Liberating Experiences
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Recipes
for a Communicative Art
His works dissolve the
boundaries between art and everyday life, between passive viewing and
active participation. For the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who was born in
Buenos Aires, process plays just as important a role as the finished
project. Whether he transforms galleries into fast food booths or installs
a supermarket in a museum – the 2004 Hugo
Boss prizewinner is mainly interested in creating platforms for
communication and common experience. Angela Rosenberg and Andreas
Schlaegel introduce the art star, whose work can also currently be seen in
the exhibition series "Blind
Date – New Acquisitions of the Deutsche Bank Collection."
Untitled,
2002
Deutsche Bank Collection, ©
Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York
Visitors
were disappointed; they expected at least a warm bowl of soup, if not a
complete Thai menu from an exhibition of the Thai artist Rirkrit
Tiravanija. And he’s certainly known for his excellent soups. Une
Retrospective (tomorrow is another fine day) is a show of Tiravanija’s
works at the Couvent
des Cordeliers, a Gothic hall from the 13th century where Marat’s
lifeless body was once laid out and which is currently serving as an
interim exhibition space for the Musée
d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Untitled(pad
thai),
Installation views, Paula
Allen Gallery, New York, 1990,
Courtesy
neugerriemschneider, Berlin
The artist, who
was born in Buenos Aires in 1961, learned cooking from his grandmother,
who ran a popular garden restaurant in Bangkok. Tiravanija likes to relate
how he spent a large part of his childhood in the kitchen there. At the
age of 19, he left for Canada to study art in Toronto, after which he
relocated to Chicago and from there to the Whitney School in the hectic
and cynical late eighties of New York. It was here, in his first
exhibition at the project room of the Paula Allen Gallery, that he set up
a gas cooker and prepared a Thai noodle dish, Pad Thai, for the show’s
visitors. Some thought the soup kitchen was the show’s catering and,
somewhat perplexed, searched around for the actual work; for the most
part, however, visitors sat down and enjoyed the food, giving rise to an
atmosphere that allowed for relaxed conversation and for people to engage
in free social interaction.
Tomorrow
is Another Fine Day,
Installation
view. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2004
Courtesy
neugerriemschneider, Berlin
The warmth of the
atmosphere nurtured a seed of dialogue over spatial intervention, art, and
activism, transforming the inconspicuous soup chef into one of the most
influential artists of his time and catapulting his art into the holiest
of venues for contemporary art ranging from the Venice
Biennale to the world’s most important museums. In 2004 and 2005, no
less than three major museums gathered together to dedicate a joint
retrospective to the artist: the Museum
Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Serpentine
Gallery in London, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
(ARC).
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Tomorrow is Another Fine Day,
Installation
view, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2004
Courtesy
neugerriemschneider, Berlin
And that’s where
there was no soup to be had, or even, for that matter, any physically
existing work at all. Instead, Tiravanija’s most important exhibitions
were talked about, filtered through the artist’s own memory and that of
his French colleague Philipe
Parreno and American science fiction author Bruce
Sterling. Voices of actors relating these memories were transmitted
from loudspeakers scattered throughout the rooms; all that could be seen
were life-sized plywood models of the architecture in which the respective
exhibitions had taken place. In the eerie emptiness, it was up to the
viewer to imagine the actual works of art.
"Basically, I create
models. My work is a model – you can recognize its structure and use it
somewhere else, like a cooking recipe, maybe. I create the recipe, and you
can take it and cook something with it or make other recipes out of it. So
they’re models that can be ideal, but that can be changed to adapt them to
life or individual tastes and desires," as Tiravanija has said in an
interview with the curator Dorothea Strauss for the Kunst Bulletin.
The fact that that artist wants this to be understood in a very literal
sense was something he demonstrated in 1996 in his exhibition Untitled
(Tomorrow is Another Day) at the Kölnischer
Kunstverein.
Untitled(Tomorrow
is Another Day),
Installation
view, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1996
Courtesy
neugerriemschneider, Berlin
The artist
decreed that the rooms of the Kunstverein should remain open around the
clock for the entire duration of the action; inside, visitors discovered a
1:1 model of his apartment in New York. The public was invited to take a
bath, cook something to eat, chat, or just hang around and watch TV. For
uninitiated visitors, the first few moments in which the familiar
boundaries between art and life were dissolved proved to be an experience
that was initially unsettling, but then increasingly enjoyable and
liberating.
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Untitled(Tomorrow is Another Day),
Installation
view, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1996
Courtesy
neugerriemschneider, Berlin
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Before long, one became part of a community of visitors to
a virtual private apartment, and it became apparent that experiencing the
art was not limited to contemplative observation alone. Instead,
collective involvement was required to activate the unusual, utopian, and
even revolutionary situation and to use it as an open platform.
It
was precisely this reduction to the model-like plywood backdrop and the
unmediated public invitation that enabled the artist to initiate new
social relationships. Visitors proved willing to become active and invest
time into the project, making “Tomorrow is Another Day” into an aesthetic
social event. It’s the human interaction that activates the work, while
the importance of the exhibited objects and exhibition space retreats
behind the performance aspect. And so it’s no wonder that the exhibition
became a setting for the celebration of weddings. For in mixing together
the hierarchies between institution, work of art, public, and artist,
Tiravanija places the visitor at the center of the work, who, fascinated,
recognizes his own mirror image in the person opposite him – and at least
a portion of his own potential.
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