Rirkrit Tiravanija | SPIKE Art Magazine
Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2017 (fear eats the soul) (white flag), 2017. Installation view, MoMA PS1, New York, 2023. All images courtesy: MoMA PS1, New York. Photos: Kyle Knodell
By Aodhan Madden
Transcending relational aesthetics, a New York retrospective catalogues the artist’s troubling of Western objecthood and the commodification of “Tiravanija” in a globalized art world.
I was born in neither the right place nor the right time to eat pad thai in a New York gallery. “A LOT OF PEOPLE,” Rirkrit Tiravanija’s first major institutional retrospective, reminds me that this only makes things more interesting. Bringing together four decades of work, from his early “spirit house” sculptures to his more recent text-based works, the exhibition complicates any simple rendering of Tiravanija as a “relational” artist, maintaining a critical tension between ambivalence and anachronism.