"The Imaginal" by Chiara Vecchiarelli

Pierre Huyghe, Liminal, 2024 – ongoing. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Esther Schipper, and TARO NASU © Pierre Huyghe
Credits
Close UUmwelt – Annlee, 2018-2024. Deep image reconstruction, generated in real time, face recognition, sensors, brain waves sound © Kamitani Lab / Kyoto University and ATR Installation view, Pierre Huyghe, Liminal, Punta della Dogana, Venice, 2024 Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Esther Schipper and Taro Nasu. Photo credit: Ola Rindal
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Sat, 05/18/2024 - 12:12

"The Imaginal" by Chiara Vecchiarelli

"These works are not inserted into an already pre-supposed space and time, but rather create their own space and their own time, positing these as the conditions of possibility for a world-constituting place of existence, even as this remains nameless."

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By Chiara Vecchiarelli,
Philosopher, exhibition curator and author of an essay in the catalogue of "Liminal"

THE IMAGINAL

 

[...]

In Pierre Huyghe’s work, worlds are constituted, and through them a reality appears—not all of reality, but rather the reality of relation, which is understood as prior to the terms it relates to: as coming before the object just as much as the subject, before the past just as much as the future, in a logical priority that constitutes the artwork’s present.

Indeed, the reality of Huyghe’s work is in the present tense: it is never an aftereffect of pure representation, every occurrence—or “appearance” (apparaiscence), in Huyghe’s own words—of his work manages to produce an endlessly renewable occasion for being different to the substance of an already completed reality. These works are not inserted into an already pre-supposed space and time, but rather create their own space and their own time, positing these as the conditions of possibility for a world-constituting place of existence, even as this remains nameless. Such worlds call on our ability to name (things), for they aspire to the place of intelligibility that a new name makes possible. This dimension appears when reality no longer answers to any of the names that are already available, that are overburdened with meanings to the point of masking the transformation at work in the reality they once claimed to name.

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Pleine largeur
Cambrian Explosion 19, 2013. Aquarium, horseshoe, arrow crabs, anemones, sand, floating rock Tank: 101 x 220 x 190 cm Base: 73 x 220 x 190 cm Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth Installation view, Pierre Huyghe, Liminal, Punta della Dogana, Venice, 2024 Photo credit: Ola Rindal
Credits
Close Cambrian Explosion 19, 2013. Aquarium, horseshoe, arrow crabs, anemones, sand, floating rock Tank: 101 x 220 x 190 cm Base: 73 x 220 x 190 cm Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth Installation view, Pierre Huyghe, Liminal, Punta della Dogana, Venice, 2024 Photo credit: Ola Rindal

[...]

 

The imaginal includes the space of bodies, but it is not reducible to this. It has a mental existence without coinciding with the mind. It is not limited by the constraints of chronological time, nor by those of physical space. The imaginal is not essentially localized in time or in space. It is a certain chronotopological arrangement that corresponds neither to the schemas of immanence nor to transcendence. When it takes root, spatially and temporally, it gestures towards the improper, to-wards a possible overcoming—an overflowing.

Why imaginal? In actual fact, two different kinds of imaginal make up this notion that will allow us to think the mode of being that is exhibited in Pierre Huyghe’s work.

 

[...]

 

Chiara Vecchiarelli
Excerpts from the catalogue of the exhibition "Liminal"

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