Rirkrit Tiravanija at the Guggenheim

Art in America, Nov, 2005 by Edward Leffingwell

The celebrated Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija was the 2004 recipient of the Hugo Boss Prize, chosen from a shortlist that included competitors from Germany, Brazil, the Netherlands, the U.K. and China. Born in Buenos Aires and based in New York, Berlin and Thailand, Tiravanija is known for interactive projects intended to reach a broad general audience. He has made art from the simplest of materials and the most accessible of gestures, preparing and sharing food, installing a recording studio in a museum and replicating his apartment for the use of gallery visitors. In his exhibition for the Boss award, Tiravanija used unconventional materials to create a low-fi television broadcast, in an installation that addressed issues of free speech and airwave licensing.

Tiravanija's project, Untitled 2005 (the air between the chainlink fence and the broken bicycle wheel), consisted of a transmission in which a 16mm film transferred to DVD was sent via analogue technology across a short distance to a freestanding plywood room (a "TV station"). The DVD player was placed in an open metal chassis and connected by wire to a small, sealed chamber of polished metal and glass; this contained a transmitter resembling an automobile antenna that served as both amplifier and modulator. The transmission was then relayed through unused airwaves to a length of found chain-link fencing and a discarded bicycle wheel that acted as makeshift antennae. Information in the gallery acknowledged the purpose of chain-link fencing as a deterrent to intrusion, and its frailty in that regard. A nod to Duchamp, the bicycle wheel was mounted on top of the station--a simple structure containing two viewing benches and, placed on a trestle table, a pair of television sets, which sometimes worked fairly well and other times not at all.

The film Tiravanija chose to broadcast was the British-born filmmaker Peter Watkins's incendiary Punishment Park (1971), an improvised, largely suppressed or ignored full-length pseudo-documentary protesting Nixon's America. Tiravanija's transmission of the Watkins film was restricted to the museum, partly because of the proliferation of cable and satellite television in New York City that confines other signals to three miles, and partly because of the museum's legal concerns. Intending that others might take his cue, the artist papered the gallery walls with enormous blueprints of documents involving FCC regulations, the First Amendment, a bibliography, notes on the history of licensing and pirate broadcasting, and Internet links to relevant sources. In the generous spirit of the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Abbie Hoffman before him, Tiravanija provided piles of the complete blueprint program, reduced in size, which he offered free to an interested public.