Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim

Our own Asad Raza spent the last year producing this Tino Sehgal show which is currently at the Guggenheim in New York. In an email about the New York Times review (below), Asad [shown in photo here] writes:

I think Holland Cotter got it pretty well.  We are, I think, doing something, reaching so many people in their subjective particularity rather than as a mass audience, on a scale that no one has ever done before, which took lot of homework--in addition to finding and training all the people and organizing everyone and everything, we were running computer models, studying how it would work with thousands of people a day--we had 3753 people on saturday!  Tino said to me the other night, as we were sitting alone talking over the next day, that this scale is way beyond anything he's ever done. It really is a big operation.

Holland Cotter writes about the show in the New York Times:

It begins when you walk a short way up the rotunda ramp. A child comes over to greet you. My greeter, a girl of 9 or 10, introduced herself as Giuliana and stated matter-of-factly, “This is a piece by Tino Sehgal.” She invited me to follow her and asked if she could ask me a question. “What is progress?” I gave a broad answer, then at her request, a clarifying example. We went further up the ramp.

Soon we were joined by a young man, a teenager, who said his name was Will. Giuliana carefully and accurately paraphrased for him my response to her question and slipped away. I walked on with Will, who commented on my comments on progress, which prompted me to try to refine my initial thoughts.

About halfway up the rotunda, Will was replaced by Tom, whom I took to be in his mid-30s and who introduced a new topic.

He had read a scientific report that morning saying that dinosaurs, long envisioned as drab-gray and green, might have been brightly colored, even gaudily striped. We had both, we said, been fascinated by dinosaurs as kids, as was his young son today. And now everyone would have to reimagine them, though artists already had done that. So Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” turns out to be natural history. Art beats science to the punch.

As we neared the last stretch of the ramp, Tom handed me over to Bob, who was, like me, in late middle age and who broached another topic. He had just returned from Bulgaria where he had talked with a range of people over 20 about their feelings about the state of their country and lives. He found, he said, a pervasive nostalgia for life under Communism, a yearning for a society that promised to take care of everyone.

More here.