Exploring the dematerialization of art and performative experience

All things, all objects, have elements of performativity in them. Through their materiality and form, they call for certain forms of engagement. They may direct our gaze and even our actions. Even more so, this is true for designed objects. They are there precisely to shape and accommodate specific actions, and by doing so, they, in turn, shape us and our engagement with the world around us.

However, there is also a form of performativity that works by a strange kind of hollowing out and dematerializing the object until there is nothing left but the very ephemerality of experience itself. In one of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales, “The Darning Needle,” we find the beginning of such an example. In the story, the darning needle ends in the bottom of a gutter, seeing fragments and trash from the world above sail away through the water of the gutter:

And all sorts of things sailed over it, sticks, straws, bits of newspapers. ‘Just look at how they sail!’ the darning needle said. […] – there floats a newspaper! – everything printed in it has been forgotten yet it goes on spreading itself out! (Hans Christian Andersen: “The Darning Needle”)

The nature of news is to be either forgotten or transformed into something not new; therefore, news has its own dissolution integrated within. While Hans Christian Andersen is playfully juxtaposing the container (the newspaper) and the content (news), the tragic joke is that material and content follow the same trajectory: as they spread, they dissolve. And in the end, we are left with nothing but a memory.

I am not sure whether the Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal knows the fairytale, but in his constructed situations, he hollows out and dematerializes the art object in much the same manner. The art object is stripped of its objecthood until there is nothing left but context, actions, and the visitor’s participatory relationship. It is probably as difficult to understand as it is to explain. Let me try.

As I visited an exhibition of his at Kunsten in Aalborg, Denmark, some years back, the ticketing clerk handed over my tickets exclaiming, “Lise Nørgaard har solgt sin skrivemaskine” (Lise Nørgaard has sold her typewriter), followed by “This is new, Tino Sehgal 2003.” The work by Sehgal consists of presenting a headline from today’s newspaper, and this headline was apparently the story of how a well-known Danish author had quit writing due to old age. But by taking me by surprise (which is often an element of the new), the work was a direct experience of the new. Fleeting and gone before I really understood what was happening. What was left was only the memory of the experience and its status as a work of art, only held together by the signature uttered by the clerk: “This is new, Tino Sehgal 2003.” Just as Andersen did in The Darning Needle, Sehgal is exploring the nature of the new, but whereas Andersen created an image of the fleeting, dissolving character, Sehgal creates an experience.

Tino Sehgal comes from a long tradition of dematerializing art to allow something else to come to the fore. Think, for example, of John Cage’s 4’33” from 1952 – a piece where no music is played other than all the sounds of a concert hall full of people waiting. Or how Michael Asher erected new walls in the foyer of the Gladys K. Montgomery Art Center in California in 1970, effectively barring access to the museum exhibition but instead creating a new empty space funneling the noises from the city outside and thereby creating a unique atmospheric experience.

Some have called this minimal art or the experiential turn. In its most compelling form, it unleashes a different kind of performativity that transcends the limitations of matter and form. Instead of (at best) shaping our experiences and actions, the absence of matter turns us towards what is there: us, the experience itself, and the framework and context within which it exists. Instead of a shaping, it becomes an awakening, where the optics, our gaze, are returned to our experiencing self.

This also means that such works of art are participatory in the sense that they are really about the experiential relationship between the visitor and the work. To take this one step further, Tino Sehgal is often incorporating interactions with the visitor in how the work is structured.

For example, “This objective of that object” from 2004 confronts the visitor with an unusual scenario. Entering an empty exhibition space, the visitor is soon surrounded by five figures who emerge silently from hidden corners, walking backward one by one. They stop a few meters away, forming a circle with their backs to the visitor, their breathing synchronized and labored. A low murmur builds into a unified, insistent declaration: “The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion.” The phrase grows louder and more demanding, with increasingly dramatic pauses. The premise for the artwork is to invoke commentary and participation. Should the visitor remain silent, the performers slowly collapse, their voices fading as they sink to the floor, their final breath uttering: “The objective… of this work… is to become… the object… of… a discussion.” In the ensuing silence, the artwork is inert. However, any comment, any reaction, brings it back to life. “We have a comment! Who will answer?” they cry, launching into a discussion amongst themselves. Always with their backs turned to the visitor, they analyze the potential meanings of the visitor’s contribution.

Such work internalizes the experiences you, as a visitor, have had with the work as a part of the work. As we are situated by his dematerialized artworks as experiencing subjects, Sehgal directs our attention not only to the fleeting and ephemeral character of the artwork, the here-and-now but also to the participatory. By moving beyond objecthood, he shows us that meaning is not inherent within objects, but rather, it emerges from the context, actions, and relationships surrounding them.

When art strips away its material form, it reveals that meaning was never trapped in objects. It lives in the fleeting space between us and our experience of the world.