BEFORE

I’ve decided on the odd but I think appropriate approach of starting to write about Tino Sehgal before seeing the exhibition because so much discussion and disclosure has taken place about it, a lot of it on web-based networking sites such as Facebook and art sites such as Artnet, and most of it in reaction to Sehgal’s efforts to control “the situation” and his brand. This discourse is part of the total experience of a project that for some is important, even transformative of the nature of art, precisely insofar as it produces discussion, not in and of itself as an artwork/performance piece.

The Guggenheim exhibition contained two performances: “Kiss,” located in the museum’s rotunda, in which a couple lock lips and limbs in emulation of a series of great art-historical embraces; and “This Progress,” the show’s more elaborate centerpiece, which occupied the central ramp and to which my comments here pertain. In advance of going to the Guggenheim, it is amazing how much I already know about a piece that seems like it could only possibly work if you came upon it without any prior knowledge. Artist Loren J. Munk (a.k.a. James Kalm) and others have managed to film their encounter with “This Progress,” posting these records on Facebook and YouTube in defiance of Sehgal’s prohibition of photographic documentation of his work. Indeed artists and art writers have found Sehgal’s injunction against documentation a rule that had to be disobeyed. Something about his canny use of all the marketing strategies involved with creating a buzz around your work has made people who usually pride themselves on their comfort with the ways contemporary art is meant to push at our buttons want to violate the premises of a conceptual performance artwork that purports to question art institutions, the exhibition format, and the traditional artwork and art market. In this regard I recommend Ben Davis’s “Photos for Tino” about Sehgal’s injunction against photographic documentation as an instance of market manipulation.

My own critical hackles were first raised by a New York Times profile on Sehgal because the author deployed a mechanism of art-historical validation I have identified as “patrilineage” (Mira Schor, “Patrilineage,” Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). This mechanism does not require that an artist be directly compared to a great artist of the past; it is enough if the two names occupy the same sentence: “If you regard Sehgal as a twenty-first-century sculptor who abjures digging stone out of a ravaged earth, then the interviews that he conducted of grade-school children and teenage college students . . . were the ecologically informed equivalent of the scouting missions that Michelangelo made to the marble quarries of Carrara” (Arthur Lubow, “Live Sculptures? Conceptual Encounters? Tino Sehgal Makes Art that Leaves Behind No Trace: The Immaterialist,” New York Times Magazine [January 17, 2010]: 27). Sehgal/Michelangelo? I doubt a reporter would think that up without a little help from the artist mastermind.

Other responses included the painter Susanna Heller, who recounted on WNYC radio her visit to the preview of the exhibition. Heller, a passionate painter/object maker/art-world bulls**t hater, loved it. She made a good case for the experience of the work as a dream, where people appear, talk to you, disappear, turn into other people, and found the disjointed conversation extremely liberating and joyful. However, reading Sean Capone’s thoughtful consideration of the piece on Facebook, “Speed Dating at a Strip Club: THIS PROGRESS by Tino Sehgal” (January 30, 2010)—via one of Jerry Saltz’s discussion threads, and also posted on Capone’s blog—I recognized some of my own views regarding Sehgal’s earlier piece “This Situation, 2007” at Marian Goodman Gallery (November 30, 2007–January 10, 2008), particularly the fact that its high seriousness verged on unintentional satire or even camp, and that you could not get the participants in that piece to respond to the actual situation. “This Situation” influences my thoughts as I prepare to see the current show.

DURING

I arrive at the Guggenheim Museum on February 14, 2010, with a prepared answer to what I already knew was the opening question of “This Progress”: “What is progress?” “Progress is the idea that things get better as time goes forward.” Sehgal’s performers, or “interpreters,” have a script, so why can’t I? I composed myself at the bottom of the ramp in order to have as open an attitude as I could given my foreknowledge of what was ahead, and began my progress. First I encountered a cluster of children who looked back at me warily and let me go by. The crowd was as thick as Rockefeller Center at Christmas. Then one little girl followed me, introducing herself and the piece. She asked The Question, I gave My Answer. She asked for an example, I said something conventional, cures for diseases, blah blah. I asked her what she thought it was, and, as per Sehgal’s instructions, she said she was more interested in what I thought. She then abandoned me. As I later learned, this was probably a mistake. She didn’t lead me to the next interpreter as she was supposed to. It was mildly amusing to look down at a very small person nearly invisible in the crowd of adults, though her size within that crowd may have led to her dropping the ball (me). As I walked farther, deliberately ambling in order to signal my receptivity to whatever I thought was supposed to happen next, I noticed two young men lurking in a keyhole shaped portal, but they let me pass. I thought, This is like waiting for a blind date in a bar. I looked hopefully at each likely candidate but no one was there to meet me.

But being a wallflower in “This Progress” gave me a chance to consider the museum itself.

There are at least two dreams shared by most New York artists: having a one-person show in a major New York museum is the first, obviously; the other is to be alone in a museum. But usually that dream includes being alone in the museum for the purpose of being able to see and experience visual artworks at one’s own pace and to have, for a moment, the illusion that one owns them. The dream is not to be in a crowded museum emptied of visual artworks and noisier than Penn Station. It is also a commonly held view that Frank Lloyd Wright’s building itself is the principal artwork, a sculpture vying for attention with the artworks stuck into its overweening aesthetic program. However, in the white glare of “This Progress,” it seemed to me that although beautiful it was lacking the tension that flat artworks create against the curved walls. The artworks may not need the Guggenheim’s walls, but it turns out the walls do need the artworks, unless perhaps the museum was totally empty, a white spiral object inside a metaphoric white cube. Crowds of people milling around in dark winter coats mess up that scene.

Now I passed by a dimly lit stairwell area where a group of middle-aged interpreters lurked. Were they on a coffee break? I wandered unaccompanied up the ramp to the end, where I ran into friends who, not knowing about the piece, had taken the elevator up to the top and thus had no idea what they were supposed to be experiencing!

OK, I decided I had to go back downstairs and start again. This time an older child assertively introduced himself with extended hand. I decided to give the same answer to the opening question, and he was better able to engage with what I had said. He efficiently passed me on, with a recap of our conversation to that point, to what had to be a Central Casting exemplar of a skinny, pimply teenager with whom I had a fairly sensible conversation. He felt that from what I was saying progress could only ever be apprehensible in retrospect, giving as an example that a family snapshot may have been taken in a moment of what seemed like strife but seen later shows a happier time. But maybe he says that to all the girls.

He in turn handed me over to a thirty-something fellow whose opening gambit was that he found that these days he was more boring and stuck in his ideas than when he was “younger” and did I experience the same thing? Now here was the one interaction where I can say that I acted with the kind of liberation from normative conversation for which Heller loves Sehgal’s work: I told the guy that I was more interesting as I got older, partly because I worked at remaining conscious and open to new ideas and partly because I was interesting to begin with! He didn’t know me so why not say it, for once.

At the next nodule of “interpreters” my self-styled boring companion did not hand me over for what would have been the final stage of my progress, a middle-aged (my age or older) interpreter. I overheard fragments of conversation as to whom to pick up next that led me to believe they were curating from the crowd. Thus ended my progress. A later discussion with an interpreter to whom I was introduced socially after the end point of the show revealed that over 2,700 people had attended on one Saturday, and that there were problems addressing all visitors. I did get the feeling that the older the “interpreters” were the more able they were to converse and the less strictly they observed the rule of not talking about the piece. My interlocutor loved doing it and talked to people about what she was interested in even though it might only peripherally be connected to the theme of progress.

Each conversation I had lasted perhaps two minutes, maximum. My interactions were not uninteresting, but they were no more engaging than conversations I have with my friends and students every day. It was enjoyable and it might be addictive or at least would enhance or increase one’s experience to keep on going around, to see how each interaction might differ, and whether, like Groundhog Day, one might eventually experience progress through what seemed like circular repetition.

AFTER

I left thinking about three performance works that form the revolutionary pre-history of Sehgal’s spectacle of “improvisation and the ephemeral” (the basic instruction given to the interpreter with whom I spoke). After Allan Kaprow’s death, I read an appreciation of his art by Paul McCarthy, who recalled a “work” in which Kaprow instructed a gallery dealer to “take a garden hose and water the sidewalk every day before the gallery opens”: “The piece essentially went unnoticed. It wasn’t announced; there were no photographs or indication by the gallery that anything had happened. And yet it was a kind of participation” (Paul McCarthy, “Final Scores,” Artforum 44, no. 10 [Summer 2006]: 325). Kaprow didn’t tell anyone to NOT take pictures. Rather he lived out the premise of his concept of “un-art.” He had enacted or, anticipating Sehgal, had others enact for him the invocation of everyday life that still poses such a vexing challenge to the market, including the artist’s marketing of self. If Sehgal de-art-contextualized himself, de-Duchamped his gesture, and, without the promotional machine he manipulates so effectively, sent his interpreters into, say, Penn Station, with little children cheerfully approaching unprepared passersby with exactly the same script—“This is a work by Tino Seghal”—something unanticipated might occur. Something like passing by a woman in a large papier-mâché red bunny headdress silently extending a loaf of bread in each hand to people getting out of the subway at the corner of Prince and Broadway one day in the 1980s. Only through a later lecture by performance-art theorist Peggy Phelan did I learn that this was indeed “art” by Angelika Festa (Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, New York: Routledge, 1993, 152–158).

Another “performance” also came to mind: at CalArts in around 1971–72, Jeremy Shapiro, a professor in the Critical Studies department, sat in the library and you could check him out like a book and do anything you wanted with him. I didn’t “check him out,” but I learned as much from his gesture as from any teacher I ever studied with, because I remember the lesson about teaching and learning that even hearing about this performance gave me: that teachers are resources only insofar as you recognize and use them as such—in the words of rule #2 of Sister Corita Kent’s “Rules for Students and Teachers,” “General duties of a student—pull everything out of your teacher.”¹ I would not call Shapiro a Michelangelo of relational aesthetics avant la lettre, but he certainly created as glowing an experience as any that I suspect I will be left with by the cloud of rhetoric and buzz around Sehgal’s “This Progress”—or the piece itself.