The Brooklyn Rail

When Rirkrit Tiravanija was invited to participate in the 1995 biennial, David Ross was serving as the museum’s director. Tiravanija’s contribution was aggressive. His installation featured a plywood hut equipped with electric guitars. Anyone could play. Tiravanija’s art is one of activation, of meaning accrued through participation. On the occasion of the Thai artist’s retrospective exhibition at PS1, Ross reconnected with Tiravanija. Over multiple conversations they discussed the evolving role of the artist, how Tiravanija adapts his work for museums while sustaining the life force it’s meant to cultivate, and the empowering role played by educators.

David Ross (Rail): I’ve been thinking about when I first heard about you, which was from Jack Tilton and I remember he said, “Oh, you’ve got to come by the gallery. You like Thai food, right?” I said, “Yeah, I love Thai food.” He said, “Just come back to the gallery, you’ll be surprised.” And there you were, making, I don’t remember if it was pad thai or curry, I can’t remember…

Rirkrit Tiravanija: I think soup. Tom kha soup.

Rail: Yeah, tom kha soup in his gallery on 57th Street, which is one of the most historic gallery buildings in New York City, right?

Tiravanija: Exactly.

Rail: And it was really good. And there you were, this skinny little guy. [Laughter] I thought, “Oh, I’ve just found my favorite artist!” It was just fantastic, and I’ve followed your work since then. And one of the things I’ve always admired about your work, which leads to my first question, was that you defined your job as an artist very differently, and very early on. I’m wondering how you got to this definition of what your job was as an artist? And then whether that’s changed? So back in the early nineties, what did you think your job was, as an artist? Here you were, you’d gotten out of Chicago, you had an MFA, you were serious about art. And you looked at the art world and you said… what?

Tiravanija: Well, my peers were all sitting around this bar Milano’s, going, “why, why, why? What’s going on with that?” I think we used to have to always redefine art, right? In a way. I mean, first of all, we had to know all of it or learn all of it. And then basically from that, we tried to rethink it, you know?

Rail: The essential animating concern at that moment, which was what?

Tiravanija: I mean, it goes back to Fluxus somehow. What is really important when one is thinking about art? For me, it’s about the relationship, right? It’s not just the relationship between you and the work, or you and the artists and the ideas, but also you and the other people looking at it.

Rail: Right. So breaking the boundary of the art world, in a way?

Tiravanija: There’s a kind of gap between what I see and what I would say Western cultural thinking is, which is basically the difference between looking at an object and using the object. And so one of the first things was realizing “Oh, they’re just taking all these things and putting them in a box.” And in a way, for me, it was missing out on the life part.

Rail: Some of your generation saw that very differently. For instance, they might say, “If all you want to talk about is the context in which that work exists, then maybe you’re afraid to actually talk about the work.” And then there’s the generation that said, "There’s no separation between context and work. That’s a false binary.” So when you would cook in a gallery, and serve in a gallery, putting yourself in that role of serving the public something basic, a little meal or just a snack, how did that change the role of the artist as you saw it? How did that question the role of the artist?

Tiravanija: Well, I was thinking about repositioning the audience and the object. I mean, you could find yourself walking across a Carl Andre, and not realizing it until you’re in the middle of it that you’re standing in an artwork, and then you feel something. Right? I wanted to make a situation where you actually enter knowingly. [Laughs] And then you realize that you’re in the middle of something that you should think about.

Rail: When you say, “feel something” are you referring to the kind of Benjaminian notion of a work’s “aura”? Is that what you’re supposed to be responding to?

Tiravanija: Well, it can be. I mean, I’ve been influenced by the Situationists, Fluxus, you know, and having been touched by John Cage in Canada.

Rail: Can you talk about that? How did that happen?

Tiravanija: I was in my second year in art school in Toronto, and John Cage came to give a lecture. He did a performance at the University of Toronto, and he invited—

Rail: Was that the Chess piece?

Tiravanija: No, it was in the auditorium and he gave us all radios, and we had to basically walk around and keep tuning them. So it was kind of a sound piece, but we were also participating. So, Cage is looking east, and I’m looking at Cage looking east, and I realize, I don’t have to look east like this. I’m already there. I don’t have to do certain things. I don’t have to put up certain things for that to be active within the idea. You know? I thought, take Duchamp’s urinal—the readymade object—and put it back on the wall and piss into it. That seems to me like such a precise description of what I try to do.

Rail: To reanimate.

Tiravanija: Yeah, to question the object by reusing it.

Rail: But actually using it.

Tiravanija: Yes, and that would be the relational part, or the idea of interaction. To basically say to the audience, “you are going to finish the work.”

Rail: And the meaning is specific to your use of it. Not necessarily to the maker’s use of it—

Tiravanija: Yes. Because we all come with different constructions and interpretations and experiences. Now I try to teach people not to do anything. I mean, I have a class called “Making Without Objects,” which is as close as I can get the University to call the class “How Not to Make Anything,” because they refuse—they refuse that title, they say we cannot call the class that! But it’s that kind of idea.

Rail: It’s pure performance, like James Lee Byars, who I thought was the epitome of getting close to nothing. I’m thinking of that piece The Perfect Kiss, where he would just barely move his lips. He would stand and just barely—I mean, you couldn’t see it, and then he would walk away.

Tiravanija: I would say “nothing” could be just how you interpret something, you know? I mean, it’s like, nothing is the opposite of all the other things you think are something. It doesn’t have to be defined. “Something” is always possible to define, nothing could be undefined.

Rail: But you’re not dogmatic about it. I’m thinking about an earlier work, I wish it was in the show at PS1, untitled 2018 (6 kilos of rice) (2018). It was an amazingly nuanced political work about the value of probably the least valued labor in Asia, right? The harvesting of rice. And yet it is the most important part of the diet of hundreds of millions of people. I thought that piece was right on that edge of being outrageous—all that silver! [Laughter] It was real silver, right?

Tiravanija: Yeah.

Rail: Can you talk about that work for a minute?

Tiravanija: It’s exactly as you were thinking. I was conscious of the value of the silver, which the general market thinks about, and how it goes up and down with the value of the grains of rice. I was playing with that.

Rail: How these two markets are hinged—the market of silver and the commodity market of foodstuff.

Tiravanija: Yeah.

Rail: They’re both traded as commodities.

Tiravanija: Right.

Rail: Oh, that’s very interesting. I hadn’t thought of it like that. I thought it was a bit more of a straight out critique of the use value of rice versus the use value of silver. In general, the culture of eating—food culture—was something you decided to use as a kind of motif in your work early on. Not because you come from a restaurant family, but just because you eat just like any other person, right? It’s the essence of everyday life.

Tiravanija: Yeah. I mean, I’m standing in Chicago, looking at the Asia wing, looking at the collection of Thai artifacts, and saying to myself, “they missed all the things that are happening around the theme,” which is life in a way, right? So how do I break this stuff from these cases? And put life back into it?

Rail: It was all stuff that involved cooking or serving food, right?

Tiravanija: Dishes, bowls, pottery, curry pots—so basically, you know, I thought, “just make curry again.” And that was the starting point, to try to reanimate the stuff and hopefully everyone sees the life around it, you know?

Rail: But it’s also a specific critique about the way museums exhibit work, and even the underlying role of a museum which is in position to preserve and protect and maintain a work in perpetuity.

Tiravanija: Yes, that’s true.

Rail: Which means stripping it often from its use value.

Tiravanija: Which is still going on today.

Rail: When I was at the SFMOMA, we bought Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), which was a great goal of mine to acquire that work. For me, it’s a critical work—and I think for you too—because of the nature of erasure and all that. So when we first put it up Bob came out to see how we were going to show it and the conservators had the light in that gallery down to like five-foot candles, because it was valuable and it was expensive. In terms of the history of art it is really important. So the conservators played their role. They said “No, David, five-foot candles, do not put another light on it. Five-foot candles.” And Bob came and he said, “What the fuck? Open those skylights man.” I said, “Oh come on Bob.” He said “burn the fucker out, burn it out. Burn it out.” That’s what he said. And I don’t think he was just being crazy, I think he was saying something really important, which was that that piece’s role was not to be the Shroud of Turin, to be preserved in complete darkness, and then shown every twenty years to the faithful to prove that this idea existed. But it was to continue this idea in a way, it was to let it stay alive. Right?

We opened up the lights and everything, but as soon as Bob left the room, the conservator says, “Excuse me, can we close those?” because that is the sacred responsibility of the museum professional, to preserve what it holds in perpetuity. How do you respond to that?

Tiravanija: Well, I responded to it by having empty shows. I had surveys in 2005 in like, two, three places, like Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. And I just said, just give me an empty space. And then we just had docents who brought people in to look at the show, who would tell you what you’re looking at. So groups of people would follow the docent and the docent would have this script.

Rail: So the idea of you producing plays—

Tiravanija: Comes from that.

Rail: Comes from that moment, and then trying to deal with the way museums have kind of taken a bite out of your work. When we did the Ed Kienholz show at the Whitney, he wanted a live rifle in the gallery and a piece that had a trigger mechanism that would go off one in every ten million chances.

Tiravanija: And shoot at what?

Rail: At whoever’s in front of the rifle. We said, no, sorry, you can’t do that. I said, You can’t have a live round of ammunition in a public building in New York City. There’s a law on the books, you cannot have a live bullet in a gun in a public space. He said “oh.” I said, “so yeah, we would do it for you if it wasn’t for that.” But of course, you know that piece only has its power—

Tiravanija: Because of that chance.

Rail: The chance of getting killed. That was the commitment you had to make to look at that work. You had to commit to the one in ten million chance that you’re gonna get shot in the face, which was a very Ed Kienholz way of thinking about the world. You are slightly different from him, but not so different. Because you also want to make the museum commit not just the object’s life, but the life of the work. And there’s a difference right? Can you talk about that? I mean, the object itself has life and conservators—

Tiravanija: No, the object itself doesn’t mean anything at all.

Rail: But the conservators who buy your work, a lot of that stuff is not museum quality material. It’s stuff.

Tiravanija: It’s just hardware store stuff. And I would say if the thing breaks down, get a new one. I mean, it’s as simple as that. You don’t have to restore it, just get a new one.

Rail: So you’re not one of these artists who is a material-purist.

Tiravanija: No, I’m not Dan Flavin. [Laughter]

Rail: So the object itself is just a placeholder. It’s—

Tiravanija: Yeah, it’s just a vehicle for the idea. I mean, if you’re serious about having a drink, do you care about the glass?

Rail: You don’t want to mistake the menu for the food.

Tiravanija: No, you don’t.

Rail: So I remember, like, in 1991, the Dalai Lama came to New York for a visit. And he went to the Newark Museum, and he consecrated their objects in their Tibetan Buddhist collection. It’s the first time the Dalai Lama, or any seriously placed person in that world, had invaded an American museum, and said, “this is no longer just an object in an art museum. This is now an object of veneration, and I bless it.” And since that time people have been leaving flowers and offerings, and the museum had to agree to that.

Tiravanija: Yeah.

Rail: It’s now known in the Buddhist community that these blessed objects are present. In a way the place is functioning like a temple. Can we talk about the spiritual issues in your work?

Tiravanija: I always say I’m an orthodox Buddhist. I’m orthodox in the sense that I don’t do anything. And that’s what Buddhism for me is about.

Rail: You do everything as well as you can.

Tiravanija: And if someone sees that, and maybe thinks that’s something worthwhile, maybe they’ll do it too.

Rail: That’s why you’re a great teacher. [Laughs] Because you don’t need to teach anymore. I’ve come to teaching late in life and I really love it. What I’ve recognized is that the relationships there are completely pure. A relationship with an art student is a completely pure relationship with an artist that is totally apart from a curatorial perspective. As a curator, you don’t get to have that. As a teacher, you get to be inside, which is quite special. But what you’re talking about, though, is a kind of teaching that assumes that enlightenment is only possible when everyone—

Tiravanija: Finds their way.

Rail: But that’s only one Buddhist path, right? There’s another Buddhist path, which is that enlightenment is a personal thing. And everyone has a responsibility to find their own. Those people don’t tend to be teachers, they tend to be ascetics and monks.

Tiravanija: Yes, those are two ways to see how to go on the road.

Rail: So, literally on the road. You went on the road by yourself, in what 1996?

Tiravanija: Yeah.

Rail: And making films of everyday life?

Tiravanija: Yes.

Rail: And showing them wherever?

Tiravanija: Well, I was going to look for Buddhas carved in the mountains in Korea.

Rail: Oh, really?

Tiravanija: Korea was a Buddhistic society before it was Confucianist. And so there are a few of them around Korea. My intent was to go and find those Buddhas.

Rail: And did you?

Tiravanija: No, I didn’t find one.

Rail: Maybe that’s the right thing. That the journey never ends, right?

Tiravanija: I went on a bus. I got off the bus in the middle of nowhere. I walked around. This is 1996. You know, Korea was still basically a closed society. There was no one who spoke English. I just continued on with my intention, but it was a complete failure. So it became a piece about the value of failure in unveiling pure intention. It’s about waiting and spending time and giving time and not expecting things to happen.

Rail: Which is your definition of being an orthodox Buddhist?

Tiravanija: Yes.

Rail: But then you take the other role when you bring the Thai students around America. Right?

Tiravanija: I do.

Rail: So that—that piece was very different. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a critique. It wasn’t a gag about America, you wanted to show them your sense of this country, or even your confusion?

Tiravanija: I wanted to show them what they thought was their ideal. I wanted to show them their dream. And I want to show them the reality of that dream. Of course I wasn’t going to say, “oh look at this and that.” At one point the van we were in got destroyed, and we had to change into this other minivan. We had to call everyone on the way and they all said, “okay, just come and stay with us”. So then we ended up in Marfa and of course as soon as they heard about the van getting destroyed, they said, “Okay, come and stay with us.” So we went and stayed right inside the compound. They were sleeping on Judd’s bed, they were sitting on his chairs. We went for a whole afternoon going through all the barracks, looking at thousands of Judds laid out. And then we got back to the bookstore. And the kids go, “oh, Donald Judd.” You know, they didn’t understand what they were seeing in reality until they saw the photograph.

Rail: Until they saw the book.

Tiravanija: That’s what I thought. Yes, exactly. You know?

Rail: So this was also about bringing the notion of the food rather than the menu into the forefront.

Tiravanija: Yeah.

Rail: I think we’ve all had those kinds of primary learning experiences in our lives. I had one during my first trip to Japan when I was twenty-five. I was having a hard time in Tokyo, and a friend—the artist Fujuiko Nakaya—arranged for me to go chill out at a ryokan on the island of Kyushu. After a very complicated day, I was taken to see a painter who lived deep, deep in the forest, behind Mount Yufu. A young Buddhist monk took me to see this great painter who for forty years had been making Fontainebleau-style paintings of the landscape that he was living in. He had a whole barn full of them. And they were amazing. He just painted the same waterfall every day for forty years. And I talked with him and I said—this is how insecure I was—I asked, “Can I buy one of these?” [Laughter] And my new friend said in a rather stern voice, “David, really, just look at the pictures, just look at the pictures.”

Tiravanija: Right, yeah.

Rail: I felt so embarrassed. In part because it was such an obvious lesson that this wasn’t a transactional experience. I wasn’t there to buy a picture. This artist would have never sold me a picture. I mean, the idea of selling a picture was not even on his radar. That’s not why he made them. But I recognized that I can look at a picture just for the sake of looking at the picture—not to acquire it or show it. And that was really important in my development as a curator, and I think as a person, actually.

Tiravanija: I think that’s precisely what I’ve been trying to tell you, with all the art works I’ve been doing. Just look at the picture, look at the moment, look at them, look at the other person next to you.

Rail: You know, one of your pieces that always impressed me was because it wasn’t your drawing of political events. It was other people drawing them, just like the piece you have on view now in the lobby of the PS1, where people come in, and are making drawings relating to their own sense of the moment. But that was an earlier work of yours, and a particularly different one. What did you want them to understand about the nature of political change or political life by drawing from a photograph of that moment? What was it that you were trying to understand?

Tiravanija: The images were all from newspapers. I think it started when George W. Bush got elected, that was when I suddenly realized there were a lot of people who were coming together, that this was something important. So I started to cut them out and keep them.

Rail: You would just cut out these specific protest pictures?

Tiravanija: Yes, from the particular day. Some days there are more than one hundred protests around the world. I was living in Berlin then.

Rail: How has your practice been influenced being a Thai person not living primarily in Thailand, but looking at the evolution of democracy, let’s say in your country over the last forty years? Is that something that’s of interest to your practice? You and your practice?

Tiravanija: Sure.

Rail: I mean, in the way that you work with your Thai students?

Tiravanija: I take everything in and I use it all, and it may come out in one way or another, maybe not the right way—but it’s all part of it. There were these protests against the monarchy—

Rail: Yes, I remember how serious that was.

Tiravanija: And there was one Instagram post of people walking, and they had a sign that said “Rirkrit is not here.” And of course I wasn’t there, because it was the pandemic. But I interpreted it as like, “I’m not participating.” And I said to my students, okay, that’s good! We should do a protest against Rirkrit, because Rirkrit is a figure of authority, Rirkrit is the figure everyone needs to take down. And so maybe we don’t protest the king, but we could protest Rirkrit.

Rail: Oh, that’s kind of brilliant.

Tiravanija: Those are the kinds of things I think about.

Rail: I appreciate that. So when you step back as you had to do in working with Ruba Katrib and Yasmil Raymond in producing your survey exhibition for PS1, and do what you probably never imagined you would be doing: a retrospective. What I always noticed when we would do retrospectives at the Whitney is that it often had a profound impact on an artist’s practice. It can be very revealing to the artist, like, “Whoa. Is that what my practice looks like?” So what are you thinking about the trajectory of your practice now that you’ve been put through this process of thinking it through with these curators?

Tiravanija: Well, I don’t like that tension because that’s not my practice. I’m trying to be on the edge, I want to be on the periphery. For me, it’s about use. It’s about usage. It’s about how people could see my work and use it for themselves.

Rail: I wanted to ask you about using the title of the Fassbinder film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Fassbinder didn’t love that film, he apparently made it as a kind of an afterthought, as an exercise. But when I first saw it, it really affected me. And I’m wondering why or how it affected you, and why you took that title and used it so prominently in a lot of the work that deals with language and cultural difference?

Tiravanija: It’s interesting because I just had a weekend with all my students. And at some point, we were talking about our favorite films and I said, “let’s watch Ali,” you know, Fear Eats the Soul because, of course, there are references to it in the show, but also, there’s a long story… there’s a work that’s now being shown up in Montreal at the Phi Foundation, which is basically the remake of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but by my own two actors.

Rail: Oh, really?

Tiravanija: That was maybe the last show I did at Gavin Brown’s gallery. I turned the whole gallery into a kind of movie set. My concept was to remake the film with these two people that were in my other film, and when I saw them in the film, I thought, “wow, I gotta remake Fassbinder’s film with these two guys!”

So when it came time to do a show with Gavin, I said, “Okay, I want to reshoot the film.” And just only the interior shots, because it’s all going to be inside the gallery. And weirdly, I had a young Korean student who was a filmmaker who I told about the project, who then became my producer. I didn’t know when I asked him, but it turned out it’s one of his favorite films! One of his obsessions—a friend of his was a cinematographer and they knew every shot, every move. I didn’t even direct it. They just all did it.

Rail: You just instigated it. Artist as producer.

Tiravanija: I just gave the idea. I just said how I wanted it, and we made the sets. The people who were working in the gallery became characters in the film.

Rail: So that takes me to another painting I wanted to talk to you about. The Peter Cain, Less Oil More Courage (2003)painting. Peter was an artist whose work I really admired a lot. Can you tell me about the way that work came about? And of course, the sentiment of it is also a kind of essential one.

Tiravanija: Yeah well I met Peter through the art world stuff, you know, like I was the art mover. Matthew Marks had basically just started and somehow our company—Fred Worden, you know, the friendly artists, our little two truck company was Matthew’s favorite. We were his go-to people to move things. We were cheap and didn’t break stuff. [Laughter] And so we were always moving Peter’s work back and forth between the gallery and his studio. That’s how I came to know him. And then after he passed away, Matthew did an exhibition. And I got a card in the mail, and the card—I don’t know if you remember this—but it was like, you know, Peter writing a note himself, and the note read “more courage less oil.” It was written on a yellow notepad, or something like that, and I kept it. I thought it was really interesting, because it was a message to himself about painting and the way he needs to approach his painting. I just kept it. And then, you know, it was 2003, I was doing the Utopia Station.

Rail: I’m glad you mentioned Utopia Station, because, you know, I’ve always thought that was a really important collaborative work. Yeah, but, please—

Tiravanija: I was invited to curate and I ended up doing it with Hans Ulrich Obrist, who was also invited. And then Molly Nesbit, who had been working with Hans Ulrich Obrist on Utopia. So I was working on being a curator for this thing when one afternoon I see Daniel Birnbaum and Francesco Bonami having lunch, who were the curator and director of the whole thing, and they said to me “you know, we just realized we don’t have your work in the show.” And I didn’t think much about it. Because when I curate, I don’t put myself into my curation. But they were adamant, so I was like, “sure.”

And I don’t really know, but these are the kind of weird little epiphanies that happen with me. It’s like when I made the first cooking piece. It’s just thoughtlessly thinking over and over things, and somehow at the right moment it comes out. And so I said to Francesco, “Well, Francesco, you know, I have an idea.” It’s a painting. And the painting is a text painting, and the text says, “less oil, more courage.”

And that’s because I’d been carrying Peter’s little card inside my head. But then there was also the Iraq War going on and the oil fields were burning. So it’s a combination of things happening around me that just align. I hadn’t thought about it, I just said it. It just came out, and the next thing I said—which surprised me—was “I want you to do it.” I said to Francesco, “I want you to do it” because Francesco was being given a hard time by the Italian press. Francesco was once a painter, an avant garde painter, and many of them were giving him a hard time for having been a painter and now he’s curating the Biennale.

Rail: Interesting.

Tiravanija: And Francesco said, “Yeah, okay,” and he went and got a canvas, and about a week later we all went to lunch at his house and he pulled me into his bedroom, and he showed me the painting that he had made based on my request, and it was terrible. And I said, “Okay, Francesco, I’ll take care of this.” But in the meantime, they took a photograph of that painting of Francesco’s for the catalogue. So if you look in the catalogue, you will see Francesco’s painting, which is that kind of gray field with this text, but you can barely tell what the text is. And that’s Francesco’s painting, which was never shown. That same day I went home and asked my assistant to go to the local stationery store and get me a stencil. And then I made this little painting, which is now in the exhibition.

Rail: This all took place in Italy? While you were working on the Utopia Station?

Tiravanija: Yes. Exactly. And the painting was still wet when I brought it to the Italian pavilion and I said, “Okay, where do you guys want this?” There was a little space between Warhol’s films, and they just hung it there. I had the feeling right away, everybody’s gonna want this. And sure enough, like the moment I walked away, these two famous collectors came over and were like ““we want to buy the painting,”” so I said, ““sorry, you know, I already gave it to my girlfriend.”” And she still owns it, but yeah, it’s kind of weirdly like, “fear eats the soul.” It works on all different levels somehow.