This series will look at a central aspect of Tino Sehgal’s practice – the coupled concepts of production and deproduction. The artist proposes these two, simultaneous activities as presenting a new economics of production, opposing current social and traditional artistic practices. This activity suggests an aspect of immateriality within the work which has been likened to Giorgio Agamben’s ‘gesture’ (Bishop, 2005) in that it opposes means and ends with a renewed emphasis on a state in between, not as an end in itself nor as a method of becoming, but as an “endurance and the exhibition of the media character of corporal movement” which Agamben calls “mediality.” (Agamben, 1992, p. 57)
In the next post I’ll start by looking at gesture from the point of view of Agamben’s writings on the subject, then take an overview of Sehgal’s work and the issues arising from it. Following this I’ll attempt to link gesture with the work’s issues and discuss the benefits of such a concept to Sehgal’s work and what implications this may have.
