Rirkrit Tiravanija: Can Pad Thai Diplomacy Change the World?

Rirkrit Tiravanija | The New York Times

Rirkrit Tiravanija. untitled 1990 (pad thai). Ingredients for pad thai, utensils, electric woks, and a lot of people. Installation view, Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE, on view at MoMA PS1 from October 12, 2023 through March 4, 2024. Image courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Marissa Alper

By Travis Diehl

“Having been labeled as the cook of the art world,” Rirkrit Tiravanija said, “I think people come to see my work expecting to interact.” Indeed, they expect to eat.

The 62-year-old artist is easily the most influential of the loose cadre that rose to prominence in the early 1990s under the banner of “relational aesthetics” — a kind of installation- and performance-based conceptual work that makes spectators feel like participants. Tiravanija’s “untitled 1990 (pad Thai),” in which he cooked and served noodles in the back room of Paula Allen Gallery, is quintessential.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija with David Ross

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Brooklyn Rail

Portrait of Rirkrit Tiravanija, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui.

By David Ross

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.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija : NO MORE REALITY →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Rosanna Albertini

Composite: Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled (no more reality), 2023, paint on newspaper mounted on linen, 96 x 981 inches, 243.8 x 2491.7 cm.

By Rosanna Albertini

No More Reality and my despair having lost the certainty about what words bring to us. What about thinking? Based on words? Not entirely, our primitive ancestors were thinking and acting before human language broke out from the brain.

Our whole body is a thinking machine: chemical conversation between cells, well organized behavior of organs : a musical score mysterious and impossible to decipher : there is no control on our body’s intelligence. AI is a technological dream. 

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The 10 most memorable museum exhibitions of 2023 →

Uta Barth | The Los Angeles Times

Installation View: Uta Barth - Peripheral Vision (2023) at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, California. Photo courtesy of the Getty Center.

By Christopher Knight

Yes, the show formally opened during the busy end-of-year holiday season in 2022, but there was no museum list last year (those pandemic issues) and, since the show continued deep into February, I’m taking the liberty of claiming it for this year. Barth’s radiant, perceptually illuminating photographs are just too good not to accentuate.

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Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai 2023: The Open World

Rirkrit Tiravanija | e-flux

ArtBridge ChiangRai, Chiang Rai, Thailand, 2023. Photo courtesy of e-flux.

The Office of Contemporary Art and Culture (OCAC), Thailand Ministry of Culture, with the collaboration of The Provincial Government of Chiang Rai, on December 9 at 6pm. unveils the third installment of Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai 2023 at Chiang Rai International Art Museum (CIAM).

Rirkrit Tiravanija is curating the biennial.

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Pick of the Week: Rirkrit Tiravanija →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | What’s on LA

Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2023 (no more reality (for pp), the news sun, august 16, 2020), 2023, paint on newspaper mounted on linen, 24 x 22 inches, 61 x 55.9 cm.

By Jody Zellen

Rirkrit Tiravanija is an artist whose work has employed unusual and diverse mediums: cooking, staged readings and platforms for socializing. The forms and formats of his installations and presentations are participatory and unconventional, often involving the sharing of meals. That is not to say that Tiravanija does not also make objects and drawings that can hang on a wall or fill a conventional gallery space. In 2020, he covered the walls of The Drawing Center in New York with over 200 demonstration drawings — black and white works on paper derived from photographs of demonstrations published in the International Herald Tribune. World events and the propagation of news has long been an interest of his and for this installation, No More Reality (For PP), he covers the gallery walls with pages of daily American newspapers (collected in 2020).

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Writing Practice: On Literature →

Philippe Parreno | ArtReview

Installation view: Philippe Parreno - Marilyn (2012).

By Adam Thirlwell

I have this feeling that everyone dislikes literature. Not reading and not writing, both of those are practices that many people enjoy; but somehow when these two come together they form literature, and then everyone dislikes it. I wonder why this is. I know that I want so much from this word literature. I want it to do so much work, whereas it mainly seems to do no work at all. It sounds dour and demented in a way that art doesn’t. Art sounds bright and fizzing and susceptible to anything new. Literature doesn’t. Literature sounds reactionary.

Maybe the better word for what I want is just writing and I should abandon literature as a word. If you plug literature into some game of word association, what would first come into my head is a line by Paul Verlaine that ends his poem ‘Art poétique’ (1874), a poem in which he defines what he wants from poetry, which seems to be music and the refusal of meaning. And then, devastatingly, he concludes: Everything else is literature, which still seems irrefutable in its dismissiveness.

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Visual Art: Rirkrit Tiravanija - Pad thai for the people: forty years of shaking up the space of art. →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | 4Columns

Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE, installation view. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Kyle Knodell. Pictured: untitled 1990 (pad thai), 1990. Mixed media.

By Alex Kitnick

Rirkrit Tiravanija is probably best known as the artist who cooks curry and gives it away for free. And this is not untrue. In 1992 he served bowls of the Thai dish at 303 Gallery in New York—and he has done so, in various locations, any number of times since. While his work, at least from this description, sounds like something that would have to be invented if it didn’t already exist, the way Tiravanija changes the space of art—transforming museums and galleries into third places, more like coffee or barber shops than chilly white cubes—has not been as frequently noted.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Spirited Survey Serves Up Social Interaction and Pad Thai →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Art in America

Installation view of Rirkrit Tiravanija's untitled 1990 (pad thai), at MoMA PS1, 2023. Photo: Marissa Alper

By Francesca Aton

If you’ve ever stood in a line for a home-cooked meal at an art exhibition, you might be familiar with the work of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who foregrounds interactions between people and their surroundings. Over the years, Tiravanija has served up Turkish coffee, pad Thai, and tea—all of which can be experienced in his exhibition “A Lot of People” at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York.

In constructing these scenarios, which he refers to as plays, Tiravanija invites museum-goers to participate and consider the ways we interact with one another. As human interaction (or safeguarding against it) came to the forefront during the pandemic, Tiravanija’s plays have only become more relevant. And if they are not enough to satisfy, the show also includes films, drawings, and works on paper.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Bracing MoMA PS1 Survey Is One of the Year’s Best Museum Shows →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | ARTnews

Rirkrit Tiravanija and Nico Dockx, untitled 2011 (erased Rirkrit Tiravanija demonstration drawing), 2011. Photo Fredrik Nilsen/Courtesy the artist and 1301PE, Los Angeles.

By Alex Greenberger

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s lively MoMA PS1 show, a strong candidate for the year’s finest New York museum exhibition, is a challenging experience. This is not because the art included is tough—although it does offer plenty of food for thought (and, in a few cases, for digestion, too)—but because the work on hand calls on viewers to do more than merely see it.

On at least three occasions, visitors are asked to lie down to experience the works. On two, they are given the opportunity to play music—including their own, made via guitars and a drum set, in one installation resembling a recording studio, minus a soundproofed wall. And, for one centrally placed artwork, visitors are even given the opportunity to perform a game of ping-pong; paddles, balls, and a table await players.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija Introduces Precious Okoyomon To His Chaos Menu →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Interview Magazine

By Precious Okoyomon

This past summer, at a former car dealership in Hancock, New York, the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija spent the weekend cooking up curry for crowds of hungry art-goers and country neighbors. It’s all part of the upstate art gallery and canteen called Unclebrother, which the artist founded with the gallerist Gavin Brown a decade ago. But it’s also in keeping with the spirit of the Thai artist’s radical, interaction-focused, and food-centric artistic universe, which Tiravanija has explored and expanded ever since he served pad thai and curry to audiences in the early 1990s.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija's largest exhibition to date is now open at MoMA PS1

Rirkrit Tiravanija | ArtDaily

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2014 (the days of this society is numbered / December 7, 2012). Photo: Thomas Griesel.

From the start of his practice, a critical material for Rirkrit Tiravanija (Thai, b. 1961) has been the presence of “a lot of people”—a purposefully broad and expansive term that stands as an open invitation to everyone and anyone, present and future. His largest exhibition to date, Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE traces four decades of the artist’s career and features over 100 works, from early experimentations with installation and film, to works on paper, photographs, ephemera, sculptures, and newly produced “plays” of key participatory pieces.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija Is Cooking Up a Storm at MoMA PS1.

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Cultured Magazine

All photography of Rirkrit Tiravanija by Daniel Dorsa. All images courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.

By Kat Herriman

Digestion is never instantaneous. Its nature is process. It spans hours, sometimes centuries. For example, a meal of rice noodles dressed with tamarind sauce and peanut crumbs—served in February 1990 as one of artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s early food works, untitled 1990 (pad thai)—was probably extruded through the intestines of participating New Yorkers overnight.

But the radicality of the gesture remains deep in the guts of the art world, pervading our cultural biome and the way we see ourselves as artists and viewers. It is into these roiling bowels that curators Ruba Katrib and Yasmil Raymond dared to venture, bringing us “A LOT OF PEOPLE.” The MoMA PS1 show, opening tomorrow, will be the inaugural U.S. survey of an artist who, for four decades, has actively worked against the shelf life of facts, objects, and identity by destabilizing (and simultaneously elucidating) the fungible borders between author and audience, material and idea, biography and lived experience.

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RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology at the Barbican review: hits hard right from the start →

Simryn Gill & Diana Thater | the Evening Standard

Fern Shaffer, Nine Year Ritual of Healing - 9 April, 1998, 1998

By Ben Luke

This important and timely exhibition about ecofeminism and art across several decades, gathers 50 international women and gender-nonconforming artists who explore the links between the oppression of women and environmental collapse. An exhibition titled RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology undoubtedly risks preaching only to the choir, but that would be a shame. It is both ambitious and admirable, if uneven in places.

Mostly through film and photography, it treats the climate emergency as systemic and intersectional; connected to widespread abuses of power relating to the extractive impulses of colonialism and capitalism, to racism and the exploitation of indigenous communities. Organised thematically, it has distinctive focuses within this vast subject, from the effects of industrial extractivism, to histories of protest and artists’ reimaginings of the connection beneath the Earth and womanhood.

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What I Buy and Why: Print Expert Judy Hecker Once Hunted Down a Work Written With Every Word of Dialogue From ‘Top Gun’

Fiona Banner and Rirkrit Tiravanija | ArtNet

Judy Hecker in front of Joan Mitchell, Trees IV (1992), a lithograph on two sheets. Photo: Argenis Apolinario. Courtesy of Judy Hecker.

By Lee Carter

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more dedicated and knowledgeable expert in the field of printmaking than Judy Hecker. Since 2016, she’s served as the director of Print Center New York, the city’s leading nonprofit exhibition space for the paper-based medium. As such, she brings her passion for printmaking to bear on the institution’s programming, broadening the public’s understanding of prints and multiples as a discrete art form that offers real experimentation.

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This Week in Culture: Rirkrit Tiravanija →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Cultured Magazine

The newspapers in this collection vary in geographical origin, ideas, politics, and beliefs, emphasizing the impact of personal perspective in locally reported news. “Everywhere, we feel the shift of power under our feet; how can we not address it, even with our tongues in our cheeks!” said the artist in a statement. 

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Pick of the Week: Jorge Méndez Blake

Jorge Méndez Blake | Whats On LA

By Jody Zellen

Jorge Méndez Blake is an artist based in Guadalajara, Mexico whose art takes apart and re-construct literary texts and re-present them as concrete poetry. Méndez Blake works on paper and canvas in addition to creating wall and ceiling based installations. In his exhibition I remember it was raining..., Méndez Blake uses the writings of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1971) as a point of departure rather than universally recognized authors such as Kafka, Joyce, Borges or Dickinson. Bishop was known for her highly detailed, objective and distanced point of view with an avoidance of personal subject matter and Méndez Blake tries to turn that distance into something more personal and familiar. For example, the silkscreen print I remember it was raining (Bishop), (all works 2023) simply states, "I remember it was raining and I was reading Elizabeth Bishop."

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SUPERFLEX - One Two Three Swing! now on view at the Korean DMZ

SUPERFLEX

The swings act as a human-powered pendulum, converting potential energy into shared movement. Swings are ordinarily meant for individual use, but in this work each swing can seat three people. Those on the swing must together utilise the force of gravity, building up to the instant where falling becomes flying and everyone moves together. In this playful moment, the energy of collective movement is released.

One Two Three Swing! invites the audience to explore the power of play and the possibilities of collaboration – possibilities that are realised when we swing into motion together. The shared experience offered by the work may trigger reflections on broader issues such as democracy, collective action and social connectivity. In this sense, SUPERFLEX’s swings are more than just an opportunity for play, they are an experiment in activating collective energy – energy that can perhaps be channeled to change the course of the planet and our path as a society.

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FEMMEBIT and the New California

Petra Cortright | Right Click Save

Petra Cortright, (Still from) New Landscapes 2023, 2023. Courtesy of the artist

FEMMEBIT’s exhibition, “In Medias Res,” is our devoted missive to Los Angeles and its Southern California landscape. This exhibition negotiates the City of Angels through artistic praxes, offering an imaginative counter-dialogue to the mainstream media and iconic Hollywood culture. “In Medias Res” reflects today’s digital uprootedness from time-based narratives of Hollywood’s silver screen to invoke liminal spaces of belonging.

The artists showcased on Feral File, four of whom are interviewed here, have rigorous art practices in film, digital art, and internet culture. Among them, Petra Cortright employs consumer and corporate software to create intricate digital landscapes. Her New Landscapes 2023 explore a simulated environment with enigmatic desert vistas.

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