Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Rirkrit Tiravanija: Untitled 2002 (the raw and the cooked)

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Rirkrit Tiravanija: Untitled 2002 (the raw and the cooked)

by John McGee

Rirkrit Tiravanija has an original recipe for success. “I can’t paint but I can cook...” he said. The Thai artist co-opts normally staid gallery and museum spaces and turns them into jocular social occasions. His exhibitions are often like one long opening reception—someone, often the artist himself, is cooking, and people sit around eating, drinking, and chatting. The interaction is the artwork. 

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2002,
mixed media (Image courtesy the artist
and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery)

Tiravanija (pronounced Teer-ah-vah-nit), 40, is in town for a solo show at Tokyo Opera City Gallery in Hatsudai and to host a month-long series of events in the Asakusa area, sponsored by the Asahi Beer Arts Foundation and Sumida-ku.

The artist gained prominence as one the leaders of “relational art”—in which the artwork is completed by audience participation—by making and distributing free curry in New York galleries at the beginning of the 1990s. In the process, Tiravanija not only wanted to appeal to the gut instinct of his bohemian, never-miss-a-free-lunch audience but also to bite into the commodification process inherent in the artworld.

Tiravanija’s not the first to address this issue. In the ’60s and ’70s, many Conceptual artists sought to eliminate the art object. To them, the idea was everything, even though it was usually little more than a recipe for an action or process written on a piece of paper. Tiravanija readily acknowledges ur-conceptualist Marcel Duchamp and musician John Cage as influences, but  a piece by conceptualist artist Tom Marioni gives additional historical background to Tiravanija’s work. In 1973, Marioni did his first “Free Beer” exhibition. Throughout the course of the show, the gallery was instructed to keep an ample supply of local beer available to anyone who wished to drink it.

Marioni may have made a lot of friends with his installation, but Tiravanija’s free curry helped launch his career. Over the past decade, Tiravanija has cooked, videotaped and otherwise interacted his way through many prestigious, generation-defining group exhibitions—the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 1999, the Whitney Biennial in 1995, the Skulpturenprojekt Muenster in 1997 and many others. 

In addition, Tiravanija has had numerous solo shows at major international museums. For example, in 1996 he set up a sound studio with instruments for visitors to play and record their own music at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. At MOMA, New York in 1997, he designed a children’s education and art-making area. Last year at Portikus in Frankfurt he installed a replica of his New York apartment where visitors could congregate to sleep, bathe, have a wedding—do whatever they wanted—24 hours a day. 

Tiravanija attributes part of his convivial approach to being Thai. “My work reflects the personality of Thai people,” he said, “[we are] open, friendly, and like to be surrounded by people.” His long dark hair and ready smile may suggest Tiravanija’s a typical Thai, but his upbringing was anything but average. As the son of a diplomat, Tiravanija was born in Argentina in 1961, and grew up in Ethiopia and Thailand, where his grandmother had a restaurant and TV cooking show. He headed to Canada, then America for art school before “settling down” in New York, Bangkok and Berlin. 

This is Tiravanija’s first solo museum show in Japan, but he’s been here before. He cooked his trademark Pad Thai in a Roppongi restaurant as part of a show at Gallery Side 2 in 2000. He also participated as a professor in the research program at the Center for Contemporary Art in Kita-Kyushu in July, 2001. And he took part in the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, showing videos (and the mini-van he drove) from his Fukuoka to Yokohama roadtrip. 

Because consumption usually takes a literal form in Tiravanija’s work—the audience chomps on his noodles and musses up his bed—the monumental ready-made sculpture he’s arranged at the Opera City show seem stiff, formal and uncharacteristically closed. On a huge plywood table stretching nearly the length of the gallery, Tiravanija has laid out a vast feast of plastic display food, instant noodle packs, bags of chips, cans of beer and soda. You can look, but not touch. 

It’s not still-life, the action is just elsewhere. For example, on the gallery walls video monitors show an artisan making a plastic model of Tiravanija’s Pad Thai, complete with the so-called “flying chopsticks” suspended in mid-air. It looks a lot like he’s cooking. The actions are very methodical and precise: wind twine around the noodles to hold them upright, harden them with a blast of the heat gun, arrange the fake shrimp, etc. 

Tiravanija admits that, though the video looks like a minor component, he is more interested in the making of the models than in the models themselves. “That’s activity, that’s where life is,” he said.

The collaborative play of day-to-day existence fascinates Tiravanija. “I’m interested in the everyday and how one puts oneself into it,” he said. This exploration of the everyday and process has roots in ’60s and ’70s art movements, but also in his own Asian sensibility. “In the west, life is based on objects, but I’m trying to do the opposite,” he said, “I focus not on the object but the life around it.” 

Context is an important component. The title of the exhibition, “the raw and the cooked,” refers to a seminal structuralist text by French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. “It’s about the conditions of looking at a culture...how things become meaningful,” said Tiravanija. 

Tiravanija was one of the first Thai contemporary artists to be accepted into an elite world dominated by Americans and Europeans. He started thinking about his “dislocated identity” in the west while studying at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The few pieces of Thai traditional art in the museum collection lacked any “feeling” around them, according to the artist. 

Tiravanija tried to find a way to unlock the vitality frozen inside the art. For his first cooking piece in a New York gallery in 1989, untitled, 1989 ( ), Tiravanija boiled a pot of curry in the gallery for three weeks. No serving, no eating, just curry bubbling all by itself. “The pot was like a museum display in the center of the show,” he said. Tiravanija says that he gave life to the pot—his own traditional Thai sculpture—by cooking in it. 

Identity and cooking—the basic ingredients that would resurface in later works—were on the table. Still, Tiravanija wasn’t satisfied. The piece, didn’t engage the audience enough. So for his next show, the artist decided to serve the curry, not just cook it. The social element in his work developed organically when he was late bringing supplies to the opening—audience members had to help him prepare and pass out the food.

There’s a small sub-gallery in the back of the Opera City show with a live computer link to Tiravanija’s internet magazine oVER Channel (www.superchannel.org). The website is a virtual platform where people can engage in open dialogues on music, fashion, cooking, etc. This “demo station,” as he calls it, may lack immediacy, but it is really another kind of pot around which people can gather and “cook” their ideas, albeit remotely.

Tiravanija acknowledges that the Opera City show doesn’t look like his typical exhibitions—he’s used plastic food and there’s no free-for-all component. But he stresses the importance of playing with his own expectations. Tiravanija sees his work as a set of models that have to be made and then taken apart. With this show, he isn’t just refining his recipe, he’s starting from scratch.
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This exhibition was held June-Aug 2002 at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in Hatsudai, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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