The Materiality of the Artwork

“I believe that the problem of the object,” Daniel Buren told Seth Siegelaub in a conversation referring to the debates of the 1960s regarding the transgression and dissolution of the traditional notion of the artwork, “is one of the most interesting problems that needs to be faced, but that one cannot solve it by producing a work without objects.“ (1) 

Both theory and practice in the late 1960s put the status of the object and traditional notions of artistic production up for negotiation: The Anxious Object, the title of Harold Rosenberg’s book from 1966 indicates the precarious status of the object. In 1973, Lucy Lippard’s radical book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 -1972 not only marks the birth of Conceptual Art but argues that “the material is negated.” And finally in 1975 in a new volume of American Art Since 1900 Barbara Rose entitles a chapters on 70s art “Beyond the Object”.(2) However, today one must conclude that the farewell to the object was rather premature. Buren gets to the core of the artistic and theoretical debates of the 1960s more accurately, when he speaks of a new “economy of means”(3). Apart from a few exceptions, there has never been a “dematerialization” of art. There are very few examples where material support for the art work does not exist. As the artist Robert Barry put it: “We are not really destroying the object, but just expanding the definition, that’s all.“ (4)

However, in the work of Tino Sehgal there are no objects. His work is realised as actions, as movement and talking; the only material support they require is the human body. Often this is the museum guard, who, when one enters the exhibition space, executes a choreography which he then discloses to the viewer as a work of Sehgal. Or it could also be the person who sells the ticket at the entrance, who after the purchase recites a headline from the daily newspaper followed by the title of Sehgal’s piece, This is new. At the Frieze Art Fair in London in 2003 at the booth of The Wrong Gallery from New York, Sehgal positioned two children about eight years old, who welcomed entering visitors with the words, “Hello. Welcome to the Wrong Gallery. We are showing This is right by Tino Sehgal,” and proceeded to enact five of Sehgal’s works to potential buyers, informing them about their prices and edition sizes. At the art fair in Basel one year later, the artist arranged a pas de deux of his dealers(5), whom he choreographed to simultaneously cooperate with and compete against each other. They enacted various works to potential buyers, but were restricted to speaking alternately only one word at a time. In order to conduct a conversation with potential buyers, they had to cooperate even to the point of formulating a grammatically correct sentence.

Sehgal’s works give art a new material foundation, but nonetheless claim the status of visual artworks. His works are presented continuously during the operating hours for the standard duration of an exhibition. They are traded by dealers and sold to collectors who acquire the right to exhibit them and therefore allow the work to become part of museum collections. As art Sehgals 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.