Vagaries of Performance and the Legacies of Conceptualism in Tino Sehgal's This Progress

Abstract

Vagaries of Performance and the Legacies of Conceptualism in Tino Sehgal's This Progress Stamatina Dimakopoulou (bio) TINO SEHGAL'S This Objective of That Object, first produced at the Insitute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in 2004, elicited responses that evoked experiences that variously recur in the growing body of criticism on SEHGAL'S work. A brief account by CLAIRE BISHOP is a case in point: BISHOP writes about how the visitor to SEHGAL'S exhibit encounters five people standing in different parts of the gallery space, who, while facing away from the visitor, repeat in a rising voice the title of the piece. The interpreters retreat when the visitor approaches them. If the visitor doesn't engage, they begin to fall down, until [End Page 143] one starts asking questions. BISHOP'S account of the exchange is worth quoting at some length: "What kind of discussion?"The performer in front of me declares, "The visitor has asked a question!""It is a question we have been asked before!" trumps his neighbor."Who will answer?" they cry in unison."We should ask the visitor what kind of discussion she would like!"Oh God, why did I utter such a knee-jerk inanity? Another visitor chips in more thoughtfully, "Is there a difference between being an object of discussion and being a subject of discussion?""A visitor has asked another question!""Who will answer?!"1 A conversation among them "about the nature of objectivity and subjectivity" follows, and Bishop tells us that it felt as if the interpreters were iterating phrases that they may have performed before.2 Cast in the role of the interlocutor in a situation that is predicated on voice and silence, proximity and distance, stillness and movement, the visitor's overall experience, in Bishop's account, was rather anticlimactic as the play on the reflexivity and the referentiality of language seemed to exhaust itself after a while. When she returned, the experience was "maddening" because the interpreters seemed to be too caught up in overperforming, as it were; as a result, conversation was nearly impossible. Bishop overall describes how the visitor is solicited to participate in the self-reflexive laying bare of a situation that has a rather theatrical guise and a Beckettian resonance. Her gloss is factual, reflexive, and reflective and in retrospect constitutes an interesting document in its own right for the irrecuperable instance of the lived experience. Initiating performative encounters that unfold on the basis of instructions devised by the artist promoted by responses such as Bishop's, Berlin-based Sehgal took the art world by storm. Sehgal has often spoken of how his studies in political economy and in particular his work with dance have informed his practice. His pieces rely exclusively on human presence for their instantiation: they come to us either as "living sculptures"—a term that Hans Ulrich Obrist has used for performances that are simultaneoulsy choreographed and improvised—or as "constructed situations"—the artist's own preferred term to designate [End Page 144] pieces in which visitors engage in conversations with performers whom Sehgal calls "interpreters."3 Among the most notable of his living sculptures is Kiss (Guggengheim Museum, 2022), in which performers enact amorous embraces that reference iconic works of the Western art historical canon such as those of Klimt, Rodin, and Brancusi. Others are more explicitly citational: Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (New Museum, 2000), for example, references Bruce Nauman's Wall-Floor Positions (1968) and Dan Graham's Roll (1970). The constructed situations, on the other hand, are dialogical and are triggered by the mode of the address with which the interpreters approach the visitor. This is the case with This Objective of That Object, or, This Situation (Marian Goodman Gallery, 2007), in which interpreters talk to each other about various social issues and randomly address and invite visitors to join in the conversation, and This Progress, which is the main focus of this essay. First produced at the ICA in London in 2006, in This Progress the visitor encounters four different persons, starting with a young child and ending with...