity and participation. However, the way in which it operates goes far beyond the most simplistic definitions of both of these terms. Its site-specificity consists of the interweaving of personal experience, the materiality of the building and its institutional history and character. El día del ojo is not just an architectural intervention, a reading of a collection or a recounting of anecdotes, but rather an exercise in which the inter-connection of these elements strengthens them with a non-narrative eloquence. Meanwhile, in my viewpoint, the notion of participation based on reflecting on the act of looking, being observed, unveiling and covering, has an infinite potential that goes beyond the spectator simply activating the work to him or her becoming a participant in this celebration [1]. Catalina Lozano

Notes:
1. In art21, speaking about his exhibition Celebration Park, Huyghe said: "What I mean by [the word] celebration is that it's something you participate in (…) when you celebrate, you're not so much observing outside the world, you're participating in this world".

Through 2 December 2012
Pierre Huyghe: El día del ojo
Museo Tamayo
Mexico City, Mexico

Pierre Huyghe: El día del ojo

Taking shape from four of Huyghe's personal experiences in Mexico, an exhibition at the newly re-opened Museo Tamayo connects a series of natural and cultural phenomena on various levels.

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