Inside Tate Modern's Turbine Hall
I am sitting on the floor of the Tate Turbine Hall, as you
do, when strangers came up and told me highly personal stories about their
lives: the young Chinese man now a
reformed liar, a Caribbean woman with recurring dreams of carrying a heavy load
on her back up a steep hill and a Sri Lankan woman who could decide at 38 years
of age whether to have children or not.
One thing they had not expected is that members of the
public would join in, not with the storytelling though I am sure there must
have been some frustrated actors there who decided to join in too but with all
the walking, running and sitting.
At one stage I too joined in. It was a theatrical experience,
which at times bordered on the quasi-religious: dozens of people standing
absolutely still chanting and singing with lights on and off.
Did it work? Yes. I forgot about the other exhibitions I had
come to see and spent most of my time in the Turbine Hall and the Tank Rooms
paying only a cursory glance at some of the other galleries.
For we have reached a stage in the visual world where seeing
a work, however important in the canon of art no longer does it for us in the
21st century. We want more from it than the passive viewing of
something hanging on the wall.
And this can only come about by the blurring of edges
between all the arts, helped by the interface with technology: the artist and
the viewer become inter-changeable, like the writer and the reader.
We want to engage with it, interact with it, to become part
of it even if only for a few minutes and this you could do with Sehgal’s work.
This is the first time the Tate have used the Turbine Hall
for live performance installation.
Hopefully we will see more in the future.
Although the event has some loose choreography, lights dim,
singing and chanting at regular intervals, running, walking, it gives the
impression of an organic whole: a mass of total strangers interacting and
moving as one.
What the artist did not expect is that total strangers would
join with the storytellers in walking around the floor of the Turbine hall.
This is interactive immersive collaborative art of the 21st
century, reflecting the zeitgeist of our time.
Yet the piece also had a strange sense of deja vu. I witnessed a similar scene over ten years
ago while a student
The School of the Art Institute in Chicago where art,
technology and performance came together in one student performance.
Oh dear! a video I made of the storytellers has been deleted from Youtube - breach of copyright!
yet we were sharing stories.....
