The Materiality of the Artwork

How does Sehgal’s work find its way into the museum? How does it become part of the art world? Does the work enter the market? Which conditions must be given, which conventions adhered to, so that nothing — in a physical sense — can become something of — economic and symbolic — value? According to Boris Groys, as we saw in the last chapter, innovation in art always takes place by simultaneously rupturing and continuing traditions, as a “positive and negative adaptation of tradition.” (57) The story of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) might have come to a quick end when it was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists, if Duchamp had not, as Thierry de Duve describes in his reconstruction of the “R. Mutt case,” very strategically launched its entry into art history. (58) He made sure that Alfred Stieglitz photographed it in his characteristic symbolic manner to give the profane object a Buddha-like aesthetic, shifting it from a mere provocation to an artwork, thereby ensuring that the urinal would be judged aesthetically. Duchamp not only “let the viewer complete the image” but by involving Stieglitz, he selected a middleman who, as the former honorary president of the Armory Show, patron of the American avant-garde and well-known artist in his right, had the authority to grant Duchamp’s readymade the status of an artwork. But even the readymade – which probably more than any other object embodies the idea of rupturing artistic conventions – connects to specific aesthetic conventions. On the one hand, it constitutes itself via “aesthetic contrasting,” as Groys formulates, but on the other hand, the readymade can also be connected positively to cultural traditions, via the reference to Buddhist iconography as well as erotic and taboo connotations. Only through this oscillation between positive and negative cultural references could this object have achieved the status of an eminent work of art. According to Groys, “an everyday object without such an aspiration would have no chance to be put in a line with precursors from the past to then make the aesthetic contrast perceivable.” (59) Innovationcan thus be understood as an act of re-evaluation and a reassessment in specific value hierarchies. (60) Precisely because an artist like Daniel Buren reverts to the most conventional medium of visual art —painting — it is essential for him to change the rules. In some sense the opposite is true for Sehgal: he has to adhere to certain conventions precisely because he has removed the most fundamental convention of visual art, namely, the material support. 

Sehgal’s work follows the mode of presentation of a conventional visual artwork: it is always present and can be viewed during the all of opening hours of an exhibition from the first to the last day. Of equal importance is the fact that, although the work is a temporary artefact, it can be repeated in another venue, therefore it persists and can be transmitted over time. It is only because of the adherence to these conventions that this work achieves the status of an artwork, and thereby manages to generate significance in the realm of visual art. In other words, only via the affirmation of the set of conventions to which a visual artwork is usually bound is it possible for Sehgal to negate the most fundamental convention —the material object—and for his work to be relevant as works of visual art. Itseems apparent in Sehgal’s workhow the performativity of an artwork, its embeddedness in and its production of reality, has become the tool for an artistic statement.

Finally, it is also essential that the artworks can be bought and sold. The artist works with galleries, who sell the works’ rights and instructions to museums and collectors. There exists no material object in these transactions, not even a certificate as a material surrogate for the artwork. Buyer, dealer and artist meet in the office of a notary and agree to the terms of the contract orally. An official whose usual function is to write things down, the notary in this case functions only as a witness and an expert in contractual issues. Present are also other expert witnesses — curators, critics and/or museum directors — who agree to memorize the contents of the contract in case of a dispute. The contract itself is not unusual. It contains clauses that define the rights and the obligations of the artist and the buyer; for example, the presentation of the work (the artist agrees to brief a person he has authorized on the correct installation of the work and the buyer agrees to show the work in the context of a collection or temporary exhibition for a period of time that is no less than six weeks); prohibition to document the work; the resale of the work (must be through another notarized oral contract); the payment of the persons executing the work (dancers and interpreters) etc. Both parties agree to the contract with a handshake; nothing is written down. The conventions of a sale are adhered to, but Sehgal strips them of their center, the material object. If Daniel Buren, as Pierre Huyghe says, produces “hollowed out objects” by stripping from the object its usual importance, then Sehgal produces “hollowed out conventions”. Since Sehgal takes away their center the objects appear as rules, as cultural agreements that are negotiable and can be fulfilled in a different way. 

Sehgal’s affirmative relation to the market is decisively different from the critique of the commodity status of the artwork in the 1960s and early 1970s. From Sehgal’s perspective, it is not the fact that something is sold but what is sold that is decisive. Therefore his work is designed to change the nature of the commodity or product but not to attack the commodity status itself. “I am still producing objects not in the material sense of the word, but in the product sense of the word.” (61) Sehgal’s works draw attention to the social and cultural processes of exchange, which constitute what we call “the market.” His argument is that precisely because the market is constituted performatively, i.e. via actions like offering and demanding, in principle the market has an inherent openness within which his work operates. In this respect the market is not the end, but the beginning of agency. Art in particular represents a field that can create a different model for the product, a progressive product so to speak, that on the one hand, does not involve the transformation of material but on the other hand, nonetheless fulfills what constitutes the historical core of an artwork, offering the collector the possibility of aesthetic experience and social status.

Since 2001, Sehgal has created a number of works that are executed by museum guards (interpreters dressed in the uniform of the museum guard and therefore perceived as guards). According to Sehgal,

“The guard is an interesting figure, because the guard is the person who watches over objects. So the material objects are creating meaning, while the guard doesn't create meaning. This is a strange relationship, somehow that in this moment these objects become more important than this person. So, what I did was to put meaning into the guard and asked, what if this person, who is anyways there, creates meaning, what is the difference? What does this imply in terms of how one produces things?” (62)

He begins with the usual situation, the institutionalized exhibition of objects and system of surveillance, and chooses the person, rather than material object as the conveyer of an artwork.

These works take place in either museum collection galleries or temporary exhibitions, and involve one or more guards. This is good, for example, is a work from 2001 that was also shown at the 2005 Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art (among other places) and was enacted mainly by older male guards. When a visitor entered the room, the guard suddenly started moving, with straight legs jumping from one foot to the other and simultaneously rotating his outstretched arms like a windmill in front of his body. After a few seconds he stopped and said, “Tino Sehgal, This is good, 2001, Collection Museum Ludwig, Cologne.” The work This is propaganda is enacted by a female guard. When one enters the room, she turns away from the viewer and sings in a high and powerful voice: “This is propaganda, you know, you know, this is propaganda,” then gradually turns back to the visitor and continues to sing the refrain, “you know, you know,” and ends with “Tino Sehgal, This is propaganda, 2002, courtesy Jan Mot Gallery.” As we have already seen with Kiss, Sehgal goes one step further in terms of dematerialization with these works and asks the people enacting the work to say the information one would normally find on a label next to the work. In This is exchange, which was also presented at the German pavilion in Venice in 2005, the guard welcomed the visitor with the following sentences: “Hello, my name is …. This is a piece by Tino Sehgal, entitled, This is exchange. This piece is an offer. We offer to pay you half of the amount you paid to enter the museum if you make a short statement about market economy and discuss it with me. Are you interested in this offer?” If one answered in the affirmative, one immediately found oneself in a conversation about market economy. At the end of the conversation the viewer was given a password, which when told to the person at the front desk the person received half of the entrance fee.

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. It gives the work a title, but it is also part of the work, because the title is uttered as part of the work itself. It is precisely because Sehgal’s titles are tautological, that their performative-generative function comes to the fore. “This is the most present tense word there is […] stronger than now,” Michael Snow once wrote about the usage of this term in his films. (63) Sehgal uses “This is” as a kind of mimetic trick to communicate the situation and transport the questions of content and meaning into the here and now. They emphasize this situation, place value on what happens at this very moment, in precisely this intersubjective relationship.

As an assertion This is appears in different contexts in the art of the 20th century. As a gesture that declares the object as art, it is inscribed into Duchamp’s readymades. “This (urinal) is art” is the statement that accompanies Fountain; thus signifying and actually carrying out the performative act of the symbolic transformation of the thing from its primary reality as an object to its secondary reality as a meaningful sign, which is directly linked to the context of art, a museum and a viewer. The negative version of this gesture is the famous image of a pipe by Magritte. In The treason of the images (1948), with the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” Magritte performs the opposite process: he disassembles the sign into its parts, the mental image and the material signifier. In 1972 at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf Marcel Broodthaers brought together these two approaches: he presented an exhibition of 266 representations of eagles taken from art, culture, science, religion, politics, history and advertising; each exhibit had a label inscribed in German, English and French: “This is not a work of art.” In the catalogue Broodthaers wrote that the label “illustrated an idea of Marcel Duchamp and René Magritte” and put an illustration of the Fountain next to a reproduction of Magritte’s painting of a pipe. (64) Broodthaers uses the figure of the eagle as a sign that is overdetermined in a double sense — as artwork and as symbol — to pose the question of the relationship between the image, the object, its signification and meaning. Broodthaers also refers to the then little-known essay by Foucault, “This is not a pipe,” (65) in which Foucault relates Magritte’s pipe painting (or rather another version of it) to a calligram. (66) He traces the confounding discrepancy between representation and signification that characterizes this image back to a calligram that underlies its structure. Synonymous with a “calligraphic image,” a calligram suspends the distinction between figurative and linguistic representation and thereby dissolves different systems of signs like text and image, drawing and writing, utterance and figure, giving the depiction the quality of a symbol and writing the spatial dimension of a painted depiction. Its complexity lies in, „to trap things in a double cipher“. (67) “Thus”, as Foucault says, “the calligram aspires playfully to efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilisation: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read.” (68) Magritte dissolves the order of sign systems; nonetheless he is concerned with signification, with designation, and not with being. Nobody would seriously claim that the image of a pipe really is a pipe. In this respect Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” differs from Duchamp’s implicit “This is art” and Sehgal’s “This is good.” For both Duchamp and Sehgal are concerned with showing, even exposing the reality claim of their statement.

The presentation of Duchamp’s readymades in the museum demonstrates that in principle anything can be art. From Sehgal’s perspective this anything is confined to specific limitations, namely the parameters of physical materiality. The illocutionary (generative) function of “This is good” lies first of all in making that which it designates appear as something, in distinguishing something from nothing. It identifies the incidents as something that has a symbolic, artistic meaning. Its actual content is thus: “This is something” — and not nothing. This is the crucial function of Sehgal’s title. Its execution, taking place, is itself a positing.(69) In this we find an affirmation of the “that” (quod) of positing, which was already of significance with respect to Buren. It is first and foremost a matter of the positing “that,” of the fact of its positing, of its existence and not of positing “as.” Sehgal’s work does not refer to reality, but emerges from the transformation of a given situation. The usual painterly or sculptural object of art constitutes itself via an ontological difference to the world of things that surround it. Therefore Adorno speaks of the artwork as a “thing of a second order” (70), marking its ontological difference from an everyday object. In Sehgal’s hands, however, the artwork realizes itself not as an ontological difference but as an ontological shift from an everyday situation to an artwork that temporarily materializes in actions, movements and speech. The transition between the everyday situation of an exhibition space and the work of art is thus fluid. After they have enacted the work, the interpreters, as there is no textual information in the exhibition space, also function as commentators or critics as they are the only ones available to speak about the work they just embodied. The objects of Minimal Arttransform the experience of art into an experience of the situation itself, which is potentially endless. In this regard Michael Fried spoke of the “indeterminacy of the situation” and for Sehgal this is even truer, since the works are not only a trigger for the experience of a situation, but can also react to the viewer. There is a reciprocal exchange between work and viewer that has the potential of being truly indeterminate or infinite. But precisely because there are no clear boundaries between work, viewer and situation, there is a necessity for something that delimits the work — and this task is fulfilled by the title.

Although Sehgal’s titles are tautological, they also produce meaning. When the guard says, “This is good,” after having enacted the work, it is in principle tautological, since every work of art implicitly maintains this claim and — considering the double meaning of good, as a positive evaluation but also in the sense of as a product or commodity — fulfils this status. Nevertheless the situation in which the title is uttered is more complex and in some sense far from tautological, since it is not clear to what the title refers when it is spoken. One can understand it self-referentially (referring to what has just happened); one could also relate it to the art objects in the room. The status of the title is unclear and thereby exposed as a process, in which the institution, the work of art and also the viewer (in her or his judgment) are performatively active by allowing certain values— like contemporariness — to be realized. In This is good, the title ultimately confronts visitors with their preconceptions, i.e., if he or she attributes the status of an artwork to the movements of the guard or solely to the object next to them. Through his titles, Sehgal makes explicit the different aspects that his works deal with. This is propaganda addresses the political dimension of art, This is so contemporary art’s power to shape and posit values, and This is exchange exhibits the difference between saying and doing. In fact, This is exchange is the most explicit work in terms of Sehgal’s consideration of economics and the culture of the market. If the visitor accepts the offer to reimburse half of the entrance fee for a conversation on the market economy, then he or she generates a real product inside the framework of a work that itself is a product. The fact that the visitor plays an unusually constitutive role is an essential part of the work.