Tino Sehgal at Jan Mot Gallery – or not?
This post had been up some weeks ago, briefly, but for the sake of not ruining the experience of potential gallery visitors I took it down; so here it is again…
In early 2004, I visited Jan Mot in Brussels only to encounter the gallerist himself, in an otherwise empty space, rendering a medley of Tino Sehgal pieces. This is how I described the scene at the time: ‘Jan Mot walked into the gallery backwards from his office; he began talking in a sober, self-absorbed way, but it wasn’t clear whether he was talking about Sehgal’s pieces or actually was one of them. Every time I tried to face Mot he would turn away, continuing to talk, throwing his arms and legs around in circles, and saying, “Tino Sehgal, This is good, 2001, courtesy the artist”. After a while he turned around, said “this is a piece by Tino Sehgal entitled this is exchange”, shook my hand and invited me to converse with him for five minutes about the notion of market economy [...] This [rendering of one Sehgal piece after another] could have gone on for ever, and in fact the piece does not stop until the visitor leaves (poor Mot).’ (Read the whole article here).
Dejá vu: five years later, I again entered an empty space. But Mot didn’t come out from the office this time. Instead I walked up to him; we greeted each other, and as I couldn’t detect a remark that sounded like it could be part of a Sehgal piece (no sudden mentioning of a newspaper headline or such) I started to feel a little unsure whether I had got something wrong and that maybe the exhibition had been postponed and the space was simply empty because it was between shows. I asked Mot something along these lines; he ignored the question and instead suggested to go for a coffee. Hmm. This was weird – it felt like the kind of thing that happens when someone you know well has just broken up with someone: you visit them, innocently ask them how their partner is, and they sternly answer ‘let’s go for a coffee, I need to tell you something.’ Was something wrong between Mot and Sehgal?
We went to the café on the corner and sat down. He had this ‘how shall I begin’ expression on his face. Poor Mot. He started to talk. Said that over the years his discontent with some major aspects of Tino’s work had grown. For example the sense of purity implied in the avoidance of using any, even the most basic technology, whether used by performers of a Sehgal piece (or interpreters, as the artist prefers to call them) or for the sake of documentation (no photos, no wall labels etc.) and the contradictions that produced. After all, he said, Sehgal did call people up or used email to prepare his pieces…
I asked – and doing so I already started to feel like a counsellor – whether he also felt this discontent in regard to the whole business of how Sehgal’s work is sold, with no written statement, only in cash and only in the presence of a notary and so on? He hesitated a little with his answer, or rather he more or less ignored it (the wound, I assumed, was still very fresh). Instead he said something more general about Tino’s purist avoidance of his work being connected to any kind of object whatsoever, as opposed to an old friend who spent a lot of his time decorating his house with all sorts of objects that held a lot of meaning and history to him. Mot added that he couldn’t see anymore why there should be anything wrong with that. Immediately it crossed my mind that by changing the subject he might have been trying to avoid admitting the most typical split-up-reason between artists and dealers – money.
Why should I be assuming that Sehgal and Mot might have parted company? Because of Mot’s strange behaviour, obviously. I’ve heard too many stories about gallerists and artists splitting up the way couples split up – cold text messages followed by heated phone calls, hurt feelings, accusations of betrayal, odd silence, bitter meetings in court. But the main reason why I suddenly had to think in that direction was that the time that had passed since around 2002 (the time when I had first seen several Sehgal pieces) and now suggested a seven-year itch. A seven-year itch that incidentally also seemed to be happening for the art world in general: after years of boom the downturn. And isn’t it typical that structural crises are often effecting personal crises?
I summoned my courage – and asked Mot straight to his face whether he and Tino had parted company. ‘Parted what?’ he replied, ‘what do you mean?’ I was perplexed. Was he saying that he didn’t understand why I could have assumed that? Or was he saying that he – as a Belgian talking to a German in English – didn’t know the phrase ‘to part company’? Or was he just in a sorry state of denial? Confused I asked if the Tino Sehgal show was actually supposed to be on, or whether it had been postponed? In the very moment I asked that question something dawned on me, but before I could say something, Mot answered my question, and I can’t recall what exactly he said, but the sentence definitely included the phrase ‘this is critique’.
Ouch. Shit. Of course. ‘Are we in the middle of doing the Sehgal piece?’ I asked, and felt silly the moment I uttered it. Of course we were doing it. I instantly felt a little embarrassed, because it had taken me – as someone who had been following Sehgal’s work for about seven years – so long to get it. But then I felt really embarrassed because I had asked Mot whether he and Sehgal had split (the kind of embarrassed you feel when you see a friend you haven’t seen in a while and congratulate her on being pregnant and then it turns out she just gained some weight). It’s usually annoying if someone leads you up the garden path. But after that initial rush of embarrassment I felt (in that order) relieved, amused, delighted. This was so simple, and yet so effective.
And then something remarkable happened. Even though the motivation behind Mot’s behaviour was now revealed, we didn’t stop the ‘critical’ conversation about Sehgal’s work. I talked about Sehgal’s refusal of the role of the ‘critical’ artist, or rather of the simplified criticality/affirmation divide, and his admiration for Jeff Koons’s work. Mot brought up Bruno Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern (1991) and the idea expressed in it that we are not modern yet because we still cling to the paradigm of a strict division between the object on the one hand and the subject that beholds or treats it, rather than accepting that there are states of hybridity in-between (objectified subjects, subjectified objects), which in reference to Sehgal meant that his rejection of the object was still part of that paradigm. I found myself defending that aspect of Sehgal’s work by saying that his achievement was not least to draw attention to that fact, to bring the separation from the object to a logical extreme. But that on the other hand his ‘interpreters’, in the moment they enact his pieces, often came across as if possessed by the Sehgal demon, and thus objectified, de-subjectified.
I steered the conversation towards the inevitable meta-question about how Mot had been instructed by the artist to do This is critique, critically implying that it wasn’t possible to be critical when one was asked to be ‘critical’ as part of a piece. But he said he couldn’t answer that question now, maybe later. Which in turn brought up the question when ‘later’ would be. Despite of that, there was no real awkwardness at this point anymore. We finished our coffees and left the café.
Back in the gallery, I was ready to admit that the reason for speculating about a possible split between gallery and artist might have been that I had visited my second Sehgal show at the gallery after a long hiatus, suggesting the seven-year itch. Mot laughed, and then answered, if sketchily, my question about how he had been instructed by the artist: he was supposed to stay in the office if a visitor entered, wait for them to approach him rather than approaching them first, and then react with a slightly grumpy, critical remark about Sehgal’s work, thus possibly starting a conversation with them. He added that in my case, as I had called shortly before showing up and as we hadn’t talked in quite a while, he had decided to relocate the piece to the café, because otherwise it would have been too awkward. But why then can’t the critical meta-questions become part of the piece? He answered that he was instructed to only answer these meta-questions once he and the visitor had left the gallery together, or in my case the café, because they were not supposed to become part of the discussion as long as the piece remained in the space where it occurred.
Isn’t that chutzpah – a piece called This is critique which precludes answers to critical questions about its make-up? Chutzpah yes, but preclusion no. Because it doesn’t preclude the answering of these kinds questions – it just prevents that part of the exchange from becoming a part of the piece. Which in turn implies a critical meta-commentary about how the division between ‘critique’ and ‘affirmation’ itself is an often flawed and contradictory one. And accordingly the piece proclaims critique, but thus pre-emptively affirms itself, and the oeuvre it becomes part of. All of this is truly mind-boggling. And (in that order) embarrassing, amusing, delightful.
This post had been up some weeks ago, briefly, but for the sake of not ruining the experience of potential gallery visitors I took it down; so here it is again…
In early 2004, I visited Jan Mot in Brussels only to encounter the gallerist himself, in an otherwise empty space, rendering a medley of Tino Sehgal pieces. This is how I described the scene at the time: ‘Jan Mot walked into the gallery backwards from his office; he began talking in a sober, self-absorbed way, but it wasn’t clear whether he was talking about Sehgal’s pieces or actually was one of them. Every time I tried to face Mot he would turn away, continuing to talk, throwing his arms and legs around in circles, and saying, “Tino Sehgal, This is good, 2001, courtesy the artist”. After a while he turned around, said “this is a piece by Tino Sehgal entitled this is exchange”, shook my hand and invited me to converse with him for five minutes about the notion of market economy [...] This [rendering of one Sehgal piece after another] could have gone on for ever, and in fact the piece does not stop until the visitor leaves (poor Mot).’ (Read the whole article here).
Dejá vu: five years later, I again entered an empty space. But Mot didn’t come out from the office this time. Instead I walked up to him; we greeted each other, and as I couldn’t detect a remark that sounded like it could be part of a Sehgal piece (no sudden mentioning of a newspaper headline or such) I started to feel a little unsure whether I had got something wrong and that maybe the exhibition had been postponed and the space was simply empty because it was between shows. I asked Mot something along these lines; he ignored the question and instead suggested to go for a coffee. Hmm. This was weird – it felt like the kind of thing that happens when someone you know well has just broken up with someone: you visit them, innocently ask them how their partner is, and they sternly answer ‘let’s go for a coffee, I need to tell you something.’ Was something wrong between Mot and Sehgal?
We went to the café on the corner and sat down. He had this ‘how shall I begin’ expression on his face. Poor Mot. He started to talk. Said that over the years his discontent with some major aspects of Tino’s work had grown. For example the sense of purity implied in the avoidance of using any, even the most basic technology, whether used by performers of a Sehgal piece (or interpreters, as the artist prefers to call them) or for the sake of documentation (no photos, no wall labels etc.) and the contradictions that produced. After all, he said, Sehgal did call people up or used email to prepare his pieces…
I asked – and doing so I already started to feel like a counsellor – whether he also felt this discontent in regard to the whole business of how Sehgal’s work is sold, with no written statement, only in cash and only in the presence of a notary and so on? He hesitated a little with his answer, or rather he more or less ignored it (the wound, I assumed, was still very fresh). Instead he said something more general about Tino’s purist avoidance of his work being connected to any kind of object whatsoever, as opposed to an old friend who spent a lot of his time decorating his house with all sorts of objects that held a lot of meaning and history to him. Mot added that he couldn’t see anymore why there should be anything wrong with that. Immediately it crossed my mind that by changing the subject he might have been trying to avoid admitting the most typical split-up-reason between artists and dealers – money.
Why should I be assuming that Sehgal and Mot might have parted company? Because of Mot’s strange behaviour, obviously. I’ve heard too many stories about gallerists and artists splitting up the way couples split up – cold text messages followed by heated phone calls, hurt feelings, accusations of betrayal, odd silence, bitter meetings in court. But the main reason why I suddenly had to think in that direction was that the time that had passed since around 2002 (the time when I had first seen several Sehgal pieces) and now suggested a seven-year itch. A seven-year itch that incidentally also seemed to be happening for the art world in general: after years of boom the downturn. And isn’t it typical that structural crises are often effecting personal crises?
I summoned my courage – and asked Mot straight to his face whether he and Tino had parted company. ‘Parted what?’ he replied, ‘what do you mean?’ I was perplexed. Was he saying that he didn’t understand why I could have assumed that? Or was he saying that he – as a Belgian talking to a German in English – didn’t know the phrase ‘to part company’? Or was he just in a sorry state of denial? Confused I asked if the Tino Sehgal show was actually supposed to be on, or whether it had been postponed? In the very moment I asked that question something dawned on me, but before I could say something, Mot answered my question, and I can’t recall what exactly he said, but the sentence definitely included the phrase ‘this is critique’.
Ouch. Shit. Of course. ‘Are we in the middle of doing the Sehgal piece?’ I asked, and felt silly the moment I uttered it. Of course we were doing it. I instantly felt a little embarrassed, because it had taken me – as someone who had been following Sehgal’s work for about seven years – so long to get it. But then I felt really embarrassed because I had asked Mot whether he and Sehgal had split (the kind of embarrassed you feel when you see a friend you haven’t seen in a while and congratulate her on being pregnant and then it turns out she just gained some weight). It’s usually annoying if someone leads you up the garden path. But after that initial rush of embarrassment I felt (in that order) relieved, amused, delighted. This was so simple, and yet so effective.
And then something remarkable happened. Even though the motivation behind Mot’s behaviour was now revealed, we didn’t stop the ‘critical’ conversation about Sehgal’s work. I talked about Sehgal’s refusal of the role of the ‘critical’ artist, or rather of the simplified criticality/affirmation divide, and his admiration for Jeff Koons’s work. Mot brought up Bruno Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern (1991) and the idea expressed in it that we are not modern yet because we still cling to the paradigm of a strict division between the object on the one hand and the subject that beholds or treats it, rather than accepting that there are states of hybridity in-between (objectified subjects, subjectified objects), which in reference to Sehgal meant that his rejection of the object was still part of that paradigm. I found myself defending that aspect of Sehgal’s work by saying that his achievement was not least to draw attention to that fact, to bring the separation from the object to a logical extreme. But that on the other hand his ‘interpreters’, in the moment they enact his pieces, often came across as if possessed by the Sehgal demon, and thus objectified, de-subjectified.
I steered the conversation towards the inevitable meta-question about how Mot had been instructed by the artist to do This is critique, critically implying that it wasn’t possible to be critical when one was asked to be ‘critical’ as part of a piece. But he said he couldn’t answer that question now, maybe later. Which in turn brought up the question when ‘later’ would be. Despite of that, there was no real awkwardness at this point anymore. We finished our coffees and left the café.
Back in the gallery, I was ready to admit that the reason for speculating about a possible split between gallery and artist might have been that I had visited my second Sehgal show at the gallery after a long hiatus, suggesting the seven-year itch. Mot laughed, and then answered, if sketchily, my question about how he had been instructed by the artist: he was supposed to stay in the office if a visitor entered, wait for them to approach him rather than approaching them first, and then react with a slightly grumpy, critical remark about Sehgal’s work, thus possibly starting a conversation with them. He added that in my case, as I had called shortly before showing up and as we hadn’t talked in quite a while, he had decided to relocate the piece to the café, because otherwise it would have been too awkward. But why then can’t the critical meta-questions become part of the piece? He answered that he was instructed to only answer these meta-questions once he and the visitor had left the gallery together, or in my case the café, because they were not supposed to become part of the discussion as long as the piece remained in the space where it occurred.
Isn’t that chutzpah – a piece called This is critique which precludes answers to critical questions about its make-up? Chutzpah yes, but preclusion no. Because it doesn’t preclude the answering of these kinds questions – it just prevents that part of the exchange from becoming a part of the piece. Which in turn implies a critical meta-commentary about how the division between ‘critique’ and ‘affirmation’ itself is an often flawed and contradictory one. And accordingly the piece proclaims critique, but thus pre-emptively affirms itself, and the oeuvre it becomes part of. All of this is truly mind-boggling. And (in that order) embarrassing, amusing, delightful.
