The famous circular rotunda of the Guggenheim art museum was completely empty. That’s not something I would normally pay to see, but I went to the Tino Sehgal exhibit with my mom hat on because one of the neighbor kids is in it. After I got there and walked through the experience I realized how many similarities there were between the artist selected set of people interacting with the museum-goers and the work I have done as a clown working meet-and-greet gigs.
I read the program: “a visitor is no longer only a passive spectator, but one who bears a responsibility in shaping and even contributing to the actual realization of the piece”. Yeah, and that can be also true of riding the subway or going to the park, basically of living in the city.
Off-hand I can think of half a dozen writers and directors I know from the under-publicized theater scene of the Seattle in the 1990’s who could have put together a far more powerful encounter between visitors and the space. I hesitate to sound like the old “my kid could paint that” dismissal.
As I spoke one by one with with representatives of the artist’s concept as we walked together up the spiral rotunda; first a child, then a teen, then a 20-something and finally an older adult of retirement age I thought about some of the work I have done interacting with audience members as part of site specific theatrical productions. Annex Theatre’s The Yellow Kid by Brian Faker and Bliss Kolb which began with audience members walking through a back alley and up dark stairs unable to avoid interacting with the kids who were there and Nikki Appino’s ambitious Djinn in an abandoned naval base warehouse come to mind. I wish I could see what they would have made if they had been given permission to play with their ideas and a bunch of performers the Guggenheim rotunda space.
I suppose everybody can say something like that.
