Tino Sehgal Contemporary Art

Modern art is usually seen as the first time in which artists challenged traditions and put on the side conventions. Contemporary art adopts this notion and relates it to issues of global warming, politics, social justice, and technology that are occurring in the world right now. Thus, a contemporary is someone who is very conscious about what goes on and tries to make artworks that recount these events from the artist own perspective, who is –usually- not bound to traditions, not only for museums and galleries, but also for temporary pop-up exhibitions, biennales, streets and other unconventional places exemplary of the contemporary world. The two more representative of art period we are living right now are unconventional places such as abandoned production factories and biennales, because of indeed their temporariness, from which follows a need for something that relates to the “now” that will excite or simply provoke strong feelings in visitors. It seemed like after Pollock nothing else could be done, it seemed as if he had come up with the last new invention and the art world was now saturated. To think

The artist is concerned with the overproduction of objects, and so his pieces are not “things” people see, but rather they are events that people experience and attend. Sehgal’s This Progress at the Guggenheim Museum consisted of a walk on the ramp around Frank Llyod Wright’s rotunda with actors who had learnt a few scripted sentences, and led conversations with the visitors that were always new and never the same about progress. In this type of art, technology is seen as destructive and so nothing is produced and nothing is documented since material things are the main issue for this artist. Yet, with its absence, technology is part of this art piece as one of the subjects in this critique of the world we live in, where everything is mass-produced and nothing is