The Materiality of the Artwork

Sehgal’s work has the character of an experiment at the heart of which lies the question of how to create something from nothing; how to semantically create meaning and create value economic without producing a physical object. Conceived in order to formulate and circulate an idea of the object, the product and the artefact that does not rely on what Sehgal calls “the transformation of material” (46), he turns to traditional art forms like dance and singing, which generate meaning exclusively via the human body without necessitating the production of a material object. He confronts media with the context of visual art, a sphere in our society that gives a high — if not the highest — symbolic (and monetary) value and appreciation for the material artifact. The museum in turn offers a ritual stage for this high appreciation. In visual art the object, in the sense of an object of perception and communication, is physical, whereas in dance, song and spoken poetry it constitutes itself in situ and in actu in the materiality of the body. Sehgal’s work revolves around the significance of this difference and its cultural and political implications.

Sehgal’s work evinces an understanding that the relation between art and society begins long before a thematic reference is made and that this relationship does not lie primarily in the employment of specific techniques taken from everyday life —as in collage or montage — for example — but resides first and foremost on a fundamental level — namely, how the artwork is produced, or, in other words, which modes of production are applied in the process. Unwittingly and independent of its content, the visual artwork affirms certain social conventions and traditions via its mode of production, most centrally the common conviction that economic value must existin a physical object, that only via the process of physical materialization can nothing become something.(47) Basically one can characterize any work of visual art as affirming this model of production, intentionally or not.One can say that those arts that are bound to physical materials constitute the social sphere that provides this model with an element of transcendence. This dominant model of production, which is so fundamental to the history of civilization that it almost seems unassailable, is what Sehgal turns against. He differs fundamentally from Conceptual Art and its theoretical references in that he is not concerned with a critique of the market or the commodity status of the artwork. Beyond issues concerning the system of distribution, his critique is aimed at the prevalent model of production: the transformation of material into goods, as it is reproduced by visual art.

“In this respect I consider communism and capitalism as two versions of the same model of economy, which only differ in their ideas about distribution. This model would be: the transformation of material or – to use another word – the transformation of ‘nature’ into supply goods in order to decrease supply shortage and to diminish the threats of nature, both of course in order to enhance the quality of life. Both the appearance of excess supply in western societies in the 20th century, as well as of mankinds endangering of the specific disposition of ‘nature’ in which human life seems possible, question the hegemony of this mode of production, in which  the objecthood of visual art is profoundly inclined.” (48)

Sehgal’s line of argument is as follows (49): Historically this model of economy served to secure the necessities for survival, enhance quality of life by diminishing lack and, as he puts it, banish the “threats of nature.” But in the 1950s in North America and in the 1960s in Europe — exactly at the time that the artistic critique of the object status of art was challenged — paradigmatic changes occurred that, according to Sehgal, make the hegemony of this model of production dubious. (50) For the first time in the course of civilization, Western societies did not face a lack of goods to cover basic needs, and at the same time it became apparent that a model of production that was supposed to enhance quality of life might actually decrease it in the long run. Over time, the depletion of finite natural resources as well as the emission of harmful substances could result in those modes of production that were designed to solve civilization’s problems will create new ones instead, and thereby no longer enhancing the quality of life but actually worsening it. For Sehgal it therefore becomes problematic to hold on to this model at a time when its historical premises are no longer in place, and especially so in an institution like the museum, which deals with shaping values in the long term.In Sehgal’s view art can therefore not be about somehow weakening the object, and definitely not about replacing it with a certificate or documentation, but rather to literally change the material substance of a visual artwork, which has always followed the model of production that of the transformation natural resources.

“Visual art has always reflected, consciously or not, the latest in technology. From the very beginnings of civilization with the recognition of stones as a tool going hand in hand with cave drawing until the latest in military technology resulting in video or internet art (...) Basically all visual art works are produced by transformations of material, there are only very few exceptions (Barry’s telepathic piece, some of Michael Asher’s works).” (51)

Any visual artwork begins with a transformation, a crafting of material; in principle this applies to a Leonardo da Vinci as much as it does to a Marcel Duchamp, a Gerhard Richter or a work of a Lawrence Weiner. Of course their works represent different statements, attitudes, and worldviews, so to speak. But in Sehgal’s line of thinking, the choice of a medium already implies a specific relation to society, technology and (technological) progress. He therefore situates political significance and the encounter of art and society on the level of the artistic medium.

To get a better sense of Sehgal’s understanding of the political implications of an artistic medium, it is helpful to contrast his position with that of Clement Greenberg, with whom he shares a focus on the factual aspects of an artwork. Coming from Marxism, Greenberg’s examination of the artistic medium does indeed have a socio-political dimension. The search for a specific essence of art equaled a “progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium.” (52) Because of the inseparable bonds between art and society, it seemed essential to Greenberg to assign a specific realm to the aesthetic experience to art in order to prevent it from deteriorating into kitsch and mere entertainment.

“At first glance the arts might seem to have been in a situation like religion’s. Having been denied by the Enlightenment all tasks they could take seriously, they looked as though they were going to be assimilated to entertainment pure and simple, and entertainment itself looked as though it were going to be assimilated, like religion, to therapy. The arts could save themselves from this levelling down only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity. Each art, it turned out, had to perform this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art.” (53)

This oft-cited passage from his essay “Modernist Painting” clarifies how Greenberg realizes his concept of distinction: he makes the individual aesthetic experience of an artwork dependent on its respective medium. Greenberg reinterprets from the side of an aesthetics of production the claim for the specificity of the art experience. He relates the essence of the art experience to specific material properties and conventions of formation. Greenberg proposes that each respective medium should have to prove that it has something singular and irreplaceable to offer. Thus the artistic medium is not a neutral support and therefore also cannot be filled with just any content. Every medium, irrespective of the content, has a specific meaning of its own, which can be resistant.

Sehgal shares Greenberg’s perspective on the specificity of an artistic medium, but he addresses the underlying question of the relation – both practically and politically – of art and society in a different manner. Greenberg is concerned with the dissociation and distinction of the arts; in this respect his position intersects Adorno’s. But again, Greenberg’s argument takes place on an aesthetic level, which explains why itsability to distinguish is limited, as the history of modern art has shown. How else would one explain that also a Pollock, whom Greenberg regarded so highly, could end up becoming a kitchen poster? Sehgal’s work performs a cultural distinction on another, deeper level. It is realized in the choice of another model of production for the artwork. As Buren did in his later works, Sehgal recognizes a potential for agency in the factual social embeddedness of the artwork, in which there always exists the possibility of marking out an actual difference. His work exhibits this difference concerning the question of how far one’s artwork perpetuates this model of production or substitutes it via another. With Sehgal, as with Buren, an attitude of criticality transforms into construction the proposal of having something else take place. Instead of formulating a critique of the object character of art as Conceptual Art did, but then to ultimately maintain this object status, or more precisely, to criticize the objecthood of art in order to actually attack its status as a product, by ultimately maintaining both the status as product and as object, Sehgal creates a model of art that does without any physical object.

“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.” (54)

How does he do that? Sehgal’s work materializes as temporary artefacts in the body of the person who enacts them. He stages the becoming-object of actions — not of humans — which by nature do not use what the artist sees as the problematic consequences of the usual mode of production. He introduces this medium (which from a purely technical standpoint can be described as archaic) not only as “high cultural” (as in Kiss) but also as “contemporary.” At the 2005 Venice Biennial Sehgal presented the work This is so contemporary, which was enacted by three people. When a visitor entered the exhibition space they danced in a happy, emphatic way around him or her singing in the sing-song style of a nursery rhyme: “Oh, this is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary. Oh, this is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary.” The melody was so catchy and the dancing so contagious that quite a few visitors left the German pavilion dancing. In a nearby pavilion I heard a visitor whispering to his neighbor, “and this is not contemporary.”

These anecdotes demonstrate that the different mode of production of Sehgal’s work generates not only another concept of the artwork but ultimately also another kind of viewer. What started as a focus on the performativity the artwork, of its own coming-into-existence leads to a very specific performative effect on the situation and the viewer. Any work that is presented at the Venice Biennial stands for what is deemed to be contemporary in art and can claim to be ”contemporary,” thereby not only representing an idea of what is contemporary but also fundamentally co-constitutes it. In this respect the title is first and foremost, tautological. But by making explicit, one can even say by exhibiting the performative power of the art institution to define what is contemporary in the work, Sehgal also opens the notion of what is contemporary up for negotiation. “Normally we tend to think of contemporary culture as informed by the latest in contemporary technology […] and that is how we construct contemporariness. I was interested if we can construct a contemporariness without using contemporary technology or without even making reference to it but using the oldest means possible, just people moving around.” (55) In declaring his medium as contemporary although from a technological perspective that seems improbable, Sehgal makes use of his own power or rather performative power to intervene into the process to define what is the contemporary,a power granted to him as the artist representing the German pavilion. Ultimately, however, the claim he makes via this work is affirmed only when the visitor confirms the work as being contemporary or something new and culturally valuable. In that moment the work —performatively — generates what it says: “If you are seduced by the thing and you say, ‘This is actually contemporary,’ then this whole structure of ‘contemporary equals informed by contemporary technology’ has broken down...”. (56) The artwork is thus a discursive interrelationship of different values, which become concrete through a system of validation and judgements about those values. One might reply that this interrelationship applies to every artwork. Yes, which is why every artwork has a performative dimension that comes into play in exactly this manner. Sehgal’s work, however, actively constructs this process. It renders its own performative power to posit explicit, thereby marking it as a process in which a number of factors (including the visitor) are involved. 

This joyful and positive attitude can indeed be taken programmatically. Sehgal employs affirmation to counter an attitude of criticality towards spectacle. There is a spectacular element in the work that the artist can allow precisely because the work’s critical stance resides not in its representation but in its mode of production. In other words, Sehgal can afford a celebratory tone, because he has built his own political stance into the foundation of the social existence of his artwork. Similarly, Buren can allow his work to be decorative, because he has changed the fundamental way the artwork functions and its mode. Thus the critique in the case of both artists shifts from the level of the symbolic or representational to the factual level of construction and production.