Welcome to This Situation: Tino Sehgal's Impersonal Ethics

Abstract

What of dance is welcomed in the museum, and what remains on the outside? Artist Tino Seghal's “constructed situations” redirect this question, reworking relations of inside and outside, participant and observer, subject and object through a collective bodily attending to the situation itself. This article explores the conspiratorial techniques activated by This Situation (2007) to consider how dance moves in and with the museum. These techniques, which are derived from or affiliated with those of performance (the intricate negotiation of bodies, movement, and time in relation), include repetition, remixing, distributed movement, conspiratorial breathing, the compliment, disjunctions between words and gestures, and more as part of the work's ecology of practices. As interpreters of the piece in Montréal (and, as such, embodied archivists), the three authors take up key issues such as tensions between ephemerality and preservation, dance's anarchival propensity, and the contagious corporeal techniques of the piece that pass between interpreters and visitors, human and object materialities, and which traverse heterochronicities of the event and its resonances. We propose that what is specific to Sehgal's work within the museum is a holding of movements and relations as a way of persistently making and unmaking its forms, contents, and relations—as a way of making art contemporary, so to speak, via dance's propensity to always begin again. This commitment to re-beginning is what we term Sehgal's impersonal ethics: how This Situation (re)activates and relies on the generation of intensive but ambiguous embodiments.

Choreographing American Dance Archives: Artist-Driven Archival Projects by Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company, and Jennifer Monson

“…8.Some choreographers, such as Tino Sehgal, rather than trying to preserve the “ephemeral,” have instead pushed ephemerality to its limit, for example, by refusing to allow documentation of the work, insisting upon no written contracts, etc. For more on Sehgal, see Pape et al (2014). …”

The Child as Art Object in Tino Sehgal’sAnn Lee, Ann Lee & MarcelandThis Progress

“…Sehgal's practice has, up until now, mostly been discussed in terms of its ephemeral and immaterial nature, since he refuses to document his pieces (see Hantelmann 2010; Richards 2012). It has also been theorized in terms of the relationship between visitor and artwork that his pieces elicit, which circulate as works of art to be bought and sold on the art market (see Paramana 2014;Pape et al 2014;Hildebrandt 2015). As Sehgal frequently casts children to execute and interpret his pieces, the important role that they play in his artistic practice requires further critical investigation.…”