Selling immateriality — The art of Tino Sehgal

Long story short: The 32-year-old Berlin-based artist creates ephemeral works which leave no permanent trace — except for the transfer of funds from their purchasers' accounts into his.

Here's Natasha Degen's February 14, 2009 Financial Times story about an artist who's managed to make "Money for Nothing" more — much more — than just a great song and video.

Pictured up top, the artist along with some of the children who interpreted his installation entitled "This Success/This Failure" at the 2007 Frieze Art Fair in London.

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Making and selling ephemeral 'situation' art

Last winter Jerry Saltz, senior art critic for New York Magazine, walked into a basketball court-sized gallery and found himself greeted by a chorus of actors.

“Welcome to this situation,” they intoned in unison. “My urge was to run out because I was so scared,” he recalls.

The six actors then created a tableau based on a famous painting and began to recite quotes and discuss their meaning. At one point, an actor turned to Saltz, asking his opinion. “I gave a kind of flippy answer and the performer called me out on it. It was the best thing I saw all year,” Saltz says, “and the most shocking.” The piece – “This situation”, by Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal – is now on view at Galerie Marian Goodman in Paris until March 7.

Sehgal’s “constructed situations” elude easy categorisation. Whereas most artworks are silent objects that are meant to be regarded passively, these installations immerse gallery visitors in bewildering interactive experiences. Although carefully conceived and choreographed, Sehgal’s situations are often mutable, according to visitors’ responses.

They are also completely ephemeral: the artist prohibits photographic or video documentation of his pieces, and no catalogues, fliers or press releases are printed. Despite such immateriality, his work is created to operate within the conventions of the art world, embracing its institutions and its market. “It is sold like most sculpture or photography, not as unique works but as editions,” Sehgal’s dealer Marian Goodman says. Last June, New York’s Museum of Modern Art bought his “Kiss” for a five-figure sum. His prices range from between €25,000, for private works, and €70,000.

Complying with the artist’s insistence that no objects be produced in connection with his work, the purchase was finalised with a spoken agreement. “There was an orally communicated contract,” Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator of MoMA’s Department of Media, explains. “As a curator you have to remember it – I was very happy I wasn’t alone because I was afraid I was going to forget everything – and you have to follow the instructions. We had 12 people around the table, including a lawyer, a notary, gallerists, curators and members of the conservation and registration departments. The meeting went on for hours.”

Nothing tangible was acquired with the transaction – no written contract, instructions, script, or receipt. What MoMA gained was the right to reproduce the installation forever, and to loan the piece to other institutions. “Kiss”, an edition of four, was also bought by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Fond National d’art contemporain, France; it is now sold out. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is currently in the process of acquiring Sehgal’s “This objective of that object”, and the Tate purchased “This is propaganda” in 2005, for €39,950.

Private collectors have also bought pieces, though, according to Sehgal, they generally enact the situations themselves. One piece, for example, requires a pair of collectors (usually a couple) to host a dinner party. When the main course is served, the first host leaves, followed by the second host a minute or two later. After several minutes, the two return but switch places. As they begin to eat each other’s food, the guests are provoked to ask what happened. The title of the work – “Those thoughts” – refers to the guests’ confusion and speculation.

Sehgal’s motivation is, in part, political. Both economic and artistic production “could be much more immaterial than we think”, he says. His pieces propose an alternative by freeing art from the monopoly of objects. According to Catherine Wood, Curator of Contemporary Art/Performance at Tate Modern, such work asserts that “an ephemeral moment might be as compelling and as lasting in the mind as an encounter with a painting or a sculpture”. In some ways, Wood says, immaterial art parallels the “experience economy”, in which businesses move away from material goods and instead sell personalised interactive events, so that memory itself becomes the product. But until Sehgal’s situations are sold on the secondary market, it’s unclear how they will hold up as alternative commodities.

“With this recent discussion of what value is and how a society values certain things, performance has been re-evaluated and reconsidered,” Biesenbach says. In late January he launched a three-year performance series at MoMA, which will include documentation of seminal works as well as live pieces. Even though Sehgal avoids the term “performance art” to describe his installations, Biesenbach hopes to include the artist in his line-up.

Not that exhibiting “Kiss” will be easy. The players in the piece will have to be cast and trained. And, while most performance pieces are one-off events, Sehgal contractually requires that his installations remain on view all day, every day, for a minimum of six weeks.

Even so, Biesenbach is undeterred. “I don’t think [‘Kiss’] is the last piece the museum will buy from Tino Sehgal,” he says, “I think he’s a groundbreaking artist.”

Selling ephemeral art may seem equivalent to outfitting the emperor in new clothes, but curators and collectors insist Sehgal is uniquely innovative. Dakis Joannou, whose Deste Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art in Athens acquired “This is propaganda” last year, suggests another reason to buy a Sehgal. “It was actually fun,” he laughs, “not to need any storage.”