Tino Sehgal's exchange economy

by David Everitt Howe

Tino Sehgal’s exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum thrillingly and sometimes disconcertingly questioned the nature of social relations in late-capitalism. If unprepared for the question “What is progress?” posed to you by the sweet, seemingly innocent child who greeted you at the bottom of a ramp, it left you slack-jawed as you slowly ascended the ramp to complicate the meaning of the term. The metaphoric time of This Progress (2006) replacing real time, you were handed over to guides who represent successive life stages. Greeted next by a teenager, then an adult, each of whom effortlessly picked up the discussion where the prior ‘interpreter’ left off, near the top of the structure an elder introduced him or herself, and stated the work’s title. Conversation continued until you reached the top of the ramp, where you were left alone.

This Progress was quite a production. I spied groups of interpreters huddled behind corners and curves of the architecture, waiting in line for the next unsuspecting visitor. The teenage participants filled a side stairwell while the children gathered by the reflecting pool. All of the encounters were, to a degree, choreographed of course. The one other work in the show being an early tip-off: The Kiss (2002) was the first thing you encountered when walking into the museum, and consisted of a couple in amorous embrace on a cleared rotunda floor, slowly and methodically changing positions. Sometimes straddling one another, hands moving up and down a thigh or backside, the couple’s movements were loosely choreographed. They occasionally paused to strike familiar art historical poses, from the quaint embrace of Rodin’s The Kiss to the downright tawdry overtures in Jeff Koons’ Made in Heaven series.

Such self-reflexive gestures trade dance for exhibition-value. Sehgal is trained in both choreography and political economics, but it is his interest in the latter, and his commodification of performance art, for which he is most noteworthy. It was Yves Klein, or even Duchamp, who seemed to prove that all you need is celebrity status to invest any nominalist gesture with value. Klein’s successful sale of Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959-62) proved what Walter Benjamin predicted long ago — that the lost aura of art would find its replacement in the aura of commodities. With This Progress, of course, the commodity was not an object; Sehgal is notorious for economic transactions that lack anything tangible. He markets his work in editions, with only a few people as witness, and the transactions are oral.

With This Progress, the commodity was the relation. In much the same way as Klein and Duchamp, Sehgal points to the institution as the real arbiter of exhibition-value, trumping any sort of utopian resistance to capitalism that a movement like relational aesthetics seemed to propose —beholden as it was to institutional exhibition spaces. Rather, Sehgal works within a capitalist system to broach its limits.

While the discussions in This Progress were in some way structured by capital, its relations could transcend such concerns. Meeting with school administrators in Harlem as part of the casting process for This Progress Sehgal, when asked what his ultimate intentions were responded: “The real deal is conversation… it’s a structure to have a conversation about people’s values.” Sehgal emphasises inter-subjective encounters that point through and beyond economic value; as I was walking up the ramp with my interpreter George, our discussion of temporality seemed far removed from market exchange. Reaching the top, George asked me whether — in between working, writing, and school — I left room for love. Such a question seems cheesy on paper, but the ramifications were serious: such a question pointed to what is priceless.


Tino Seghal is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, until 10 March