Pierre Huyghe

In Pierre Huyghe’s latest exhibition, nature and artifice converse lovingly yet are underscored by an implicit social critique. At the museum’s Palacio de Cristal, the artist alludes to the flora of the Philippines, which was also the focus of an 1887 colonialist exhibition at the same venue, an exhibition that inaugurated the palace and marked Spain’s international importance. Here, having removed overt commentary on the Spanish conquest of an exotic Other, Huyge questions Western culture’s communal routines and celebrations.

Huyghe has invented a calendar of variegated plantings for Madrid’s intimate conservatory space, a building that emulates London’s Crystal Palace. The show’s vegetation includes cross-seasonal competing species such as pumpkins, bamboo stalks, cherry tree saplings, and pine trees. There are café seats for adults (some bearing the Amstel beer logo); in another bay are artificially colored plastic miniature seats for children. This vernacular seating references a pair of ceremonial chairs in the nineteenth-century Philippines installation.

This overly comfortable oasis could have threatened a work such as this, that seeks to trouble determined behaviors. After all, Huyghe prefers spontaneity and unpredictable natural-world encounters like the surprise of singing, swooping birds. He resists conventions and seems to wink at those marigolds and petunias in the colors of the Spanish flag that are found in plantings on pedestrian plazas throughout the country. However, when compared with other extravagant social and ecological projects, the work’s impact is immediate and penetrating. Following Voltaire, one is reminded of the ongoing importance of cultivating one’s own garden.