On first reading one might get the impression Tino Seghal is on a mission to eliminate the art object: he doesn’t make objects and doesn’t allow any resultant objects to come from his work (including all forms of documentation). Generally, his work inhabits a social space rather than a material one, whether a conversation, a game, or a simple gesture. Even when he sells his work (and he does), the transaction involves no form of documentation or written description, only an “oral contract1“. However overzealous these strict rules may appear, Sehgal seems primarily concerned with conceptual integrity: he works with immaterial ideas, and material representations might only serve to distract from the “thing-in-itself2“.
My first introduction to Sehgal occurred when I unknowingly stumbled into his piece, This Progress, at the London Institute of Contemporary Art in the spring of 2005. It began with an eight-year-old girl posing the question “What is progress?” as I followed her into one of the exhibition spaces. I was led throughout the empty galleries and back stairwells of the ICA, continuing that thread of conversation, and being passed off from one guide to the next (each one being older than the next, with their own contributions to the conversation). By the end, I ended up right back where I had started, equally enthused and dumbfounded by the ‘thing’ I had just experienced.
In contrast to This Progress, I was initially quite disappointed with his solo show at the Walker Art Center. The works presented at the Walker are much less individually engaging and interactive than This Progress; in one gallery, a young woman dressed as a gallery attendant sings “This is propaganda,” which also happens to be the title of the piece. Later on, a middle-aged man (also dressed as a gallery attendant) dances and waves his arms for a moment, then announces the title: “This is good.” In the final room, a woman lays in a contorted position at the end of the empty gallery, slowly and methodically moving about the floor. Ironically, the work here can easily be seen as another type of ‘object’: much of the social element is absent due to a lack of direct interaction and each piece inhabits a temporal and physical space more akin to a ‘living sculpture’— high-brow versions of the silver-painted street performer.
However, what at first seemed like a series of conceptual anti-objects became more interesting after considering their relationship to the Walker Art Center itself. After I encountered This is Propaganda, there was a complete inversion of how I navigated the Walker’s galleries: rather than focusing on the artwork, and ignoring the gallery attendants, the objects and representations inhabiting the space melted away and I focused on anybody wearing the gallery attendant’s uniform. As I greeted the various men and women wearing grey shirts, I found myself studying their gestures and making inquisitive eye contact, wondering if I would be treated to another welcome disruption of the usual hushed museum environment. At one point an older gallery attendant approached me with something in her hand—was this to be another part of Sehgal’s exhibition? It turned out that she was offering me a pencil (I was taking notes with a pen). What would have normally been a mundane reinforcement of institutional regulations was briefly an exciting chance to see something new and interesting.
This example is not incongruous with Sehgal’s own views on his work and ideas. In a recent interview, he suggests “the exhibition format is the most contemporary format we have, because it addresses the individual2“. Despite the critical attention paid to his stringent exclusion of objects, much of the conceptual background of his work has to do with the institutional art environment, and the role it has in our culture. While the work in Tino Sehgal’s Walker exhibition may seem at first to be a series of “one-liners,” it has the potential to catalyze the experience of the art institution as a subjective experience rather than an objective one—to focus one’s perception on the individual rather than the object.
Tino Sehgal’s solo exhibition was at the Walker Art Center from December 12, 2007 to March 23, 2008. This article was originally published in ARP! Vol. 1, Issue #4.
1 Sayej, Nadja; “Terms and Conditions: Selling Tino Sehgal.” artUS, October-November 2006
2 Interview with Kultureflash: http://www.kultureflash.net/archive/192/priview.html