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The tubes are gold and surround the dinner party-goers — in the spirit of a nimbus or halo in historical art. The least expensive and most effective option for that much gold (don't laugh): thirty cans of spray paint. There was a real nimbus of gold floating in our studio for a good 12 hours after we painted.
This photo is after the set is built, but before we painted the tubes gold. One piece we've thought about a lot is Bernini's The Ecstasy of St Theresa. Bernini is one of those influences we come back to frequently.
Bruce Nauman, Self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1966, C-type print [source]
Bruce Nauman is going to represent the United States in the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Here's where we were at as of Thursday morning. Tomorrow: images of the costumes.
We're starting to stack the tubes to create the wall of tubes. So far, the strategy described in the previous post is working.
We're using an 18-gauge brad nailer (see this and this) to attach the tubes to the wood frame. We thought that would be easy. Wrong. In our first attempt we got about 15 tubes up before half of them fell off and went rolling across the room. In that system we only attached the tubes together and every fourth tube to the frame so that the tubes could be arranged organically. Although we got the organic look, it just wasn't strong enough to support these heavy 25 lb. tubes.
In our second attempt we nailed "the heck" out of the main supporting tubes, but it still felt weak. We didn't have the confidence that this system would still work once several rows of tubes were installed above the first row.
After a lot of time scratching our heads, we got the idea to install plywood strips to our 4x4 structure that would allow us to easily brad nail all tubes in all positions (see image above). This created a substantially stronger base while allowing for the required organic arrangement. It worked splendidly.
We find that every complex problem takes at least 3 tries to get it right.
We've started construction on the set (actually started last week). This frame has to hold 3400 lbs. of cardboard tubes.
BTW, you might remember that we purchased our first impact driver a few monthes ago. These things are incredible. Ours had no problem driving the the 10" long 1/2" wide lag bolts that secure these 4x4's. It's a delight to have the right tool for the job.
Last night we rented a 14-foot U-Haul truck so we could pick up the materials for the video set we're building this week. What you see here is 138 industrial cardboard tubes, 8'' diameter, 30.5'' long. These tubes are the central building component in the dining room scene.
It took Murray and I three hours, working non-stop, to unload the truck and get those tubes to our studio.
Tino Sehgal at Frieze Art Fair, 2004 [source]
It's not often that performance art surprises and challenges my assumptions. Call it an unfair bias from a former performance artist who has given up the medium in favor of video, a decision that was many years and conversations in the making.
The state of performance in the 21st century is lukewarm at best, rife with reheated investigations of body, gender and otherness: conversations that were so elegantly explored in the heyday of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Even performance artists like Chris Burden and Vito Acconci have moved on to more diverse pursuits, like bridge-building and utopian architecture.
It's a daunting challenge to make live performance relevant in this commercial, object-oriented art world, and yet: there is Tino Sehgal, at a 57th street blue-chip gallery, with no props, installation or costumes, breathing new life into the genre. Sehgal's performance work, This situation, like the best conceptual art, is held up on the ephemeral scaffold of a simple good idea, well executed.
In short, six "players" working in 4-hour shifts, gather in a gallery to engage in conversation. As viewers enter the room, the players greet them with the musical drone "....welcome... to this... situation," and then change the subject of conversation. There is a choreographed formula of tai chi-like movement that shifts the players around the room, and each new conversation begins with one of the players reciting a challenging quote that, during the time we were in the gallery, ranged wildly from philosophy to economics to personal phobias.
Here's what is different about this piece: the performers themselves are empowered to create fresh content, but under heavy artistic direction; audience interaction is accepted but unnecessary; and the performers are equipped with enough formula to keep the piece on-track regardless of any unknown variables.
Unlike the "happenings" of yesteryear, where the audience itself was often the performance and anything they might do unawares might become the artwork’s content, Sehgal's elegant and utterly postmodern work has both the precision and the agility to modify meaning based on the specific slice of conversation that the viewer happens to interrupt. This situation speaks to the contemporary zeitgeist with such persuasion that it might, in fact, make great strides towards reinvigorating that old medium of live performance.
Tino Sehgal
Marian Goodman Gallery
30 November 2007 - 10 January 2008
