Tragic event overshadows Tate Modern opening
Tino Sehgal's storytelling takes
centre stage in vast Turbine Hall
By Gareth Harris. Web only
Published online: 26 July 2012
Snorkeling off the Italian island of Elba ;
a mother’s tears as her son departs for university; the trauma behind erasing a
tattoo: these are some of the tales told by participants in Tino Sehgal’s
commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London
Sehgal’s team strike up
disconcerting, affecting conversations with visitors, interspersing these
intimacies with manic movements choreographed by the Berlin-based artist; the
storytellers start running in a frenzied circular fashion in pursuit of an
invisible quarry, play tag and chant: “Even in the technological age.”
Chris Dercon, the director of Tate
Modern, says that Sehgal has transformed the museum into a "biopolitical
and anarchic experience”. Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of London
But not everyone is impressed. The
critic Alastair Sooke wrote in the Daily Telegraph that he experienced: “A
whiff of artifice about their stories, which feel polished and rehearsed.
Sehgal does not hit the spontaneous social interaction that he strives for.”
The participants are not actors although they are paid, working four-hour
shifts.
Sehgal sells his work, or
“constructed situations”, by means of verbal transactions in the presence of a
lawyer with no written contract. Instructions on how to re-enact his works are
delivered by word-of-mouth, with collectors under strict orders never to
photograph or video the works, a prohibition that he extends to museums.
The opening of These Associations
on the evening of 24 July was overshadowed by the death of a man who fell from
an external balcony of Tate Modern late that afternoon.
Sehgal is the 13th artist
commissioned by the Tate for the Unilever series. According to the news agency
Bloomberg, Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods conglomerate, has yet to
decide if it will continue sponsoring the annual commission; the series was
renewed in 2008 for a five-year period. The Turbine Hall is due to temporarily
close next year to enable construction to go ahead of the gallery's Herzog and
de Meuron-designed extension.
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