Exhibiting indifference to the participating subject in Pierre Huyghe's Untilled (2012) at Documenta 13
Pierre Huyghe's art installation in the composting area of the Karlsaue Park at Documenta 13 doesn't care about my experience of it. Events such as pollination and compostation continue to happen whether or not I choose to view or participate in the exhibited work. As such, it raises questions for a regime of contemporary art that focuses on viewer-object relations or on the co-completion of meaning through openness to public participation, as well as for attendant political claims premised upon reconfigurations of the subject of sense experience. This paper proposes that Huyghe's Untilled (2012), through complicity with material processes, stages an indifference to participation, and challenges the claims of a participatory regime of art by actively producing a non-subject-dependent reality. The work suggests a politics distinct from both relational aesthetics and its antagonistic reworkings, which are premised on openness to and dependence upon a subject.