"The Aggregate as an Image of Connection and Individuation: the case of Pierre Huyghe's Untilled (2011-2012) and Abyssal Plain (2015-2016)"

Can the notion of the aggregate, here considered as aesthetic synthesis, in the form of a “perceptive” image or in the form of an artistic formation/project – provide an intelligible frame in which to place a set of contemporary practices aiming at testing new cooperative standards for (aesthetic, artistic, and political) experience? After recalling some current uses and misuses of the term, often viewed as a standardized guarantee of an open, unstable pattern of connection and relationship, the article examines the possibility of taking into consideration an aesthetic meaning of the aggregate, redetermined according to its “image-making”. While taking on this question, the article addresses in particular two in situ interventions by prominent French artist Pierre Huyghe (Untilled and Abyssal Plain), in order to focus on their respective and specific image-characters, while diversely generating, in the form of an “aesthetic aggregate”, connection– and individuation–outcomes through an arrangement and re-arrangement of organic and inorganic material in a unique environment.