ABSTRACT
For the 2012 edition of dOCUMENTA, French artist Pierre Huyghe created a situation entitled Untilled. Built in the compost facility of Kassel’s Karlsaue Park, the situation consisted in a garden whose ecosystem was designed to evolve through the interactions between the human, animal, botanical, and mineral components of the garden. The artist has stated that the situation encapsulated his concern for vitality—a vitality (the “leaking” of an idea or artifact in a “biological or mineral reality”) that arises when a situation is both porous and indifferent to the spectator. This chapter examines the dethronement of spectatorship in Untilled. It asks: what is the feasibility and productivity of the dethronement of “seeing” and “seeing others seeing”? Tackling this question, it approaches Untilled as a speculative realist commitment, which marginalizes the viewer-artwork correlation to enable the situation’s possibilities of transformation.
