Conceptual Anarchy

PARIS — Pierre Huyghe has long loved “Locus Solus,” Raymond Roussel’s 1914 novel about an inventor who invites friends to a secluded estate to show off his creations, one of which is a tank filled with cadavers that re-enact the most important moments of their former lives, animated by a miraculous substance called resurrectine.

The office where Mr. Huyghe, one of the most admired and intellectually formidable European artists of his generation, was shaping his own creations here one July morning was not particularly lairlike. The tidy space, behind big Second Empire courtyard doors, was dominated by a few white desks and computers, and the closest thing to a diabolical device was the espresso machine in the kitchen. But the walls, teeming with diagrams and drawings for Mr. Huyghe’s many overlapping projects, cast a Rousselian cloud of mad science over an otherwise sunny corner of the Marais.

When more than two decades of Mr. Huyghe’s art heads west for his highly anticipated American retrospective, opening Nov. 23 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it’s not clear which of his works-in-progress will be fully incubated, in part because of their sheer experimental complexity. There is, for example, his butterfly project, a collaboration with a Rockefeller University scientist to engineer living examples of the fictional butterflies (one with checkerboard wings) that Vladimir Nabokov, an obsessive lepidopterist, sketched for his wife, Vera. There is an eerie new piece involving a pill camera, a swallowable video capsule used by doctors to inspect digestive tracts; Mr. Huyghe is harnessing one for more ethereal ends, as illustrated by pictures on the wall showing the grottolike contours of a human interior, topped by the craggy head of Willem Dafoe.

“Maybe, I will ask him to be a part of it, to swallow one,” Mr. Huyghe (pronounced hweeg) explained, shrugging and describing an abiding fascination with the idea of depicting an actor from the inside.

Yet another project, shot recently in Japan, is intended to make its way to Los Angeles, where he says its implications could be interesting in a city built on appearance. He traveled in July to a town between Tokyo and the Fukushima nuclear disaster exclusionary zone, where a restaurant owner has become YouTube famous — or perhaps infamous — for using a macaque monkey, done up in a dress and a humanlike mask, as a part-time waiter.