“What is the riddle?” asked the young woman, doing a little writhing dance as she spoke. “The riddle is this, the riddle is that: what is the riddle?” Search me, I said.
We met just beyond the shimmering floor-to-ceiling glass-bead curtain – a 1991 work by the late Félix González-Torres – that marks a transition from everyday encounters into the world of Tino Sehgal at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris. Sehgal’s Carte Blanche, his largest show to date, fills the building with sounds and furies and manufactured encounters, with dancing, chanting, yelling, walking, running, talking and kissing. Sehgal has invited other artists to take part. The ground floor has a gorgeous false ceiling and mirrored walls by Daniel Buren (a work Buren first showed here in 2004); in a chamber on the lower level the soundtrack of James Coleman’s 1977 film Box (Ahhareturnabout) emits an amplified heartbeat rhythm, synchronised to intermittent flashes of archive footage of the 1927 world heavyweight return match between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, that can be heard, almost subliminally, through the building.
Coleman’s voiceover is an almost hoarsely whispered interior monologue, a punishing bout of words. “Box!”, he says, “The fight is on! Deliver, deliver! Return, return!” This is what being in Sehgal’s show is like. It is relentless and seems without end. One minute you are buttonholed by a stranger with a story to tell in These Associations (Sehgal’s commission for Tate’s Turbine Hall in 2012), the next stumbling about in an utterly dark room in This Variation, which I first experienced at the most recent Documenta, surrounded by yelping head-bangers, people crawling around in the dark and singers keeping up a manic tempo of steam train hisses and piston rhythms.
These Associations works extremely well in the wide-open spaces of the Palais de Tokyo’s lower level. People are milling about, grouping and regrouping, jinking round the pillars, running together and drifting apart. A chant starts up, but the words are mostly lost in the echoing space. Something to do with elementary particles, but I don’t quite catch it. A tall, young man with pale eyes starts telling me some tangled story about his sister and a gone-wrong attempt to rent her flat on Airbnb that had precipitated some sort of psychological crisis. What am I supposed to do? Offer advice, sympathy? These people have already been at it, in shifts, for a month, and they’ll be here almost until Christmas. Later, a woman approaches to tell me about a sex game with her boyfriend and how he only wants her to get pregnant by accident. The more I delve, the more troubling her story gets. I have cast myself in the role of agony aunt, working my own shift among lost souls.
Looking for respite, I came to a raw concrete area at the back of one of the Palais’s cavernous lower levels. Pierre Huyghe has flooded the floor, and water gurgles through pipes and spurts from tall, sinister-looking columns. An empty lift wheezes up and down. Now I feel as if I’m Harry Dean Stanton searching for the lost cat in the first Alien movie, just before the terrifying adult thing appears. Through a hole in the wall I find an untended computer and electronic gizmos winking away with red lights in an empty, wrecked room. There’s just enough space to squeeze through.
Huyghe’s contribution to the show exudes a sort of menace. Even the explanatory wall label hangs in the dark. This all has something to do with logarithms and in vitro cancer cells, which are being grown somewhere, and the interdependence of all the organisms, “real and symbolic” in the situation of the exhibition. I just want to run away.
The next day, beyond the bead curtain, I meet a young boy. We walk together through Buren’s brightly lit installation, to a break in the mirrored wall. He asks what progress means to me. I think global warming, Trump and Brexit, of progress and regression. The kid passes me on to a young woman, who inquires if I have achieved my ambitions. Am I happy? Not a moment too soon a woman in her 40s has taken over, leading me on with another progressive gambit. Quite how I found myself descending the stairs to a lower part of the building, with a guy from Berlin of about my own age in tow, I can’t recall. “This morning was dark and grey,” he observes, “But now it is getting brighter”. This could be the worst chat-up line I have ever heard – or the sort of thing secret agents are supposed to say to one another on first meeting. Give the wrong response and you are dead meat. We fall into discussing Trump and the just-announced death of Leonard Cohen. The world darkens. “Time to take to the barricades again!” he offers, cheerily, by way of a quick Brexit auf wiedersehen.
Walking into an empty room, a bunch of people are facing the wall. An Irish bloke at the threshold announces, to no one in particular: “The objective of this work is to be the object of a discussion.” Playing up my vanity, I say that to be the object of a discussion is the objective of my life, but it doesn’t go down too well, and there follows a long repartee about drunkards, for whom drunkenness may be an objective in itself, not merely an aid to countering sorrow. I need a drink.
Does Sehgal really invite our interaction? I enjoy the call and response of his work, the possibility, and perhaps the danger, of intrusion and entanglement. He makes us uncertain, as if a trap door has opened under our feet. One way or another, we are all interpreters, even when we regard ourselves as mere spectators. But there are no innocent bystanders. Here we all are, in the here and now.
Three years ago, I sat on the sloping floor of the subterranean theatre in the Palais de Tokyo, listening to a child acting the role of Annlee, the off-the-shelf manga character Philippe Parreno and Huyghe had been developing since they bought her in 1999. The two artists passed the avatar on to a number of other artists, including Sehgal. First Annlee was a flat cartoon, then an animated video, now a three-dimensional living being, played by a child. She has progressed. Here I am with her again, in the same room she occupied in Parreno’s 2013 show. It is as if I never left. She still asks the same questions of the audience she was asking then. Would you rather be too busy or not busy enough? What is the difference between a sign and melancholia?
She has now been joined by a boy called Marcel; a child savant whose words are often taken from Marcel Duchamp. There is something extremely touching about their dialogue. Marcel is worldly, wise beyond his years. At a certain point, the boy drops to his knees, as if winded by knowing too much. I watched this eight or nine times over two days, with two different pairs of child interpreters. Each time it was the same, each time different, their conversations taking different forking paths. Annlee has never been outside an artwork. It is where she has her being. She barely knows how to breathe. “Have you ever been outside? Outside an exhibition space?” Marcel asks. “Never? I’ll take you.”
Eventually, Marcel leads her out of the theatre and into the world. Ten minutes later, she is back, starting all over again. Every time she goes, I fear for her. Watching Annlee’s slow progress into the world, one step forward and two steps back, is another riddle. I still haven’t got to the bottom of it, because there isn’t one. As much like a fairy story though this is, the world is never far away, separated from us by the thinnest membrane, González-Torres’s glittering curtain.
- Carte Blanche to Tino Sehgal is at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, until 18 December.
