L'Écrivain Public

From a dog called Human (who has a pink leg and wanders around the exhibition space) and a beehive sitting atop a reclining nude sculpture to a manga character bought in collaboration with artist Philippe Parreno and shared with a number of other artists, Pierre Huyghe’s works are a combination of films, drawings, events, exhibitions, installations, and other situations that come together to form a surprisingly coherent practice that reflects on the passage of time, memory, and the human experience thereof.

In L’Écrivain Public, a writer was commissioned to sit at the gallery during the opening and write down everything he or she observed, heard, or seen within the stipulated timeframe, in this case the opening of the exhibition. The pages the writer filled with observations were then immediately made available for visitors to read, and the entire history of the opening, as penned by the public writer, is later preserved as a work in its own right. Thus visitors could partake in an experience, perhaps memorialized by the writer as part of it, while at the same time also onlookers onto that exact same experience. The sensation of estrangement also fixating on the way we all behave and perform a certain role in public space without ever knowing it.

L’Écrivain Public is an early example of a hallmark of Huyghe’s practice, what he calls “autogenerative systems”: the encounters that take place as part of Huyghe’s art are unplanned, which means he sets up the conditions for the events that unfold in his exhibitions, never choreographing them, just allowing them to unfold in response. Time and duration become not only the subject of the work, but also an indivisible part of it—Huyghe’s works take place in unstable time and space and exist as artworks, exhibitions, and event all at once.