The French artist Pierre Huyghe was in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last week, peering into a plastic bucket of water containing small horseshoe crabs.
Little did they know, the scuttling crabs were “unconscious actors,” in Huyghe’s words, about to get supporting roles in his large new aquarium artwork, “Satellite.”
A construction crew was moving around Huyghe, trying to complete Zoli, a restaurant opening later this fall adjacent to Amant, a contemporary art center that opened in 2021. Amant was founded by the collector Lonti Ebers, who also commissioned “Satellite,” which separates Zoli’s bar and the main dining area.
Huyghe, who comes across as a friendly intellectual, was wondering how many crabs to put in the three-tank aquarium, a triptych of sorts. He was questioning whether the lighting on the tanks was just right, typical finishing-touch questions from the notoriously detail-oriented artist.
“I am a perfectionist, sadly,” said Huyghe, 63, a former New Yorker who now lives in Santiago, Chile. His work includes elaborate installations, as well as videos, sculptures and other media, and he has been making aquarium works since 2009; “Satellite” is his biggest and most complex to date.
Huyghe was surprised that the bright yellow, genetically modified GloFish in one side tank were not greener in color, as he had been expecting, but he decided to roll with it.
“It’s not a big deal,” he said. “I wanted a color that instantly reads as artificial.”
Unlike some restaurant fish tanks, the swimmers were not placed there to be eaten later, or even to conjure the idea of appetizing dishes — quite the contrary.
The sludgy-looking bottoms of the tanks, complete with generic-looking detritus made for the work, were fashioned to resemble the depths of the famously polluted East River offshoot Newtown Creek, about two blocks away from Amant.
In this case, “site-specific” refers to an official Superfund site.
“I think they call it ‘black mayonnaise,’” Huyghe said of the unsettling nickname for the toxic stew.
Ebers, who is on the board of the Museum of Modern Art and is married to Bruce Flatt, the chief executive of Brookfield Asset Management, owns other works by Huyghe, so she knew she was getting a provocation. “It has this eerie ecology, but it is totally captivating,” she said.
The perversity of people eating so close to his work made Huyghe giggle occasionally during his visit, a reaction that fits with his longstanding approach — making high-minded Conceptual artworks about technology, nature and what it means to be conscious and alive, but with sardonic edges.
“He’s the ultimate contrarian,” said Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Huyghe had a retrospective beginning in 2014.
The center tank of the Zoli installation has a large floating volcanic rock, meant to be the satellite of the title. Both side tanks have slowly rising and falling liquid levels, as if the central rock were a moon creating tides. (Huyghe collaborated with the Brooklyn-based City Aquarium company on the project.)
“On one side, you have living fossils like anemone, horseshoe crabs, arrow crabs,” Huyghe said, noting that they have existed for hundreds of millions of years. “The other side is genetically modified organisms. It was important to me to have GloFish, because it’s a brand” — thus heightening the artificiality.
The glass of all three tanks can be made transparent or opaque, and the system is programmed to alternate between clear and not-clear, sometimes flashing for just a second, sometimes lasting longer. When the glass was opaque, the shadows of the fish were almost more mesmerizing than the real thing.
Huyghe compared the effect to a curtain coming down briefly on a play between acts, and said that the switching on and off kept the work from being static.
“I do like the idea that there is something not always visible, that is concealed, and that there is a rhythm to visibility,” Huyghe said.
Huyghe lived in New York for more than a decade, over three separate stints, and once had a studio in Greenpoint, not too far away from Amant. He recalled seeing a Chinese restaurant on the Lower East Side late at night, with a lit-up fish tank glowing against an otherwise pitch-black background.
“I thought, ‘Oh, what a beautiful, strange situation,’” he said.
His aquarium works have included the “Zoodram” series, one version of which included a sculpture meant to look like a head by the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, into which a crab could crawl, as well as a 2015 project on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Huyghe said he relished “Satellite” partly because a restaurant setting meant that viewers would look at the work much longer than they would in a museum: “You’ve got everybody’s attention.”
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