BLOGS: Jacques Testard in NY – Tino Sehgal and Paris
Submitted by admin on February 24, 2010 – 8:16 amNo Comment
Tino Sehgal and Paris and the Avant-Garde at the Guggenheim
It looks like Notes From The Underground’s stock is rising in the US. This time around I did manage to secure not one but two press passes to the Guggenheim Museum (insert image 1) on the northern end of Museum Mile. Having seen Kandinsky there back in December, I had high hopes for the Paris and the Avant-Garde exhibition, hoping that the museum’s unique and ultra-modernist layout (insert image 2) would make for a progressive and innovative rendering of oft-exhibited artists such as Miró, Braque, or Picasso.
My guest and I were in for a shock when we were greeted by an empty museum. Empty of canvases, but certainly not empty of thronging crowds of tourists and arty New Yorkers alike. Usually, the spiral ramp is where the main exhibition is on show, leading the museum-goer around and upwards to the climactic heights where art and architecture come together in an inimitable style. Oddly, the walls were bare, but the museum full. I felt wronged by the museum staff, taken for a ride, shown up as an amateur. I also felt self-righteous in the knowledge that NFTU’s burgeoning fame had allowed me to skip a massive queue that stretched out around the corner on the snowy streets of New York. Smug, in fact, that I had bested those that would pay and queue to get into an empty museum.
And then, I saw a couple writhing around passionately on the floor, kissing and groping each other right in the middle of the otherwise empty main room. People stared, and the wardens said nothing. I looked at my ticket stub: ahead of the Parisian clique on the ticket’s hierarchy of shows was the name Tino Sehgal, whom I have since discovered is a British-German artist whose work revolves around the idea of ‘constructed situations’, or situations which involve one or more people carrying out instructions conceived by the artist. This particular piece, called The Kiss, was not particularly enthralling. It was daring, perhaps a little shocking, but constrained by its conceptuality. It was also difficult to take it seriously on that particular day: I happened to have been visiting the Guggenheim on Valentine’s Day.
A little bemused at the Museum’s barrenness, we walked on up the spiral, hoping to locate the Parisians in one of the building’s annexes. Within about ten seconds, a young girl of about ten walked up to us, introduced herself, and asked us to follow her, claiming that she was an exhibition by Tino Sehgal. I was not on the receiving end of this introduction: my guest was, and he promptly turned down the offer of a museum stroll with a child, stuttering the words: “Err, no, I think we’re going this way.” But the museum was empty, and the kid did say that she was part of an exhibition, so after collusive consultation, we returned to the somewhat offended child and asked her to lead the way.
“What is Progress?” she asked of us, while leading us up the spiral ramp. We struggled to take her seriously at first, but managed to eke out an acceptable definition for her before she passed us on to an acne-ridden adolescent who led us further up the path of progress. We talked about morality, we talked about the differences between the ideas of individual and societal progress, and all the while we walked up and around.
Suddenly, he disappeared off behind us and was replaced by Stacy, a few years older yet again, and taking us to a next level of conversation. Progress, she seemed to want us to understand, in her understanding of Socrates as an existentialist, is best when taken at the level of the individual: for society to progress, we each have to unlock the key to our own selves and progress as individuals. As we approached the top of the spiral, Stacy vanished behind a pillar, and we were led further up by an older lady, who told us the fable-like story of her own progress through life – a case study of the ‘progress-in-individuals’ idea constructed and fashioned by Sehgal.
Whilst those sceptical of conceptual art will brush this exhibit off as yet another proof of its pretention and failure, Sehgal’s This Progress actually works on different levels, and should not be dismissed as such. It makes great use of one of the most spectacular venues for art in the world. It also challenges the museum visitor to engage with the artefact itself, as he becomes an active component of the art itself, rather than a mere spectator. It also ensures that the uniqueness of each individual’s museum experience. It reminded me of Janet Cardiff’s work, one of the most interesting conceptual artists of recent years, and can be counted among the more complex strand of conceptual art, as compared to the shallowness of works such as Warhol’s Brillo Boxes.
By contrast, the Paris and the Avant-Garde exhibition seemed dull. It had indeed been relegated to the outer reaches of the museum, and offered nothing that has not been done before. In fact, those Londoners who saw the Aimé Maeght exhibition at the Royal Academy a while back would have seen a better curated and more extensive version of the same show. The two hanging Calder sculptures made up for what was an otherwise dull exposition of Miró’s early Surrealism and of Braque and Picasso’s Cubist period (did you know, by the way, that at one point there painting was so similar that they couldn’t tell each other’s canvases apart?).
There was also a good Anish Kapoor exhibit called Memory (insert image 3). A huge cast-iron submarine-like contraption filled an entire room, so much so that one could only see it from different perspectives at different times, meaning that one had to construct a vision of the whole from memory. The ultimate vision was of its dark inside, a gaping black hole of nothingness which Nietzsche would no doubt have thrown himself into head first (insert image 4).
For a more comprehensive analysis of Sehgal, check out: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/magazine/17seghal-t.html?pagewanted=all
Other than that, I’ll soon be posting an interview with Lorin Stein, senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York City. He edited, amongst other works, The Savage Detectives and 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and has written for the LRB, the NYRB, Harper’s, and The Paris Review.
