In his early work, HANS HAACKE already integrated animals and plants as co-actors into his art. In that way he not only laid the foundations for a redefinition of sculpture as a real-time system, but also paved the way for a contemporary artistic practice such as is championed by Pierre Huyghe.
Together with the ZERO group founders Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker, in 1965 Hans Haacke designed an outdoor sculptural ensemble for the pier in Scheveningen, Netherlands. It consisted of barrels of fire mounted on rafts, buoys as mobile sculptures, bottles with ZERO messages in them, silver foil on the water, and objects made of smoke. Haacke planned to gather seagulls by using a mobile feeding point, and he construed their flight information and ‘mass’ as a ‘seagull sculpture’. In particular in his early oeuvre (approx. 1965–72), he increasingly used animals and plants as co-actors in his sculptural concepts and humorously described them as his “Franciscan works”, alluding to St. Francis of Assisi who was, after all, considered a friend of all animals and an ecologist. In this way, the ‘flying sculpture’ was one of the early works that used ‘living’ material to establish a living sculptural aesthetic, i.e., so-called “non-human living sculptures”.
Hans Haacke, Life Airborne System, 30.11.1968, Planned in 1965, realized in 1968, Hans Haacke, ed. by Walter Grasskamp, London & New York 2004, here p. 101, © Hans Haacke/VG Bild-Kunst; image via burg-halle.de
Hans Haacke, Goat Feeding in Woods, 1970, © Hans Haacke / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019; image via zikg.eu
Hans Haacke, Ten Turtles Set Free, 1970; image via pinterest.com
By turning his back on a classic object-based aesthetics, with these non-human living sculptures he called for a redefinition of the medium of sculpture in favor of “sculpture as a real-time system”. In other words, the sculpture first evolves before the eyes of the audience, is no longer static, and instead responds through its process to its surroundings. A prime example of his approach is “Goat Feeding in Woods”: For this piece realized at Fondation Maeght in the south of France in 1970, Haacke confronted a goat with a new habitat and new food. This real-time and “biological system” included choosing the section of the woods, the temperature, the weather, the animal’s biodiversity and nutritional preferences, such that the goat’s organism and metabolism, which form a unique complex system, became the theme of the piece. The action was also a nod to institution critique: The young Haacke had this “living sculpture” eat and model at will in the immediate vicinity of the grand museum park in which stood sculptures by renowned artists such as Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti.
The lines dividing nature and culture
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.
Pierre Huyghes devised his piece “Untilled” for the documenta 13 (2012) exhibition and it is long since considered an iconic work as a prime example of such an art practice today. His walk-through biotope in the Karlsaue meadows in Kassel questioned the validity of construing a dichotomy between nature and culture. To this end, Huyghe did not choose the option of “taming” nature such as is to be encountered for instance in Baroque landscaped gardens; instead, he favored a “non-place”, namely the composting plant at the edge of the park. The title he chose highlights this, with its allusions to an untreated, uncultivated space. However, this is precisely the conceptual paradox he creates: For the space is not, even if this is clearly intimated by the title, some “terrain vague”, meaning an abandoned interstice in the urban fabric. Instead, Huyghe carefully planned and composed it.
Planned down to the smallest details – and yet hard to control
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.
Pierre Huyghe, Untilled, 2011–12 Living entities and inanimate things, made and not made Photo © Pierre Huyghe; image via estherschipper.com
Pierre Huyghe, Untilled, 2011–12 Living entities and inanimate things, made and not made Photo © Pierre Huyghe; Image via estherschipper.com
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.
The juxtaposition of the work of Hans Haacke to that of Pierre Huyghe creates new perspectives on sculpture as a medium: The two artists question the long-standing tradition of an object-based aesthetics and by creating matrices of relationships using all manner of different actors favor instead one founded on openness, process, and relationality. While Haacke’s systems are meant to be revealed such that we can visually comprehend them, in the case of Huyghe the interlinkages remain largely hidden from sight. For all the dynamism, both protagonists conceive an ‘image’ in their minds beforehand that in the course of the exhibition for all its suggested openness (in the case of Huyghe) was subject to modification and constant nurture. Both artists simulate and domesticate nature; with their “non-human living sculptures” they present nature as created by humankind, i.e., a “third nature”, and thus make a substantive contribution to expanding our notion of sculpture.
