Tino Sehgal at the ICA
Art in America, September 2005
By Stephanie Cash

London-born, Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal puts a lot of thought into his work, and not much else. Literally. But his economy of means lends itself to experiential, thought-provoking work that is rich with meaning. His spare performance installations at the Institute of Contemporary Arts consisted only of a rotating group of "interpreters" and often perplexed gallery visitors, who were sometimes so thrown by the goings-on that they didn't enter the space, or exited prematurely.

In the spacious downstairs gallery, a performer writhed on the floor in slow motion, evoking both a physical seizure and modern dance. Titled Instead of allowing some things to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000), the piece referenced early videos by Dan Graham and Bruce Nauman.

In the upstairs gallery was a more engaging work, This objective of that object (2004). Visitors walked into the space to find five individuals standing throughout the gallery's two rooms, their backs to the entrance. After a short while their breathing became audible, and then a rhythmically whispered phrase that increased in urgency and volume: "the objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion." Great. Another minimalist/conceptual performance, one might think--which wouldn't have been all bad, just rather simplistic and old-hat. But the patient viewer was rewarded with something more.

When I entered the gallery, two other visitors were sitting near the entrance, and as the interpreters' voices began to rise, one of them started to interject a question, at which point the actors excitedly exclaimed "we have a question, we have a question." The visitor, who apparently knew "how to play," asked, "what do you think of Henri Bergson's theory of creative evolution?," prompting an interpreter to knowingly (perhaps too knowingly) expound on the philosopher's treatise, which somehow led to musings on music, and back to the group's initial misunderstanding of "creative evolution" as "creative revolution." At the end of one long digression, the group simultaneously leaned back on their heels, let out a whoop and bounced around the space, pogo-like, changing positions with each other. It was utterly silly.

An acquaintance of mine had a very different experience. After he and his friend entered the gallery, they searched intently around the space, scanning the walls and corners of the room for some minute presence of "art" that, they thought, the participants must have been pondering. As the two moved around the space, the actors shifted their positions, always keeping their backs to the visitors (and tipping off my friend that he had, indeed, found the art). Then the chanting began ... and ended, with no interaction. After a pause the chanting resumed, but this time the actors slowly "died" and slumped to the floor, not having achieved their stated objective. As the two visitors stepped over the person blocking the entrance and proceeded to the stairs, whispering to themselves something along the lines of "what the hell was that?," an interpreter came to life shouting "comments, comments, we have comments," sparking a discourse among the group as to what the visitors might have been saying.

What does it all mean? Perhaps Sehgal is truly trying to engage his audience in intellectual banter, but then frustrating those very attempts by having his performers "turn their backs" on visitors. It's one of the ways that he both engages the art world and rejects its assumptions and conventions. Another is that he does not photograph any of his performances (to avoid creating salable works) or provide documentation. He seeks to disconnect art from both the object and objectivity. Some visitors undoubtedly departed scratching their heads or wondering if they'd "done it right." And perhaps that is Sehgars point. The experience of art is truly subjective; viewers' encounters with it are colored by their own assumptions and experiences. Whatever the case, the work certainly engendered more than the usual amount of discussion and contemplation among those who witnessed it. [This was the first of three Sehgal exhibitions to take place at the London ICA through 2007. His work appears along with that of Thomas Scheibitz in the German pavilion at the current Venice Biennale.]