Shore, 2013

Pierre Huyghe’s Shore places a fossilized turtle shell among the dust that results from sanding down a portion of the museum wall. Revealing successive layers of paint, the incursion into the wall alludes to all previous exhibitions in the space. Thus, the work juxtaposes two distinct gauges of time: one, belonging to the realm of nature, is geological, while the other, belonging to the realm of culture, concerns MOCA’s particular history. Yet the paint strata can also be read like tree rings and the shell can be seen as a sculptural object. The integration of Huyghe’s installation into its surroundings echoes the broad recognition in the twenty-first century of the ecological interconnectedness of all forms of life and the effects of human activity on climate and biodiversity. By presenting the gallery’s floor as a beach and paint from its wall as sand, Shore suggests the necessity of a new account of nature that subsumes both museum and turtle.