The Materiality of the Artwork

In 2005 the Institute of Contemporary Art in London presented a solo show of two works by Sehgal, including one of his earliest works, titled Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing dan and bruce and other things which was created in 2000. At the far wall of a vast, long, otherwise empty exhibition space a young woman lying on the floor was moving slowly, into the room and back again. Her body was never still, but in constant movement, changing its Gestalt without emphasizing any of the individual movements. The figure seemed introverted, in a strange way, distant or remote, almost as if in a trance. One had the impression that the movements happened without intention, as if body parts were following rather than actively conducting, moving automatically through a sequence without beginning or end, without a center and without the intention to express something specific. The impulse for the movement seemed to stem entirely from the breath, which generated a steady rhythm of contraction and release in the torso, the extremities followed automatically and unintentionally. Approximately every two-and-a-half hours, the dancer was replaced by a new dancer, who lay down taking the exact position continuing the movement while the first one stood up and left. In this manner the work existed — executed by different dancers (male and female, young and old) — every hour of every day that the museum was open, from the first until the last day of the exhibition.

Nothing in the figure’s movements suggested that they were addressing the viewer. Possibly this was one of the reasons that it didn’t occur to many visitors that they were seeing a choreography enacted in front of them. The body produced the impression of an object; at certain moments it even appeared as an undefined, anthropomorphic mass. At precisely the same time, this introverted movement gave the dance a sense of self-absorption that made it possible to experience this situation as an artwork. Visitors to the museum reacted in various ways. Some just passed by, others were irritated and a few became confused, even frightened and insecure. Apparently, for many it was not easy to categorize what they were seeing. Visitors often alerted the staff at the front desk that something was wrong. Sometimes they talked directly to the dancer, asking, “Are you all right?” When I saw the work in 2001 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, (6) one visitor lifted the dancer and carried her away, explaining that he was a doctor. Other viewers apparently thought that they were looking at an automated doll. Many however, as if to restore the normality of a situation that so obviously did not correspond to the norm of museum experience, inspected the work with the same degree of attention that they give to other pieces in the museum collection. Once a group of schoolchildren began dancing after they read the title of the work: Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things.

The title refers to Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham, who both integrated modalities of dance into their practice after being influenced by the minimal dance of choreographers like Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti. Nauman and Graham are mostly cited for employing the moving body in their film and video pieces, thus expanding the media of visual art. Tony sinking into the floor, Face up and Face down and Elke allowing the Floor to rise up over her, Face up, both made in 1973, are Nauman’s first works where he used actors, whom he instructed to imagine specific situations, like sinking into the floor. Wall-Floor Positions (1968) is an early work in which Nauman takes up different positions, each one creating a new configuration between his body, the wall and the floor. In his focus on space, there is a strong connection to Minimal Art, with the decisive difference that Nauman uses the body as both material and medium. These movements were recorded by Nauman and then shown as a video in exhibition spaces. The camera, which Nauman largely uses in an unreflective manner, becomes an integral component in the work of Graham. Roll (1970) is one of a series of films in which Graham experimented with the interplay among camera, gaze and body. Lying on the floor, the artist rolled around his own axis while holding a camera and at the same time was filmed by a second camera, placed on the ground some distance away, thereby generating two film sequences: in one the fixed camera is filmed by the camera held by Graham and in the other the artist is trying to keep his gaze and camera directed towards the fixed camera while he rolls.

Sehgal took stills that had been published from Roll and integrated them as movement poses in his own choreography. Like Graham and Nauman, Sehgal refers to the art form of dance and integrates it into the context of visual art, but the way in which this connection is made differs fundamentally from the work of these other artists. Both Nauman and Graham work with elements of dance or movement, but the moving body enters the exhibition space not as a body but as a moving image – a transformation that Graham anticipates and incorporates into the work itself. In contrast, Sehgal introduces the choreographed body as choreographed body—not as a video image—to the context of visual art. While Graham and Nauman brought dance and choreography into the visual art context by translating it from one medium to another, Sehgal asks how the moving, choreographed body can itself become a work of visual art.

At one moment in Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things, the dancer lifts her head and looks in the direction of the viewer, her hands forming a rectangular shape as if she were holding a camera to photograph the viewer, which seems to allude directly to Roll, specifically the moment when Graham focuses the camera he is holding on the fixed camera that is standing on the floor. Sehgal’s fictive camera generates a similar effect to Graham’s actual camera but while Graham sets up a closed circuit between two cameras, Sehgal initiates a closed circuit between the dancer and the viewer. The dancer’s pantomime of the camera eye seems to return the gaze of the viewer. Both works experiment with forms of mediatized communication, but Sehgal omits the technology. The extra space between some and thing in the title, Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things can be understood programmatically: The material object is replaced by a situation between two people; while one embodies an artwork, the other observes the embodiment of the work.

Sehgal’s works are conceived as situations that unfold in time and space. The work is the situation including the viewer. How do they become part of history? Sehgal does not allow visual documentation of his work in order to prevent the translation of situations into a two-dimensional medium, thus preventing documentation from functioning as a kind of surrogate for the work. (7) It is of crucial significance to the work’s life if a situational artwork enters history as a memory or as a document. For him visual illustrations not only reaffirm the two-dimensional image as the dominant historical record of visual art, they reinscribe the work in precisely that mode of permanence and conservation that the work opposes.

As specific situations, Sehgal’s works are ephemeral and singular, but structurally repeatable, and thatis what makes it possible for them to persist. His work transcends the essential distinction between event and permanence. Oral transmission and bodily memory – traditions that are antithetical to the museum’s principle of conserving artifacts – become the essential and constitutive principles, as the transmission of his work relies entirely upon the mode of memorization. The work persists only via the body, which naturally cannot generate an identical repetition because transmission via memory can never guarantee an identical recreation of a situation. Thus the structure of the artwork always remains open and subject to modification although this does not imply an arbitrary enactment. There is indeed a clearly defined way to execute the work, but, because there is no fixed original, the respective individual way of interpreting it co-defines the work. Over the years a work of Sehgal can circulate through hundreds of bodies; through those who enact them — but not only the participants but astonishingly, also many visitors react mimetically to Sehgal’s works, imitating, impersonating and enacting them as well as telling them to others. These forms of re-presentation interest Sehgal in contrast to the permanence of the material object and its documentation via images.

In Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing dan and bruce and other things, Sehgal takes up an art historical discourse, namely the recourse of visual artists to incorporating movement and the idea of intermediality implicit therein. He borrows from a specific aesthetic, which he then transforms into his own, which is precisely not based on a mixture of media but focused on the choreographed body in a medium-specific way. This kind of referencing of historical predecessors serves to illuminate their practice or, in the words of Paul Veyne, their mode of “doing/making”. Veyneonce wrote about Foucault that it was his “most central and original” thesis to have shown that “what is done or made, the object or thing,” can be explained by “what – in a given historical moment – (was understood as) ‘doing/making’.” (8) In this line of thinking the object, the thing or the product recedes behind the act and the mode of production, i.e., behind the practices that generated it, which themselves stem from specific conventions. It is precisely such a perspective that Sehgal puts forth. If one looks at the works of Nauman, Graham and Sehgal on the level of what is represented, they are definitely similar, if not somewhat comparable, in spite of the fact that they are realized in different media. The material-medial level however constitutes an essential difference. Nauman and Graham represent the body by the mediatized image and thereby produce an enduring object; with Sehgal the artwork consists of a choreography, which is temporary, but by virtue of being repeatable achieves durability and the potential to be transmitted. Herein it is not only or not primarily a question of whether the event can be integrated into the museum or —more generally — into an “archive” (and thereby obviously changing the cultural imperative of the archive), but rather it is a matter of emphasizing the act of archiving as an event in itself. Jacques Derrida has called such a shift (which he examines mainly in the medium of writing) the transition from the “archived event “to the “event of archiving.” (9) He refers to the late texts of Paul de Man, who proposes to distinguish between an event that has irreversibly taken place and the production of an event in the act of archiving. Derrida emphasizes this act of an actual material inscription, of “something that occurs materially, that leaves a trace on the world, that does something to the world as such.” (10)

Here the notion of history departs from its focus on the temporal and connects with the question of the power to posit, of the power to inscribe, to integrate into an archive. “This value of occurrence,” Derrida writes, “links history not to time, as it usually thought, nor to the temporal process but, according to de Man, to power, to the language of power, and to language as power. Hence the necessity to take into account performativity, which defines precisely the power of language and power as language.” (11) The notion of performativity reappears here: It denotes the act of a temporal, material, societal positing.

In his book Archive Fever Derrida traces the etymology of “archive” and gives it a political thrust. (12) The archons of ancient Greece were not only responsible for the preservation of important documents, but also had the power to interpret the law — political leadership and exegesis went hand in hand. (13) Derrida politicizes the problematic of the archive, but not by adding a political dimension to the supposedly neutral archive. The question of the archive is not a “political question among others. It runs through the whole of the field and in truth determines politics from the bottom as res publica. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.” (14)

It is one thing to allow the forgotten, the marginal and the suppressed to be part of the archive, to continuously open it to what it did not have access to. It is something else to claim another mode of archiving for what has been excluded, as Rebecca Schneider suggests in an essay that another mode of the archival is inherent to the body, to fleeting movements and gestures, to the spoken word.(15) Drawing on Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche, she speaks of a “counter-memory” that is not only inseparably attached to the body, but also challenges traditional distinctions between absence and presence, being and disappearance, original and mimesis. Sehgal integrates such a “counter-memory” into the hegemonic archival culture of the museum. He insists on the museum as the context for his works, because as he says “I’m interested in the political efficiency of the museum – it is still one of the main agents of cultural values, and over time, offers a possibility for long term politics. It is a place where one can influence discourse in the future perfect tense: ‘This will have been the past.’” (16) The artist not only acknowledges the museum’s significance for a sustainable, long-lasting existence of art, but also accepts the institution as an instance of generating societal values.

As a counterpart to Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing dan and bruce and other things, Sehgal’s Kiss is enacted by two dancers in a close embrace who move very slowly and continuously through different choreographic constellations that draw from images of kissing couples throughout the history of art: At times one may recognize the kiss of Rodin or those of Brancusi and Klimt or a Picasso, at other times the sexual positions of Jeff Koons and Cicciolina and then back to Rodin and so on. As in Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing dan and bruce and other things, this work is realized as a continous, uninterrupted flow of movement. No position is held or especially accentuated, although sometimes one recognizes a figurative scene, which then dissolves once again into something illegible, undefinably anthropomorphic. The work functions as a kind of boîte-en-valise. (17) In this reenactment of historical sculptural works as choreographed movements, we find here again an understanding of continuity and duration as the simultaneity of (art) history and the forms of history’s actualization, which is precisely the modality of the performative — repetition and transformation. In Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing dan and bruce and other things Sehgal situates his medium in a specific tradition of visual art dealing with dance in the 1960s, while in Kiss he refers in his medium to the masterpieces of high culture. At one point in the choreography the dancers recite alternately with their faces averted from the visitor: “Tino Sehgal, Kiss, 2002, Fond National d’art contemporain,” orally transmitting the information one would usually find on a label next to the artwork: the name of the artist, the title, the year of its creation and its provence. The choreography repeats, but with the dancers in reversed roles. This work is equally conceived as a loop, and it exists, executed by changing dancers, for the entire duration of the exhibition.

Kiss and Instead of allowing something to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things are Sehgal’s most sculptural works, in fact, Kiss may be even more clearly perceived as a sculpture as one can move around this “freestanding” work and view it from all sides. The slowness with which the movements are executed in both works adds to their sculptural quality: the near-stasis produces the impression that the work is generating a multiplicity of sculptures, but, unlike a tableau vivant, doesn’t statically hold the pose. It might seem far-fetched to introduce the category of sculpture as a reference to these works. In my view, however, it is precisely because these works which insist on a status as an artwork beyond the material and static object that they establish a dialogue with sculpture, which has over the course of the 20th century, increasingly distanced itself as an art form from its fixation on the material art object. In contemporary art the term sculpture has become unspecific as a categorical designation, as Rosalind Krauss’ term “sculpture in the expanded field” demonstrates, situating sculpture in a wider arena which includes environments and installations. (18) However, I will employ the term in its historical specificity to highlight the connections to and distinctions from Sehgal’s work. One could say that the work of Sehgal takes on the classical parameters of this art form and twists them: while classical sculpture tries to transcends its own static materiality via the composition and the staging of the human figure, Sehgal’s work is enacted by living bodies presented in an objectlike manner. Thus he touches upon a topic that is essential to sculpture and inscribed into its history from its origins. Sculpture has always been marked by its aspiration to transcend its own material objecthood, an aspiration that is continued in modernity with the attempt to negate the commodity status of the artwork, which was seen to relate to its physical materiality.