Review of Pierre Huyghe "Liminals" (LAS Art Foundation) at Berghain Halle, Berlin

Instructions to give your audience the impression that they are encountering ‘the void’ for €10 (using just a gallery film of 1 hour and an expensive set of speakers):

1 Project an image of a naked woman on a huge screen.

2 Arousal makes your audience feel like something is really happening so make her sexy.

3 Keep the room dark, with concrete walls and high ceilings. The back room of Berghain would work perfectly.

4 The flickering light from the screen should never be quite enough to get a full sense of the room’s dimensions.

5 Accompany your film with dramatic electronic music (crackles, roaring static). Surround the audience with speakers.

6 Have your naked woman crawl and writhe around on the floor – ensure she looks naïve and childlike. Better still if she is cold, bruised and vulnerable.

7 Get a good look between her legs – get the camera right up in there. Vagina = void (Freud said it first: ‘dark continents’!!).

8 Scoop out her face and put another dark gaping hole in its place (She has got to be depersonalised and inhuman enough to be ‘post-human’ but just human enough so that her tits stay perky).

9 Place her in a desolate otherworldly landscape (…a ‘dark continent’). Make sure your landscape has some big craters (more deep dark holes to get the blood flowing).

10 Give her a C-section scar (but don’t think through its implications of birth and new life too much, her body must continue to stand for a masculine fantasy of the void as death and otherness).

11 For the final flourish, opaquely cite Wittgenstein in the explanatory post-film interview (conveniently leave out his most famous line: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ or… shut the fuck up, the void is right there in you already you silly man).