Sharing Interiority:Notes on Tino Sehgal’s Guggenheim Solo Show

This paper presents an experiment in creative critical writing by focusing on my engagement—over the span of an entire day—with the two works presented in Tino Sehgal‟s solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from January 29 through March 10, 2010. While Kiss (2004) is a sculpture-in-motion, performed by a couple of professional dancers, This Progress (2007) is a relational installation which takes visitors through a series of conversations with “interpreters” (non-professional, paid actors), hired for this purpose. Structured around subjective retellings of my successive encounters with Sehgal‟s two pieces, which situate themselves at the intersection between performance and the visual arts, the paper draws on a range of contemporary writings in art and theatre/performance studies in order to highlight both the indebtedness of Sehgal‟s work to theatrical conventions and its simultaneous departure from, and continuation of, some of the principal tropes of relational aesthetics. Ultimately, these observations give rise to a reflection on the place of the face-to-face encounter within today‟s generalized drive toward ethically oriented community-formation in the growingly interconnected realms of contemporary art and performance