A short history of Rirkrit Tiravanija - Thai artist who cooks meals as installation art

Art in America, Feb, 1996 by Jerry Saltz

Combining elements of Beuys, Warhol and post-'60s street artists, Rirkrit Tiravanija produces installation-events where he offers free meals to grateful--and sometimes baffled--gallery-goers.

There's a guy in Santa Cruz, Calif., Corey MacDonald--a clown, actually, known as "Mister Twister"--who was arrested last fall for going around town and feeding change into peoples' parking meters so they wouldn't get tickets. The authorities warned him to stop. He didn't, and that was that. It turns out giving things away isn't so easy: it's viewed as a subversive act that undermines notions of property and value. Closer to home, Rirkrit Tiravanija's art work is free. When I first encountered one of his cooking-sessions-as-art, my initial reaction was, "What is this? What am I supposed to do?" It was a reaction I had had before, though. I was 14 in 1966 when people were first forced to confront the idea that it was okay to walk on Carl Andre's sculpture. Even now, when I walk on an Andre, I have a hesitant sense of personal and artistic transgression--as if I'm doing something wrong. Andre turns your ideas about art upside down, literally making you "see" his sculpture with your feet. That kind of aggressive buzz runs through Tiravanija's work, too. He asks you to make decisions. He asks you to "see" his work with your eyes, hands, nose, mouth, tongue, digestive system--to eat his art, or at least the fruits of his labor. He also asks you to "see" with both your heart and your conscience by placing you in a strange ethical-esthetic situation where you wonder about giving, receiving, ownership and property. If someone put a quarter in you meter, wouldn't you want to give something back? That's how Tiravanija's work makes you feel.

Tiravanija (pronounced Teer-a-van-ee-ja) is Thai. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1961, son of a diplomat; he has lived in Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada. He went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and completed the Whitney Independent Studies Program in New York in 1986. AD this makes him something of a hybrid insider-outsider. Since 1989, his most characteristic--but not his only--artistic act of generosity has been to cook food in galleries--usually traditional Thai curried vegetables--and offer this food to his "viewers" for free. Usually he does this in architectural spaces (galleries and museums) that he fiddles with in some way.

Last June, in Untitled, (Still), Tiravanija stripped bare the first of the two exhibiting spaces of New York's 303 Gallery, removing everything including window shades and doors, and setting up what looked like a makeshift refugee kitchen in the large back room. There, too, everything was taken away but the built-in reception desk. Tiravanija set up shop with an array of paper plates, plastic knives and forks, cooking pots, gas burners and tanks of cooking gas, cutting boards, sawhorse tables, a refrigerator, Tupperware, cardboard boxes, oils, spices, bags of rice, cans of food, vegetables, two round folding tables and some simple folding stools. He left Lisa Spellman, the owner of the gallery, in place at her desk amongst the leftovers, cooking smells and diners. During the seven weeks his show was up, I ate there 11 times--more on that later.

Untitled, (Still) is a subtle, and not so subtle, variation on a work he did in the same gallery in 1992 called Untitled, (Free) in which he placed the entire contents of the gallery--including Ms. Spellman--in the front room and set up a similar larder in the otherwise empty back room. In the 1995 piece the food was "still" "free" and the full/empty balance had been shifted from front to back but otherwise the viewer had the uncanny sensation that this was the same piece--that he was stepping into the same installation for a second time. (Indeed, Parkett magazine published a reproduction of Untitled, (Still) misidentified as Untitled, (Free).)

Tiravanija is a Potlatch-Conceptualist. The Native American potlatch is a banquet lasting several days, given by a member of the tribe: artistically speaking, that's what Tiravanija does for his art-world tribe. He cooks, you come; he gives, you take. The word potlatch means "big feed," hence Tiravanija is a "feeder." In the dialect of the Northwest Haida tribe, potlatch also means "killing wealth"; in other words, to give something for free is to undemline wealth. Tiravanija seems to suggest that as wealth is accumulated, fewer and fewer people can enjoy it. To buy means to strike a deal. Things are clearly understood--a stasis occurs. A gift is different. A gift is more mysterious than property. The weight of a gift continually shifts from giver to receiver, creating reciprocal obligations. A gift also involves an emanation of Eros.

Conceptualism, being an art movement without a visual style, is a little like radiation: it never goes away. Tiravanija extends notions present in the work of a number of austere Conceptualists but he also mitigates their austerity with a sensuous tranquility that is aD his own. Tiravanija is a genuinely individualistic artist but it's amazing how many different strands of artistic DNA make his art as singular as it is.