Looking for emotional connection? Artist Tino Sehgal and his troupe of living sculptures can help
“My teeth are crooked now,” says an elderly lady outside Blenheim Palace. Excuse me? “I don’t know if I want to smile anymore.” She’s perfectly cheerful, this stranger, if a little intense: her body, she tells me, is “disintegrating rapidly”. “Are you ageing?” she asks. As I mumble my answer, though, she jogs off without a word. Not too decrepit, then.
She isn’t the only one in a hurry. In fact, a swarm of people is buzzing hither and thither across the Great Court, whooping and whistling and uttering strange, high-pitched yelps and arpeggios that ricochet off the palace’s Baroque fa?ade. “La-la-la, cooee!” Perhaps they’re day-trippers on the rampage: did the shop run out of shortbread? “Gang-gang-gang, shush!” They sound like melancholy whales, or the All Blacks performing the haka. Suddenly, the cacophony stops. What’s got into everybody?
You’d never know it from their clothes, which, when they’re strolling silently, make them blend in with all the tourists, but this 50-strong mob is participating in Blenheim Art Foundation’s latest exhibition: a series of “live” works, choreographed within the palace’s grounds by the 45-year-old artist Tino Sehgal, who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2013. Sehgal, who discourages photographic documentation of his work, doesn’t make things (he calls museums “temples for objects”), but stages ritualistic happenings, using bodies and voices as his raw materials. And his unexpected interventions, which here occur throughout the day, take various forms.
Shaded within the Secret Garden, a young woman, singing acapella, belts out a hit by Alicia Keys. Nearby, beside an ornamental pond, a beat-boxer wearing a nose ring and baggy yellow basketball shorts performs a medley of Beethoven’s greatest hits. His peculiar mash-up of classical music and hip-hop goes on far too long, but at the climax, with immaculate timing, the fountain’s jets erupt, as though it were a sort of rain dance. Bravo!
Meanwhile, inside the Great Hall, beneath the faintly disapproving eye of the 9th Duke of Marlborough, as memorialised in Jacob Epstein’s bust, a couple is kissing on the floor. And I mean properly smooching. As it happens, these long-haired living sculptures are recreating famous embraces by artists from Rodin to Jeff Koons. Still, get a room. Most of Sehgal’s “interpreters”, as he calls them, are amateurs, Oxfordshire residents aged between 16 and 74. A few, though, are trusted collaborators, including, I suspect, these writhing hipsters.
Anyone who saw Sehgal’s 2012 Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern will recall that, as well as group choreography and a “score” involving sounds like vocal warm-ups or the dawn chorus in a jungle, he orchestrates one-on-one “encounters” in which his participants share fears, anxieties, and other intimate musings. South of the palace, scattered across a vast lawn, motionless members of Sehgal’s corps are rolled up like balls on a bowling green: stepping out from Blenheim’s Great Saloon, the scene provides an arresting vista, as beautiful as any painting. Are they praying? Gradually, like newly flowering plants, they unfurl, before sauntering over to divulge their stories. Workshopped for weeks, these can feel scripted: you’re unsure if answering back will heighten the moment, or amp up its awkwardness. Sometimes, they’re banal: one bloke told me how distraught he was as a boy after losing his beloved cuddly toy, Moo-moo on family holiday.
Occasionally, though, a tale will hit the mark, generating a spark of emotional electricity, a genuine connection between participant and spectator. A woman explains to me how life, with its myriad compromises, chipped away at the dreams of her youth until, when she was 40, she read that the comedian Billy Connolly didn’t like “beige” people. “And,” she confides, with stinging, self-lacerating honesty, “I suddenly felt: I’m a beige person.” Oof. I’m stunned, heartbroken. She may not feel special, but this exhibition – the eighth and bravest in the foundation’s contemporary programme stretching back to 2014 – certainly is.
Until Aug 15; information: blenheimartfoundation.org.uk