Tag: Art

Tino Sehgal – Selected works

The following is a selected list of the artist’s works with short descriptions:

  • 2000 Instead of allowing something to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things
    An interpreter writhing on the gallery floor.
  • 2001 This is good
    “… gallery guards singing … thrashing their arms about in circles while jumping from leg to leg.” (Bishop, 2005)
  • 2002 This is propaganda
    “… a brief, ghostly recording by an unidentified woman singing “this is propaganda, you know, you know” (from a pop song); the recording is triggered whenever someone passes by an unmarked spot in the room.” (Gabri, 2003)

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Gesture

I will look at two essays by Agamben published in the early ‘90s that centre on the term ‘gesture.’ Kommerell, or On Gesture (1991) and Notes on Gesture (1992) are both based on what appear to be the same set of notes, with duplicate passages in both texts, however the overriding subject matter changes in each case. The former discusses the writings of the German literary critic Max Kommerell and his relationship to the circle of Stefan George. Gesture in this case is discussed in a literary setting. The latter is a less polished set of notes outlining the development of the scientific study of gesture and the role cinema would play in its understanding, beginning with Gilles de la Tourette and touching in only a few pages on Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Deleuze’s theory of cinema, Aristotle, Edward Muybridge and a number of other writers.

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Introduction

Download a pdf of this essay

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.

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Buren—Lyotard—The Written Word

Although it’s not clear if this is a direct response to Lyotard’s exploration of his work (Lyotard, 1979; Lyotard, 1981) Buren made his own statement about why he produces texts and what purposes these texts serve.

This piece, Why Write? comes across as almost reductively prosaic in its presentation of the facts of writing that Buren considers relevant. The types of writing that he undertakes are literally enumerated and defined: 1 Necessity, 2 Urgency, 3 Reflection, 4 Commissions, and, 5 Pleasure.

He states that “what a visual work has to ‘say,’ if anything, cannot be reduced to any other ‘saying.’” (Buren, 1982, p.109) The act of writing and its remnant, the text, are disabused of the function of complementing the work of art, in the way I believe Lyotard proposes for Buren’s work.

My writing shouldn’t obscure the fact that my main activity is tied to the ambition of making visible the “not-yet-seen”: the two activities can neither be isolated or confused. Although one has the mad desire of flushing out the “not-yet-seen,” the other could never aspire to express the “not-yet-said.” (Buren, 1982, p.108)

The function of the writing for Buren is to act as a sort of testing ground for the work of art. In Buren’s case, at least, the work of art is (textually?) “silent” – the writings about them act as a “baptism of fire” (à la Nietszche?) from which the effective work of art will emerge unscathed:

… only those which can emerge intact or reinforced manage to prove that they have something to “say” beyond the written word. (Buren, 1982, p.109)

This seems to suggest a necessary synergy between the work and the text, that the text serves to justify and promote the work to a new state. However, the text is never the artwork in a very real sense – the difference between the artwork and writing is described as “the uncrossable and impossible distance between the two ways of saying.” (Buren, 1982, p.109)

He finishes by making the pointed remark that “if I put time and care into my writing, it’s because I feel that words have a certain strength, and their power shouldn’t be monopolised by so-called specialists.” (Buren, 1982, p.109) Exactly who he is directing this to is unclear, but I can believe it could easily be towards Lyotard’s co-option of his work.

I suspect that Buren is talking about his artworks in-particular, rather than about art in general here. He may also be reacting to some other critic, I don’t know the context of the piece, Buren may have had many critics in mind, Lyotard may be completely irrelevant here. But I think Buren’s conception of writing is an interesting adjunct to his work and obviously provides some useful background to it.

  • BUREN, Daniel (1982). Why Write? Art Journal, vol. 42, no. 2 (Summer). pp.108–109.
  • LYOTARD, Jean-François (1979). Preliminary Notes on the Pragmatic of Works: Daniel Buren. October vol. 10 (Autumn). pp. 59–67.
  • LYOTARD, Jean-François (1981). The Works and Writings of Daniel Buren: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Contemporary Art. Artforum International no. 19 (February). pp. 56–64.
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