Tino Sehgal

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 23 Number 4 and 24 Number 1, 2005

Transcript

Lucia Farinati: I would like to ask you about your pieces here in the German Pavilion? Is this contemporary or does it go against your requirement of not needing commendation?

Tino Sehgal: For me to speak about something is a good comment for commendation. So the first piece is three museum guards who, when you enter the space, start dancing and singing, ‘oh this is so fantastic, contemporary, contemporary’ and they use those two words and then they go away, then there are variations in the way they sing it.

LF: How do you choose the people?

TS: I was looking especially for people between 40 and 55. All my works are with guards because they are important as they take care of the object; they themselves become object like, instead of taking care of one. Then he emancipates himself from the object. There’s always this movement.

LF: So the object in a sense in your work, is a body in space.

TS: I think the object would be the work the persons are doing, not the person, but what they are doing. To me it’s so contemporary it’s like an installation, an installation with three walls, which come towards you, and leave again, But this space is produced by three people who are somehow in a celebratory mood.

LF: But the Biennale is like you know the first (?) is contemporary art and to me it’s seeing things that question that, you know concerts?

TS: That’s a possible reading of the work, but to be honest I’m not that interested in the Biennale, that I could be worried about criticising it or deconstructing it. Of course there’s a critique towards the way art is produced normally and the model it follows, which I think is a problematic model. I am saying that this is not a problem at all as it is also a boring model. When I say this is so contemporary, for me I’m aware of course of all the readings it can have and that’s maybe the enigmatic part of the piece as it kind of mirrors whatever your own reflections are and what I mean by contemporary; do I mean this sculpture; do I mean the Biennale; do I mean that most of them are old but also contemporary. We are contemporary because we use contemporary technology. My piece is like the oldest piece in the Biennale, because it would have been possible technically even before painting. If you attribute my piece as a contemporary work of art, then I have managed to create this equation, ‘contemporary equals the use of contemporary technology’. That’s what for me is interesting, and therefore I like this piece a lot because you don’t need to actually understand this, it happens to you if you understand it or not.

LF: With the piece by Thomas Schûtte, did you actually negotiate the space with Thomas?

TS: Yes we negotiated the space but of course I didn’t know how big his sculpture would be. This is his decision.

LF: The second piece is ‘Exchange’; it works on a different level. You think it’s just people standing but then you’re approached by them, people dressed in uniform again, and they ask you for opinions about economy.

TS: They offer to pay you half of what you paid to enter the Giardini if you try something out. Somebody’s coming in and the buyer is saying to the seller, the visitor, ‘look you have something on offer which you don’t know about, but I am interested in you selling it to me, are you interested to sell?’ The other person either says ‘OK I have something to sell’, or not. Then it’s the game, if the supplier doesn’t supply, because they’re interested a different question, about art, or about the war in Iraq or something then the buyer says ‘sorry you didn’t supply so I’m not going to pay’. And if they have an opinion, which we find totally ridiculous or wrong or or something, but they answered the question, they have to somehow deliver the product, which is an opinion on market economy.

LF: Did you actually have to give training to the people for these pieces?

TS: Of course, yes. I spent ten days with ‘This is so Contemporary’ and I met the exchange people twice.

LF: And did you choose them in a different way?

T.S: They had to be intelligent and speak other languages a little. ‘This is so Contemporary’ is for people who live around here and have a beauty in their own right, and the ‘Exchange’ is for people from Venice who are more academic more sophisticated.

LF: The two pieces reflect your background, choreography, dance and economy?

TS: It’s true I studied dance and economy for the same reason, because I was interested in other points of production, not in economy or dance as such. I was interested in how come we produce differences in our society and how theoretically I can study economics and dance is a kind of solution because it produces differently and there’s this kind of simultaneity of production and de- production. You do something and so it somehow stays and it also somehow gone, so I think that this is in both pieces; they show the two end points of my work.