Tino Sehgal's art is shown in museums, yet it does not take up exhibition space before visitors arrive or once they have left. His works are produced without using material objects, and in the moment of their de-production they leave nothing material behind. This artistic concept is based on the premise that a work of art has ‘always been an object’ and that art has always followed ‘technological developments, from cave painting to Internet art’.Footnote ¹ Against the horizon of this tradition, Sehgal has set himself the task of making space for another form of production. His art can thus be understood as an answer to the question of how to produce something and exhibit it in a museum without using technological aids and perpetuating the ‘celebration of material production’.Footnote ²

One result of this other form of production was on show at the Venice Biennial in 2005, where Sehgal, along with Thomas Scheibitz, was chosen to exhibit at the German Pavilion. Upon entering, the visitors were welcomed by a woman and two men. They sported the characteristic outfits worn by Biennial attendants but their behaviour had little in common with what is normally expected of museum attendants. They danced cheerfully towards the newcomers from three different corners of the room, encircling them closer while singing, in different choral arrangements, ‘Oh! This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary’. After half a minute they fell silent and stopped moving. Suddenly, the woman said, ‘Tino Sehgal’, whereupon they all continued singing, ‘This is so contemporary’. Then one of the two men sang ‘2004’ before his colleague finished reciting the words that are usually to be found on signs in the exhibition space, ‘Courtesy Jan Mot Gallery’.

The journalists’ verdict of Sehgal's work was particularly interesting. Their reviews revealed that their experiences had triggered a number of irritations. What was the point of this ‘clownery’Footnote ³? Was it simply a provocation? And what did ‘this’ refer to that was supposed to be ‘so contemporary’? One reviewer, who felt ‘harassed’ by the ‘overly pubertal agitating, all too transparent production’, surmised that the intention was ‘seemingly to reflect on the major issue of what might be contemporary (or modern) in art and in life’.Footnote ⁴ Others interpreted the verses sung as an ironic commentary on Scheibitz's sculptural forms or as a ‘satire on the art business with its tireless quest for the new, the trend, the absolute present’.Footnote ⁵ Yet the self-referential relationship between the attendants’ words and the ongoing scene was, surprisingly, given no mention.

Like all contemporary works of art, This Is So Contemporary not only represents an idea of the contemporary, but also makes a substantial contribution towards establishing it. In this respect, Sehgal's work does not differ from other contemporary works of art. It has the authoritarian ability to play a part in the idea and definition of what is to be considered and recognized as contemporary. But by transferring the production of his idea of the contemporary to the here-and-now and having it appear only performatively in situ, Sehgal does not only accentuate the definitional act itself. At the same time, he underscores the negotiability of his own idea of the contemporary.

‘Oh! This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary’, the attendants sing cheerfully as soon as a visitor enters the German Pavilion. Yet two distinct voices can be heard clearly in these words. While the work of art and the concept of the contemporary on which it is based begin to materialize with the articulation of these words, the players at the same time claim that this other form of production privileged by Sehgal is ‘so contemporary’. The line thus formulates an offer to understand ‘This is so contemporary’ as a performative or a constative statement, so that the meaning of John L. Austin's one-time proposal ‘to forget’Footnote ⁶ the distinction between performatives and constatives is here demonstrated in an altogether exemplary manner. If ‘This is so contemporary’ is taken as a constative statement, then the assertation significantly illuminates its tautological character within the context of the Venice Biennial. At the Biennial, one of the most important contemporary art shows, all participating artists surely deem their work on show contemporary. Moreover, every visitor would probably expect to see contemporary art. By explicitly raising the issue of what every work of art exhibited at a contemporary art show implicitly claims to be, Sehgal draws attention to the fact that the claim ‘to be so contemporary’ may be judged true or false and that a work of art which proposes an idea of the contemporary can only be acknowledged as such if someone confirms this claim.

But how does this claim relate to Sehgal's own work – a work of art that resorts to dance and song as forms of production which, in terms of the technological possibilities at the disposal of art today, may at first glance appear not particularly contemporary themselves? I should like to emphasize that This Is So Contemporary does indeed qualify as a work of contemporary art, and does so precisely because Sehgal resorts to dance and song as forms of production. The plausibility of this thesis naturally depends on the way in which the concept of the ‘contemporary’ is used.

In everyday speech, and in particular within the context of art, ‘contemporary’ is often used as a synonym for ‘modern’ or ‘up to date’. Something is contemporary and therefore modern or up-to-date because it displays content and/or formal aesthetic characteristics that are or are intended to be typical and determinative of the present in question. In addition, however, there is another possible meaning of ‘contemporary’. It also means ‘simultaneous’ and, as the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary notes, refers in this sense of the term to something ‘happening, existing, living, or coming into being during the same period of time’.Footnote ⁷

What a ‘period of time’ means is, of course, relative. It can be years or even decades and refer to a period in which people live alongside each other as contemporaries. However, it can just as easily mean a precisely defined short period of time such as the morning of a certain day, during which entirely different things happen synchronously at different places without being causally related. When we refer to contemporaneity, it can therefore mean events or actions that do not necessarily take their course either at a single location or at precisely the same time. Conversely, we can also refer to a contemporaneity that focuses on events or actions, which take place over a certain period of time at a specific location and can be perceived and experienced in the here-and-now of a selective present in space and time.

This Is So Contemporary is a work that enables such selective presents in space and time in which contemporaneity is established by players and visitors relating to each other in what they do and perceive. At the same time, it is a work requiring the simultaneous presence of players and visitors to create in space and time the particular present in which it is able to materialize. It shares these characteristics with all theatre and dance performances.

But in these selective presents, contemporaneity can also take shape in another form in which it is always at work both in This Is So Contemporary and in every theatre or dance performance. As distinct from an ongoing present that covers years or decades, the selective present is a temporal moment, in which, as Niklas Luhmann puts it, ‘the future ceaselessly and irrevocably becomes the past’.Footnote ⁸ Through this distinction, the selective present also comes to the fore as the section of micro-time that, as it were, has always been characterized by the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous, by the paradox that at the present moment ‘the unity of the difference between past and present’ looms large.Footnote ⁹ By making people dance and sing in situ (rather than presenting their dance and song as a technically transmitted video recording), Sehgal makes the contemporaneity of materialization and prompt dematerialization, in addition to the contemporaneity of the presentation and its reception, an essential condition and property of This Is So Contemporary.

In This Is So Contemporary Sehgal pointedly expressed the nature of the other form of production that he chose and that in the final analysis applies to all of his works. When the last visitor leaves the room only the players remain, and they only resort to action again when the next visitor arrives on the scene and helps to create the present in which Sehgal's works materialize into something that will have been the past.

Due to this sense of contemporaneity of presentation and reception, as well as origination and dissipation, Sehgal's work is frequently categorized as performance art. It is true also that the work of many performance artists results from the joint presence of performers and audiences, but if one focuses solely on this common ground one also runs the risk of neglecting the material differences between Sehgal's approach and the intentions of performance art.

Like other neo-avant-garde currents, performance art sought to overcome the limitations of existing art forms when it took shape from the visual arts as a theatrical genre in the 1960s. Performance artists discovered their own bodies as the material on which to work, and with these new forms of expression they set out to put the real and present experiences of body, time and space in the place of an understanding of art as representation. While they sought to replace the traditional ideal of a work of art through modes of theatrical production, in order to undermine the system of art based on conservable and marketable works and change the public's practised reception patterns, they also wanted no part of the theatre, which they saw as a place where fictional roles and plots were portrayed. Performance art thus established itself as a genre between theatre and the visual arts and at the same time sought to bring about a caesura in the history of both. But the aim of parting company with the rules, discourses, and conditionalities of museums as well as theatres in turn generated contradictions that brought performance art into irreconcilable conflict with its own intentions.

These contradictions began with the demarcation line drawn between performance art and theatre. Theatre was regarded as the enemy, due to its ‘fake’ character, as Marina Abramovic stated in retrospect in the 1990s.Footnote ¹⁰ As such it was important to draw a distinction from it in aesthetic practice as well as at the conceptual level. The desire to establish clear distinguishing criteria, however, primarily reveals that performance artists were well aware of the theatrical elements in their work. Martin Carlson noted, ‘The very presence of an audience watching an action . . . called up associations with theatre. Moreover, even as performance emerged as a distinct genre in the early 1970s, many of its practitioners utilized distinctly theatrical approaches’.Footnote ¹¹

In spite of these common points, however, there was and continues to be a significant difference between theatre and performance art. While theatre usually lends a privileged status to repeating productions, in performance art the stage becomes the scene of one-off performances. This is one of the main characteristics that distinguishes Sehgal's work from performance art. Sehgal is interested in the permanence of repetition. With the idea that his works repeatedly rematerialize and thereby position themselves in the history of art as living events, he fundamentally departs from performance art. And by affirming this structural element of the theatre that performance art negates, he moves close to theatre itself.

In producing one-off events, performance art not only distanced itself from certain theatre traditions, it also felt that it had found a suitable means by which to divorce itself successfully from the economic laws of the art business. That said, it was precisely the principle of performing works only once and thereby preventing them from being passed on that promptly became a stumbling block. Pragmatic motives (such as the need to earn money) or those of art history (such as the artist's desire to preserve his or her work from oblivion) eventually led to the production, collection and marketing, as something else, of documents and relics that can today be found in museums where they testify to the unique and fleeting events they accompanied. They became self-contained works of art, substantial reminders or deficient remnants, but in all events objective and protected artefacts. The history of performance art is the history of this conflict between an art form in event mode, intended not to be purchasable and preservable, on the one hand, and, on the other, the documents and relics that are traded and archived in order to leave behind some kind of picture of these events. These documents and relics reveal the paradoxical about-turn that has befallen performance art's self-understanding, testifying to the practices by which the performance artists sought to set themselves apart from the very structures that are now called upon to demonstrate both their attempts to demarcate and their failure to do so.Footnote ¹²

To save his work from a similar fate – or to save the materializations of his work for an indefinite future – Sehgal chose another approach. Although his works materialize only temporarily, they fulfil all the requirements that any work of the visual arts must fulfil if it is to lead a lasting existence, circulate in the market and go down in the history of art. That is why Sehgal's works can be bought, collected and repeatedly put on show.Footnote ¹³ Unlike performance artists, he does not try to withdraw from the market. In fact, he recognizes that a fundamental task for art is to produce, distribute and sell works. Thus he does not oppose the fact that a work of art is a product like any other and that the art market functions on the basis of the usual laws of the goods economy. He operates within the market and the museum in order to find out what ‘is possible not “beyond” but precisely within these familiar processes of production and consumption’.Footnote ¹⁴ His aim is not to critique the market economy's laws that govern the art system – and therein surely lies the most far-reaching difference between his approach and that of all neo-avant-gardists. Instead, he criticizes a mode of production that continuously gives preference to the transformation of material. ‘I think’, he says, ‘that a market economy or capitalism – the system of distribution we live in – is not such a problem: the problem is what circulates within that system. And what circulates has nothing to do with this system of distribution itself, but with a specific culture’. What this culture does not provide for is the circulation of ‘things’ ‘that most people wouldn't consider to be things at all’.Footnote ¹⁵

While Sehgal ensures that his work is passed on by enabling its repeated materialization, he also refrains from producing of any kind of film or photographic documentation. He knows that those documents would begin to circulate sooner or later. Thus he lets the constantly changing situations and the meanings and experiences that they put forth performatively live on solely in the memory of those who met for that given period of time. In terms of his self-understanding, Sehgal is taking preventive action. The existence and circulation of photographic and film material would, in the long run, jeopardize both the recognition of situational events as the proper materialization of his works and his endeavour to bring about another form of production.