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| MAN IN GALLERY RUN OVER BY STATIONARY GHOST CAR |
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The processes of administration and elimination that presuppose the structure of a city reject that which cannot be usefully organized, such as abnormality, deviance, illness and death. Michel de Certeau’s exposition of this premise asserts that, “Progress allows an increasing number of these waste products to be reintroduced into administrative circuits and transforms even deficiencies (in health, security, etc.) into ways of making networks of order denser.”1 Is this performance then an incorporation of the aberrant into an ‘appropriate’ venue within the network of order, or proof that it is the unwillingness of individuals to engage with aberrant behavior that predicates its expulsion? The latter is certainly true, and it seems that the piece successfully creates tension between incorporation and pure aberration, by using the gallery space as a sort of institutional-aberration embassy.
Charlotte Segall is a professional painter and resident art-and-culture writer for MOFLO magazine.
(Above) Tino Sehgal, 2008 Performance at BASE / PROGETTI PER L'ARTE VIA SAN NICCOLÒ 18r / I - 50125 FIRENZE / ITALIA http://www.baseitaly.org/ photo courtesy of Charlotte Segall
1 Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Cultural Studies Reader: Second Edition, ed. by Simon During (Routledge: London and New York) 1993, pp. 129. |
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