Feb. 07
This Success or This Failure – Tino Sehgal at the ICA

Lucky for me the group decided to start running races instead of playing the perplexing game. I mustered up enough energy to become the adult winner of a hopscotch race and then dizzied myself by lying on the floor and rolling from one end of the room to another only to come in last. I redeemed myself during the pair-dancing competition which won me and my partner a few fans among those under 12. When my solo moves only earned me third place in the break-dancing competition, one of my aficionados, an 11 year old boy, reassured me that I didn’t win because I was ‘too professional’.

I had so much fun running around the art institution as if it were a playground that I never stopped to question what all this winning and losing had to do with art. In retrospect, I am starting to wonder, as I am sure you are too, as you patiently read this, how much my experience had to do with the artist’s intention. I now know that the piece I was part of was called This Success or This Failure and was the final segment of a three-part solo exhibition by Tino Sehgal at the ICA. I have learned a bit more about Sehgal’s work from the press and less formal reports from friends who attended the prior two shows. The first exhibition entailed watching a person rolling around on the gallery floor in imitation of Dan Graham and Bruce Nauman, while upstairs a group of people with their backs to you tried to have a conversation with you. In fact, if you didn’t speak to them, they would wilt to the floor. As was explained to me, when you entered the second show you were greeted by a young child who asked you what your idea of progress is; in the second room the same question was posed by a teenager; then in the next room you were queried by someone middle aged; until at last, in the final room, you are greeted by an inquiring old woman. In short, each work is highly experiential and depends a great deal on your interaction with the individuals you encounter.

In a way, I found Sehgal’s latest work highly successful in that it made me wish I had experienced the others first hand. However, in comparison to what I believe the other shows expressed, This Success or This Failure seems less polished and not as well thought-out. In some ways it seemed actually more difficult to interpret in terms of success and failure. With the two previous pieces the artist’s intentions seemed more easily gleaned. Perhaps my understanding of the works and their status as art is clearer because it has been filtered through the opinions and interpretations of others. In This Success or This Failure, I was both a success and a failure when I partook in it. But was this planned? Did the artist tell those kids to make us participate in talent contests? Or were they simply coming up with ways to pass the time because they had been given no instruction at all? If they had been following orders, clearly Sehgal could not have known I wouldn’t win every single contest. I could equally have lost them all. Probabilistically it was most likely that I would succeed at some and fail at others. Did that matter to the artist? More important than winning or losing to me, of course, was the enjoyment I felt in playing the game. Was that Sehgal’s intention? To sum up the work in that way seems overly simplistic and trite.

All of Sehgal’s works provoke discourse about the dematerialisation and commodification of the art object. Since he does not allow his works to be recorded in any way, he raises questions about the role of the art institution (he relies on museums and galleries to hold his events). He invites exploration of the meaning of authorship (is Sehgal as author any more or any less responsible for the meaning of his work than the viewer/participant?). Sehgal indeed forces his audience to ask the most basic questions about what art can be and what it can mean. As critic Lucy Steeds aptly pointed out in her review of his first show, “he seems less concerned with subverting or challenging global capitalism, and the art institution, than with making them freshly visible, open to new possibility… he has moved beyond critique in his new work, further exploring his novel medium – that of the human being”. Sehgal succeeds at avoiding the pitfalls of critique “since”, as the artist himself points out, “it also affirms what it criticises and does not propose a solution to the problem”. I am at a loss in trying to sum up his work and its criticality precisely because he is really onto something new. What more could one ask for from a work of art?

All quotations are from Lucy Steed’s article “Tino Sehgal”, Art Monthly, March 2005, No 284. http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/seghal.htm

© Oriana Fox 2007