This review was originally published in March 2005 / No 284, p28-29.

Tino Sehgal

Lucy Steeds

Someone has been writhing, artfully, on the floor of the ICA gallery every day since January 17. A number of people have assumed the role and, changing shifts every three hours, they successively embody a work by Tino Sehgal: Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things, 2000.

The title of this work directs us to Dan Graham and Bruce Nauman, whose movements captured on film and video form the basis for Sehgal's choreography. The slight rupture in the title – that gap between 'some' and 'thing' – draws our attention to the product status of these earlier works, differentiating them from the live dance on offer by Sehgal. If Graham's work (Roll, 1970) is seen to critique the camera's invisibility in Nauman's work (Wall-Floor Positions, 1968), then Sehgal critiques this critique.

Instead of allowing ... is presented at the ICA as the first work in Tino Sehgal's young oeuvre. The counterpart shown upstairs is his most recent piece: This objective of that object, 2004. Here there is no label, nor is the title spoken aloud (or sung live), as in other works by the artist. On entering the gallery, the visitor becomes surrounded by five individuals, who approach backwards, enunciating words almost too quietly to be heard. Without ever turning to face their audience, indeed swivelling away from attempts at confrontation, the five then begin to chant in unison: 'The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion'. Fail to respond to this pronouncement and the five wilt to the ground, giving one final gasp to their recital; the work is over. Exclaim or ask a question, however, and the 'discussion' professed as 'the objective of this work' will begin. Vaguely analytical statements are extemporised, one person speaking at a time, spontaneously taking turns. The ritualistic circumstances constrain the discussion, which is stilted by lack of eye-contact either between the five or with their audience/participant(s). This awkwardness might ease over time, but your time may be short: each new visitor to the gallery prompts the work to loop 'itself' back to the beginning and your own moment is hijacked by someone else's.

Sehgal allows his art only fleeting materiality; less performance than live enactment, he refuses it both visual documentation and written transcription. Having studied dance and political economy he seeks to bridge these domains with immaterial products that rely upon the museum, gallery and art fair for their transient existence. Well-versed in art history and theory, he seems less interested in dematerialising the art object than in offering his ideas for sale, without them ever materialising into enduring traces.

The (art) market and ownership issues aside, Sehgal has opened up a space within the gallery where we may elude being beholden to objects: he provides an event space; obliging an encounter and insisting on an experience without spectacle. Having started to doubt that political economy was 'the place where things are discussed', as confessed to Hans Ulrich Obrist, he has turned to art – and seems less concerned with subverting or challenging global capitalism, and the art institution, than with making them freshly visible, open to new possibility. In the label for the Jeff Koons work that Sehgal selected for 'Artists' Favourites' at the ICA last year, he credited Koons with understanding 'that critique is a trap since it also affirms what it criticises and does not propose a solution to the problem'

In discussion at the Goethe-Institut shortly after his London show opened, Tino Sehgal was keen to suggest that he has moved beyond critique in his new work, further exploring his novel medium – that of the human being. This objective of that objectis reliant for its interest upon the particular interests and interest of those who embody the work. However at the ICA, without much possibility of engaging these people in proper discussion, the company of the writhing man downstairs, the slow fluidity of his dancing prone, is more appealing. This appeal distracts, incidentally, from comparisons with the work of Santiago Sierra; from questions of just how much the labour of out-of-work dancers might cost.

Sehgal's work arguably benefits from the split-gallery situation at the ICA, which frees audiences to walk unattended en route from one piece, one encounter, to the next. This particular solo exhibition is also split over time, with another two shows for the same artist promised in the next two years.

Tino Sehgal was at the ICA London from January 17 to March 3 2005.

Lucy Steeds is a writer and researcher based at Goldsmiths College.

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