Exhibitions / Tino Sehgal / Selected writings

SELECTED WRITINGS ABOUT THE ARTIST

A rising star on the international scene, Mr. Sehgal doesn’t make objects, send out announcement cards or dispense news releases, nor does he allow his pieces to be photographed. Being there is the only way to experience his careful structures of words, time, human relations and art-world rituals.
(Roberta Smith)

Sehgal presents an alternative mode of production, one that utilizes action instead of materials. In place of objects, he exhibits ephemeral situations whose only resource is human energy. Stemming from a kind of compassionate conceptualism, his art is sustainable and transitory, but like any other works of art, it can be sold, collected, and re-presented. Herein lies its radicality. Sehgal’s work is not about economics or politics, for he recognizes that art is inseparable from these spheres. Any critique he proffers, therefore, is self-critique, and any solution that arises is a solution from within, one that may subtly influence our social reality.
(Nancy Spector)

Tino Sehgal does not want to produce anything. Or at least anything that could be perceived as a conventional, physically existing work of art. He does not want to create tangible objects, nor is he interested in leaving any visible trace. His medium is immateriality, and he uses it to generate highly provisional pieces of art that challenge the traditional museological context. Even though at first glance Sehgal's work seems rather accessible, it is enormously complex, oscillating between various artistic and intellectual fields to radically question the groundwork of contemporary society. […] Sehgal insists that his pieces are visual artworks, since they is the only way that have the power to question inherent beliefs about exhibition practices. […] Sehgal does not want to dissolve the art system; he wants to master it. (Jens Hoffmann)

Sehgal's aim is to create real situations that remain situations, or in other words, simultaneously fully accept their own theatricality and reject, even for the needs of documentation, the fate of becoming images or words. In this sense he has carried forward the radicalism of the avant-gardesof the 1960s and 70s. This leads him to challenge the scriptural and documentalist credo of the most significant of these avant-gardes, conceptual art, so that the artwork remains, as the conceptualists wanted, an object of discussion.
(Michel Gauthier)

Sehgal is interested in dance and song as modes of production because they resist transforming ideas into goods: this is work that leads to no product outside itself. In this way it foregoes the ideology that has dominated market theory throughout the 20th century: that of eternal economic growth. […] There are no labels on the wall because there is beauty in an act that, like an orgasm, establishes and erases itself in the same instant. It's the notion of beauty that mathematicians have in mind when they see a simple formula that aptly describes complexity, without the help of brackets.
(Jörg Heiser)

SELECTED QUOTES BY THE ARTIST

My art is primarily about making an artwork that is produced differently. An artwork has always been an object, and art follows technological developments, from cave painting to Internet art. I want to drive a wedge into this logic and use media that were technically available before any kind of technology, which means that on a purely technical level, these works would have been possible at that time too.

One could say that my work – like any work of art and any form of expression whatsoever – contains moments of both affirmation and critique. It affirms a market economy process, but it alters the (material) basis of this process, and that would be its critical aspect. What interests me, then, is how a product was produced.

It is just the classical relation of interpreting somebody else’s work: those who do the work are a medium, a channel for my subjectivity, but at the same time their subjectivity also plays a part in how they interpret it.

My work is an experiment in how far one can get if one does not transform material for a change (like transforming a tree into a piece of paper that then serves as a certificate).

Although there are certainly visual aspects in my work, they are not in the foreground or important enough to merit being turned into two-dimensional images so I can say: look how great this composition is. I want to take care to avoid such a confusion.

My works are defined precisely by their purely action-based character, which is why it may seem rather unusual that they circulate nonetheless, when they are purchased by a collector or a museum for example, without the work being verified by a certificate or something of that kind - i.e. that there is no material object that says “this situation exists”. I am interested in reminding that an action or a situation exists in itself.