TINO SEHGAL "ART WHILE IT TAKES PLACE"

Tino Sehgal (London, 1976), who trained in dance and political economy, is one of the most singular artists working today for he has created an iconoclastic language that breaks the expectations of our era. He choreographs actions performed by dancers, guards or guides in the exhibition rooms of the institutions that invite him to intervene. This is an unprecedented situation in the contemporary art scene but one that is similar to the 1960s when abstract painting underwent the mutation that turned it into an object. Just as then, the artistic medium chosen by Sehgal for his project needs to be tackled with direct knowledge and without intermediaries. His work is not reproducible in any form of documentary support – be it in photographic form or on video – except for the bodies of the "actors” who give shape to the piece. As a result, it is impossible to write about his works unless one has seen them for oneself. Sehgal has himself remarked that memory is a form of documentation better suited to his work than any technological medium because it creates an impression that more closely resembles the experience of the work. In the light of this, writing, understood as a report and as a temporal medium, would seem to be an appropriate vehicle for providing an account of his work.Another important detail is that his practice has evolved in stages, during which it has become increasingly subtle and complex. As a result, I will only be talking about the five pieces I have had the opportunity to "see” and will describe them in chronological order according to the year in which they were produced. The period I will be covering spans from 2000 to 2005. Therefore my account will exclude a number of works, including This is right (2003), presented at the Wrong Gallery in London, or his more recent This objective of that object, shown at the Galerie Johnen + Schöttle in 2004, which would provide a more complete vision of Sehgal’s oeuvre. Nevertheless, the body of work I will be analysing is sufficient to expose the paradox underlying Tino Sehgal’s ambitious artistic initiative: the synthesis of a medium-specific artistic practice with political action. In other words, the co-ordination of two worlds that are seemingly poles apart on today’s stage. Sehgal’s first contact with the artistic scene came about in 2000 with the performance in several museums of a piece called (untitled) when announced in a written medium but which changed its name when the artist gave it a title at its performance. The title would vary according to the country where it was being staged. Hence, it was called 20 minutes for the 20th century in English-speaking countries, das 20. Jahrhundert in Germany and so on. The work functioned as a portable museum of the various styles of choreography of the 20th century, from Merce Cunningham to Xavier Le Roy, taking in Trisha Brown and Pina Bausch along the way, but kept to the temporal co-ordinates of the stage. That same year, Sehgal presented his first piece designed for the context of an exhibition that was a departure from his background in dance, as he turned instead to the traditions of sculpture and performance. This piece was entitled Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things and was a reinterpretation of various actions by the artists Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham in the late 1960s and early 70s, namely Nauman’s Wall-Floor Positions (1968) and Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up Over Her, Face Up (1973) and Graham’s Roll (1970). These works all share a number of aspects: the artist as performer, the floor as the base for the actions and video as the final support for the work. In addition, they all acknowledged the direct influence of the choreographies of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer that take as their starting point a series of reflections on the spatial relations of the Minimalist object. These choreographies include Huddle (Forti, 1969) and Continuous Project-Altered Daily (Rainer, 1970). This path led from the reflexive phenomenology of the cube to the poetic transitivity of the body as an artistic medium, as demonstrated by certain works by Robert Morris, such as Untitled (Mirrored Cubes), from 1965, and his collaborative venture with Carolee Schneeman in the theatre montage Site, in which Morris used his sculptures Two Columns (1961) as substitutes for the human body.The critic Michael Fried was one of the first writers to note the possible links between new sculpture and the human body in his famous essay "Art and Objecthood”, published in 1967. In it, Fried accused Donald Judd and others of his generation of having perverted the self-referential impulse of Modernism to a point of no return, at which the lack of a distinction between the space of the work and that of the viewer was its consummation. A recent reflection by the art historian Alex Potts on the American critic’s intuition reveals this process. According to Potts, "He [Fried] was both anxious about yet fascinated by the affective power of work that had a strong impact on a viewer’s sense of occupancy space, and he also highlighted how any talk about such affective power inevitably brought into play a vocabulary of intersubjectivity in which the work became a quasi-human presence. In the case of Minimalist sculpture, he invoked a very specific kind of intersubjective drama, as if the presence that impinged were also going to crowd out and confront one.” The words of the British historian indicate that Fried understood choreography – however unwillingly – in a similar way to choreographers such as Rainer or Forti. The difference is that for these choreographers, the "vocabulary of intersubjectivity” given rise to by the literalism and theatricality of the specific object and the way in which "the work became a quasi-human presence” presupposed the birth of a new artistic language free of the conventions of the past, whereas for Fried, it signified the end of autonomous art and the final fusion of art and life.The connection between Minimalism and dance – though largely unrecognised today – was a key element for artists linked to performative practices as it exposed the fact that, at some point between 1960 and 1970, there was, beyond the literal appearance of "specific objects”, a repressed metaphorical field that alluded to the presence of the viewer. This was in fact one of the areas of work pursued by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham at the turn of the decade. Both attempted to adapt Rainer and Forti’s ephemeral experiments to suit the exhibition space by using supports such as video and photography. Even so, the passing of the years has shown that this option was contradictory because projection on a screen or monitor eliminated much of the specific sense of the performance: the interaction between the exercise, the real space and the viewer. Nauman and Graham’s subsequent shift towards architecture, as well as other artists’ abandonment of the performance-documentation binomial, would seem to confirm this hypothesis.Thirty years later, Tino Sehgal wanted to try another alternative to the audiovisual solution that works such as Roll and Wall-Floor Positions provided to the influence of dance in the visual arts. Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things, which was presented in the summer of 2002 in Frankfurt during the fourth Manifesta Biennale, explores the intermediate space between sculpture and movement that Rainer and Forti’s choreographies had pointed to. For this work, Sehgal employed a number of amateur dancers to perform a movement inspired by Nauman and Graham’s videos live during 90-minute-long shifts. The action consisted of a loop that the performers completed by spinning slowly while lying on the floor next to the corner of a wall on the landing of the staircase in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut. Moreover, and as an ironic remembrance of the audiovisual origins of the performances on which the piece was based, the performers formed a kind of cinematographic frame with their hands that on occasions seemed to contain the part-fascinated and part-bewildered viewer watching them.Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things is not a performance, nor is it a piece of sculpture or choreography, but a dynamic "object" that performs a specific action in a museum and which occupies a strange position straddling all these genres rather than opting for any one of them in particular. It stays in the same place, yet changes constantly. It is a work configured as a synthesis of the spatial and corporeal specificity of Minimalism and dance, and as a response to the audiovisual use of the human body in documentary performances that Sehgal sees as being "ahistorical” and which he views as a backward step in the conquest of the exhibition space. Sehgal’s actions, unlike those of his predecessors, may not be recorded or photographed, nor is there any documentation on them. Their support is not a video or an object but a person. They are ephemeral pieces that reproduce themselves and which exist when the visitor is in the room, while the performance takes place, and which disappear when he leaves. They are interventions that place the emphasis on the specific elements of the art of action and the particular meaning of the experience of perceiving a body interacting in a particular place in front of a viewer. Sehgal is an artist who does not seek to free himself from the medium but rather to deconstruct it. He brings into action an urge opposed to the reification of the neo-vanguard movements while refuting the myth of immateriality by means of his insistence on the specific and temporal conditions of the museum as a medium. His heterodox approaches take to unprecedented extremes the task begun earlier by artists such as Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren and James Coleman.His "specific actions” are an in-depth exploration of the principal intuition of the art of the 1960s: the belief that the world of objects, the world outside the subject, reality, is transformed as the individual perceives it and interacts with it; and the conviction that is not the space that gives rise to events but the events that produce the space, according to the phenomenological approach of May 68. Sehgal, however, seeks to go beyond this framework. As he sees it, reality is not limited to inert bodies but includes, above all, intersubjective relationships. To achieve this, he has created an iconoclastic oeuvre intended to be experienced live, off the screen, through paradigms such as dance or singing that challenge the contemporary hypervisuality and virtualisation of experience that have been spurred on by the new economy. Whereas Donald Judd introduced the "specific object” into museums in the era of industrial capitalism, Sehgal now proposes to do the same with the "specific actions” typical of service industry capitalism. He swaps the exchange of commodities for the exchange of experiences.The historian Hal Foster asserts that this kind of historical link can be understood through the effect of the delayed action: a relationship of psychoanalytical origin that draws from the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida and which explains the passing-on of unresolved traumas from the past to the present. It is important to introduce these two concepts – deconstruction and delayed action – in relation to Tino Sehgal’s work because they help to draw fine distinctions in the relationship between two periods of history with different sets of problems. On the one hand, the delayed action points out the appropriateness of a work to a particular historical period, while on the other, deconstruction, as a mutation of the self-reflexive attitude, does away with the error of seeing this initiative as a mere nostalgic reconstruction. Other authors, such as Andrea Fraser, Vanessa Beecroft and Santiago Sierra, as well as writers associated with "relational aesthetics”, have followed a similar genealogy with uneven results.The most important aspect of this early experience of Sehgal’s is that with it he managed to establish the fundamental element on which his following works would be based: the identification of the artistic medium with a person who performs a specific action adapted to the space of the museum and its time. This is the basis of operations that came to underpin various issues dealing with the relationships between the object, the space and the viewer, which, over the years, have revealed political implications of a broader scope. The This is… series of pieces that Sehgal began to make in 2001 and which is still continuing to grow today is a representative example of this way of working. This is good was the first in the series and was presented in the group exhibition "I Promise it’s Political”, curated by Dorothea von Hantelmann at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. On this occasion, a man dressed as one of the museum security guards drew our attention in one of the rooms by jumping from foot to foot, moving his arms in circles while declaiming the title of the work, "Tino Sehgal, This is good, 2001, courtesy of the artist”. This took place alongside the work Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) by Robert Morris and one of Félix González-Torres’ famous stacks of paper. The action lasted ten or twelve seconds and started over again whenever anyone entered the space. Whereas the main intention behind Instead of allowing… was to expose the artistic medium by means of an austere mise-en-scène for the dance outside of its usual location, the purpose of This is good was to confirm this operation in order to make it more complex and reflexive by introducing new elements such as utterances, songs and questions that bring into play issues that were only hinted at in the previous work.In effect, the fact that the work proposed by Sehgal is temporarily installed in the person charged with caring for it and conserving it adds shades to its meaning. At the same time, it is imbued with a humorous and subversive gesture that is a constant feature of Sehgal’s work throughout his career. What is the guard supposed to be guarding? In reality, it is as if the institution were pondering on its own nature and as if the museum had become a self-referential object by means of the security guard converted into a metaphor. The work is the guard, the guard is the museum and the museum is the work. Furthermore, the short script that details the characteristics of the work – title, author and date – provides all the information required in order to identify it and functions as a kind of signature that the artist delegates to the conventions of the institution. The information on the wall confirms, as is often the case, that what we see taking place before us is indeed a work of art.This is good reduces the work of art to its bare minimum elements: the museum (represented by the guard) and a title that names and identifies it. This is a tautological structure that revises the classic devices of discontinuity of the "art institution” and transforms them into a performance. But as often occurs in tautologies in art, much more lies hidden from sight behind the appearance. In the manner of the famous slogan of "what you see is what you get”, applied by Frank Stella to Minimalism, the affirmation that is so self-evident as to be absurd that defines the artistic identity of Sehgal’s intervention, rather than supporting any particular meaning, tends instead to raise a number of questions to do with the conventions of the work of art in the context of the museum and the way in which we perceive it. This is good is, therefore, a question disguised as a self-sufficient truth that brings into play a discursive mechanism on issues such as the permanence and temporariness of the action, the exchange value of this act, the possibility of collecting it or archiving it and the notion of authorship. This is good, converted into a machine for generating meanings, lays the foundations for a series of consequences of greater importance as regards contemporary society, its economy and its politics. Another work of the same series is This is propaganda (2002), which Sehgal exhibited at the 2003 Venice Biennale and was reproduced in 2005 together with This is good at his solo show at the Serralves Museum in Oporto. In Venice, This is propaganda was part of the "Utopia Station” group show and was performed by women dressed as the Biennale security guards. Their task was to catch the eye of a viewer looking distractedly at the works of other artists by singing in an operatic style "This is propaganda, you know, you know, this is propaganda, you know, you know. Tino Sehgal, This is propaganda, 2002, courtesy of Jan Mot Gallery”. Two years later in Oporto, where he shared the exhibition space with the painter Raoul De Keyser, a woman aged over 60 caught the viewer’s attention while performing the same action, though in this case the name of the lender of the work was changed to the Haubrok Collection, which had acquired it in the period between the two shows. Viewers responded in a similar manner at the two events, watching her suspiciously out of the corner of their eye, like someone pretending everything is normal when in the presence of a madman or woman.A comparison of the two versions of This is propaganda reveals that the factor of time is not only related to the movement and the "taking place”, but also to its historicity, in other words, to a flexible identity that questions the classic notion of permanence, an iterative identity that is transformed by mere repetition during the time the works take place. This approach is consistent with self-critical methodology and explains the continuity between a new work and the ones that went before it. This is propaganda, for example, shares with This is good the common denominator of its repertoire (person and action), yet also reveals at the same time variations in the nature of the occupancy of the space, the gender of the performer and the objective of the message. This is good was more formalist and was limited to the performance of an exercise in self-defining. This is propaganda, on the other hand, has a much more extrovert and contextual purpose. The way in which the space is occupied in these two works shows this to be the case. Whereas the characteristics of the action are self-contained in the first piece, in the second piece both the circle drawn by the performer as she sings and the loud tone of her voice make it much more expansive and open. While This is good was an enigma that raised a question on the essence of the work itself, its sequel pondered on the political meaning of art. This is a feature of all Sehgal’s actions but on this occasion was particularly evident.This sensation was heightened when one noted that the voice singing This is propaganda was loud enough to fill the entire space occupied by "Utopia Station”. One was drawn inevitably to conclude that Sehgal was commenting in a critical and joking manner not just on what was happening in the exhibition – which consisted in the main of "politically engaged” works of art, notably those on an audiovisual support – but also on what we understand by political art today. The Venetian version of This is propaganda was therefore, a declaration of intent that synthesised the experiences of Sehgal’s previous work and which was all the more concentrated as it intensified the political dimension drawn from his critique of the artistic medium that he had been working on ever since Instead of allowing… The interaction between Sehgal’s piece and many of those shown with it in the Arsenale made it possible to distinguish clearly between a singular "formal” approach to political aspects and a "discursive” approach. This piece shows that it is no longer a matter of seeing a museum as a repository for a collection of inert objects but as a space for production, a place for the transformation of actions and not for contemplation. The political "effectiveness” of a work does not depend so much on its content or on what it says (pure propaganda) but on the way in which it says it and above all the manner in which it relates to the viewer and the surrounding space. According to Sehgal, "my point is that dance as well as singing – as traditional artistic media – could be a paradigm for another mode of production which stresses transformation of acts instead of transformation of material, continuous involvement of the present with the past in creating further presents instead of an orientation towards eternity, and simultaneity of production and deproduction instead of economics of growth”. Lastly, two recent pieces put into practice all the elements considered so far and explore in depth the complexity of Sehgal’s commitment to engagé art. These works are This is new and This is about, produced by the Serralves Museum in Oporto in February and March of 2005. This is new was the first piece at the start of the visit and consisted of a female member of staff at the ticket office reciting the most important news headline of the day as she handed over the ticket. On 19 February, for example, she declared "Sondagem dá maioria absoluta ao Partido Socialista [Poll indicates absolute majority for the Socialist Party], This is new, Tino Sehgal, 2003”.The type of material used to construct This is new is highly risky for any artist. It is well known that virtually all works produced too close to reality, without sufficient historical distance, usually end up being notorious failures. Nevertheless, and despite its extraordinary simplicity, Sehgal’s piece is successful in that it achieves his goals, which are to surprise the viewer and situate him in a particular time and place as soon as he crosses the threshold that traditionally separated reality and history from a supposedly inner, autonomous world. What the artist aims to do with this complicit and ironic gesture is to ensure that his audience retains in their minds those everyday issues that are normally put to one side for a while when one enters a museum. This is new puts into practice a personal interpretation of site-specific behaviour. Tino Sehgal sees the institution not as a place that enables one to escape but as a terrain indissolubly attached to a particular historical, political and social context. The other piece produced by the Portuguese museum is This is about, which presents two very important new aspects. For the first time in this work, Sehgal employs exhibition guides as the protagonists of the action and replaces the affirmative statements of the past with a question. Once again, the choice of "actors” and the formula of the text are justified as another turn of the screw in the self-reflexive or deconstructive process of the series. In the case of this work, the exercise is divided into two parts. The performer opens the piece by walking in front of a group of visitors around the corridors of the museum building designed by Álvaro Siza. The performer suddenly stops, allows his head to fall as far forwards as his spine will allow and recites in a strange voice from the pit of his stomach "What do you think this is about?, Tino Sehgal, This is about, 2003”, while at the same time waving his arms compulsively and twisting his body so that the upper part turns to face his stupefied audience. The result is, it must be said, unusual and calls to mind the girl in The Exorcist and the zombies in Thriller. As soon as the piece is over, the guide reveals to the audience that this is a piece by Sehgal, continues on his way and immediately launches into the second part, in which the gestures are repeated but the discourse is modified, as he now declares, "So now, what do you think this is about? Tino Sehgal, This is about, 2003” Obviously, the fact that the question concerning such an extravagant act is placed in the mouth of the guides who explain the content of the exhibitions adds an extra meaning to the work. Nevertheless, the artist does not content himself with using the guides as a ventriloquist might his dummies, but instead adds utterances spoken in a ghostly voice which, given the indecorous posture that he forces the guides to adopt, seems to come from the base of the spine. The debate is left open.Sehgal’s recent works retain their characteristic formal rigour but are increasingly extrovert and humorous, and consolidate a trend that has grown more pronounced ever since his presentation in 2000 of Instead of allowing…, his most impenetrable, self-absorbed piece. This is about consolidates this intersubjective trend present from the outset of his career and takes it to a new level by appealing directly to the audience, who find themselves wondering how a work of these characteristics might be collected, whether it is possible to buy or sell it and, above all, what these changes signify in the face of the museum and the "art institution”.According to Sehgal himself, his works cannot be conserved or archived as physical objects due to his determined reaction against the capitalist system of production. As he sees it, many art objects reaffirm a priori structures that he has serious doubts about given that they reflect and are involved in the historical form of the economy that now holds sway: the transformation of material. This is about, like his other works, aims to create a self-sustaining artistic device that will serve as an alternative to the accumulation of goods and chattels and to the transformation of nature. As a result, his works generate no material remains either when they are in use or when they are archived in the memories of the artist and those who have experienced them, nor when they are sold through an oral agreement arranged under the supervision of a notary. Moreover, the exceptionally provisional nature of his approaches allows for other possible readings closely connected to the ways in which his works are exhibited, disseminated and sold.Firstly, Sehgal’s temporary actions are resolutely public art, not in the popular sense, however, of a work of art placed in the street, but rather as a device designed to be perceived as a collective subject, as is particularly true of This is about. One curious aspect of his exhibitions is that when one of his works takes place our perception of the physical space and of the audience alongside us is especially intense. In contrast, in other approaches, such as in certain videos, for example, this space usually disappears through the use of the "black box” that takes us into a world of fiction that isolates us from everything happening around us. Put more prosaically, when we look at a painting or a photograph, any other viewers are a nuisance. When we look at a piece by Sehgal, other viewers are our aides and partners.Secondly, Sehgal’s determination to make his works public and temporary has evident consequences as regards their circulation in the marketplace. Even though it is true that the capitalism of flexible accumulation today has devised mechanisms that make it possible to own anything, even the temporarily material works by this artist, it is also true that there are times when short circuits occur in the system. As a result, even though any private individual can buy one of Sehgal’s pieces, personal possession makes no sense as they are not designed to be installed in an individual’s home but in museums, exhibitions and other collective recreational spaces. Thus, his artistic project in some way performs a destabilising act in the face of the economic structure that prevails in the world of art by transforming owners into mere sponsors who donate their works for the purpose of public display. One example of this is the Haubrok Collection, which has done just this with This is propaganda in the K21 art gallery in Düsseldorf, an initiative that dismantles the bourgeois infrastructure built on autonomy and private property and which strengthens the role of the museum in the city as a factory of an emerging subjectivity based on alterity and dialogue with others through innovative formats that have emerged from the establishment of new institutions such as democracy and the middle class. Finally, it is possible to connect Sehgal’s view of self-critical art as a medium for political activism with a widespread crisis in all disciplines that have postmodern values. In his book World Risk Society, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck posits the existence of a "reflexive modernization” that offers epistemological alternatives to "weak” postmodern thinking. According to Beck, "radicalized modernization undermines the foundations of the first modernity and changes its frame of reference, often in a way that is neither desired nor anticipated. […] This is not ‘postmodernity’ but a second modernity”. Sehgal’s artistic practice, like that of other artists who have begun working in the last ten to fifteen years, shares this self-same sensibility, which is characterised by a common interest in the deconstruction of the neo-vanguard movements and by the critical reawakening – far removed from any fetishist or aesthetic temptations – of ideas latent in the movements of the 1960s and 70s that were not pursued at the time due to the initial impact of the conservative cycle that led to postmodernism in the 1980s. That period promoted different kinds of backward behaviour, the common denominator of which was associated with an acritical referential approach in keeping with the lack of other cultural models.Sehgal’s is not engagé art in a propagandistic sense but in a practical and perhaps more radical sense. His work demonstrates that a specific criticism of the autonomy of museums is a way of influencing the economic, political and social system of today. In his critique, the political aspect does not lie in denunciation but in the creation of new habits and channels of communication that intensify a phenomenology linked to contingency. Sehgal’s interventions create relationships and build subjectivity. They produce a spatiality based on difference and alterity in the presence of the other. When faced with Sehgal’s actions, the viewer becomes aware that works of art do not need to be static but that they can stimulate the creative and transforming bond that exists between subjects and reality. Tino Sehgal’s art is a form of politics of the impossible. Here and now.

Text: Pedro de Llano

Curator: João FernandesProduction: Fundação de Serralves