metropolis m

‘Classical contract theory, is I would insist a social cosmology that is deeply performative—that is to say: it is oriented to installing the future it imagines.’

Angela Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia, 2012.

‘… He had accused her of moping around to the point where it was slowing down her performance. He received a magazine called Business Bits free in the mail, and evidently he’d been reading it.
“Oh, my performance,” said Louise, “you must excuse my performance”.’

Tom Drury, ‘Accident at the Sugarbeet’, The New Yorker, February 1992.

Tino Seghal’s performance piece This is Exchange (2006) holds an allegorical place within the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on a busy Monday morning. Following the opening of a Matisse survey over the weekend, the museum is well attended. Ambient conversations occur in Dutch predominantly, and almost two-years after its re-opening—for all the proponents and detractors of its space-age architecture, its lost parquetry floors, or of the new corporate tags that adorn its rooms— it seems the Museum has reassumed its place within the life of the city.

This is Exchange is one of sixteen performance works presented over a twelve month survey A Year at the Stedelijk that substitutes duration for floorspace. The itinerary of works is set to reach its peak in June with This Variation (2013), featuring fourteen performers, originally presented at dOCUMENTA(13) and co-presented at the Stedelijk as part of the Holland Festival. Overall, the survey hails ‘one of the most radical artists of his era’, a title held largely for Seghal’s leading role in expanding the concerns of conceptual art to secure a place for ‘live art’ in the museum.

‘Liveness’ could itself be the Stedelijk thematic of the moment Seghal’s mid-career retrospective is flanked by the bio-organic vivacity of a Matisse survey and a major showing of the new generation English artist Ed Atkins’ video monologues wherein life in the 21st Century is narrated as a phantom, barely motivated to haunt among cigarette ashes and digitized voids. It would appear that in the transition from modern to contemporary, something has happened to ‘life’ as we know it. Seghal’s new brand of performance—which takes lived experience as the object of art—offers a key to understand this shift.

Seghal’s This is Exchange takes place within a room on the second floor—also occupied by Sol LeWitt’s WALL DRAWING #1804 (2013). Two security guards approach visitors, inviting them to engage in a conversation on the market economy in exchange for €2. I loiter in the room, observing the le Witt and attempting to look like a regular visitor, although unsure what that should mean. ‘This is a work’, says one of the guards eventually approaching me. She has her routine established—keep firm eye contact, people tend to withdraw; affirm that this is not the wall-drawing, people tend to get confused; keep a good distance, even artworks have personal space.

She sets out the terms of the trade, €2 for a talk on the economy, ‘Do you accept?’ ‘Ok, sure’, I say. ‘So’, she says, ‘what do you think about the market economy?’ ‘Well’, I say, ‘I think it’s important that we think about the market economy as something historical rather than as an eternal fact.’ ‘Oh’ she says, looking surprised, ‘you’ve thought about this before.’ There’s a long pause, in which I begin to panic that I’ve broken the work. Eventually I ask what usually happens. ‘Well, normally people haven’t thought about it,’ she says, ‘so it’s just a matter of getting them talking for a while.’

We speak further—she’s at the end of her session, it gets exhausting approaching people, she volunteered because she’s interested in the artwork of Seghal and gets a small stipend, yes she could do anything in the exchange, no she’s never thought to take someone to another room to pursue the conversation. After a while the conversation seems to have run its course and so we say goodbye. ‘Oh wait,’ she says, ‘This is Exchange, Tino Seghal, 2006’.

It is discomforting to the conventions of the critic to give such a narrative account of a work, and yet under the terms that have propelled Seghal’s live art into the museum, this is all a part of the piece. Every element of the conversation—the guard’s fixed eye-contact in initiating it, the viewer’s observation of etiquette in not breaking this gaze—all components are contained by the work, sealed in the end by the trademark attribution to its author: Tino Seghal.

It is in this way that Seghal’s chief achievement in opening up the art museum to a new wave of performance art has not been so much in introducing live bodies to the space as a new contractual form. When Seghal sells one of his works it occurs never in a written or material form, but rather as a verbal agreement. The buyer must carry the work and its conditions within memory. This innovation is infact a modification of buying-power that permits performance art itself to be purchased, rather than material artefacts such as scores or photographs.

This is a point that Seghal re-iterates during an interview after a day’s rehearsals; ‘I knew I wanted to do it but I didn’t know if it would be possible,’ he says of his transition from choreography to visual art in the early 2000s. ‘I think the framework of the museum is a place for objects to be celebrated and valued, and not to create an object in an industrialised society which is so focused on objects, was for me per se a political act.’

If by radical we mean emancipatory then perhaps it is time to question the often given claim of performance art’s heterodoxy with regard to the museum institution. Art historian and critic Sven Lütticken has already wagered this point in his 2006 article Progressive Striptease: Performance Ideology Past and Present.

Lütticken: “It is high time to […] formulate an alternative to the ideologization of performance as an intrinsically progressive phenomenon.”

The claim of performance art’s inherent radicality with regard to the museum is generally premised in a formal distinction between ephemeral time-based art and material object-based art. But perhaps the museum needs to be situated within greater macroeconomic shifts within the global organization of space and time, particularly following the decision by the United Sates in 1971 to decouple the contract from of capital (money) from its material standard (gold). The subsequent mass-mobility of finance (the time value of money) has led to a new order wherein politics is restructured as debt-governance and in which the citizen is recast as a consumer of state services.

What Seghal and this shift have in common is a basis in the contract form. In her incisive analysis, Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (2012), political theorist Angela Mitropoulos discusses the privatisation of risk and capitalisation of futurity that subtends the neoliberal order. In the transition from social democratic ‘welfare’ to market-based ‘workfare’ the real costs of cuts in social spending are borne in the work of what Mitropoulos terms “intimate self-management”.

Could it be that through his contracting of the social encounter, Seghal’s work relies upon a viewer’s observation of social convention in a way that is similar to this? If so, then we might ask whose ‘work’ is in fact taking place in a piece such as This is Exchange?

Essential to this complex is a confusion over ‘object’ and ‘commodity’. Perhaps, what is needed is not to avoid producing art objects for the museum but to avoid producing art commodities. Has Seghal’s art-social contract rendered a new performance-commodity, rather than presenting a much-needed Performance Theory of Value, to use the Marxian terminology? At worst does this work participate in—and profit from—a new economic order not of worker/owners, but of performer/authors?

‘When I say six years, much of that working is in my mind,’ says Seghal of This Variation, his most collaborative work to date, ‘It’s more that I create the algorithm of the work.’

Here a gendered history of the algorithm is telling. In her lecture The Rule of Rules (2011), the science-historian Lorraine Daston outlines the transition by which the value of calculating or performing an algorithm has been emptied in the transition from the enlightenment to the contemporary period. To scholars such as Leibniz and Condorcet not only devising an algorithm but executing it in calculation was part of the noble art of knowing numbers. Over time, a division in cognitive labor emerged, divorcing the work of authoring an algorithm from performing its calculation.

By the time of WWII cryptography the gendered nature of this division had become entrenched. A ‘computer’ referred to low-paid female clerical staff and an algorithm’s complexity was colloquially considered in ‘girl hours’. While Arthur Scherbius who invented the Enigma machine and Alan Turing who contributed to breaking its code are widely known, the role of the legions of women who performed the work of these computations are not. We must ask what it means to advanced capitalist society that procedural and experiential knowledges have been so feminized, de-authored and consequently de-valued.

The problem of a so-called knowledge economy—wherein authorship is ownership and performance becomes commodity—bears significant consequences across a globalised economy. Already this century traditional Indigenous botanical and medicinal knowledge have been exploited by the pharmaceutical industry, for example. Even for the well-to-do one of the greatest public-interest debates surrounds data retention, not only for securitization but for protection against data profiteering. In his recent publication Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (2014), sociologist and legal scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues it is “cognitive-injustice” that fundamentally underpins global architectures of poverty and ecological destruction.

With regard to Seghal’s practice the question then arises—does the work insist upon the necessary discomfort and complexity of these conversations, or does it occupy and monetize the terrain in which such discussions could take place? Each work deserves to be addressed anew in this way, and it may be that the forthcoming piece This Variation offers a departure within Seghal’s approach.

The work stages a diffuse and anonymous experience. Viewers navigate in pitch darkness among fourteen performers who produce various percussive and humming vocalizations, occasionally slipping into melody. They move among viewers in configurations that are at once spasmodic and physically aggressive at times, yet barely perceptible in the darkness.

It seems that this larger group composition exceeds Seghal’s own contract model. For one, it is hard to imagine a museum director or art collector memorizing the choreographic complexity that the verbal agreement would require; or if one did it would provoke interesting questions for the skill-set and investments of a person in that position. If the work were somehow saleable with simple instructions then surely the intellectual property would reside with Seghal’s long-time associate, Louise Hojer, who executes the work of rehearsing and training performers. To purchase the work would then be to purchase Hojer, or at least part of her knowledge and time.

This Variation also goes the furthest to negating the conditions of the museum— occurring in pitch-darkness it suspends the basic apparatus of visual art, being the capacity to view works. Perhaps most symbolically significant, it refrains from using the performative register of language to contract all that occurs in the space into the authorship of Seghal. There is no utterance of the line; ‘This Variation, Tino Seghal, 2013’, and while the title and date are occasionally used as a performance cue, Seghal’s name is never spoken.

Gesturing to the nature of the contract as that which mediates between the irrational gamble and the pragmatic investment—we may hope that all bets are off with This Variation’s intervention of a dark-room in the Stedelijk Museum; that practically anything could transpire. The question then, is whether the work insists upon this possibility; and of what conversation it provokes us to have towards which future.

Vivian Ziherl is associate-curator If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam

The author would like to thank the following people for their generous conversation during the writing of this piece; Frederique Bergholtz, Jonas Staal, Christel Vesters, Alice Creischer and Janet Biehl.

A DUTCH TRANSLATION OF THIS TEXT WAS PUBLSIHED IN METROPOLIS M Nr 3-2015 NO LONGER ART & OOG OOR HAND

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