Warm spots in Pierre Huyghe's often chilly Conceptualism at LACMA

The traveling 20-year retrospective of French Conceptual artist Pierre Huyghe turns the Los Angeles County Museum of Art into a mammoth vivarium a carefully orchestrated, walk-in terrarium-cum-aquarium. The exhibition creates a self-contained ecosystem of plants, sculptures, video projections and installation works, plus a variety of animals.

Those living creatures include bees, tiny invertebrates, a dog, crabs and other spiny sea creatures, puppets, a masked monkey and, yes, even museum visitors themselves. Nature and culture, art and science promiscuously intermingle.

LACMA's Jarrett Gregory organized the retrospective with curators from the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, where it has already been seen. Huyghe (pronounced hweeg) reconfigured each exhibition according to the given situation, perhaps because one cannot step into the same river twice. So don't expect a typical retrospective, where the evolution of an artist's work unfolds in sequence.

Here a visitor wanders adrift, accumulating sensations that are fragments of the whole. Artistic ideas keep turning back in on themselves.

Surprising moments of wonderfully bewildering poetry do pop up, at once reflecting and illuminating our brave new transnational world in which technologically sophisticated, ecologically imperiled lives are now lived. Too often and too easily, however, these moments fall between the sprawling exhibition's cracks.

The show features 51 works, which have been set free in vast, dimly lighted spaces. (Be sure to get the handout map at the entry.) Several are video projections, one set up like a puppet theater, which play intermittently. Many rooms seem empty until something gets turned on.

In one, a sort of Minimalist video game is suspended overhead like an enormous, inverted "Saturday Night Fever" dance floor. A grid of lighted squares crosses a Pong-like diversion that visitors control with joysticks and the kind of cheesy drop ceiling one might find in the basement of a suburban tract house. If only it were all less scrambled and more strange.

One of the most compelling episodes comes near the back of the Resnick Pavilion, just before an outdoor patio installation of overhead machinery producing steady cascades of rain, fog and snow water in its liquid, gaseous and solid states. Titled "Precambrian Explosion," the sculpture is a large aquarium.

The work refers to the billions of years between the Earth's formation and the proliferation of hard-shelled sea creatures that we know from fossil remains. (Biblical literalists will be appalled.) A big chunk of lava rock is suspended inside a large, water-filled glass cube. Exotic sea creatures in shocking pastel hues explore the aquarium floor's sandy terrain and crawl around on the boulder's underside.

It takes a moment to realize that nothing appears to be holding up the massive rock, which protrudes above the water line to create a little landscape of unoccupied terra firma. Visually it floats, suspended within a magical fluid space and conjuring Magritte's renowned 1959 painting "Castle of the Pyrenees," a colossal chunk of rock that the Belgian Surrealist showed hovering over the sea.

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Warm spots in Pierre Huyghe's often chilly Conceptualism at LACMA