A still from Pierre Huyghe's A Journey That Wasn't, 2005.   (Photo: Tom Powell Imaging/Marian Goodman Gallery/Courtesy of the Whitney Museum)

5. Pierre Huyghe, “A Journey That Wasn’t,” at the Whitney Biennial 2006
The only artist in this year’s Whitney Biennial to truly flesh out the show’s “Day for Night” concept (a dystopian, artifice-laced riff on François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine), Huyghe made an enchanting pseudo-documentary about a search for a rare species of albino penguin, cutting from Antarctic ice floes to a rainy nightscape of Central Park. (New Yorkers, through the Public Art Fund, were invited to appear on set.) The resulting video installation conveyed a familiar yet surreal landscape: Wollman Rink haunted by the specter of global warming.