Abstract

In UUmwelt—Annlee (2018–2024), the most recent iteration of Pierre Huyghe’s UUmwelt series, shown at the artist’s Liminal exhibition at the Punta della Dogana in Venice (17 March–24 November 2024), the artist summons the digital specter of Annlee, the Manga character that he and Phillipe Parreno bought from the Japanese animation studio Kwork to initiate their multiauthored collaborative relational art project No Ghost Just a Shell in 1999. In so doing Huyghe directly connects what I have termed the ecosystems aesthetics manifest in his recent work, including Untilled (2012), After ALife Ahead (2017), and UUmwelt (2018) with the relational aesthetics of his earlier, 1990s work produced as he first emerged to international prominence among a wider cohort of relational artists. In so doing he stages the genealogical relationship of one to the other.

In this article I focus on articulating some of the broader implications of Huyghe’s ecosystems aesthetics for addressing the ecological or environmental turn within contemporary art, one that entails a move beyond institutional critique. In what follows I argue that undertaking a more substantive reckoning of contemporary art’s ecosystems aesthetics requires us to revisit the historical legacies of institutional critique, returning to its foundational debates in the heyday of anti-aesthetic postmodernism. And, furthermore, this in turn entails reconsidering earlier debates about artistic postformalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s that were undertaken by New Left aligned theorists and critics who engaged and sought to characterize the practice of postminimal and conceptual artists (particularly Jack Burnham in his systems aesthetics). Here the interrelations between aesthetics and critique as well as between art, politics, and institutionality were staged in radical ways that prove relevant again today as certain concepts, which were discarded in the interim, form new constellations with the artistic problems of our present.