Pierre Huyghe: generating antagonism through appropriation of public space
by Elizabeth Atkinson
Chantal Mouffe describes our social realm to be made up of sedimented practices, which conceal the original acts of their contingent political institution, thus being taken for granted as selfgrounded.1 For Mouffe, every social order is predicated upon the exclusion of other possibilities, thus generating a susceptibility to challenge. 2 She identifies such “antagonism” within artistic practices, in their ability to disrupt the smooth image that corporate capitalism spreads, bringing to the fore its repressive characters. This contribution to the construction of new subjectivities is not a total break but rather a proposition of an alternative model, crucial in our radical democratic project. 3 Claire Bishop furthers this argument by developing a critical reflection on art as the site for a politics of spectatorship. Here, subjectivity is fundamental: “all art presumes a subject – insofar as it is made by a subject (the artist) and
is received by a subject (the viewer.)” 4 For Bishop, subjectivity, as premised on “the fictitious whole subject of a harmonious community”, must be replaced with the demand for “relational antagonism” premised on a “divided subject of partial identifications open to flux.” 5 Installation art is thus the ideal model for generating such antagonism, as it “insists on our presence to subject us to the experience of decentring.” 6 A decentred subject experiences feelings of division from the public as a whole and is thus able to recognise alternate means of action within society, in order to go against political norms. Both critics emphasise the importance of collaboration – as a means of identifying and exploring alterity – between the artist and viewing public in the experience of installation art in a public space. Pierre Huyghe’s appropriation of public space for his installation Untilled at dOCUMENTA (13) is an artwork that generates such antagonism. Huyghe offers up artistic “zones of
1 Chantal Mouffe, ‘Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space’ in open, (NAi Publishers, 2008), pp. 6 – 15, p. 9. Mouffe goes on to explain how the frontier between the social and political is unstable and requires constant displacements and renegotiations between social agents.
2 Ibid, p. 10. 3 Ibid, p. 11. 4 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, (London: Verso, 2012), p. 12. 5 Ibid, p. 79. 6 Ibid.
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