peter schjeldahl on tino sehgal at the guggenheim

tino sehgal creates an anti-museum experience at the guggenheim through march 10th.

Never-Ending Story by Peter Schjeldahl (The New Yorker, February 15, 2010)

You will enjoy your visit to the Tino Sehgal whatchamacallit at the Guggenheim—“show” doesn’t fill the bill—or else expose yourself as a hopeless grouch. The thirty-four-year-old London-born artist’s “relational” works can seem chichi in theory—arch twists on the readymade—but they afford dizzying experiences. The museum is bare of everything but people. Young dancers, a man and a woman, mime lovemaking with flowing, stylized postures, on the ground floor. You may like that or not. But then you are met, as you ascend the ramp, by a relay of conversationalists—a child, a teen-ager, an adult, an oldster—who pose abstract issues (for starters, “What is progress?”) and seem fascinated by your views. I arrived at the top of the building with no clear sense of how I had got there. So I did it again, with different interlocutors but the same result. Now I’m remembering the encounters as a collection of short stories, of which I am the bumbling protagonist. They continue to unfold, endlessly. ♦

Posted by Madame Lamb on Monday, February 15, 2010 at 7:46 AM