Tino Sehgal: the talk show host at the Tate Modern

His Tate Modern commission was declared a hit by critics when it opened last week. But what exactly, Ben Luke asks Tino Sehgal, is the idea of strangers in the Turbine Hall telling visitors their life stories?
Artist Tino Sehgal
Rex Features
31 July 2012

Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is always a lively, bustling place but last week it was thronging in the heat, with an excited babble echoing around the cavernous space — it’s no surprise to learn that, despite other distractions, 115,000 people passed through the gallery as a whole. The buzz was triggered by Tino Sehgal’s These Associations, the latest in the annual Unilever Series, which has joined Olafur Eliasson’s sun and Doris Salcedo’s crack in becoming the kind of unmissable public participation event that is such a hit here.

Sitting on a bench on the lawn in front of Tate Modern, Sehgal tells me that he had begun thinking about filling the space long before his official invitation came in 2008. “I had these flashes of ‘What would you do in here?’,” he says. “I had this idea of a larger group of people coming towards you.”

After lengthy workshops and discussions with the Tate curators, he honed his idea to focus on the intense personal discussions and disarming collective movements of a group — and it was inspired. Critics have been unanimous in their praise of These Associations. You probably already know how it works. “I’m one of four girls,” a young woman who broke away from the herd of 70 people moving together around the hall approached me and said, as I leant against one wall to observe the action. “Me and my twin are the youngest, so we have got two older sisters. My mum has been ill for four years because she drinks, basically, and this Easter she fell down the stairs.”

She launched into the details of this terrible trauma at the heart of her life without introduction — no courtesies are exchanged, we know nothing of each other’s backgrounds, careers, even each other’s names. And the conversations are only part of her repertoire and those of the other participants. They walk slowly through the space, quicken to a run, play strange, inscrutable games resembling tag in huge swarms. Occasionally, as the lights go out, and darkness falls in the Hall, they stop, many of them sit down, and they begin to chant and sing.

All good fun, if disconcerting. But what’s it all about, Tino?

I tell him that when I first saw the work, it was the quality of life point that hit home — I felt that, immersed in our BlackBerrys and iPads, we are becoming cut off from direct engagement with people. “I do think that human interaction is the most complex ‘site’. No technology can live up to the complexities of a human being,” he says. “Just think about the trouble of creating artificial intelligence — people in the late 20th century were far more optimistic that it could work. It shows how complex the human mind and soul, if you so wish, is.”

The Turbine Hall conversations often end as abruptly as they start, as the “interpreters” rejoin the throng. The woman with the alcoholic mother concluded by talking about the closeness she and her sisters developed as they rallied around their mum. “There is a set of questions which I have asked them and you hear their answers to my questions,” Sehgal says. This particular question was “When did you feel a sense of belonging?”.

Great pleasure comes from the exchanges but the experience is fleeting — it’s likely that you will never meet them again. “If you think of cinema or literature, it’s as if you zoom into somebody’s world, you hear somebody’s thoughts,” he says, “and then that breaking off is something that gets employed a lot in literature and cinema — the cut, when you just cut out of a moment, and you are in the next moment.”

Born in Wimbledon 36 years ago, Sehgal has lived in Germany for most of his life — currently Berlin, with his partner and two sons — and speaks fast, fluent English with a lilting German accent. Tall, with curly black hair, he is professorial, arty and engaging, erudite company, and as likely to talk of the politics of choreography in the court of Louis XIV as the importance of the oral tradition in the development of football.

The collective chanting and singing, of a quote by philosopher Hannah Arendt among other things, is impressive but ambiguous. It emphasises the power of community but is creepily cultish, too. “If you make art, I guess you always make some kind of statement,” Sehgal says, but he sought to avoid a hectoring tone about individuality and community, instead choosing to “show different moments, and see how we feel,” he says. “This singing together, which is so traditional, and also the walking together, how do we feel about that today?”

Sehgal has no formal art training and once confessed that he was “really bad at art in school”, instead studying dance and economics in Berlin and Essen. He admits that his work is “very much in a choreographic tradition” but it is not dance. “The tradition of sculpture and installation is the one my work makes sense in, even if it has a lot of other influences and employs the craft of a different field to a certain extent,” he says. “My relationship to dance or choreo-graphy or the live arts is like that of a video artist to film. It is using a similar craft but it is in a different tradition.”

And it needs to be in a museum or gallery. “I’m always asking: ‘What can we do instead of objects?’” he says. “And the museum is the right backdrop to do that, because when you see my work you think, ‘There’s not a giant sculpture now in the Turbine Hall but there’s a large group of people doing stuff’. So you have this comparison.”

Museums can “lack intensity” as a cultural experience, he thinks. “Although we have had them for 200-300 years, I would dare to say that the museum was never really fully worked out as a format,” he says. He feels that paintings particularly suffer — in being denied the chance to be seen “at all different states of your life, in different emotions” as they would be in a home or a church, they are less powerful.

Sehgal is prompting museums to radically adjust their practices. He has a work, This Is Propaganda (2002), in the Tate collection, in which a museum guard breaks into song, “This Is Propaganda, you know, you know” and names the artist and the date. When the Tate acquired it, reportedly for a five-figure sum, no written contract existed – the agreement was reached orally, with a lawyer, Sehgal and Tate staff present. The Tate has the right to show the work but Sehgal or someone he nominates co-ordinates its re-creation; he insists that his installations and interventions are never documented on film, tape or in photographs.

Why, I ask? He jokes that he is lazy but explains that the Tate-owned work “doesn’t rely on me doing it and it is not the same person doing it all the time, it doesn’t rely on a particular person. There is no urgency to document it.”

But surely that affects his legacy? “I still think body-to body-transmission or an oral tradition, even though it doesn’t have a high currency in our thinking, is the most powerful and precise mode of passing things on,” he says.

This philosophy is at the core of the man and his art. He is a fascinating paradox, his work is radical enough to grace our temples of contemporary art, forcing museums to adjust their systems and visitors to rethink what to expect from art, yet it is steeped in ancient rituals of storytelling. As soon as one of Sehgal’s participants walks towards you in the Turbine Hall, you are thrust into this compelling world.

The Unilever Series: Tino Sehgal is at Tate Modern, SE1 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk) until October 28. Open Sun-Thurs 10am-6pm (Fri-Sat until 10pm). Aug 5 & 12 until 10pm. Admission free.

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