The Materiality of the Artwork

One of Sehgal’s most complex works to date is This objective of that object from 2004, which was shown at London’s ICA in 2005 with Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things. One entered the site of the work through a corridor from which two exhibition spaces branched off on either side, both appearing to be empty. After a short while, however, while still in the corridor, one was suddenly encircled by five people, one of whom blocked the exit to the staircase. One after the other, five people walked backwards towards the visitor from the hidden corners of the spaces and stopped at a distance of about 3 to 4 meters in a circular formation. They all had their backs to the visitor and were breathing heavily and in synchronous rhythm. At first a hardly audible murmur turned to a phrase that was delivered in unison and repeated insistently: “The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion.” The louder this sentence was spoken, the more emphatic it sounded like a demand with increasingly longer pauses between each utterance. This was the prologue of an artwork that aspires to provoke its own commentary. If the visitor does not comment, i.e., if there is no reaction by the visitor, the players collapse after a few minutes. Their voices become weak, as they slowly sink to the floor, and as if with the last breath of their life utter for a last time “the objective ... of this work ... is to become ... the object ... of ... a discussion.” That was it, than in silence, the players lie lifeless on the floor. Without a comment, without communication, the artwork has no life force. But as soon as something occurs, even just a visitor clearing her throat, they stand up again and excitedly say: “We have a comment, we have a comment. Who will answer, who will answer?”. Then one of them answers “me” or “I will…” which initiates a discussion among them. The players discuss — always remaining in circular formation with their backs to the visitor —the possible meanings and implications of the visitor’s comment. As the comments are likely to be different, the discussions differ considerably. One discussion I experienced was initiated by the frequent question: why do the players always remained with their backs turned, which led to a conversation about the cultural significance of eye contact. The sudden ringing of a cell phone, laughing, a comment in a foreign language can be the beginning of another discussion. The players interpret the visitors’ comments in a way that is similar to the way a critic would discuss an artwork. Although visitors are able to influence the course of the discussion by contributing to what is being said or interjecting a comment, they nonetheless never attain a position equal to that of the players in part because of the formal arrangement of the situation. The stratification that Sehgal constructs with this work is a strange mix between a conversation and a sculpture or a social situation and its aesthetic. The visitors are crucial and constitutive to the work, without their comments the main part could not take place. If no comment is made, the work does not go beyond the invariable prologue. The artwork needs to become the object of the reflection, just as the visitors must become the object of the conversation they witness — it is as if the work of art were holding a mirror to the observer.

“Normally when you go into an exhibition you are confronted with something. […] this object […] represents a certain Zeitgeist or a certain culture which our society or our state thinks is worth preserving. In my case […] the work basically asks the viewer, ‘What do you think?’ and thereby also infers, what you do or what you say matters and will also change the course of this work.” (71)

The artwork and its reception are in an infinite feedback loop, with a fragile and constantly negotiated power relation between the players and the visitors that, to a certain extent is directed by Sehgal’s mise-en-scene and dramaturgy. If there were five pairs of eyes directed at them, the visitors would be subjected to a completely different kind of power. The fact that the players are facing the wall is crucial, as it allows the visitors to perceive this formation as something constructed and aesthetic. This spatial configuration creates a kind of equilibrium between those enacting and those visiting. The players know what is to do and the visitors can identify the players. Since the players are always facing the walls and do not have a complete overview of the changing situation; they cannot be aware of things like nonverbal communication between visitors. “It’s something between ballet and chess,” one visitor commented, and in fact this work functions like a spatial and formal game that the visitors try to understand and also to control. “The visitors are trying to play a game on us,” one player said, as a number of visitors drove her into a corner in an attempt to see her face, thereby altering the spatial configuration of the work.

With respect to this piece, Sehgal says, “In most of my works there is this moment when the visitor can speak with my interpreter and I wanted to integrate this moment, which was always part of the piece for me, really into the piece. [...] I wanted to make it kind of the center of the piece.” (72) And in fact he does give the viewer a share of the responsibility and thereby realizes an ethical dimension to this work, if one understands ethics as “the forming of relations to others and oneself” as Foucault once said, that marks an essential feature of all of Sehgal’s works. 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, which is not only produced in a completely different way but compared to Coleman and Buren, also generates a different kind of viewer. Coleman’s work reflects the dissolution of the ideology of a sovereign, self-determined subject that prevailed in modernity. There is a strong element in Coleman’s work of the viewer being addressed but — as is apparent in Box — it is dialectically contrasted with an equally strong element of dissociation, dissolution and almost violent encroachment on the viewer. Almost all of Coleman’s works allegorically circle around the subject. It exists, but only in its disappearance, as a figure that is experiencing its own dissolution. If Coleman stages the figure of the subject in the process of its dissolution, then in Buren’s work the subject is emptied out by the weakening of its counterpart, the object. Buren’s work generates a strong aesthetic experience, but one that remains diffuse, that does not allow for immersion or contemplation, but rather is designed to dissolve that very form of art experience.

In Sehgal’s work the conception of the subject is different. Precisely because he has changed the parameters of visual art so fundamentally, he can re-address the role of the subject in a positive manner and newly define it. One could say that in Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things Sehgal reverts to a contemplative form of the work-viewer relationship that seems almost anachronistic. As in a Chardin painting, at least for a certain amount of time one can experience oneself in the immersion represented in this work. In this respect Sehgal comes surprisingly close to what Fried calls “absorption.” (73) Fried takes up a model developed by Denis Diderot for both theater and painting, which presupposed the nonexistence of the viewer in front of the image or of the spectator in theater. The figures involved in a representation or the actors in a play should not turn outwards. They were to be fully taken up by their actions and interactions. Yet precisely the representation’s focus on itself, precisely the negation of the viewer, his or her exclusion from the compositional focus, ultimately involves the viewer even more strongly and more authentically into what is represented. Sehgal utilizes this model like an artistic technique, which allows him to constitute his work as a work of art and its counterpart as an object-viewer.In this way he constitutes a work-beholder relationship that is no longer generated via an object, or as Fried describes it, “epitomized in the object.” Herein lies the crucial difference of Sehgal’s work. Via a mental and quasi-metaphysical experience of the artwork and the self, Fried’s viewer is to be in a “perfect trance of involvement,” (74) as he calls it, and should forget that he or she is ultimately standing in front of a profane thing.

“[…] translating literal duration, the actual passage of time as one stands before the canvas, into a purely pictorial effect: as if the very stability and unchangingness of the painted image are perceived by the beholder not as material properties that could not be otherwise but as manifestations of an absorptive state – the image’s absorption in itself, so to speak – that only happens to subsist." (75)

Ultimately there always remains a certain stasis inherent to the kind of object-subject relationship construed here. This explains many of the critiques of the artistic approaches of the 1960s and 1970s, which were directed towards activating and opening the parameters of these relationship and thereby generating a more open form of subjectivity. As there are no material objects in Sehgal’s work, and the artwork and beholder are of the same medium, they generate a fluid and active movement between player and visitor that constantly changes with any activity inside this relationship. When Adorno speaks of artworks that “open their eyes,” (76) he means it metaphorically. In Sehgal’s work a look can change the entire situation. It can hit the gaze of the viewer who might then look to the floor or turn away. In these moments Sehgal’s works are not only eventful, but momentarily they constitute an event. As a philosophical category the event is characterized by the occurrence of a situation that cannot be categorized. This is true of Sehgal’s work in the moments something occurs that is not preconceived in the given context and that eludes any existing category of aesthetic experience. Understandings that we all share — every child that walks through a museum knows that this is a place where things stand or hang and are viewed — seem suspended. For a short moment an order that is taken for granted is penetrated by an experience that claims a radical alterity. Gilles Deleuze writes that „Making an event – however small – is the most delicate thing in the world: the opposite of making a drama or making history.“ (77) The event can neither be directed intentionally nor reduced to a content. It is a moment of pure singularity, which following Deleuze, belongs to „another dimension that that of denotation, manifestation, or signification.” (78) Such an event only exists for a short and singular moment, in the case of Sehgal’s works it is followed by a search for potential explanations and categorizations. “He has gone crazy,” some visitors said when they encountered the dancing guard. And a woman said to the museum guard who was singing This is propaganda and whose voice could be heard throughout the museum, “I could have sworn that you just sang.”

With Tony Bennett one can understand the museum as a place that contributes to the instantiation of specific technologies of the self, which were constitutive for the historical formation of a bourgeois subjectivity. In Sehgal’s work the museum on the one hand becomes the site of an experiment, but on the other hand the experiment is based precisely on those conventions of subject constitution that have always been inscribed into the institution of the museum. Sehgal take up fundamental conventions of self-formation that the museum cultivates and steers them in another direction, as the artist emphasizes:

“[…] actually what I am doing is quite media-specific to the exhibition. The exhibition has always been much more about people, that is, visitors, walking through spaces as individuals, being addressed by an art experience as individuals. That is really the innovation of the exhibition, of the public exhibition, without the guided tour. The specificity of an exhibition is that it can single out citizens as individuals and not, let’s say, like cinema still does or theatre has done for thousands of years: address people as ‘the people’. The exhibition has always been much more about individuals and about individuals also seeing each other.” (79)

Indeed, the historical and cultural achievement of the museum lies essentially in the fact of having constructed an historical and cultural ritual that serves the formation and self-formation of the citizen. From this perspective the museum is not only and maybe not even primarily the place for the exhibition of objects. Rather these objects function as tools for a “civilizing ritual” for the individual, as Carol Duncan writes, that aims at the internalization of control and power. The museum is thus not only the place where values and ideologies are represented in artworks. It is equally the place where these values become part of a mental and bodily exercise; where they are and have to be embodied to be at all effective. For Sehgal this ritual of perception and reception differentiates itself even further, as it is the individual in relation to itself that is addressed in his work – though not only as perceiving and receiving, but as an active instance that intervenes into and shapes what is going on. The individual has agency and carries responsibility; it is engaged in a work of self on the self, so to speak.

At the beginning of the 1980s Foucault, who had been involved since 1966 in the project of dissolving the modernist ideology of a sovereign, self-determined subject and had worked over decades on the position of the subject in the relation of knowledge and power, took up the question of the subject from a different perspective. He was no longer primarily concerned with a critique of the notion of the subject of enlightenment, but rather with practices of self, via which individuals recognize themselves as subjects. In this project he turned to Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?”: “The general framework of what I call the ‘Technologies of the Self’ is a question which appeared at the end of the eighteenth century. […] This question is very different from what we call the traditional philosophical questions: What is the world? What is man? What is truth? What is knowledge? […] The question, I think, which arises at the end of the eighteenth century is: What are we in our actuality? You will find the formation of this question in a text written by Kant.“ (80) Philosophically exemplary, according to Foucault, is Kant’s outline of an ontology of the present, in which he asks what it means to be a responsible and, in a political sense, mature person today. Foucault, however, is interested in the practices or “technologies” of self through which an individual constitutes itself as a moral subject.

„This latter is not simply ‚self-awareness’ but self-formation as an ‚ethical subject,’ a process in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines his position relative to the percept he will follow, and decides on a certain more of being that will serve as his moral goal. […] And this requires him to act upon himself, to monitor, test, improve, and transform himself. […] Moral action is indissociable from these forms of self-activity.” (81)

Foucault is interested in concrete forms of subjectivity as a way of relating to oneself and one’s existence. The ethical subject that constitutes itself in experience and shapes itself via practices—the work of the self that the subject carries out—are foregrounded. Foucault focuses on the creative potential of the individual without returning to the notion of the subject of modernity, which is usually linked to the concept of creativity. Rather, he understands creativity from its technical side, as a capacity to appropriate certain techniques and to apply them in specific ways, as the willingness to follow as well as to break rules to formulate new ones. Sehgal’s work also tackles the issue of an ethic that is concerned with practices of self and the resulting process of the differentiation of the self. His work conveys both a sense of power and powerlessness to the visitor as well as a sense of the possibilities and limits of his or her agency. In short: it addresses the viewers as potent and responsible individuals. What was subtly implied in Instead of allowing... becomes more and more clear in subsequent works: the visitor becomes the instance that initiates the taking-place of the work and whose decisions influence and form the course of the work. In this manner the ethical dimension of responding, of responsivity becomes the central element of the work. The fact of being produced differently ultimately generates a different beholder; a visitor who is no longer only a receptive instance, but a figure that shapes and responsibly influences the work. Regardless of whether one feels called to direct action or is addressed in a more subtle sense by a work like Instead of allowing..., Sehgal’s works always imply questions of responsibility and agency within an intersubjective relation. One is constantly interrogating oneself: Should I watch this person? How do I position myself towards him? Or during the dying — the sinking to the floor of the players when there is no comment — in This objective of that object: Am I the cause of this? That cannot really be true. Do I have to do something? This work in particular generates a constantly shifting relationship between the players and the visitors, who themselves feel mirrored and somewhat exposed, since their comments becomes the object of a discussion. Not all visitors are comfortable going along with this. One visitor, who experienced this work with me, refused to comment, observing “I don’t want to talk about it in this space.”