Later, I began to take more interest in Sehgal, especially when I saw his principal motto could be: “When art goes by like life.” Sehgal proposed that only by participating in his performance could a person say he or she had seen his work. If you think about it, that’s really good. When art goes by like life. It sounded perfect.
Boston and I went outside and into the old tumbledown annex next door to the Hessenland. After walking down a short corridor, we arrived at a small garden, where on the left-hand side was the room in which nothing could be seen and where you could, if you wanted, venture into the darkness itself to see what happened, what kind of experience awaited you. It was a dark room, Boston warned me, a room you entered thinking no one was there, perhaps just another visitor who had preceded you, but after being inside for a while, we started to perceive, without being able to see anybody, the presence of some young people, like otherworldly spirits, singing and dancing and seeming to live among the shadows. They were performers of sometimes enigmatic, sometimes fluid movements, occasionally stealthy and then frenetic, in any case invisible.
Although many other things could be said about that dark room, in principle I could summarize: Tino Sehgal was presenting This Variation, a space in darkness, a hidden place in which a series of people awaited visitors and, when the moment was right, sang songs and offered the experience of living a piece of art as something fully sensory.
Sehgal, Boston reminded me, rejected the idea that art had to have a physical expression, that is, it had to be a painting, a sculpture, an artifact or installation; he treated the idea of a written explanation of his work with equal disdain. Therefore, as she’d told me before, the only way to be able to say that you’d seen a Sehgal work was to see it live. For example, there wasn’t even a record of that piece in the thick Documenta 13 catalogue, as Sehgal had asked Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez to respect his desire to be invisible.
Pure Duchamp, I thought. And I remembered that sunshade Duchamp was working on one summer in Cadaqués, which, in the end, turned out to be to shelter him from the sun or, to put it a better way, so he could settle into the shadows, his favorite territory. Where was that sun shelter now? Only in the minds of those who saw it or enjoyed the shade beneath it. Since they’d all been dying off, there were very few left — if any — before that “canvas” (once a silent work of art) would disappear from living memory.
Yes, it was clear: art goes by like life. And Sehgal was an illustrious heir to Duchamp. But was he innovating? Could it be said that he belonged to some avant-garde?
No, I decided, he wasn’t really innovating. But since when was it necessary for art to be dedicated to innovation? This is exactly what I was wondering when I walked into This Variation, Sehgal’s dark room.
(That night, I coincidentally stumbled upon a long interview with Chus Martínez on my computer — finally I saw her face — and her declarations helped me gauge whether today’s artists were innovators or not. In the interview Chus explained that Documenta 13 wasn’t like other exhibitions; it wasn’t just for looking at, but could also be lived. And when she was asked if art was still being innovative or if it was more schematic, she answered: “In art we don’t innovate, that happens in an industry. Art is neither creative nor innovative. That we leave to the world of shoes, cars, aeronautics. It’s an industrial vocabulary. Art is art, and what you make of it is up to you. Art, of course, neither innovates nor creates.”)
Not yet knowing that Documenta 13 was for living and, especially, not knowing “art is art, and what you make of it is up to you,” I walked into This Variation and advanced through the dark room without seeing anything or sensing anyone’s presence. I even forgot that there might be more than one person or ghost in there.
Soon I found out I was not alone. Suddenly, someone, who seemed more accustomed to the semidarkness of the place, went past me and intentionally brushed against my shoulder. I reacted, prepared to put up some resistance if anyone tried to touch me again. But it didn’t happen. For the rest of the day, I wouldn’t be able to get the feel of that touch out of my head.
Soon afterward, I thought I noticed — it was impossible to see anything but darkness — that the person who’d brushed up against me was dancing away toward the back of the room, gathering there with other souls, who, when they distinguished my presence in that impenetrable obscurity, abandoned their silence and also began to dance, humming strange, slight songs or chants, almost like Hare Krishna.
I walked out of there thinking it had all been more than odd and that, depending on how you looked at it, it was terrible to discover the significance of a stranger brushing against one’s shoulder.
“Well?” was all Boston asked when she saw me.
I understood that she wanted to know how my experience inside the gloomy room had been, but I found it difficult to communicate what had happened to me there. I had the impression I’d just seen something that wasn’t art about some matter, that wasn’t discursive or about anything weighty that I’d spent a lifetime fleeing and not managing to get away from; it seemed to me that I’d just seen art itself. But I didn’t know exactly how to explain that to Boston; I had to think more about it; so I opted to answer evasively, telling her I’d just been reminded of the canon of Poitiers.
The word canon sounded strange in that context. Of what? she asked. Someone Montaigne wrote about, I said, a preacher who didn’t leave his room for thirty years and gave some extraordinary excuses for not leaving. Sounds like Ratzinger, remarked Boston; they say he never moves from his office in the Vatican.
14
Leaving Sehgal’s room behind, we crossed the garden of the old annex, walking along the corridor that led to the street.
Boston said she was a fan of strolling, of journeying on foot. It seemed so odd to her that the most natural and basic way of getting around could become the most luminous of activities; perhaps it was such a creative thing to do because it took place at human speed. Going for a walk, she told me, seemed to produce a clear mental syntax, a narrative of its own.
After this brief reflection, she went back to worrying about the impression Sehgal’s room might have made on me, she wanted to know how I’d felt.
“Well, look,” I said point-blank, “I have to tell you that without England’s resistance to Hitler, I wouldn’t be here today.”
That sentence was clearly a McGuffin, perhaps arising directly from the very art of walking. It came out as the first thing that entered my head. I realized that this art of journeying on foot facilitated, among other things, the ability to say things without thinking about them first; you said things, letting them literally fly out of your mouth. Unlike what we say after we’ve carefully formulated an idea, polishing it until we feel ready to let it go, the sentence that is unconsidered and born directly from a walk may be daring, strange, and seem at times as though it is not ours. On other occasions, it may even have an unexpected syntax that sometimes surprises us, because we discover it was overwhelmingly ours without our knowing it.
“Without England’s resistance?” Boston queried.
I kept quiet, I didn’t know what to say; in truth that McGuffin hadn’t felt like mine at any point. I kept quiet, but it was not an embarrassing silence. When two people walk along conversing, the silences are never tense, violent, or serious. It doesn’t matter, for example, if you don’t respond to something, because in fact everything follows its course without any excessive dramatization.