The person playing

Until September 14, the exhibition “Vac Live: Tino Segal” - prepared by the VAC Foundation, continues to work, the first large show of works by the artist’s works in the capital, in recent years, more actively mastering the territory of the theater: the Opéra de Paris ballet has opened the last season by the premiere of two new productions of Segal at once, this fall the renovated Berlin Volksbühne will present the project “ Samuel Beckett / Tino Sehgal " . About the Moscow retrospective of the works of Segal - Zara Abdullaev.

The work of Tino Segala finally saw in Moscow. The theory and practice of an international artist born in London (mother - German, father - Pakistani) living in Berlin, constructing a situation in the museum space, are simultaneously transparent and provocative.

Segal refuses to call his opuses “performance”. Although, in a cursory glance, his situations are built into the tradition of performative art. So, in the history of the immersive theater and other trends of art scenes in a broad sense. He continues to experience the "aesthetics of interaction" (Nicolas Burrio), which has become a common place of progressive curatorial projects. The hero of the elegant, stinging film of Ruben Estlund “Square” (“Golden Palm Branch” at the Cannes Film Festival-2017)-the curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art-quotes the notorious Burrio and exaggerates no less ritual names of projects (“Exhibition-non-exhibition”, “Place-not the place) that appeals to terrible discussions. Why do authoritative art historians and curators believe that Segal, representing the performances-non-surmanse, means “a new path of art” (Hans Ulrich Obrist), and write, like Francesco Bona, from Dyushan to Segal ”? In the same Swedish film, a chic curator tiredly explains the laws of the “non-exhibition” by the American journalist with a worn example about an ordinary bag placed in a museum space and which has become an art object. Funny.

What is the mystery of Segal, pragmatic mythologizing his image and deserves, as usual, the reputation of either a “fraudster” or an “innovator”? He, like Lars von Trier, the debate around which until recently they destroyed personal relations, does not fly on airplanes and clouds the idea of ​​authorship. He chooses an oral agreement, and not signed contracts with museum workers, playing the role of an agent of institutional criticism. He prohibits, unlike conceptualists, who devoted one of the early “performances” to document their museum interventions. In the film “Square”-monstings of museum functioning (from relationships with sponsors, public-tocks with artists to the cynicism of advertisers hired to promote non-exhibition)-a plan is replicated when the caretaker ritually proceeds the visitor to turn off the iPhone.

It is no accident, probably, acquaintance with Tino Segal in Moscow begins with the project “This is new” (2003) - simple -minded and ironic. When you buy a ticket, the cashier of the new Tretyakov workers shares today's news neutral tone. The freedom of this news prompts to retroactively responding to the ephemeral of Segal's situations, according to the plan that are not subject to documentation - although the pirates, of course, violate the artist’s commandment. “My job is not a photo. My work is living things. ” In historical time, the news reported by the cashier introduces a post -fact in the head of visitors to the thought of “new art”, about which it will not be relevant tomorrow, as it is now here. Or as great dancers, choreographers of the last century, to whom Segal dedicated the collage “Twenty minutes for the twentieth century” (1999), shown in the Stockholm Museum of Contemporary Art. This mounted quote from the choreography of Duncan, Nizhinsky, Balanchin, Pina Bausch ETC. , Like an art guide on the history of conceptualism “Dancing Bruce and Dan ...” (2000), rooting in tradition-educational and consumer. But in the “Kiss” (2006), designed in the Hall of Socialist Apotheosis of the New Tretyakov Gallery, and in the new version of the “Personal”, represented in the Ruin pavilion of the Moscow Museum of Architecture, Segal violates the boundaries specified in the early opuses. After all, he is not only a former dancer. He studied political economy at the University of Humboldt. These classes provoked his “hybrid” art, combining both the entertainment, and reflexivity, and the production of a new experience of the visitor to the museum. Thus, Segal works at the junction of the “Society of the performance” and “Society of People”. In such a risky and pragmatic for purists or radical comrades, a trick of this situist is concluded.

Combining different strategies is a condition for its success. The method of dedication, which Seagal proclaims, involves the work of the audience memory - the “Politics of the Vychan” (Claire Bishop). As it was remembered, it was. Or not quite so - variations are inevitable. Segal stands on this sensitive platform, vibrates and plays with visitors to museums.

Its “hybrid” art combines the entertainment, and the reflexivity, and the production of a new experience of the museum visitor - Segal works at the junction of the “Society of the performance” and “Society of People”.

The subversive activity of his situations occurs in the scenery, alien to them, as in the Hall of Socialist paintings by Gerasimov with Stalin, Voroshilov and the first horse. The “kiss”, which two dancers, quoting plastic elements from another history of art (from Klimt, Roden, Brankuzi to someone else), are reproduced on the floor under the views of totalitarian giants, initiates conflicts that are irreducible to the only interpretation. Unless the conjugation of intimacy and monumentality, distance and tact, social and bodily is obvious in such a counterpoint, alienating portraits of leaders of the parallel, unbearable sensual kisses, embrace. At the same time, the visitor to the museum does not always become a spectator of the Segalovsky structure. Watching such people is a special pleasure. They intentionally or unconsciously miss the work of performers, but they are attentively mixed on the socialist scale. Of course, the audience who observes “tripartite football” (sport, invented by the artist Asger Journ) between a decoration background, performers and visitors to the museum, and the museum who took the dance couple for visitors, only completely free from apology/criticism of such art. The conclusion of the performers in this hall can be read as a promotion, protesting in relation to the background on the walls or indifferent to it. In any case, the partisan of Segal is manifested in the fact that visitors are not identified with kissers. The spectacle designed for the “Society of the performance” is still destroyed in the name of the production of spectator experience, and not the goods against which, as everyone knows, the situists of the first call rebelled. But you can sell on art market because “pure experience” is also a product, albeit intangible and important as air.

For all that, Segal accompanies the “kiss” with another situation, plumping the abilities of visitors/spectators to another phase of perception. Two artists in the costumes of caretakers work out their refrain in the next room with the paintings of Deineki, Laktionov, where “this is propaganda” (2002) with false tenderness. The banality of the slogan is alienated easily, elegant. So Segal makes a dialectical revaluation of ideological and artistic material. So he enters into a dialogue with the classical concept of long -standing situations - Detournement (deviation, change in direction).

The slogan, brought by repetition to comic, loses the “trademark”, and Segal, travesting the status of the author, approves it. Time -spent ideas or meanings receive a new interpretation. But since the situations last in museums for a certain period, they are again subjected to oblivion.

A flexible artist and political economist, Segal does not refuse “aesthetic creation”, but does not neglect the political claims of his art. It includes the “dominance of the performance” in the context, which shakes the performance - decoration (“this is propaganda”) and performive (“dance creates and destroys the final product”). Perhaps the desire of Segal, if not “revolutionize his own life” of a person and the viewer, as Guy Debor wrote in the “Report on the construction of situations”, then revolutionize his perception, understanding situations, remains unshakable. Such is the Segalov version of the "partisan propaganda."

Offering a new version of the “kiss” in the dark room of the Ruin pavilion, where the visitor's eye should get used to to distinguish the contours of the performers, Segal problematizes the physiological, aesthetic aspects of visual art. So he constructs a situation that literally cancel the spectacular basis of the performance already in the narrowest meaning of the word.

The dark room was preceded by the situation “this progress” (2006) - a replica to the drift of old situations, that is, the technique of passing through different spaces. (However, the word d é rive On Argo means “wandering life”, but only partially refers to theatrical “boils.”) Each visitor becomes “live object” here, which is transferred to each other four volunteers who have passed the casting. The different age of volunteers is responsible for the seasons of the human destiny. And - for the continuation of the traditions of the "seasons". Ritual - unchanged - the question at the beginning of wandering in the pure, without objects, the museum of architecture remains the question of the child “What is progress?”. Further, personal communication of conductors and visitors occurs simultaneously according to the intended and impromptu scheme. The measure of both depends on the agility of a living object. The reports of my acquaintances, talked with volunteers, did not match at all. Only the path of the path that young boys and girls laid on the ground floor remained a common place, and the elderly aunts completed their memories on the third. So Segal gracefully reinterpreted the “psychogeography” of former situations. And so he transposed the ethics of the interaction of living objects on the way to a difficult aesthetics of interaction in a dark room.

The film "Square" was born from an installation with the same name. It is installed in several European towns. The square is a limited street space in which people (according to the concept) provide equality and assistance in case of trouble if someone got into it. The indifferent “witness effect” in such a territory turns into an effective effect of revenue. The hero of the film, who turned out to be outside the imaginary museum in an alarming situation, is looking for an emitted piece of paper with the phone, on which it is vital to call him. Respectable Bobo ( Bourgeois Bohemian ) is born, distraught, or, on the contrary, thinking back, in garbage bags filling the entire screen. Ruben Estlund removes this episode as a grand installation “on a landfill”. The director’s gaze admires the image of a non-passerler, but does not spare the image of a curator, gradually parting from the role of an egoist-seeker.

In the situation, “this progress” Tino Segal delegates to visitors to the real museum the role of objects that realize their subjectivity. His right to an inanimate life. The object that becomes the subject in the square of the square or in the museum space is not the other, but I, you, he, she, who believed at least for a short while in “this progress”.