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On Pierre Huyghe’s UUmweltanschauung: Art, Ecosystems Aesthetics, and General Ecology

Luke Skrebowski

Pierre Huyghe. UUmwelt, 2018. Installation view, Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt, Serpentine Gallery, London (October 3, 2018–February 10, 2019). Photograph © Ola Rindal. Courtesy the artist and Serpentine Galleries.

Pierre Huyghe’s UUmwelt (Serpentine Gallery, London, October 3, 2018–February 10, 2019) develops the ecosystemic turn that the artist announced in 2012 with the production of Untilled at Documenta 13, a turn that was prepared by his rejection of predetermined exhibition “choreography” in The Host and the Cloud (2009–2010) and which he developed subsequently in After ALife Ahead in 2017 at Skulptur Projekte Münster. In this respect, Huyghe’s career exemplifies the wider “ecologization” of artistic practice outlined by Eric de Bruyn in his introduction. In what follows I undertake a detailed reading of UUmwelt that tracks its artistic genealogy and its relation to work by other contemporary artists in the context of wider debates about the emergence of a new theoretical paradigm of general ecology.

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On Pierre Huyghe’s UUmweltanschauung: Art, Ecosystems Aesthetics, and General Ecology

Luke Skrebowski

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