The first time I came across the name Rirkrit Tiravanija was trough a friend, Jake Kelly, who honoured the work of Tiravanijna with a curry night on a residency in Rotterdam in september 2024.
I read up on him a bit back then, and with this assignment it was the first artists I was thinking about.
Diving into his work was (as it was with the others), a rabbithole. There is a lot of material to find on the internet, video's, articles etc.
Luckily, the work of Tiravanija comes down these baseline topics in my opinion: People and planet, relationships community and overcoming differences. Wether it be the mondial south vs the west or within Bangkok(who's afraid of red yellow and green) with a callback to the moment he discovered that utinsels that are used daily in the north of Thailand are put upon display in the Asian wing of a chicago museum.
'Cooking the food back in the pan' he calls it in his artist talk with the Hirschhorn is his contribution to art after the readymade. Hence his remark about using the urinal, mounting it back to the wall and using it. To actually use ready made objects for art, in the way they are intended.
Reflection
Terms as decolonisation, capitalism, community and healing are widely used to describe art, just like music and I believe these are popular words in general at the moment. I think Tiravanija's work with utensils that are up in the museums, making curry, fits perfectly in this definition. Yet the art world has not yet adopted this term for the (process art) work that he makes.
Later i found an interview in Artplugged, recorded in 2023 where these themes are discussed.
A large exhibitions was called Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Green. Referencing Curry. This was first done in Bangkok in 2010. There all and everybody was divided politically. To serve curry and get people back together was the goal.
What I really like is how he describes in one interview, the one with the Hirschhorn, how he was doing different 'demonstrations'. Not in the usual way, but by providing a kitchen or a space where people can just be, or demonstrate what they are good at such as cooking or knitting. This created a physical Learning Space.
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2019/07/09/be-useful-rirkrit-tiravanija-interviewed/
https://www.kurimanzutto.com/artists/rirkrit-tiravanija#tab:slideshow
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/17/shall-we-dance-4
https://www.groene.nl/artikel/wat-een-wereld-zeg-onvoorstelbaar-zeg
https://artplugged.co.uk/rirkrit-tiravanija-breathing-life-back-into-the-western-idea-of-an-object/
Collaboration
"Rirkrit's work is fundamentally about bringing people together.”
Rirkrits work is about community. Serving food (curry) and collaboratively create the charcoal murals together is creating a happening. This way visitors can participate in two ways.
Rirkrit himselve describes it as: "Trying to get people to pay attention to the details around their own existence. The spicyness of the curry, the heat of the rice and the charcoal dust on the floor. These are all possible trough time. without time you would not pay attention to thihngs like that. And to have other people collaborate with it, it is like having them be the guide."
Rirkrit mentions process work and Gordon Matta Clarke in his artist talk, when he describes how he wants to give life back to everyday Thai utensils that are displayed at the museum in Chicaco. This shows for me that he wants to bridge the gaps between cultures, the west and the rest of the world.
This is where his famous quote about the readymade, Duchamps(or Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's) urinal comes from:
comparable to reaching out, removing Marcel Duchamp’s urinal from its pedestal, reinstalling it back on the wall, and then, in an act of returning it to its original use, pissing in it.
Rirkrit Tiravanija repeatedly works with serving curry. It started with an exhibition in Bankok.