The film creates a subtle intervention in what some people call the ‘post-phenomenological’, describing a condition where all human life is premised on and shaped by digital technologies; a condition in which the thing itself is only a thing because of digital metrics that circumscribe and reveal it. There is a kind of brutal sense of thingness in Untitled (Human Mask): everything is reduced to its phenomenological presence, and for the monkey at least, nothing seems to stand in for something else. Imagine a world, then, without metaphor. Is that world not the post-apocalypse, the great revelation? The end of interpretation? A world that hovers somewhere between the mundane and the miraculous, before the digital world, before humans discovered the cinema, before their selves and images split? Before the fall, really? A world without metaphor would be a world where the fantasy of capitalist inevitability had not yet been inscribed (ex post facto) on all of history. Untitled (Human Mask)'s poetics tug at our collective sense of epochal discomfort, at our increasing realisation that Wallace Stevens's famous, oft-quoted line that ‘the great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written’ 67 might remain intact for the rest of our time; that the great poem of earth will never be written because it would necessarily be a lie. If it is a fool's errand to believe in such a poem, as Adorno suggested after Auschwitz, then we are forced to confront the horror of our own inhabitation of a world that returns our gaze with a violence as unpredictable as ours is predictable. The only thing we know for sure, in Michel Serres's gloomy words, is that if ‘persons sometimes kill, the collective always kills’.68
Huyghe's film reminds us of the radical transformations that hope and care have made, how the future as motif and siren call has been thoroughly trashed. But it also suggests we can still imagine. The fact that the end of hope and care is represented by a strange and even cruel fantasy means that there is, buried somewhere, an alternate reality, where most of us stop killing and destroying, and we no longer listen to those who continue to want us to do so. There is a kind of kitsch to our world, a cheapening and erasure, often violent and without careful consideration, of our best achievements. We need to make work for a better a time. In that way we can leave the dangers of kitsch behind.
Everything that I have written here, all the fragments and tangents, came to me when I was thinking about Pierre Huyghe's Untitled (Human Mask). All of these are things I thought about through his work. I learned a lot, and a lot of things got unlearned. I think that's really all you can hope for when you look at a work of art. For me the writing of this book has been an opportunity not only to engage with this work, but also to imagine other works that might have been and ideas I had never even considered before. I let Untitled (Human Mask) make other possible works form in my head, often elliptically, sometimes with reference to my own films – made and unmade. After ‘the end’ there is opportunity to revise your summary, come up with a slightly different story, rearrange possibilities productively, or at least curiously. In the clash of what is and what could have or should have been written, painted or filmed, Elena Ferrante sees pure possibility and fecund source. This certainly gives me hope. She writes:
Between the book that is published and the book that readers buy there is always a third book, a book where beside the written sentences are those which we imagined writing, beside the sentences that readers read are the sentences they have imagined reading. This third book, elusive, changing, is nevertheless a real book. I didn't actually write it, my readers haven't actually read it, but it's there. It's the book that is created in the relationship between life, writing and reading.69
As I transcribed this quotation I kept thinking of how I still can't understand what the monkey in Untitled (Human Mask) wants. How strange the film still feels, and how it has taken me in so many different directions, has burrowed and entangled itself permanently inside my own reflections and ideas. The film in this regard is preternatural, uncanny, disturbing. Thinking of it here in my final sentence is making me shudder…
The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over. […] I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.
– H.G. Wells70
Stills from Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask), 2014, film, colour, sound 19min. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth, London; Esther Schipper, Berlin; and Anna Lena Films, Paris