Tuesday, December 6, 2011
tower blox - BBC 25 November 2011
Viewpoint: Could people learn to love tower blocks?
1945 saw Britain as victors and victims - lost men, lost skills, lost industry, and, most significant, a critical shortage of homes.
Once tower blocks were the answer to a housing crisis but many people came to hate them. With Sheffield's Park Hill estate being refurbished for its 50th birthday, can people learn to love them again, asks architect and broadcaster Maxwell Hutchinson.
The new Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee was a democratic victor but a scapegoat for government's failure to come up with solution to the critical homes crisis.
Homes were the most pressing and seemingly insoluble of all post-war social issues. There was no labour force, no bricks, and acres of still-smoking slums.
Enter continental pre-war modernist architecture, forged in the creative minds of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and others, and kept alive in the fertile minds of Britain's young architects, who had been plucked away from their studied enthusiasm for the new modernism to fight a war.
They returned, not demoralised by the fighting, but with a fervent zeal for modernism. They brought with them a solution, and government loved it. Housing problem? What problem? Build them high, make them in factories, and slot them into the waste lands of easily cleared slums.
There were no Nimbys [not-in-my-back-yard] then. No pressure groups, no conservation areas - British towns and cities were one huge brownfield site.
So the British tower block was born. Glasgow rebuilt a city with more tower blocks than any other city in Europe. It's still the case. London's East End cheered as cloud-scraping towers provided modernity, inside lavatories, central heating, Formica, and hot baths.
Tower blocks were the answer to a major housing crisisBut this vision did not last long. The middle class saw tower blocks as ghettos that they would rather pass by. Post-war families boomed, but the ideologically inspired dreams of cheap, quality, high-rise housing started to be neglected and demonised.
The tower block started to be seen as all that was misguided about post-war Britain. Maintenance was often abysmal - lifts failed, rubbish chutes were blocked, garages were burnt by vandals.
There had been doubts, but events triggered by an early morning cup of tea in a tower block in east London on 16 May 1968 turned the UK wholeheartedly against high-rise living and all that it stood for.
Ivy Hodge lived on the 18th floor Ronan Point, a 22-storey tower, named after Harry Louis Ronan, a chairman of the London borough of Newham's Housing Committee, which had opened on 11 March 1968.
As Hodge struck a match to light her stove, a gas explosion ripped the corner out of the tower. That corner fell down like a pile of loosely stacked tiles.
That was how the block and many more like it were built, story-high, load-bearing concrete panels stacked sky-high with what proved to be appallingly badly made joints. Hodge survived but four residents died and 17 were injured in the disaster.
Hodge's cup of tea had brought down more than the corner of one tower - it shattered the public's confidence in all high-rise dreaming.
The innate enthusiasm of the English for vernacular architecture took hold of the nation's mood - all would now be comfortable brick, near the ground with pitched roofs, garden front and rear. It would be just like good old England.
Such was the government's over reaction at the events in Newham that they tore up their high post-war ideals and started an orgy of tower destruction.
The undeserved perception of failed idealism was celebrated by spectacular displays of demolition pyrotechnic. The tower block had failed and picnic parties sat on London's Hackney Marshes as tower after tower exploded and crashed into a pile of wasted idealism and dreams.
But all was not lost. Some energetic and visionary young architects and property developers have seen merit in the towers in the 21st Century.
Many of the old towers are still there - their very existence proving they are intrinsically sustainable. A tidy-up of the common areas, new lifts, a permanent concierge, entry-phone system and high-rise slums could become desirable homes.
London's famous Trellick Tower, by the architect Erno Goldfinger, is now a 30-storey style pile. That goes for towers in Glasgow, now swathed in multicoloured insulating overcladding.
Not all concrete ideals of the post-war building boom have survived, Alison and Peter Smithson's polemic Robin Hood Gardens in east London is not long for this life, despite the protestations of the architectural elite. Concrete cancer, poor maintenance and the vandalism of social discontent have had their way - down it will come.
But there is nothing intrinsically flawed with the idea of high-rise living. Sustainability, good maintenance, careful management and a sense of ownership can make things work.
If the lift works, towers are particularly suitable for the elderly - great views, peace and quiet, neighbours who can still remember the post-war devastation.
Towers also work for the young - they are convenient, give a good leg-up on the housing market, and, with good neighbours, great fun. There is plenty of time to have children and move into a predictable estate on the outside of town. In the meantime, one can enjoy life with one's head in the clouds.
The tower of homes is making a refreshing comeback. New technology means faster, more reliable lifts, and acoustic improvements mean greater privacy.
There is now a new generation of high-riseNew materials and structural engineering innovations produce a new architectural language for the tower. Although concrete is still an essential part of the buildings' structure, it is no longer a singular cladding material.
The new towers benefit from the introduction of colour and texture. The tower prejudice has all but gone - today's urban world is once again reaching for the sky.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Holy Grail Obstacle Course
My first proposal for a reenactment:
Plan for Crit
In the next few weeks I would like to host a reenactment of a sequence of scenes from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. The scene is the pinnacle of the film where Indiana Jones, his father Henry Jones, his colleague Marcus Brody and their associate Sallah reach the final resting place of the Holy Grail. Along with the desire of the Holy Grail of the Nazis, and to save his father’s life, Indiana Jones is forced to proceed along the ancient obstacle course set in place to deter pilgrims of the Grail quest from obtaining the eternal life giving cup. Through careful research and study over the years, his father has acquired a number of vague clues to successful passage through the tests and traps set in place to kill contenders.
For this crit I am presenting an edited clip of the scenes, and an installation of the props I will use in the lo-tech reenactment. This will include some round cardboard blades covered in tinfoil, a floor plan of letters, a lion’s head and sesame seeds.I would like to host this reenactment in the basement of the Vic. I will use the lighting to stage a certain filmic quality, and the music technology and a projector to play the edited version of the scenes during the reenactment. I will invite classmates, other students, and anyone in the Vic that day to participate in the crowd or to be one of the contenders. The participant who ‘runs the obstacle course’ has the choice to wear an Indiana Jones style hat, and can stick to the script of the film, using prior knowledge of the film, or with the help of the projection, or they can interpret the course as they like.
This piece will hopefully allow me to progress my experience of the issues surrounding participation, as I will act as director in so much as I will install the course, but the participants will be free to choose how to use the course.
Potential Problems on the day:
- No-one will come, (I plan to put up posters, see poster)
- I will find difficulty explaining to participants, esp if several people, what my intentions are, as I am not yet sure
- The scene which lasts about 8 minutes might be too long to hold the attention of the participants. (editing would have to consider the most relevant scenes detrimental to the execution of the exercise)
I have previously been preoccupied with the idea of working outside the school, with already formed groups, especially in non-art areas. However, while still within the art school, I have decided that it would beneficial to take advantage of the supportive, open and enthusiastic world that the school provides, and strip my practice back to the experimental stage.
Documentation
I plan to either film this myself or ask someone with better skills and/or camera to film it for me. I think I may have to do the course myself, I’m not sure if some participants will let me get away with not doing it. Although this is not a performance, and I would rather not blur the lines of intention. I will also use photography as I hope the course will be run more than once, so I will have opportunity to film and photograph. I am aware that sound is particularly difficult to capture in a large space with lots of people, so I will need to borrow a sound recorder form EMS. I am not sure if I would attach it to each contender as they run the course or not.
In an exhibition situation, I would show this work without the props, and on two screens. One screen would be the original film, one would be the footage I make alongside, with the audio at the same place. The footage film may be partly or all stills, depending on the quality of the filmed footage.
Please take part in:
HOLY GRAIL
OBSTACLE
COURSE
Inspired by Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade
Downstairs in The Vic
TIME, DATE, Clare Marks
Reenactments
Extracts from the paper:
Art in the period of its dissolution, as a movement of negation in pursuit of its own transcendence in a historical society where history is not yet directly lived, is at once an art of change and a pure expression of the impossibility of change.
—Guy Debord, Thesis 190, The Society of the Spectacle1
From Beyond the Grave of the Politics of Re-Enactment
Text / Pil and Galia Kollectiv
—Guy Debord, Thesis 190, The Society of the Spectacle1
Guy Debord's thesis number 190 concisely defines the paradox at the heart of twentieth-century art practices—the demand for an impossible permanent revolution, the mediation of an unmediated, authentic experience, and the constant pull of both past and future, progress and decadence. The recent spate of artists' re-enactments of historical events and performances seems caught up in this dialectic, haunted by Debord's paralyzing circular discourse. In his writing about history and time, Debord claims that modern time, in the wake of the domination of linear history, is subordinated to pseudo-cycles of work and leisure. Fads, consumerist seasons, remakes, and retro fashions are, in his view, imposed by capitalism on history. Are we therefore to see artistic re-enactments as logical conclusions of the spectacle's repetitive imperative?
Melanie Gilligan writes in her essay on performance and its appropriations, "Which practices involving re-enactments might be retrograde withdrawals from new aesthetic and political struggles, and which others are catalysts for them?"
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| Jeremy Deller, stills from The Battle of Orgreave, DVD, 2001, 62:37 minutes (directed by Mike Figgis; commissioned and produced by Artangel, London; photo: Martin Jenkinson) |
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| Andrea Fraser, (Kunst Muss Hängen) Art Must Hang, 2001, DVD, 32:55 minutes (courtesy of the artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, and Galerie Christian Nagel, Köln/Berlin) |
Thomas Struth Family Portraits
I usually make a choice for the location, and then people can position themselves on the stage that I’ve selected - which most of the time is where they live. I ask people to sit however they want to sit, or stand. Its part of the system that inevitably people sit or position themselves according to the dynamic of the moment and whoever they want to be close to…it represents the dynamic of the moment in the group.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Utopia Station
article
50th Venice Biennale
VENICE, VENICE, ITALY
The opening days of the Venice Biennale were so hot that it felt as if everything was about to melt like scoops of ice cream in the sun. Nowhere was this feeling more acute than at ‘Utopia Station’, curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija. In contrast to Gabriel Orozco’s delicately curated space, ‘Utopia Station’, also situated at the far end of the Arsenale, is full to the point of bursting. Works by more than 60 individual artists, architects and artists’ groups, along with posters by another 100, are wrapped in and around a vast plywood ‘platform’ designed by Liam Gillick and Tiravanija. This construction incorporates several rooms with video projections, areas for the visitors to lounge and hang out, and a small stage where talks and lectures are planned throughout the duration of the Biennale.
‘Utopia Station’ presents itself as a functional neighbourhood open to social interaction, complete with a garden with funky communal showers designed by Tobias Rehberger, Padre de la Fontana (Father of the Fountain, 2003), ecological toilets designed by Atelier van Lieshout (Scatopia, 2002), its own web radio station (Zerynthia, in collaboration with Franz West), and a stilted hut where one might take a quick nap should it all become too exhausting (Billboardthailandhouse, 2000, by Alicia Framis). The concept of the station is an offshoot of Tiravanija’s nomadic roaming around the world and is more a junction, or a meeting-place, than a stop en route to a predetermined destination. The project here is not finished, but the interim culmination of a series of events and seminars that will see two more stations established at the Haus der Kunst in Munich this autumn and the spring of next year.
Intended as a place where the notion of Utopia can be collectively considered, many of the works and projects included in ‘Utopia Station’, such as Martha Rosler and the Oleanna group’s collaborative investigation of the term, are concerned with generating relationships between people. Nicolas Bourriaud has described this kind of art production, ‘whose main feature is to consider interhuman exchange an aesthetic object in and of itself’ (Postproduction, 2002) as ‘relational aesthetics’.
Although utopian thought both criticizes existing social forms and tries to think of new ones, it has always been attacked for concentrating its concerns in the realm of fantasy. Elmgreen & Dragset’s contribution to the show, Spelling U-T-O-P-I-A (2003), gently mocks this problem. During the opening weekend two successive monkeys tried, as the title suggests, to spell out ‘utopia’ using enlarged dice inscribed with the relevant letters. But as the monkeys’ attempts to arrange the letters in the right order failed, so - the artists suggest - real Utopia is always just beyond the grasp of human beings.
‘Utopia Station’ is a far cry from the extreme order and stability that characterize Thomas More’s ideal society, famously described in the book that introduced the word into popular usage, Utopia (1516). The show is probably closer in spirit to the temporary utopias of rock festivals or carnivals, and in this sense Venice, with its strong libertarian traditions, is the perfect setting. The section’s most striking feature, however, is its sense of chaos. Though not as radical as Carsten Höller would have liked - his contribution, No Names (2003), proposed to not reveal any of the participating curators’ and artists’ names in order to encourage a discussion based on the actual works on display - individual works lose out in the organic mix of the whole. Making literal the motif of entropy, Carl Michael van Hausswolff and Leif Elggren could be seen shredding and then pulping copies of More’s book, producing new sheets of handmade paper as part of their project The Annexation of Utopia by the Kingdoms of Elgaland/Vargaland (2003).
The sheer volume of artworks and information is both the weakness of ‘Utopia Station’ and its strength. There is a danger that the overload becomes just too much, causing a communication breakdown and thus jeopardizing the social relations that it is trying to facilitate. But then again, this simultaneous construction and wrecking might be the point. The moment when attempts at establishing real utopias go wrong is usually the point at which they become permanent.
Jacob Dahl Jürgensen
from http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/jacob_dahl_juergensen/
New Public Art: Redefining or Reconsidering Community-Based Art? Elize Mazadiego
I have extracted some passages from an essay by Elize Mazadiego which I found while researching my Critical Journal:
The term “new genre public art” sprang out of the 1991 exhibition program Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago. Following this was an abundance of artworks, projects, exhibits, and texts that defined “new genre public art” as a form that fosters an often temporary collaboration between artist and communities in the making of locally-specific, sociopolitically oriented works. In contrast to traditional public art (that is, a public siting of sculptural forms and installations) the new genre foregrounds community, and its interaction with the artist, as the artwork....
....Miwon Kwon’s 2004 publication One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity is critical to this conversation as it gives a historical framework in which we can place Cruz and Lowe’s talk, but also offers us a language with which we can describe their works. Kwon’s text historicizes and theorizes site-specific art practices to distinguish critical shifts that have taken place within this loosely defined genre. In doing so, Kwon underscores the ways in which the genre itself is a “site of struggle” as various artists and groups call into question the nature of the site and its relationship to artistic practice.[1] In their attempt to rethink how site-specificity operates, these groups also generate new models that reinvigorate the political strategies and aesthetic sensibilities in a site-related art. Over a series of chapters Kwon loosely traces site-specificity’s historical trajectory over three categories: 1) phenomenological/experiential, 2) social/institutional; and 3) discursive.[2] Based on her outline, site specificity moves from the materiality of a specific location to a place that is determined by the specifics of a social network, such as a community.
Actually this whole essay is relevant to my research so I will just post the link http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=26
The essay analyses Miwon Kwon's book One Place After Another: SiteSpecific Art and Locational Identity and particularly the chapter which is a relevant source of my CJ From Site to Community in New Genre Public Art: The Case of ‘Culture in Action'
Book review - Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market
Matthew Barney, Cremaster4. Photograph Michael James O'Brien © Matthew Barney
Money and art. What's not to like? Most of the works i write about on the blog have very little to do with art speculation, auction houses and investments funds but that doesn't mean that i'm not curious about the myths and mysteries of the art market. I've read a few books on the subject over the past few years. Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World
Art of the Deal is in a class of its own. Like Seven Days in the Art World, it was written by an insider. Noah Horowitz is a member of the faculty of the Sotheby's Institute of Art in New York and the Director of the VIP Art Fair - the first-ever exclusively online art fair. Horowitz, however, doesn't confuse respect for the art world with blatant kowtowing. He even manages to be critical without falling into the cynical trap.
The merits of the book do not stop there.
It opens where every recent book about the contemporary art market starts: Damien Hirst and an auction that has its own wikipedia entry. But it then ventures into territories left untouched by other authors of similar essays. Instead of talking Murakami paintings and Koons sculptures, Horowitz approaches more 'immaterial' genres which, despite their popularity in art galleries and biennales, tend to get far less attention from collectors and auction houses: video and 'experiential art' (performances, installations, action art... any art form that focuses on experience and social interaction.)
Philippe Parreno, Invisibleboy, 2010. Film Still. © 2010 Gautier Deblonde
Philippe Parreno, Invisibleboy, 2010. Film Still. Courtesy of Air de Paris, Courtesy of Centre National des Arts Plastiques, © 2010 Philippe Parreno
I learnt something at almost every single page of the book: the way videos and their ancillary goods drive the art market, how Barney financed the Cremaster Cycle, issues of content ownership, the rise of the collector's box, the 'experientialization' of the global art world, the difference between prestige buying and investment in art for financial return, what collectors acquire exactly when they purchase a "constructed situation" by Tino Sehgal, an artist who doesn't create tangible works, doesn't issue press releases, refuses to throw opening parties and doesn't allow photo documentation of his work.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pad Thai, 1991-96
Horowitz doesn't generalize, nor does he simplify facts. His conclusions are prudent and well-balanced. He bring economics and art together like no one has done before (as much as i can tell.) Perhaps more importantly, the author doesn't live in an hermetically closed contemporary art bubble. He has read Geert Lovink, he (briefly) takes into account artists who -whether by choice or fate- do not sell their works, drives parallels with the commercial music and film industry, doesn't throw daggers at ubuweb and even sees youtube and other online video platforms as 'providing new opportunities and challenges for future developments of exhibiting and collecting standards.;
Art of the Deal is dense, impeccably researched, its language is clear, its insider stories come fast and numerous.
Horowitz doesn't touch upon the delicate issue of the market for new media art but my next review might have more about the subject.
Issue 82 April 2004 This is Jörg Heiser on Tino Sehgal
I've just visited Nantes, Paris and Brussels to see some work in the flesh
Over the last two years I have encountered three pieces by Sehgal: someone crawling along the floor like a broken robot in Frankfurt; a singing guard at a motley show in Venice; and two kids performing what seemed to be a cycle of instruction pieces in an empty art fair booth in London. Yet a discussion of Sehgal’s oeuvre based only on the experience of these works would have felt more like rumour-mongering than art criticism - hence my Grand Tour.
Sehgal studied dance and economics in Essen and Berlin and was interested in performance and conceptual work, but couldn’t, as he put it, ‘dance his way into the art academy’. His work resides in the time and space it occupies; in the bodies and voices of the performers; in memory and its reception. It does not, he is adamant, inhabit photographs, videos, labels on the wall or even sales contracts - which explains why there are no images with this text. I’m still puzzled that I have been persuaded to accept what might be seen as purist iconoclasm, a footnote to the history of the dematerialization of the art object, as something so different, so appealing.
The scene is the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, a massive building with polished floors and grand rooms full of paintings of wildly different provenance. In an empty gallery a couple on the floor are kissing, but not passionately, their mouths meeting in the style of a 1930s’ film. They wear casual clothes and move slowly, like a pair of sloths practising sexual positions. At one point the man lies beneath the woman, his hands on her buttocks, and she turns her head towards a non-existent camera, recalling Jeff Koons and La Cicciolina in Manet Soft (1991) from the ‘Made in Heaven’ series. Yet the Koons piece was based less on Manet than on a typical porn pose. Maybe Sehgal’s piece needs this playfully vulgar refererence to make you recognize the more subtle art-historic ones - Auguste Rodin’s Kiss of 1886 or Constantin Brancusi’s Kiss of 1908. The point seems to be they are exhibits in a museum of remembered positions.
The two performers go slowly through their motions as if on a loop. Shortly after someone enters the room the woman exclaims, ‘Tino Sehgal’, the man says, ‘Kiss’, and she replies ‘deux-milles quatre’ (two thousand and four). With the next visitor they reverse the order of who says what. After about an hour another couple arrives and begins mimicking the movements of the first. They move in sync for a minute or so, until the first two performers walk away, leaving their replacements to continue. The piece is conceived to run for the duration of an exhibition - in this case for six weeks, six days a week, eight hours a day. During regular museum hours you came across the piece in the same way you might discover any artwork. It could be described as a ‘living sculpture’, like Gilbert & George performing the old music-hall number ‘Underneath the Arches’ for eight hours for their Singing Sculpture (1970).
For Manifesta 4 Sehgal used performers who seemed equally self-absorbed: again, in an otherwise empty gallery, a person on the floor moved like a hydraulic android stuck in a corner. The movements were based on two famous pieces of filmed performance: Bruce Nauman’s video Wall-Floor Positions (1968) - the artist probing a set of body positions between wall and floor; and Dan Graham’s Roll (1970) - a double film projection, one of which shows the artist rolling through woodland holding a Super-8 camera, while the other consists of the shaky footage actually shot on it. In Sehgal’s piece Nauman’s and Graham’s movements are literally rolled into one, transforming the performers into uncanny puppets. The title Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000) brings into play a third piece, Nauman’s Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up over Her, Face Up (1973), an exercise in endurance: a performer lies still for 40 minutes while, in an act of auto-suggestion, she tries to sink into the floor.
There is a decisive difference between the Manifesta piece and the one shown in Nantes: although they both ‘store’ historically defined movements in the bodies of the performers, the latter was not accompanied by any label on the wall. The performers announcing the title and date of the piece function like a snake biting its own tail, an integral part of the piece’s execution. This became hilariously clear in the recent group show ‘Ailleurs, ici’ (Elsewhere, Here), organized by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. As you entered this off-site exhibition, three guards jumped up from their chairs and hopped around in loose circles, raising their arms and proclaiming ‘This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!’ One then uttered, ‘Tino Sehgal’, then all in unison ‘This is so contemporary’, another ‘2003’, and the third ‘courtesy Galerie Mot!’, with the last syllable screeched at a ridiculously high pitch, before all of them returned to their seats.
The artist allows the guards some interpretative leeway - they performed slightly differently each time, as if to keep themselves entertained. It felt at times as if they were referring to their own actions as being ‘so contemporary’, at others as if they were mocking the show, which was spatially dominated by architect Didier Fiuza Faustino’s futuristic construction of gold and silver sheets suspended in mid-air. The visitors’ reactions ranged from embarrassed amusement to even more embarrassed attempts to ignore what was going on. Either way, people lingered, like nosey parkers transformed from victims into culprits in an instant as they watch others enter.
Sehgal is not the first artist to have used exhibition staff as material - Andrea Fraser and Christian Philipp Müller, for example, have done it to great effect. Yet the clown-like piece in Paris expanded Sehgal’s scope, almost calculatedly, from intellectual gravitas to lightweight Pop appeal - a great quality. Beyond the uninteresting prospect of arguments about whether Sehgal’s work is superficial or profound, it shows how, as in all good jokes, reality here is stuffed into a tumble dryer and made to revolve around itself. His pieces don’t just hoax their way into the institution but establish their own ‘institution’ along the way, as the performers’ status is determined by their own speech - or, as at the Venice Biennale last summer, their singing.
The curatorial concept of the Biennale’s ‘Utopia Station’ section resembled a festival - as if it were less about the show than the gathering. But Sehgal’s guard, who strolled around elegantly singing ‘This is propaganda’ and then proclaiming ‘Tino Sehgal, this is propaganda, 2002, courtesy Jan Mot gallery’, made you feel as if you had tuned into a short-wave receiver and had stumbled across Johnny Rotten singing ‘This Is Not a Love Song’, a tune that simultaneously establishes and questions its own status - what kind of propaganda simply states that it’s propaganda?
The function of speech in this mind-boggling game of self-reference can be traced back to J.L. Austin’s book How To Do Things With Words (1954). Austin distinguished what he calls speech acts that simply say something (constative) from speech acts that do something (performative) - i.e., they accomplish what they say. Thierry de Duve, in his Kant after Duchamp (1996), applies this theory neatly to modern art after Marcel Duchamp: the performative speech act ‘this is beautiful’ is replaced with ‘this is art’: ‘To say of a snow shovel that it is beautiful (or ugly) doesn’t turn it into art.‘1 But by simply saying ‘this is art’ Duchamp famously did the trick.
Judith Butler, in Bodies that Matter (1993), implemented the theory of the performative speech act into her inquiry into the determination of the physical body as ‘sexed’. Now even ‘mere’ descriptions of bodies as being, for example, ‘feminine’, lose their innocence. In other words, it’s not only performative speech acts that do something but also constative ones, as they repeat conventional descriptions and so confirm - or subvert - them. The constative and the performative become intertwined in the endless attempt to determine sex, gender, race; to fix the distinction between what is sealed by fate and what is subject to change.
Sehgal takes these three things - the theory of the performative speech act, its application to the art object and to the body - and throws them together. He commits the sin of applying theory directly to art production - but succeeds because he sticks slavishly to it. ‘This is’ is the phrase that de Duve awarded so much determining power, and as it is uttered not by a label on the wall but by the performers literally calling the work into being, it is as if they become ‘possessed’ by art.
In Brussels I thought I knew what to expect: Jan Mot would ‘restage’ the exhibition at his gallery from a year ago. The empty white cube behind a shop window recalled Yves Klein’s Le Vide (The Void, 1958), yet the show’s title, ‘Le Plein’ (Fullness), was in turn pinched from Arman’s reaction of 1960. Arman crammed bulky refuse into the same space, so I presumed the performance too would ‘fill up’ once I entered.
Jan Mot walked into the gallery backwards from his office; he began talking in a sober, self-absorbed way, but it wasn’t clear whether he was talking about Sehgal’s pieces or actually was one of them. Every time I tried to face Mot he would turn away, continuing to talk, throwing his arms and legs around in circles, and saying, ‘Tino Sehgal, This is good, 2001, courtesy the artist’. After a while he turned around, said ‘this is a piece by Tino Sehgal entitled this is exchange’, shook my hand and invited me to converse with him for five minutes about the notion of market economy.
I rightly suspected this to be a rendition of a Sehgal piece. (It involves visitors being lured into talking to a museum guard about economy - if they do so, they get half of their entrance money reimbursed.) But that was not the end of it. If anyone had entered the gallery at that point, Mot would have been obliged to go back into the office and repeat his awkward entrance. Thankfully no one did, so his gallery assistant entered instead. They embraced, kissed each other and slowly sank to the floor - it was Tino Sehgal, Kiss, 2004, shown for the first time two days earlier, but ‘documented’ a year before. This could have gone on for ever, and in fact the piece does not stop until the visitor leaves (poor Mot). Its ‘fullness’ is that of Duchamp’s boîte en valise (1936-41) cramming an entire oeuvre into a neat briefcase of meta-art.
Sehgal introduced the referential mode with (Untitled), a 50-minute dance performance of 2001. Naked, Sehgal performs styles of 20th-century dance, from Isadora Duncan through the Ballets Russes, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer and others. But the point is neither that you recognize all the references nor - though Sehgal is a trained dancer - that you should expect a perfect rendition. Rather, the piece is like a ruthlessly rearranged medley of tunes. Sehgal’s body is transformed into a boîte en valise, memorizing a museum of dance.
When Sehgal was invited by The Wrong Gallery (itself a meta-venue) to participate in last year’s Frieze Art Fair, he took the basics of a fair - objects sold in booths - and twisted them like a showman turning a balloon into a puppy. As visitors entered the empty booth, two kids acquainted them with Sehgal’s oeuvre, in much the same way Mot did with ‘Le Plein’. At one point, they ‘documented’ the piece Tino Sehgal, This is about, 2003, courtesy of Galerie Jan Mot, which involves asking people attending a tour of a private collection in zombie-like voices: ‘so what do you think this is about?’ Uttered by kids in front of an art crowd, it recalled Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1974) saying, ‘your mother sucks cocks in hell’. The evil spirit of the art market was almost tangible.
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. Using a deadpan, literal approach, Sehgal spelt this out in a recent theatre production - (Untitled) (1997-2003) - for the Hebbel Theater Berlin: in between the dance ensemble table-dancing to Beyoncé‘s ‘Bootylicious’ (2001) Sehgal gave an ultra-dry lecture on market theory, including growth-rate diagrams.
Sehgal’s work is driven by one question: are there ways to create something while circumventing the usual cycles of production and consumption? A question as simple as it is impossible to answer, it goes to the heart of ‘political art’. The market happily gulps down any discontent, turning it into yet another piquant, bite-sized offer. Frustration with such hungry indifference often leads to escapism, cynicism, or nihilism. Sehgal resorts to none of these. He returns to moving, dancing, talking, singing. And yet his work is less about pious dematerialization than conceptual closure. 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.
1.Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London 1996, p. 302.
Jörg Heiser
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