Tino Sehgal's work draws on his training in experimental dance and economics to create what he calls “constructed situations.” Before the start of the Beckett performances at the Volksbühne Berlin seen in the final dress rehearsal of November 9, 2017, several works by Sehgal were staged in the various foyers of the theater, including “This Exchange,” in which one of Sehgal's actors approached us and said he would pay twenty percent of the value of our ticket price if we gave our opinion on the market economy (which, in our case, was nil, since our preview tickets were gratis).
We had a freewheeling conversation, although one the actor quickly backed away from as soon as I tried to steer it toward a meta-conversation about the artwork we were participating in and the Volksbühne itself: that is, questions regarding the market economy as they related to the recent protests, and my misgivings about whether our ability to discuss these topics in a rarified space such as the one we found ourselves in did more to assuage our anxieties regarding privilege than it did to engender actual, equitable shifts (we had been discussing the importance of relating across different boundaries, but the nature of discussion and the place in which we enacted it was itself a certain marker of privilege, since we were a select and self-selecting audience). Even so, ever since encountering Sehgal's retrospective at Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau in summer 2015, I've been curious about his work, which is transacted and enacted without placards or written text—the ultimate act of humility, if you look at it one way, or the ultimate gesture of arrogance, seen from another (like a god, Sehgal is everywhere and nowhere, watching [in this case, from the house seats of the theater when we attended the rehearsals that Thursday evening]). I'm not completely cynical about these dialogues, but I also find myself slightly in thrall to them in a way that makes me suspicious of my enthrallment (fairly or not, my suspicions are also colored by the fact that he is a darling of the international gallery and museum circuit; so to speak, the system loves him). But, to be cynical is an easy and incurious stance, and I think Sehgal is ingenuous in his concerns, even if to call him a “revolutionary artist,” as Dercon does in this video, is a bit much. Part of what his work is doing, one could say, is making evident the tricky double-bind that took place during our conversation in “This Exchange” (so, our failed meta-conversation is the meta-conversation, an illustration of the impossibility of having a conversation about the “economy” that isn't influenced and framed by our relationship to it; like a god, the economy is everywhere and nowhere).
At the end of the Beckett program, Sehgal's work resumed, with the actress Anne Tismer changing out of her “Footfalls” costume and into street clothes onstage, then joining the other Sehgal performers in striking the chairs from the theater's house; there was an implicit invitation to the audience to participate in this action, though the evening I attended it was more or less ignored by most of the public. The actors sang a song about “fences and defenses” as they worked, while the actual stagehands struck the set onstage in silence.
In this way, Sehgal's interrelational art is more phenomenological and psychoanalytic than it is performative or theatrical. Sehgal generates a situation, which then unfolds according to the conditions present among the persons who interact with it, without the goal of a fixed outcome across distinct circumstances. The idea, as I see it, is that the “fences” dividing the hired actors for Sehgal's works from those of us encountering them would be rendered permeable, allowing everyone in the situation to interact without these barriers excessively impeding our exchanges (or, at the very least, making us conscious of them in a way that encourages us to question their use and function).
Difficult to achieve, but a compelling aim, and one that had its richest manifestation that evening in the situation which took place following the striking of the stage and house seats. We wandered onstage and populated the entire theater, while the actors engaged in an task similar to what is called “flocking” in improvisational and postmodern dance. After running very quickly in a group to different parts of the theater, the actors would come to stillness, some of them recounting a (seemingly) personal anecdote to members of the audience in English or German, which would be interrupted by another impulse from the group to begin the flocking motion again. At one point, the actress Anne Tismer, whom we had watched perform the Beckett pieces, ran up and knelt beside me; we looked at each other and she gestured as though picking up something off the ground; we shared an exchange you might call a 'moment,' but it was less theatrical and less contrived than that; because of the highly mediated space we found ourselves in, we were, for a few seconds, entirely present with each other, in spite of all our fences and defenses. Dear Reader, it was sublime. It was, you might say, doch Kunst.
Yours, Kathleen
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