The Brooklyn Rail

“Nothing is expected of me” is the feeling I have halfway through Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Tomorrow Is the Question, at Argo Factory in downtown Tehran (2024). It’s a surprisingly liberating feeling. My experience of stepping into an exhibition space is often accompanied by anxiety: Will I be able to relate to the work? Perhaps it has to do with my presumptions about “art”—that which strives to address itself to the “sublime”— that holds me down. It never hurts to be rid of one’s extra baggage, of course. I find myself going around pretending that I should know about things around me, whereas it would be much truer to experience them as if for the first time, as a novice, so to speak. Very few things, in fact, need to be understood conceptually. Often, though, I take my not-knowing as a privation, which in turn leads to self-absorption, and keeps me from seeing and feeling what’s out there.

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At the entrance of the Factory, next to the elegant stairway that will take me to the second floor, a film is playing. Several plastic stools are scattered in front of the screen, the ones that you see outside fast-food joints around Tehran (these are new and unused, however). The exhibition attendant, clearly there to answer any “question,” in textbook fashion, and leaving it for no “tomorrow,” explains that Tiravanija followed an old farmer in the film, who at this point is planting rice seedlings into a paddy, and that the stools were intentionally placed to create a street-food feel, when the Thai-Persian food will be served—shortly, I am promised (there were nine portable stoves, brand new, much like the stools, in the yard before I entered the exhibition space). I know about food, of course. It’s the first thing that I hear mentioned from the two people who encouraged me to go see the exhibition. So I don’t want to spend time sitting on a plastic stool watching a humdrum film I am so used to as an Iranian. I move on to see the rest of the exhibit, climbing the arched stairway, which invites slow motion as it opens to a vista prefigured by the sound of playfully unpredictable ping-pong balls in the air.

Four gorgeous ping-pong tables on which “Tomorrow Is the Question” is tastefully printed in Persian, English, Arabic, and Armenian, stand before me. A couple is playing on one table. The attendant, who has kept me company through the celestial ascent, has his mental textbook opened to the ping-pong page: “You can play on any available table.” “But I have no one to play with,” I sulk and immediately brighten to ask, “would you like to play?” I totally love ping-pong. It is one game that brings me childish joy. “Of course,” he says kindly, “but I am not a good player.” His textbook is still open, which urges him to explain what the single picture tiled seemingly endlessly on the three walls surrounding the tables signify. I like to play but have to wait. “Mr. Rirkrit”—the attendant is using the artist’s first name throughout, I suspect, because his last, Tiravanija, is not so easy for any of us to figure out how to pronounce—“and his assistant, Hamid Amini,” who, I later learn, is the artist’s full-time assistant and not one commissioned by Pejman Foundation, the owner of Argo Factory, for this particular show, “decided to form a people question-mark. The question-mark is a throw-back to Tiravanija’s remake of Koller’s 1978 Anti-happening Universal Futurological Question Mark (U.F.O) (1978), for which the artist had children perform a question mark in a field. For the Tehran show, the action was performed around the tree depicted in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1987 film Where Is the Friend’s House? The documentation of this performance is the source for the wallpaper throughout the exhibition.”

He lets out a breath which I duly suppress. “But why? What’s the point of having this picture tiled high up so many times? It seems like a waste of good paper to me!” This is not in his textbook, I am afraid, but the table is there to move to and relieve the tension. As we exchange the first balls (he is not a good player), my opponent tries to be faithful to his duty and explains away the different sections of the show. I am more interested in playing. The couple on the next table are serious about their game and they seem to be enjoying themselves. Our net is sagging. I suggest tightening it. Perhaps that would make him more keen on playing. We do, but someone calls out for him and he relieves himself of me.

My passion for a good game of ping-pong unsatiated, I move down the ramp to another section where a T-shirt printing machine is at work. When I entered Argo I noticed the staff wearing “Tomorrow Is the Question” T-shirts printed in four languages; the one in Persian, however, is not only curvier in script but more ambiguous in meaning, because the Persian grammar has no definite article to place before the question! So, it can be read “tomorrow is the question” or “tomorrow is in question” at the same time. The title of Ornette Coleman’s 1959 album, which Tiravanija has used as the title of his show, also bears a poetic ambiguity. The Persian, however, has a catchy apocalyptic sense to it, and I decide right there to purchase one for my fifteen-year-old. It would be good for him to know that tomorrow is really in question, ominously so, and not simply as “okay we are facing another end-of-the-world situation, so what?” He may argue wisely, “you guys (meaning the whole of humanity) have had to face, time and again, such a situation. Why make a big deal out of it now?” I have to grant him that. At his age, end-time scenarios had no purchase with me, though I would readily admit that the situation was dire and in need of my generation to take care of things. It’s for this idealism, refreshing to have, that I want the T-shirt. Not in Armenian, though.

The crude T-shirt printing apparatus is currently doing Armenian (“why Armenian,” I find myself asking) and I ask the machine attendant if they are doing a Persian script as well, not knowing that two chambers down these T-shirts are piled on a mirror on the floor for everyone to take home as a present! I paid a small sum at the entrance and didn’t think that I would take home a present with me. “No,” he answers, somewhat miffed, “we are currently doing Armenian.” I move along in my journey through Tomorrow Is the Question at Argo Factory with the ups-and-downs of life governed by expectations unmet rather than met.

Bottles of Argo Brand non-alcoholic beer are stacked in a corner. I ask what this was about. “We are out of beers,” the young attendant nearby explains, “but here is where you were given a beer and asked to place the empty bottles next to each other.” Another expectation ignited and unmet, I move on. It is only later that I learned this section was not part of the designed exhibition but that Argo Factory suggested it to the artist, after all, in untitled 1990 (endless column), the artist took the detritus from his gatherings (food waste, beer bottles, cups, etc) and stacks them in plastic bins as a sculptural commentary on excess. I am not sure if the Argo brand beer is related to the Factory, but I do know that the foundation’s Argo Factory “is a Contemporary Art Museum & Cultural Centre, housed in a former drink manufacturing factory … [which was functional] in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s.” This is an intriguing piece of info if you consider that Iran has banned the manufacturing, purchasing, and consumption of alcoholic beverages since the advent of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. This, of course, by no means suggests that alcohol is not consumed in the country. It’s entirely possible that no such prohibition on alcohol has historically achieved its goal. In 2016, Pejman Foundation acquired and reconstructed the Factory. Sobriety is essential if you are to understand art conceptually, my intuition tells me. But then, Tomorrow Is the Question is more like an ordinary happening, and alcohol usually lubricates such human togetherness.

Underneath what I assume used to be the distillation part of the Factory, because of its cathedral-like ceiling, I see the T-shirts again, heaped at the center of the chamber, bearing the show’s title in the four languages. Banners hanging above-head bear the same scripts. “You can pick up a T-shirt in the language that you want,” the attendant explains, “and by doing that you expose more of the mirror that reflects the banners above.” I am gleeful. “Is there one written in Persian?” Yes, there is, and I pick it up, thinking of my son all the time. I am satisfied and can now listen to the attendant with more attention. But there isn’t much more. He takes me to the adjacent hall where, a few steps up, is a small opening through which I peered down at the pile of T-shirts covering the surface of the mirror.

I walk down the narrow stairs to the basement, and get reminded by a huge signboard at the far end of the long gallery that tomorrow is still in question.

My interest pricked, I want to know more about Rirkrit Tiravanija and his art. I go to the desk at the entrance which has the catalogues of different Argo Factory shows on display. There is no catalogue for Tomorrow Is the Question, however, save for an electronic one. I go to the screening area and sit on one of the plastic stools. Lung Neaw, the main character in Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours (2011), is walking, carefree, on a dirt road. He must be done with planting rice seedlings. The simple expression of joy on his face is not out of some happy circumstance that I can see, but of life itself governed by the play of necessities. Perhaps he is on his way to visit neighbors.

A ping-pong ball plops down from the second floor and dances on the tile floor of the screening area. Another is soon to follow, and others in close tandem. “The documentary features a retired farmer,” the Wikipedia entry on Rirkrit Tiravanija reads, "that lives in a tranquil village in Chiang Mai, far from the recent political turmoil in Bangkok. At a moment when many people are demanding equality, opportunity, and democracy, we see in Lung Neaw an existence marked by compassion for his environment and his fellow villagers. The film offers a contemplative look at one man’s humble dialogue with his surroundings." I am intrigued. Iran went through several political turmoils after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, starting significantly with the much contested 2009 presidential election that a good number of my fellow Iranians at the time felt was rigged. They took to the streets of Tehran and many other cities and were tolerated for a few days before the state officially announced that the election was fair and any demonstration to the contrary would be met with force. Since then, mass ranks of people in many cities in general, and Tehran in particular, have poured onto the streets at regular intervals to show their dissatisfaction with the country’s ruling order. In Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours, Tiravanija seems to be saying what goes on in rural areas is much closer to the land and everyday life of their inhabitants, and that such concerns as elections, political representation, freedom of expression, welfare, material comfort, and the rule of law are conceptually-driven constructs made necessary by complex human systems.

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A ping-pong ball skips down the stairway. Lung Neaw is by a river. He pulls out a bar of soap from a flimsy plastic bag, dips in, and scrubs himself down. “Will the water be polluted now?” I am thinking, knowing full well that these are urbanite obsessions—recycling, traffic, plight of the poor, crime, environmental degradation. That plastic bag that we so readily get rid of without even thinking about it is a useful bag for Neaw. And for Rirkrit Tiravanija meaning arises only with use: “The extension of the readymade is to use it,” he confides to curator Pauline J. Yao in a conversation, “to take it off the pedestal, and bring it back to function; and by using the object new meanings and new relationships can be formed.” Squatting on a floor close to a stove, Lung Neaw’s daughter (I am assuming she is his daughter, as I haven’t followed the subs) is making food and in a while he will have it with his father. I get up, having followed the farmer on screen for twenty minutes, and decide to leave. The food is not ready yet, but I feel fully satisfied. “Nothing was expected of me,” I catch myself thinking. A pleasant feeling permeates.