“This is not theater,” he corrects me. “There is no script. There is no stage. I’m asking you to be yourself.”
“But there are rules,” I remind him. “So is this a philosophical game?”
“To play it well does not mean to win,” he teaches me. “It means to contribute to an interesting situation.” Sehgal’s work proposes a dynamic take on the idea of the “expanded concept of art,” arguing for a process of production that revolves around exchanges and transformations of thoughts, as he has said, “rethinking the notion of a product as a transformation of actions not as a transformation of materials.”
No photos.
No videos of the work.
No documentation at all.
No invoices.
Just memory.
Just art.
Magasin 3 presents an exhibition of constructed situations by the acclaimed artist Tino Sehgal. At the Venice Bienniale exhibition guards suddenly broke into song and started dancing around the audience. In New York he recently had a critically acclaimed show where a group of people started a discussion on market economy with the visitors and at the Berlin Bienniale of 2006 he had a couple slowly moving around on the floor embracing in a passionate kiss.
There are no objects in Tino Sehgal’s exhibition at Magasin 3. As a visitor you meet different people in the exhibition space who have been instructed by Sehgal to move in a certain way or say certain things. The artist provides the structure and the participants interpret the intention. The artwork is the constructed situation which arises between the audience and the interpreters of the piece.
Curator: Richard Julin
MARCH 6 – MAY 4, 2008
Sehgal’s point of departure as an artist is the fact that we are using up more of the planet’s resources than what is necessary for survival. In his work he challenges the notion of production, both artistically and economically, by creating immaterial ways of generating meaning. His artwork exists only in the moment in which it is experienced, and as a verbal narrative when recounted to others. It is not documented by any audiovisual means. His practice revolves around people who are instructed by Sehgal to use their bodies, voices and personalities to interpret a specific set of rules. The reaction or even participation of the spectator gives the possibility for the work to actually happen. He makes a point of the fact that his art is not a performance, a medium which historically has been a reaction to the art market. Sehgal’s pieces exist as exhibitable, sellable and collectable, yet immaterial work.
A conversation between Tino Sehgal and chief curator Richard Julin.
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