Panza also asked Judd to sign contracts confirming ownership of his purchases. For the collector, such agreements were a logical extension of his interest in explicitly conceptual works like Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, which were sold on the basis of certificates and instructions. In Judd’s case, however, the written agreements marked the beginning of a series of misunderstandings culminating in Panza’s suggestion that contested works should be resolved by their respective lawyers—a proposal Judd angrily denounced as bringing him “within the door of the insane asylum.”

Reasons for deploying behind-the-scenes contracts and certificates run from practical to philosophical, perhaps the only consistent theme being that there is no consistency. Indeed, professionals coming from other fields often express amazement about how much art-world business is conducted without written agreements (from selling objects to realizing projects). Sometimes that’s okay, and sometimes not—with pitfalls dramatically illustrated by the 2007 implosion of Christoph Büchel’s unfinished MASS MoCA installation into a bitter and protracted legal battle.

And now we are presented with the work of Tino Sehgal, whose refusal of documentation includes elaborate oral contracts, rather than written agreements, that add layers of difficulty to collecting and exhibiting his work. Sehgal has insistently slammed shut a backdoor connection to performance and related practices, where claims about a work’s immediacy somehow coexist with its widespread dissemination through enduring documentation. Yet it is equally important to recognize that a denial of materiality is hardly radical as such. In addition to the already long history of conceptual art, one can point to the significant role of intellectual property in today’s global economy.

Yes, there are way too many things in the world, as Sehgal has observed, and emptying the museum of its objects is a way of dramatizing that condition. There’s also something intriguing, even amusing, about the museum’s embrace of such willfully resistant work. But I am left to wonder how the lack of materiality will reverberate outside the museum’s walls, and if not, whether we are witnessing the transformation of institutional critique into a version of the formalism once understood as its opposite.

I feel a strong affinity with Sehgal’s art. We both began our careers studying political economy and then moved on to another discipline. Sehgal says he wanted to escape the limiting nature of political economy, or what he has called its trap: as an approach mostly oriented to critique, it is forced to affirm that which it wants to do away with. And so he has found a form that allows him to dramatically change the conversation. He forces the viewer to engage with new ideas about money, economics, the market, and our society, thereby pulling us into a dialogue that is no longer happening outside the museum.

Peter Brown raises the all-important question of materiality in Sehgal’s work. The absence of objects is a powerful, disconcerting experience for most of us, who live in a world cosseted by stuff. But I suspect there will be a growing receptivity to the challenge he lays before the viewer—the destruction of our planetary home through a surfeit of goods is an idea that resonates strongly among many North Americans.

Let me end with a comment about Peter’s final question: what do we make of Sehgal’s embrace of the commercial world while also tweaking it? I find his stance to be brilliant. Political economics teaches that things without a price command little or no value in our world. Demanding a market price insists on the value of Sehgal’s art and therefore the importance of his message. At the same time, he shuns the bourgeois practice of written contracts, creating instead a return to the pre-capitalist moral economy of trust and reciprocity. But perhaps the most important of the singular exchange practices he enforces is the demand that the immaterial be valorized (to use a favorite piece of jargon from political economy). That is simply superb.

PANELIST

Peter asks us to ponder the question of leaving no trace. It’s an interesting prompt to speak about absence, especially in reference to an ephemeral exhibition that, in large part, only exists because we who interact with the works exist. Sehgal seems to refocus our attention away from things and back to the relationships between us. It is only within the framework of relationships that we can truly explore what Peter describes as “the differences in values between those who fully embrace our economic system and those who derive their values based on the good of society and the Earth’s living systems.”