love it when life plays its games; had vijay iyer’s historicity playing on my ipod on the m4 bus to tino sehgal and dorothea von hantelmann at the guggenheim

only to wander in to the anish kapoor exhibit which i had forgotten was showing.

kapoor’s piece, called memory, made for a lovely calm contemplative epilogue to sehgal’s participatory ‘this progress’ exhibit which was the most fun i have had at a museum since the blue whale at the museum of natural history turned me back into a little boy over the summer.

after being asked to think about progress (what is progress? is it always good? are we progressing? will tomorrow be better than today?), memory (fluid, fragmented, compressed) and lovesex (intimacy, male-female, female-male power structures / struggles, performance, sanctity), von hantelmann’s questioning of what makes art politically and socially relevant was almost too much to take in. she had some interesting ideas and theories about the evolutions of the exhibition, museums and art in the ages of industrialism, consumerism and post-modernism (i only really understood bits and pieces of her talk). though her thesis that the contemporary format of the museums and the exhibition was a representation of individualism that was not relevant in a non-western context seemed a stretch. the question of course if highly pertinent in the context of the guggenheim’s upcoming abu dhabi expansion.
there was some concern in her talk and in the audience’s questions about how museums would translate to the ‘east’ with china’s ambitions to build a thousand museums mentioned condescendingly and almost menacingly a few times.
von hantelmann did illuminate sehgal’s work placing it in the context of our consumerist, post-physical information-age: ‘if it can be bought and sold, it is a product and can therefore be defined as art’.

i don’t think the guggenheim has ever looked better completely stripped of art.

oh and you really should buy historicity.

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