Late last month, just outside Guadalajara, the sun was sinking into a bright pink sky as a crowd gathered in front of the Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ). It was a bustling Friday evening: the historic cobblestone pedestrian walkway was strung with electric lights and lined with vendors selling tchotchkes and street food. Anticipation was building for a new work by the renowned performance artist Tino Sehgal.
It was to be the crescendo of his self-titled exhibition, which runs through March 1 at the museum. “The work starts long before the exhibition starts,” said the museum’s director, Viviana Kuri Haddad, who curated the show with the artist. “Tino works with people. He creates relationships. He’s one of those artists who changes the way you see art. That happened to me when I saw one of his pieces for the first time. I don’t want to be cheesy, but it’s true. There is the before and the after. It’s a powerful experience.”
The plaza outside Estación MAZ, the extension of the Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ), with the Arcos de Zapopan at left. Photo by Alejandro Gallegos.
Andador 20 de Noviembre is an adaptation of These Associations, which debuted at the Tate Museum in 2012 and was staged at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo in 2016. It is named after this storied thoroughfare that links the museum’s two separate buildings. Without warning, the piece began, and it was like a cloud coalescing as members of the audience detached from their conversations and a hive mind activated. Locked in formation, the phalanx inched down the street in slow motion.
Sehgal, a Venice Biennale Golden Lion winner, is arguably the most famous performance-based artist next to Marina Abramović, and they share an interest in human contact, forging an electric bond with the viewer and pulling in everyone in the vicinity. But whereas Abramović exudes an almost oracular intensity—approachable in the sense of someone coming into contact with the divine—Sehgal, who mostly uses a cast of performers to enact his pieces, is the quintessential man behind the curtain. He can disperse and disappear into both his interpreters and his audience. Partly of Indian descent, born in London, raised in Germany, and now based in Berlin, bespectacled and dressed low-key, he rarely looks out of place.
Performers staging Tino Sehgal’s “These Associations” outside MAZ in Zapopan, Mexico. Photo by Carlos Hidalgo Valdes.
As the mass speeds up and descends towards the fountains, Sehgal, wearing a washed out orange button down and black jeans, hovers almost imperceptibly on the outskirts, mostly hidden behind café tables or along the sidewalk. His countenance shifts from indifferent to at times stern and his subtle direction comes in the form of a hurried gesture, signaling with his hand right at his mid-section to speed it up. To any passerby this would look like he is trying to signal someone to hurry it up, beat the traffic, stop staring in a shop window.
The jumbled mass of performers sped to a jog around the fountain at the bottom of the hill, surrounded by imposing statues of corn deities. They stopped to engage pedestrians with personal vignettes (one involved a family serving a pet rabbit for dinner after it had died of natural causes; another troupe member told of collapsing on the floor of her office and feeling the spirit of her mother passing).
Performers during the opening of the performance exhibition by artist Tino Sehgal curated by Luca Cerizza on February 2, 2018, in Turin, Italy. Photo: Giorgio Perottino/Getty Images for OGR
Once the initial surprise wore off, the charm did as well. This performance art vernacular—a population suddenly “activated”—has long been co-opted by social media, and what was unfolding could easily be construed as Sprite messaging. But just when I was getting pretty blasé, it started to hit. Two performers wrapped their necks around each other like swans and were singing some otherworldly incantation. Their voices were angelic and the harmonics synched, and the effect was profound, moving and earsplittingly beautiful. It ended for the night with the swarm carrying one aloft down the historic stretch like a reigning chieftain.
German artist Tino Sehgal poses with Golden Lion award for the best artist in Venice, Italy, May 31, 2013. Next to him stand Massimiliano Gioni, curator of the 55th Biennale and Paolo Baratta, president of the Bienalle. Photo: Felix Hoerhager. Picture alliance via Getty Images
The Street as Studio
It was the next afternoon, and Sehgal was back in the city of Zapopan fine-tuning, pulling some performers aside and quietly giving them directions while others were stopping passersby to tell their narratives. Others still were situated around the fountain, curled into balls in front of the jets so it looked like the water was spewing from their bodies.
When I asked Sehgal if he could sum up the theme, he replied, “I literally don’t have an elevator pitch, and I guess that’s a privilege that I don’t, after so many years. I could come up with it, but I prefer not to. I know what I was thinking at the time about what it means. What is the question of the collective? But now, I’m literally more like a craftsperson, trying to somehow make it work. Like, ‘What is the shift change at 2 o’clock?’” He continued, “Whatever I’m interested in doesn’t really matter.”
The artist Tino Sehgal. Photo by Bastian Achard. Courtesy of Bastian Achard and Dapper Dan Magazine.
Sehgal and I sat at a small outdoor café on Andador 20 de Noviembre. He prepped for the piece by studying hours of video shot along this pedestrian thoroughfare, and he’s barely left this small stretch since arriving in Zapopan ten days ago. He kept a watchful eye as his swarm passed us multiple times, doing sundry activities: completely laying down, walking backwards, etc. This performance will run for a month and close out his residency.
“They bring their own clothes,” Sehgal said. “We tell them not to have big writing. Like one had a T-shirt the other day saying ‘The Beatles,’ and then it becomes too explicit, where people broadcast their own little piece of meaning.” The casting process is dependent on the piece; for this one, it is a mélange of local creatives and amateurs combined with some of his regular Europe-based collaborators. “We tried to get a cross section of society,” Sehgal said. It’s a detail-oriented process. For a project at the Turbine in London, casting took a full year.
Finding Form
Sehgal was raised in the West German city of Düsseldorf and went on to study political economy and dance; these two fields would converge in his practice. “When I was 18 I didn’t think that they could coalesce into one thing,” he said. He eventually landed in post-wall Berlin in the 1990s. “Berlin was the city of funded theater, and at the same time, it was also the ’90s, this moment of eruption in the art scene there. So, I grew up in that kind of climate, where a lot was being brought together a bit randomly. And so for me, it was almost normal to bring [politics and dance] together.”
Performer in Tino Sehgal’s “These Associations” outside MAZ in Zapopan, Mexico. Photo by Carlos Hidalgo Valdes.
Sehgal was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, his hair askew. It is hard to imagine him as a dancer; he took his first ballet class at 19. “It took me a long time to understand the basics because I was a skateboarder,” he recalled. “That’s all about being loose and relaxed in the body. In dance I got into a little bit of trouble at school, I’d say, because I didn’t fully understand that in ballet and modern dance—which is all the same technically—you pull yourself up a little bit.” As he speaks, he makes a small upward gesture with his hand, tracing an invisible line through his center, and in the adjustment he subtly transforms himself, the grace he still holds is revealed. “And that’s the technique which lets your legs move freer in a way. It took me a long time to understand that. It was a slow process. I was coming from an alternative background.”
Music plays an important role in Sehgal’s work. Live, he refuses amplified playback, instead incorporating everything from songs he has written himself to transposed Beethoven. His personal listening is broad. “I go through phases. In the second half of my 40s, I cycled through things from my past. I had a phase where I went back to Faith No More’s Angel Dust. Young Gods—I literally didn’t listen to them for 25 years. They did this version of Terry Riley’s ‘In C’ that’s amazing.” He listened to Ministry, was brought up on Nine Inch Nails, and Sonic Youth. The André 3000 flute album was on repeat the last few years, he said. “But I don’t have streaming. I like to commit to music.”
The exterior of Estación MAZ. Photo by Alejandro Gallegos.
Choreographing Intimacy
As part of Sehgal’s exhibition at MAZ, two versions of his benchmark 2002 work Kiss have been staged there since November. “I was worried how it would be understood,” Haddad, the show’s curator, told me earlier, “but so far people have come out of the exhibition surprised, moved, and happy. Sometimes they don’t understand, but they call me a week later and tell me, ‘I’m still thinking about this.’”
The piece is a slow, sculptural pas de deux in which a couple’s romantic narrative is choreographed. It is also a refraction of a century of art history, with the performers echoing poses of famous lovers by Klimt, Brancusi, and Rodin. I didn’t pick up on any of that, but it didn’t diminish the visceral power of the piece, which is still shocking in its graceful suggestions of intimacy in this era of all-out OnlyFans abandon. In its romance and innocence, a love story set to movement, it can still be read a transgressive experience for many. Kiss, especially this iteration, is the Trump–Kennedy Center’s worst nightmare.
The minimal setting for Tino Sehgal’s Kiss at Museo de Arte de Zapopan. Courtesy of Sam Morris PR.
The rendition I saw was a queer interpretation with an untitled operatic segue that featured a heavenly musical interlude and then turned into a version of Kiss performed in almost complete darkness. Your eyes had to adjust before you could make out the forms and discern that they were completely nude. The undulating, morphing space between their bodies was like a shifting sculpture. It was beautiful. I told Sehgal it reminded me of the blue amorphous blob one sees when you huff a lot of really good poppers.
The pieces worked so well together, the sparse audience was rapt for the almost two and a half hour experience, and we all seemed to think that we were witnessing different acts of the same show. “I wouldn’t disagree with that,” Sehgal shrugged. “In the end, I don’t want to say distance, but I’m not super attached to this notion of art. At the end of the day, you come in there and say it’s an experience with three scenes. You can see it like that.” To Sehgal, the fluidity of perspective is part of the art.
The performers were set upon a sea of mauve carpet. Sehgal had to loosen his ephemeral dogma here—it was a means to an end. “When we started to rehearse here, Vivian [Kuri Haddad] was like, you can’t be naked on this floor. It tears up your skin,'” he recalled. “We got this carpet last minute. But I try to use what is there normally.”
The artist Tino Sehgal. Photo by Bastian Achard. Courtesy of Bastian Achard and Dapper Dan Magazine.
I ask Sehgal if he is anti-consumerist in his own life or if he collects fashion or fine furniture. “Yes and no,” he replied. “I have a nice couch by Patricia Urquiola, but I’ve had it for a while. I’m not the greatest shopper, but I would like to be a better one.”
He continued, “My work is a product to be consumed, if you put it in purely economic terms. A collector or a museum buys my work, then that’s a product which is being consumed, right? So, in that sense, I’m offering products for sale, but they’re immaterial, like insurance or any kind of rights that you buy.” As he spoke, his 24-legged mass was slowly inching down Andador 20 de Noviembre, advancing and dissolving like a single organism.