Artist Tino Sehgal / Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art
As an arts reporter, you learn to live with a certain inadequacy: Whatever words you lay down on the page will never equal the impact of encountering the work itself.
In the end, every review bends toward the same conclusion — you, dear reader, simply have to go and see it for yourself.
Still, you can attempt a translation. You can describe the atmosphere and the scale. You can single out details, place them in context and include photographs that give readers something tangible to hold onto. At the very least, you can offer an echo of the experience persuasive enough to make them step outside and walk into the museum.
With Tino Sehgal, even that modest consolation falls away.
There are no images to describe. No objects to analyze. No installation shots to accompany a paragraph. His craft emerges instead in the immaterial space between strangers, through voices and choreographies that materialize from thin air and dissolve just as quickly.
So this may be the rare instance in which a review must confess its own futility from the start. For Sehgal’s art, there can be no descriptive surrogate. Whether you end up hating it or loving it, you really do have to be there. And with that shortcoming acknowledged, the article can finally begin.
Auguste Rodin's "The Burghers of Calais" stands beside a flower sculpture by Jeff Koons, part of the display arranged according to Tino Sehgal's curatorial concept. Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art
It is at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul that Sehgal brings eight of his works, or what he prefers to call “constructed situations.”
That phrasing is deliberate. The artist has long resisted the language of performance, which implies a fixed theatrical event with a clear beginning and an end. His living works exist only when activated by people, unfolding within the museum space he describes as a “liberal, individualized ritual.”
Source: Korea Times News
