RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

Tiravanija is often recognized for his role in “relational aesthetics,” a movement in art in which social interaction is key and the artist is a catalyst for social exchanges. 

In addition to his performances, the artist has created wall drawings, sculptures, installations, and text-based works that often relate to his social initiatives. ‘Untitled 2009 (No Fire No Ashes)’, on view from the Collection of Craig Robins, is indicative of Tiravanija’s text-based paintings. The bold words are evocative and the artist has said that these text works might be viewed as slogans or ‘road signs’. Like a drive-by where small snippets of information might enter one’s consciousness. The phrase remembered is out of context and the scale of the work insists upon a embodied interaction with the phrase as poetry or an information. One must use their own experience to understand and assign significance to what is being read— whether we are reminded of ashes to ashes, dust to dust, recognize a warning for the end of times or a repudiation of destruction, or perhaps see a simple statement about the nature of fire and its alchemy. 

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s diverse artistic production eludes classification. He has accurately described it as “relational”: a body of work focused on real-time experience and exchange that breaks down the barriers between the object and the spectator while questioning the art object as fetish, and the sacredness of the gallery and museum display. Tiravanija is an Argentina born Thai artist who lives between New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai, and his work carries strains of this nomadic existence, blending and re-combining different cultural contexts. Rather than insisting on a particular reality or truth, his work creates open-ended contexts for people to grapple with these questions themselves. The strength of Tiravanija’s work lies precisely in its ephemerality and the slippery ways it escapes definition; he takes the material of the every-day and re-stages it, allowing the viewer a perspective at once banal and deeply profound about the quickly fleeting nature of life itself. Tiravanija’s central focus has remained on exploring human interactions and bringing people together to share. In addition to cooking, the artist has constructed environments within the museum setting where guests can read or listen to music. He blurs the distance between the artwork and the viewer. His exploration of the communal role of art and everyday actions as art recalls Joseph Beuys’s notion of social sculpture (art’s potential to transform society through human activity with language, thought, action, and objects).