The orchestrated crowd: choreography, chorus, conceit in Tino Sehgal’s These Associations

Abstract

In 2012 artist Tino Sehgal created These Associations, the last in the Unilever series of commissions for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London. Within this space Sehgal transformed and challenged the role of the public and ‘participants’ or interpreters in the creation of a relational art piece which represents ‘[…] a direct response to the shift from a goods to a service-based economy’ (Bishop 2004: 54). In common with earlier works by Sehgal, and with the ‘social turn’ of relational aesthetics, These associations (2012), is centrally concerned with alternative modes of production. And as has been extensively noted elsewhere (Umathum 2009, Pape, Solomon and Thain, 2014, Green 2017) Sehgal is uninterested in adding to the ever-increasing mass of objects in the world. Instead he asks; how do we think of production in our times? How (and what) can we produce without producing objects?