Tino Seghal

Tino Sehgal
An article where he and others are quoted as saying;
"he does not want to add more images to a world "consumed by visual pollution."
"he ‘wanted to do dance with the same seriousness as art was done… not with the entertainment factor [of] theatre and film.’"
"he rejects the term ‘performance art’, preferring to call his pieces "constructed situations" it follows in the tradition of the ‘happenings’ of the 1960s and 70s, even if his refusal to allow them to be documented in any way reflects a twenty-first century ethos."
"This is Progress (2006), in which visitors are engaged in conversation by groups of increasingly older performers"
"capacity to draw in and yet reject the viewer"

I love that it only exists as an idea, as ideas are something i get really excited about. There's a satisfaction in the creation, but i love the purity of an unformed idea.

This goes against everything I've ever been told but... I think perhaps lots of works of art didn't need to be made.

The prime reason to make something physical is to be able to show it to other people. (and maybe sell it) To have it enter 'the conversation'. However, if we are talking conversation, then surely an idea is just as good, providing it's spreadable. Debatable. Providing enough people are in on it. But then, ideas fall into a different category. The category, perhaps, of philosophy.

I often dwell more on works i have only been told about. Like a book or a story or a poem. The ideas and images of situations you have only imagined stay with you far longer. Maybe this is just because my memory is so mixed in with my imagination I can no longer tell the two apart. I am highly suggestible to forming any kind of false memory simply with the recounting of event. I am interested in how the retelling, picking apart of an event can lead to a totally different perception. Something happens and is witnessed by several people, results in several different perceptions of the same event.

This is no new idea. But why is it important? It is important because it is yet another demonstration of the lack of ultimate truth. Plato's 'Allegory of the Cave' in The Republic, almost represents this theory, but Plato suggests that as a philosopher you could step out of the cave and see things in the sunlight as they really are, transcend the limitations of perception. I don't agree. The biggest restraint is perspective and that is unshakeable. Sorry P-man.

What about an exhibition that is simply full of descriptions of artworks? That surely must have been done before. I wonder how it would be. Even thinking about the possibility of it gets me probably more excited than i would doing it. Because if i did it, it would never be as good as it was in my head.

But i think now i come to the many many flaws in my argument. How can people talk about something they haven't experienced? Experience must be different from thought, even just because there would be people there with you, reacting differently to the descriptions. You could talk about each actual description, whereas if it's still only an idea, everyone would be imagining different descriptions of different artworks and what that would be.

I suppose, pinning things down is important in the end because things are so nebulous anyway, as i have just described, you want to start with everyone having the closest common experience possible so that you can at least start on the closest possible common ground. Even if experiences and reactions would be very different.

What an unsatisfying conversation it would be if we were all talking about ideas of what things might or could have been like. Marvelously free, but unsatisfying. I know I'm getting horrifically ahead of myself here, but I can't help but wanting to state absolutes, even if I'm tragically under-qualified... when will i ever be qualified? So with that caveat, maybe quite a good definition of conceptual art, is the satisfaction of philosophy. Where philosophy gets satisfied. It's full, penetrative sex to philosophy's batting eyelids.

p.s. I would like it if 'jugs' became my word for 'seeing things from all perspectives'. Has a lewd quality i obviously enjoy.