Art Fag City at The L Magazine: Tino Sehgal Doesn’t Make Much Progress

POST BY PADDY JOHNSON

Image via: c-monster

This week at The L Magazine I discuss Tino Sehgal’s exhibition at The Guggenheim. Here’s what I thought.

I can’t get over the feeling that I wrecked my enjoyment of Tino Sehgal’s This Progress at the Guggenheim by thinking about it too much. I know writing such things makes me sound anti-intellectual, but seeing as how I went from genuinely liking the piece to leaving angry, there might be some substance behind these worries.
Now entirely emptied of its contents save for visitors, Sehgal’s exhibition at the Guggenheim consists of two pieces: The Kiss, a performance in which two people make out in slow motion in the rotunda space, and This Progress, an experiential work that takes place on the ramps of the museum. There’s a little too much this-is-a-really-important-kiss-because-it’s-deliberate-art feel to the former, but Sehgal’s primary piece boasts a few more memorable moments. The most enjoyable part of The Kiss was witnessing a one-year-old baby frantically crawling toward the performers as though it wanted to participate. A parent intervened, and that was the end of that.
The show’s centerpiece, This Progress, begins at the foot the museum’s rotunda with a small girl asking your definition of progress, and ends with at the top of the ramp with a middle-aged person talking abstractly about the concept. In short, volunteers discussing the idea of progress guide a visitor’s entire walk through the museum. The physical representation of this idea seemed rather elegant as I walked up the ramp with my tour guide, though that assessment only held true so long as I didn’t think about it at great length. It is, after all, an awfully simplistic representation of a complex idea.

Read the full piece here.

http://tommoody.us tom moody
Three words: child labor laws. Your great-grandfather was William Hadaway? (I just googled–now that’s progress.)
http://tommoody.us tom moody
Three words: child labor laws. Your great-grandfather was William Hadaway? (I just googled–now that’s progress.)
zack
“I took the tour again, determined to draw further meaning out of the work”
you have more patience than I would have for this. I still say they needed an excuse to empty and refinish the floors on the ramp, and this was a clever cover so they could continue to charge admission while making repairs at night.
zack
“I took the tour again, determined to draw further meaning out of the work”
you have more patience than I would have for this. I still say they needed an excuse to empty and refinish the floors on the ramp, and this was a clever cover so they could continue to charge admission while making repairs at night.
http://matthewlusk.blogspot.com matthew lusk
Frankly, this is a little disappointing. I would’ve thought that you would’ve given this a more considered response, though I don’t think your final answer is as contradictory, or as much a rebuke of the work, as you might like to think it is. It might be accidentally right on the mark.
http://matthewlusk.blogspot.com matthew lusk
Frankly, this is a little disappointing. I would’ve thought that you would’ve given this a more considered response, though I don’t think your final answer is as contradictory, or as much a rebuke of the work, as you might like to think it is. It might be accidentally right on the mark.
http://matthewlusk.blogspot.com matthew lusk
Frankly, this is a little disappointing. I would’ve thought that you would’ve given this a more considered response, though I don’t think your final answer is as contradictory, or as much a rebuke of the work, as you might like to think it is. It might be accidentally right on the mark.
http://tommoody.us tom moody
Frankly, it is a little disappointing that you didn’t flesh out your description with photos of your “guides.” Just kidding. This type of project could be powerful without museum sanction: tag-team free-lance docents take you up the Guggenheim ramp and ask you psychotherapeutic questions, interrupting your train of thought like torture interrogators. Over and over the gang is caught and given the bum’s rush but new gang members keep sneaking back in. Eventually the museum issues a ban on all children, determining that “age progression” with kids at the bottom of the ramp is the gang’s main methodology.
http://tommoody.us tom moody
Frankly, it is a little disappointing that you didn’t flesh out your description with photos of your “guides.” Just kidding. This type of project could be powerful without museum sanction: tag-team free-lance docents take you up the Guggenheim ramp and ask you psychotherapeutic questions, interrupting your train of thought like torture interrogators. Over and over the gang is caught and given the bum’s rush but new gang members keep sneaking back in. Eventually the museum issues a ban on all children, determining that “age progression” with kids at the bottom of the ramp is the gang’s main methodology.
onomato
How many people do you think replied that progress is an illusion? I suspect quite a few, though not as many as the ones who equate progress with linear growth, complexity or day hikes and ski lifts. How about physical rehabilitation to get back to where you once belonged?
I’d view this installation as more of a tableau vivant. the “how are you doing today” of the big box store has been replaced with a more philosophical greeting of the robot confessional – “what concerns you?” The question is a bit of misdirection, as if the Mona Lisa always inquired who the fine fellow behind you was, and when you turned to look, she floated herself off the wall and bit your neck. The only thing missing here is an electric cart and some red lit ground mist. Does that desire for theatrics make me anti-intellectual or a hedonist? Both?
The fact is, you probably don’t go through your day like a teenager raging against the machine – or like a college philosophy major asking what progress is – hopefully you are a coldly rational adult asking why you just paid 15 dollars to lift the curtain when you could have paid a little more for a helicopter tour to see the Statue of Liberty, which is a gift from the people of France that represents progress towards more liberty, and only disappears when viewed from a rotating stage.
onomato
How many people do you think replied that progress is an illusion? I suspect quite a few, though not as many as the ones who equate progress with linear growth, complexity or day hikes and ski lifts. How about physical rehabilitation to get back to where you once belonged?
I’d view this installation as more of a tableau vivant. the “how are you doing today” of the big box store has been replaced with a more philosophical greeting of the robot confessional – “what concerns you?” The question is a bit of misdirection, as if the Mona Lisa always inquired who the fine fellow behind you was, and when you turned to look, she floated herself off the wall and bit your neck. The only thing missing here is an electric cart and some red lit ground mist. Does that desire for theatrics make me anti-intellectual or a hedonist? Both?
The fact is, you probably don’t go through your day like a teenager raging against the machine – or like a college philosophy major asking what progress is – hopefully you are a coldly rational adult asking why you just paid 15 dollars to lift the curtain when you could have paid a little more for a helicopter tour to see the Statue of Liberty, which is a gift from the people of France that represents progress towards more liberty, and only disappears when viewed from a rotating stage.
onomato
How many people do you think replied that progress is an illusion? I suspect quite a few, though not as many as the ones who equate progress with linear growth, complexity or day hikes and ski lifts. How about physical rehabilitation to get back to where you once belonged?
I’d view this installation as more of a tableau vivant. the “how are you doing today” of the big box store has been replaced with a more philosophical greeting of the robot confessional – “what concerns you?” The question is a bit of misdirection, as if the Mona Lisa always inquired who the fine fellow behind you was, and when you turned to look, she floated herself off the wall and bit your neck. The only thing missing here is an electric cart and some red lit ground mist. Does that desire for theatrics make me anti-intellectual or a hedonist? Both?
The fact is, you probably don’t go through your day like a teenager raging against the machine – or like a college philosophy major asking what progress is – hopefully you are a coldly rational adult asking why you just paid 15 dollars to lift the curtain when you could have paid a little more for a helicopter tour to see the Statue of Liberty, which is a gift from the people of France that represents progress towards more liberty, and only disappears when viewed from a rotating stage.
onomato
How many people do you think replied that progress is an illusion? I suspect quite a few, though not as many as the ones who equate progress with linear growth, complexity or day hikes and ski lifts. How about physical rehabilitation to get back to where you once belonged?
I’d view this installation as more of a tableau vivant. the “how are you doing today” of the big box store has been replaced with a more philosophical greeting of the robot confessional – “what concerns you?” The question is a bit of misdirection, as if the Mona Lisa always inquired who the fine fellow behind you was, and when you turned to look, she floated herself off the wall and bit your neck. The only thing missing here is an electric cart and some red lit ground mist. Does that desire for theatrics make me anti-intellectual or a hedonist? Both?
The fact is, you probably don’t go through your day like a teenager raging against the machine – or like a college philosophy major asking what progress is – hopefully you are a coldly rational adult asking why you just paid 15 dollars to lift the curtain when you could have paid a little more for a helicopter tour to see the Statue of Liberty, which is a gift from the people of France that represents progress towards more liberty, and only disappears when viewed from a rotating stage.
http://JDSiazon.NeoImages.net JD Siazon
Not only did this show piss me off I almost feel that it doesn’t deserve a review. Analogous to Brice Marden’s retrospective at the MoMA three years ago, the Tino Sehgal show is a vacuous parody of an overly commercial and cerebral art world. His “Kiss” piece is an awkward nod to PDA while his “Progress” piece unabashedly exploits children while virtually transforming the museum itself into a long drawn-out sales pitch for Tino Sehgal himself. It would have been much more interesting if two handicapped people were performing the “Kiss” or maybe even dwarfs or two lesbian octogenarians. But Sehgal chooses instead a young and attractive interracial couple which is so last century.
And as for his piece “Progress” it would have been better in my opinion if old people met you at the bottom and children at the top. But, alas, Sehgal will be Sehgal for better or for worse.
http://JDSiazon.NeoImages.net JD Siazon
Not only did this show piss me off I almost feel that it doesn’t deserve a review. Analogous to Brice Marden’s retrospective at the MoMA three years ago, the Tino Sehgal show is a vacuous parody of an overly commercial and cerebral art world. His “Kiss” piece is an awkward nod to PDA while his “Progress” piece unabashedly exploits children while virtually transforming the museum itself into a long drawn-out sales pitch for Tino Sehgal himself. It would have been much more interesting if two handicapped people were performing the “Kiss” or maybe even dwarfs or two lesbian octogenarians. But Sehgal chooses instead a young and attractive interracial couple which is so last century.
And as for his piece “Progress” it would have been better in my opinion if old people met you at the bottom and children at the top. But, alas, Sehgal will be Sehgal for better or for worse.