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Review: Pierre Huyghe Mixes Stones and Water for Roof Garden at the Met

Pierre Huyghe’s installation for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art includes uprooted paving stones and a massive fish tank.Credit...Ángel Franco /The New York Times

Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden this summer might suppose at first that the maintenance crew has been tearing up the terrace’s paving stones in search of a leak. Displaced slabs are stacked next to rectangular cavities exposing underlying dirt where puddles and rivulets have gathered. In fact, the apparent disarray belongs to an installation by the French Conceptualist Pierre Huyghe, an untitled work commissioned by the Met for its annual Roof Garden show. Conceived by Sheena Wagstaff, the Met’s chairwoman of modern and contemporary art, and organized by Ian Alteveer, an associate curator of modern and contemporary art, it’s an intriguing but dry, cerebrally puzzling and disconnected affair.

Besides the uprooted paving stones, there is a boulder of Manhattan schist, the bedrock supporting most of New York City’s skyscrapers. The third and by far the most interesting element is a massive fish tank containing a curious assortment of objects, animate and inanimate. Inside is a boulder of lava similar in size to the Manhattan schist chunk. It is, improbably, floating in the water, its top rising a bit above the surface. A couple of inches below is a mound of sand around which swim little brown eel-like lampreys and bright orange Triops cancriformis, or tadpole shrimp.

A remarkable feature of the aquarium is that its thick, transparent walls intermittently turn opaque white, rendering the tank’s interior briefly invisible. That’s thanks to computer-controlled liquid crystal technology.

To fathom all this it helps to consult the booklet accompanying the exhibition. Here you learn, for example, that the lampreys and the tadpole shrimp are species believed not to have evolved in millions of years. So, one of Mr. Huyghe’s themes is time, as the installation reaches from the era when Manhattan schist was formed — about 450 million years ago — to the present day and the proliferation of new technologies. Then there’s the lava, a cooled piece of the superhot molten stuff that’s been churning within Earth’s core since the planet’s formation.

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Inside the tank is a boulder of lava, eel-like lampreys and bright orange Triops cancriformis, or tadpole shrimp.Credit...Ángel Franco/The New York Times

There’s a play between the natural and the artificial, too, and the installation involves more artifice than is immediately apparent. Mr. Huyghe (pronounced hweeg) intended that the water pooled in the holes left from the removal of the paving stones appear to be leaking from the aquarium. But actually the water circulating in the tank and the seemingly leaking water are separate systems.

In another touch that could be easily overlooked, gravel and dust are under and around the schist boulder. It looks as if someone forgot to sweep up, but they are part of Mr. Huyghe’s design. The gravel and dust came off the boulder during transit from a stone monger in Long Island City, Queens.

The boulder itself is the sort of thing homeowners buy as landscape ornaments to add accents of picturesque nature. In so doing, they effectively emulate Frederick Law Olmsted’s naturalistic but in fact highly artificial design of Central Park, just beyond the rooftop garden’s parapets in all its verdant glory.

You might also note allusions to more recent art history. Hans Haacke’s early, ecological works come to mind, as do Carl Andre’s Minimalist sculpture, and projects by earthwork artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. The Conceptualist Michael Asher’s quasi-archaeological deconstructions of galleries and subtle interventions in museums also loom in the background.

At this point you might grant that there are lots of interesting and poetic connections to be discovered by the thoughtful and sympathetic viewer, yet still wonder, What’s it all about?

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“The Roof Garden Commission: Pierre Huyghe” runs through Nov. 1.Credit...Ángel Franco/The New York Times

In an illuminating interview in the booklet, Mr. Huyghe offers Ms. Wagstaff this philosophically telling explanation:

“Walking through Central Park, you realize that all events there — the stone, the frozen lake, the plane overhead, the maintenance worker — are equally necessary. The important thing is not necessarily the big event. There is an ecology in the broadest sense of the word; different states of life, each element playing a role — even sometimes antagonistically.”

Followers of the recent philosophical movement called Speculative Realism may detect in Mr. Huyghe’s thinking the influence of writers like Manuel De Landa, author “A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History,” and Alfred North Whitehead, whose “process philosophy” takes all things great and small to be dynamically interconnected. This points up the problem with Mr. Huyghe’s installation: It doesn’t appear organically integrated. It seems obscurely didactic and somehow incomplete.

Elsewhere in the museum, a 19-minute film called “Untitled (Human Mask)” that Mr. Huyghe made last year (it’s not part of the Roof Garden commission) is projected in a darkened gallery. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful and poignant movie about a real trained monkey who wears a waitress uniform and the mask of a girl and a long black wig. This strange creature entertains diners in a restaurant outside Tokyo. (Mr. Huyghe learned about the monkey from a YouTube video called “Fukuchan Monkey in wig, mask, works Restaurant!”) In Mr. Huyghe’s film, the mood is first set by images of abandoned streets and buildings within the forbidden zone of radiation-devastated Fukushima in Japan. Then the scene switches to the restaurant, where the camera meditatively follows the monkey after-hours as it sits pensively or wanders around the empty, shadowy rooms, seeming at times desperately lonely and alarmingly human.

The film is magical, gorgeously unified and emotionally charged, perhaps in part because Mr. Huyghe identifies intimately with the lonesome monkey. In his Roof Garden installation, that sense of personal, urgently felt engagement is regrettably missing.

“The Roof Garden Commission: Pierre Huyghe” runs through Nov. 1 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Between a Rock and an Art Place. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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