Breathing In

You walk through a narrow museum corridor and into a large white gallery room occupied by six people positioned along the four walls. As you step in, they turn to you and greet you in unison: “Welcome to this situation.” You can't help but smile; maybe you want to thank them. Before you can decide, you hear a subtle draft of air that swiftly rises in volume. The six people are drawing in a long breath that culminates in a gasp for air. Your eyes widen; unwittingly, you have inhaled, too, in unison with the people in the room.

This is how many visitors first encounter Tino Sehgal's piece This Situation: through the micro-movements of widened eyes, spontaneous smiles, and an involuntary gasp. As we noticed as “interpreters”Footnote ¹ of the piece in Montréal in 2013, most of this happens before you can get your bearings and deliberate a response. If This Situation has already pulled you in, it did so by signaling to your body. As bodies inhale, a “breathing” courses through the exhibition space that sweeps the visitor up and lands her in a relation. This breathing produces an immediate resonance between attentive bodies that now belong to the same event: con-spiration begets co-motion. This Situation invites a mode of attention that goes beyond conscious acts of individual participation; it creates a collective bodily attending drawn out by the micro-event of the breath itself. The entire room is on its toes.

The moment is fleeting. The collective holding of attention is followed by commotion: Once the breath is drawn, the six interpreters begin to walk backward along the walls of the room. If you stayed close to the entrance or near the wall beside it, you are likely in their way. So you shuffle around, trying to find an inconspicuous spot in the room, as the interpreters cautiously walk in reverse. Suddenly the backward walk arrives into a still pose, some of them vaguely familiar: each interpreter settles into a different posture, which can range from a casual seated position to an authoritative hand pointing into the room, all the way to a group tableau. Is this tableau a re-staging of Le déjeuner sur l'herbe? You're not quite sure, but your memory has been tickled. Silence falls into the stillness, and another moment of suspense ensues. To avoid drawing attention, you still your body as well. For a brief moment, the space has become a sculpture garden.

The long inhale, shuffling steps, and still poses—these are only some of the techniques that compose the rhythm of This Situation. Many more micro-techniques will complicate the beat. But what can already be felt is the pulse of the piece: by virtue of these techniques, This Situation contracts and releases—contracts into a collective holding of attention and releases into a bustle of individual movements. The important point is that much of this passes through bodies moving in an exhibition space. Sehgal choreographs a dance in the museum, with the museum.Footnote ²

This Situation is a dance with the museum because it nudges the museum out of its comfort zone and traditional posture as custodian of the arts. This Situation, like all of Sehgal's pieces, must not be documented or leave any material trace. There is no title plate naming the piece and the artist to prepare visitors who enter into the space. If a museum acquires This Situation (as the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal has done), the transfer happens without a written contract; the agreement comes into effect by a notarized handshake only. The interpreters of the piece are recruited locally in academic and artistic milieus, and they are trained by Sehgal and his producers themselves, from their own embodied memory of the work, rather than from a score or material record. For the duration of the exhibition, photographs or video recordings are not allowed. After the run of the piece, which usually lasts between four and eight weeks, the museum retains no material trace of its acquisition.

This poses a problem for the institutional framework of the museum, with its mandate to archive and conserve art. How can an immaterial artwork be archived? What are the techniques of conservation that could ensure a restaging of the piece in five years? Fifty years? Two hundred years? These questions of documentation and conservation have, of course, been central concerns in the fields of dance and performance studies ever since their inception.Footnote ³ A performance, by virtue of its ephemerality, resists capture by a unified discourse of knowledge, just as much as it resists preservation. Thus, the introduction of performance into museums and academic discourse poses a twofold challenge: how can one get a firm grasp on an art that manifests itself temporarily without reducing its distinctively ephemeral qualities?

This Situation takes up the tension between ephemerality and preservation in a productive way. The piece stages an encounter between the two tendencies and articulates the problem as a “situation” to be embodied and lived. This shift in Sehgal's work toward art as a lived experience opens toward new ways of thinking the relationship between dance and the museum. As mentioned earlier, this rethinking passes through the body: interpreters and visitors come together through a collective breathing that enfolds them in a machinic assemblage of bodies, physical space, institutions, and histories. We suggest that This Situation composes an ecology of practices in which fleeting gestures preserve themselves through repetition.Footnote ⁴ We see Sehgal's work as an ecology of practices in two ways. First, the piece engages the museum as an ecology rather than an environment, that is to say, it animates the potential of forces rather than placing itself in a container; it takes up a set of propositions rather than acting upon inert material. Second, This Situation relies on the continual question of how does one practice an ecology, not only by making evident the encrusted habits of the spatio-temporal contingencies of the work and its participants, but through playful invitations to rearticulate our modes of engaging in unexpected ways. In this ecology, practice as a technique of immanent repetition makes the primary site of archiving the body itself.Footnote ⁵ The goal of preservation is thus the sustainability of the field. Conceived in this way, preservation is less concerned with the eternal endurance of a finished object than with a careful renewal of a delicate liveliness. This sustainability comes from the fact that the body as archival medium is necessarily unstable, a tentative holding in place, that inevitably produces its own difference. Consequently, the body is at the same time a site of preservation and a promise of undetermined futurity. In This Situation, the body (re)discovers a potential for creation that goes beyond individual agency (of the artist, the interpreter, or the visitor) to make manifest the liveliness of the situation itself.

This Situation: From Agency to Machinic Assemblage

Think of This Situation as a machine. The machine is made up of many different parts and pieces, both material and immaterial, some of which we have already mentioned: institutional frameworks, a museum space, bodies. What animates this machine and gives it consistency is a set of techniques. We have already mentioned the welcoming, breathing, walking backward, and posing. That is where we suspended you earlier, in the silence of the pose. This hesitation is another cog in the machine. Eventually, one of the six interpreters will speak. He or she might say this: “In 1810, somebody said: ‘The kind of well-being that is generated in an animated conversation does not precisely consist in the subject of the conversation. Neither the ideas nor the knowledge that one can here develop are of principal interest; it is a certain manner by which one acts upon one another.’”

The interpreters slowly come out of their poses and sustain this curious slowness in all of their movements. During the conversations, interpreters are charged with the mandate to move at all times, without gestural accents, and at a slow speed, jarringly at odds with the habitual and frequently excited pacing of speech. These desynced bodies, out of time, now begin a conversation about the quotation that has just been recited. Initially, the conversation largely circulates between interpreters, a back-and-forth that builds a world around the quote. Sooner or later, one of the interpreters may ask a visitor “Or, what do you think?” as an invitation to participate in the conversation. Participants might respond to the invitation, or jump in spontaneously, or the responsibility for carrying the conversation could remain with the interpreters. The latter may also give an elaborate compliment to a visitor. But as soon as a new visitor enters the space, the machine jumps back to first position—welcoming, breathing, backward walking, posing in silence, giving a quote, slow movements, conversation. The interpreters have three more pre-given techniques at their disposal if the new quote does not make for an interesting exchange: they can rewind to an earlier part of the conversation; they can spontaneously inhale and thereby reinitiate the series of techniques; or they can caption the piece with the following sentence relayed clockwise between their bodies: “Tino / Sehgal / This / Situation / Two thousand / and seven.”

In case this description might create the false impression that This Situation is a sequential mechanism that prescribes the switch from one technique to another in linear fashion, let us clarify: This Situation does not function as a mechanism of cause-and-effect, for there is no telling what will happen next. Neither interpreters nor visitors can predict how the situation will evolve because any of them, in their immediate involvement, can cut into the ongoing performance and, through that intervention, reorganize the entire situation. The whole field will readjust: a visitor who chooses to be a troublemaker can jam the machine. Rather than as a mechanism, This Situation must be thought as what Félix Guattari calls a machinic assemblage.

Guattari proposes this concept to account for the complex creative processes at work within a given ecology. The assemblage is a composition of heterogeneous elements toward a “functional ensemble” (Guattari Reference Guattari1995a, 35). This functional ensemble exceeds the mere sum of its components; indeed, “[t]he different components are swept up and reshaped by a sort of dynamism” (35). The machine is for Guattari a means for thinking artistic practices and institutions as ecologies rather than structures, to understand them as “autopoetic foyers for subjectification” (Guattari Reference Guattari, Bains and Pefanis1995b, 12). This is a reminder that, in an ecology, subjectivities are continually practiced and recomposed (whereas an environment receives the actions of a precomposed subject). This distinction illuminates the movement qualities of This Situation: “The machine has something more than structure. It is ‘more’ than structure in that it does not limit itself to a game of interactions which develop in space and time between its component parts; rather, it possesses a core of consistency, insistence and ontological affirmation, which is prior to the unfolding into energetico-spatio-temporal coordinates” (Guattari Reference Guattari, Bains and Pefanis1995b, 12). This is really what is at stake in This Situation: a metastable dynamism that lifts off from its composing elements and, in return, allows them to self-differentiate. In other words, the machinic names a liveliness that is not simply about an ontology, but rather affirms being as self-differentiation—a becoming-other that immediately poses the question of what-elseness: “The abstract machine passes through all these heterogeneous components but above all it heterogenises them, beyond any unifying trait” (Guattari Reference Guattari1995a, 39). This Situation is a relational field that allows for a reconsideration of what an artwork, a visitor, a museum can do.

This openness of the piece is its very condition of existence: “The machine always depends on exterior elements in order to be able to exist as such” (Guattari Reference Guattari1995a, 37). It is also what gives the dynamic field a precarious metastability. If a minor intervention can destabilize and even disrupt the situation, it is crucial to develop certain procedures that ensure the field's consistency. The techniques we have listed—welcoming, breathing, walking backward, posing, reciting, moving slowly, inviting, complimenting, rewinding, captioning—do this work. They act as refrains that sustain the field in several ways. On the one hand, they prevent the situation from devolving into complete randomness. What is the purpose or even necessity of participation in a situation where anything goes? On the other hand, the lack of clear indications as to what is expected of the visitor prevents the situation from falling into the bland cause-and-effect loops of much participatory art.

For instance, many visitors try to “mess” with This Situation by asking questions about the piece itself, trying to loop it into a self-explanatory meta-reflection that would also allow the visitor to re-become a distant, critical observer. This strategy is an attempt to identify This Situation as an art object. Other visitors might ask deliberately personal questions to undo the impersonal collectivity of the piece. This approach seeks to dissect a relational field into distinct subjects. Through its various refrains, This Situation engages these tactics in a push-and-pull that gives the piece its playful character. You want to be personal? Alright, let us see how you react to a compliment. More importantly, however, the refrains persistently infuse the situation with embodied collectivity. After hearing “welcome to this situation” for the third time, you might already be sing-songing along. The collective inhale is equally hard to resist; your body does it for you. The backward walk inevitably makes you shuffle around the room again. It is in these moments of repetition that This Situation is fully experienced as a shared embodiment, a consistency, a transindividual holding of the field.

By insisting on the fragile complexity of the machine, This Situation poses the question of participation as a truly ethico-ecological one: How do you actively participate in a relational field? How do you know what to do when there is no straightforward causal connection between what you do and what will emerge? How do you tend an ecology of practices? The delicate indeterminacy of the piece requires ongoing care to sustain its relational ecology: again, it is this sustainability as inventive rather than prescriptive that is the ethical proposition of the piece. These questions are entirely open, for This Situation does not teach or instruct interpreters and visitors on the art of conversation. In fact, the techniques that compose the piece inevitably provoke the interruption, if not breakdown, of a flow of conversation. To have a conversation is to continuously begin again—to make that initial effort once more to get a conversation going. The how must constantly be reinvented. In this sense, a refrain gives consistency and at the same time opens the field to its own potential.

For example, how will interpreters approach a quotation after it has been recited by one of them? Some will insist on a meticulous exegesis of the passage, considering what, given the historical context, a passage can (and cannot!) mean. It is questionable whether this helps build a concern that is shared by all. The lecture style of the exegetic method exposes a habitual asymmetry between the interpreter as the holder of knowledge and the visitor as the student. Simultaneously, though, another asymmetry between the information of fast speech and the static of slow movement pushes against the academic “dance” of authoritative posturing. Other techniques for seeding a conversation include starting from a vague resonance with a recited passage, using a piece of philosophy as a launching pad for one's own thinking, or riffing off just a single word that stands out upon hearing a passage for the third or the thirtieth time. As interpreters, we began to play with those passages, using them strategically so we could continue the conversation we were having or deflecting it into another direction that we would like it to take. We would juxtapose them in new ways to bring out their tacit assumptions or yet undiscovered aspects. We would occasionally tease a fellow interpreter with a quotation that we knew she hated. These techniques—riffing, collaging, teasing—do not come with the piece; they are created in the openings and indeterminacies of This Situation and bring out the elasticity of thought effectuated by its heterochronicities.

This Situation develops its concerns—the art of conversation, the relation between life and art, the role of capitalism in society—at the intersection of various temporalities, speeds, and slownesses. A curious juxtaposition of quotes can spark unexpected ideas within a matter of moments. At other times, the full implications of a passage may slowly dawn on us over a duration of weeks. The quotations themselves—each contextualized only by the year in which they were originally uttered—span across centuries, from Montaigne to the Salonnières all the way to Michel Foucault and Ulrich Beck. They introduce a long history of thought into the present of the conversation. Finally, there are the interpreters' poses, some of which are clearly restagings of famous paintings. One group tableau can easily be identified as referencing Édouard Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (1862–1863). Another one takes up elements of Georges Seurat's Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte (1884–1886). Other poses are more difficult to place but nonetheless carry marks of genre painting or the bucolic. In this way, This Situation is inevitably a remix of heterogeneous times and spaces. An interpreter's intervention can make you travel from the museum to the Salon, from there into a classroom or a sunny park and back. A reviewer in The New York Times reports that in This Situation, “A kind of time travel unfolds” (Smith Reference Smith2007).

Dance at the Threshold

The Museum Opens to Life: Tending Attention Economies

This Situation as a machinic choreography is built from ontogenetic openings; these both invite visitors into the dance and reopen the performance to the unexpected for interpreters as well. If the staging of the piece (in Montréal, a bare white room with no signage) frequently feels “undressed” as a work, with numerous visitors clearly mistaking the scene that they had stumbled into for one of a non-exhibition space, it is up to the bodies and movements to continually create a performance site. A challenge for the piece, one of the functions of its choreographing of uncertainty, is how to amplify the delicate sense of this performance as a potential threshold emerging from this dance with the museum.

Each entry into the space triggers a choreographic movement composed of gesture and breath. In unison, interpreters greet the visitors and let fall the conversation at hand: “Welcome to this situation!” On the inhale, mobilizing breath as a collective mode of recentering, they change positions in the room and settle into predetermined locations and poses. These are held, patiently and expectantly, until someone launches a quote. The movement re-begins, and the conversation ensues. At spontaneous moments, the visitors are explicitly invited to join in, the conversation suspended with an “or/ou … what do you think? Que pensez-vous?” that, through eyeline targeting, interpellates a visitor. Visitors, of course, can take it or leave it. Many do not wait to be invited; others almost seem to feel that they can will themselves into a renewed spectatorial invisibility through stillness and nonresponse. In either case, though, visitors both become part of the debate and share in what is already theirs: the ambiguous archive of art and culture mobilized by the work. Rebeginning and rediscovery are thus key techniques of the work.

One of the more minor techniques of This Situation is that of the compliment, which, even more than the invitation, is a form of magic. The compliments trigger tentative relations that rework social convention not so much through content, but through the form and feeling of attention. What counts? After the highminded content of the quotes and discussion, the compliments can seem frivolous, superficial, and strangely personal, emerging from the ambiguously impersonal embodiments of academics and their borrowed poses and ideas.

But if we think of the compliments in terms of choreography, they provide an internal cut in a performance with no offstage space. They break the conversation, but the compliments instantly charge a singular, one-to-one mode of relation in a radically different way than the invitation to the collective discussion, “Que pensez-vous?” In the same way that choreographers on stage can use a radical shift in lighting to make everything else drop away, this also happens here, rearranging participation and perception. Compliments are unprepared and unexpected, random elements of the choreography that single out a visitor not with the invitation to interact and to enter an existing collective, but to become the object of attention. Reading off the minimal cues available, an interpreter must tell a brief story, worthy of attention, that holds the visitor up in an exploratory suspense. When the compliment is over, more often than not the focus simply dies away and the conversation begins again. It is an excess, a frill, an “irrational cut” that recharges the space.Footnote ¹⁰

If the entire piece's tentative holdings of disjunction (within and between bodies) asks us to move in the museum's impersonal and often homogenous space, indeed staging the blankness of that space in the white gallery made visible as more than background, what is the point of the compliment? It can, on the surface, seem like a reestablishment of the personal in the midst of the impersonal. The compliment immediately foregrounds the problem of perception within the codes of social habit, raising the question, “What do we see?” It becomes a testing ground for self-presentationality, and for reconnecting cues of personal style (as an interpreter, you spend a lot of time checking out people's shoes, clothes, and hair—their meso-public intimacies—looking for a toehold on which to mount a compliment) to the wider flows of culture and conventions, speaking to the signs we take for granted in everyday interactions. It makes the body's surface presentationality into the object of art.

Given the suspense that the compliment produces—of the attention economies of the conversation as exchange, of the flow of the matter at hand, and of the deer-in-headlights freezing of the addressee—the compliment can seem like the antithesis of dance movement. But as a dance move, the affective force of the compliment moves the visitors, even if only in the heightened intensity of feeling singled out. The compliment makes attention palpable in corporeal relation itself: shading into embarrassment, pleasure, voyeurism, vulnerability, and sweetness. It is a mode of contagious mimesis, a taking on of another's ecology, where a single detail opens speculatively to an entire world of habits, preferences, conventions, and desires: what is made contagious is the situation of art itself. As a technique, the compliment activates a mode of ambiguous embodiment, between personal and impersonal, between subject and object, between collective and singular. The compliment's restricted timing, its irrational cut in the conversation, breaks open the machine and charges the body itself as the object of the work's attention economies. These feelings are real, even if fleeting; they are the worked material of dancing the outside.

Chronic Collage: Relational Ecologies

Sehgal's work is often described as leaving no material trace: nothing to buy at the gift shop, no signs on the walls naming the piece, no flyers at the door, and above all, no photos. Read by some as a pretension, it can also been seen as part of the artist's ecological ethics (evident for example in Sehgal's insistence that those working in his pieces avoid airplane travel because of the high environmental impact). In the work, conversations are prompted by quotes mapping the material residue of capitalist culture: planned obsolescence, the accumulation of worthless trash, the environmental catastrophe of consumerism. Bodies are deployed in the museum space without any material support, as if carelessly put into temporary storage: the long shifts were the source of much anxiety on the part of interpreters at the beginning of the exhibition. This extends all the way to the lack of a paper contract between museum officials and Sehgal at the purchase of an artwork; a gesture holds the promise of payment and of care.

A concern across much contemporary critical theory, including what has been termed “new materialism” asks: how can we be attentive to the heterogeneous specificity of that which often does not appear in the thought and analysis of art objects, in particular the ambiguous liveliness of objects and materials themselves? Media ecological approaches, for instance, explore the ways in which media are not discrete objects but are enmeshed in emergent relations and networks, where the interstices between materials are as relevant and sustaining as objects (such as artworks) and material supports (such as the museum) themselves. A post-McLuhan media ecological approach draws on the importance of the collage aesthetic in modern art as an articulation of this mode of thought.Footnote ¹¹ Much of Sehgal's work activates a similar impulse, and it is in this sense that we can understand his work as thoroughly material, through its choreographing of repetition, and its staging of a distributed and durational materiality emergent from the chronic collage of the embodied arts.Footnote ¹² To think a collage aesthetic through an embodied art like dance, rather than via media culture, is to ask what a machinic choreography can connect to in each repetition of a performance. It invites an attentiveness to the heterochronicity of performance itself. In Sehgal's immaterial productions, chronic collage articulates a relation between dance and the museum that connects to all the media archives of dance by which that work has traditionally entered museum space, including film, video, photography, and digital technology: the alter-embodiments of mediated dance itself, and the recording machines of dancing bodies. This Situation does not dematerialize these other modes through which dance appears in the museum by reasserting the ephemerality of the performing body. Instead, the piece relies on the fragile intensity of the body itself as a primary experience of holding together that welcomes difference as its outside: the ontological affirmation of self-differentiation.

The “cut and paste” poses of the interpreters are held like breaths at transitional moments in the choreography and serve both as a material support and counterpoint to the citations. The repetition of the physical gestures works at a different rhythm than the excised and reanimated words. As with so many of the other choreographic impulses, this staged gap between words and movement has a double quality. On the one hand, it is explicitly embodied: many spectators reported that they were simply unable to concentrate on the content of the citation, so caught up were they in the flow of form. On the other hand, the gap is immediately impersonal precisely because it is productive. It starts something and is an invitation to novelty, whether this novelty emerges and is sustained or not. Regardless of who is speaking, they are also being spoken; regardless of who is moving, they are also being moved, in an anarchival reanimation of a common body of knowledge and art (Thain Reference Thain2010). This anarchic archive is continually refreshed in performance. The piece's impersonal appeal is to make felt the interstitial, relational glue of the work's chronic collage. This impersonal field encompasses both memory (subjective and collective) and potential—the feeling of futurity that can emerge in the reanimation of the past.

A chronic collage makes the archive visible obscurely, only to make it available to take up again, displacing the “what” of reference with the “how” of happening, which always contains the speculative dimension of the “what if?” The chronic collage of This Situation stages an explicitly citational relation to meaning, signification, and history immediately doubled by a palpable sense of something-elseness. Quotes are dated but anonymous, and only sometimes elucidated by the ensuing discussions; poses hold up the missing rest of the images for view. The “where” of the work's happening is obscure and ambiguous. For the interpreters, this feeling of liveliness persists as well. In Montréal, there were times when no one would come, when we would slouch around on the floor like abandoned toys, or where someone would poke their head in and then, alarmed by the whirring into life of our “Welcome,” would leave before our first line was even launched. There are rules to the game, and repetition becomes an intimate feature. On a busy day with many visitors, you could circulate through the same poses multiple times, and the relentless interruptions of the conversations with each new arrival meant that, at times, only the repeated elements of the work were animated. This piece's mechanism, though, is designed to be machinic, in the same way as a collage aesthetic is designed to make a thing and its novelty apparent in a way that says: “This, and what else?”

A contemporary form of the collage is the remix, bound up with discussions of the promise, potential, and pitfalls of participatory culture more generally. We tend to think of the remix in terms of popular culture, less so via the re-citationality of the residue of high art and philosophy. Remixes are media forms that activate the sense of the threshold as they move across contexts, platforms, and heterochronicities. The remix is ambiguously positioned between craft and art, between originality and re-citation, between possession and openness. Remixes pose the question of belonging as a question of ethics, much as This Situation makes this same question one that passes first and foremost through the body, both in the foregrounding of how the body of an individual work holds together (a remix as the thing and its composition) and how that work connects, obscurely and explicitly, to other works, other moments, other iterations. What belongs to the situation is the ethical stake: not just the staging of relation, but dance as a topologization of the museum's curated limits.

If the ethics of This Situation are articulated through an embodied remix of techniques (reanimating the history of ideas, artworks, institutions, and so forth), then (our) writing about this piece is concerned with nothing less than an ethology, that is, an investigation into a functional complex of habits, conducts, attitudes, and techniques that intersect within and sustain a given environment. This Situation provides such an ethology: an ecology of practices that we have tried to trace in the previous pages. But we have also seen that no ethological account can reduce its anarchival element of creation. It is for this reason that Deleuze characterized ethology, in a definition so resonant for contemporary discussions of ethics and new materialism in art today, via Spinoza's speculative (re)beginning: “We do not yet know what a body can do” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze, Crary and Kwinter1992, 625). It is impossible to predict what makes for “good” or “bad” participation at any given point. There is no particular action one is “supposed to do” at this or that moment. Instead, one must attend to the continuously changing immanent criteria of the situation. In other words, one must care: How can one open up this conversation that has been going around in circles for ten minutes? How can the barrier between interpreters and “audience” that has reimposed itself just now be undone again? What does this thought need right now to keep moving? These questions embody a truly curatorial impulse that does not precede the exhibition but that constitutes the artwork's exposure itself: curare as a collective care-taking, ambiguously embodied across visitors, artists, and interpreters, through moving and being moved. This way of conceiving a collective remix insistently (re)begins right in the middle of a relational field. Welcome to this situation!