By Dorothea von Hantelmann
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Tino Sehgal’s work is realized as actions, as movement and talking; the only material support they require is the human body. His works are presented continuously during the operating hours for the standard duration of an exhibition. They are traded by galleriesand sold to collectors who acquire the right to exhibit them and therefore allow the work to become part of museum collections. As art Sehgal’s works fulfill all of the parameters of a visual artwork except an essential one, its inanimate materiality. While other artists start from an object, which they lend an event-like quality, Sehgal starts from an ephemeral event, like singing, moving, or speaking lending it an object-like quality.
Sehgal’s works are conceived as situations that unfold in time and space. The work is the situation including the viewer. 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. 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.
Almost all the titles of these works begin with This is which acts not only as a signature of the work but also fulfils an essential performative function which is to constitute these incidents as an artwork. After they have enacted the work, the interpreters, as there is no textual information in the exhibition space, also function as commentators or critics of the work they just embodied.
The simple fact that the visitor triggers the work, that it only exists for her or him for that moment, contains an element of empowerment for the viewer. This “empowerment” is crucial to Sehgal’s work. The individual not only perceives and receives, but is an active instance that intervenes into and shapes what is going on. The individual has agency and carries responsibility.
Dorothea von Hantelmann’s text examines how Tino Sehgal continues the debates of the 1960s regarding the transgression and dissolution of the traditional notion of the artwork by producing works without objects. In the first half of the article, applying a wide-ranging field of theory, she draws parallels to modern dance, minimalism, Fluxus, performance and conceptual art. In particular, she discusses the relationship between Michael Fried’s central postulate that art aspires to transcend its objecthood and Theodor Adorno’s opposition to the objectification of a work of art, in the light of the immaterial nature of Tino Sehgal’s works. In the course of the article, she describes several of Tino Sehgal’s works, placing them in a context that accounts for their critical potential in our age, including the artist’s criticism of the distribution system and the dominant production model: the transformation of material into goods, as it is reproduced by visual art.
In the latter half of the text she examines the artwork and its reception as an infinite feedback loopwith a fragile and constantly negotiated power relation between the interpreters and the visitors that, to a certain extent is directed by Sehgal’s mise-en-scene and dramaturgy.
Finally, she looks at the ritual role of museums as social institutions in the light of the empowered viewer in Tino Sehgal’s works, which ultimately transform museums into more social spaces.
This text is Chapter III in Dorothea von Hantelmann’s book, How to Do Things with Art (Zurich, Dijon: JRP|Ringier, Les Presses du Réel, 2010).
If you want a quick overview of the text, read the passages in bold font. These passages are an abridgement of the key points of the text.
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