His new retrospective at MoMA PS1 celebrates avoiding making art.
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Rirkrit Tiravanijais an artist without a studio.
I dont have those expenses and overheads, he tells me.
My favorite place, he says.
I could hit all the right notes, he says of making expensive objects.
He is most famous for cooking Thai food in art spaces.
These communal experiences were deemed revelatory in the 1990s and early aughts, when he first came to prominence.
To have any food in museums is unusual, notes the performance artistMarina Abramovic.
The whole thing will be steeped in 90s anti-capitalist slacker-refusal nostalgia, at least for those in the know.
But this time around, expect TikToks.
You cant really speculate on a dirty electrical wok with noodles on it.
That doesnt mean Rirkrit hasnt sold his art, especially in recipe form, to institutions.
But hes never been a collectors darling.
You are always working in opposition to what you dont want to be a part of, he says.
Rirkrit was born in Buenos Aires, where his father, a Thai diplomat, had been stationed.
There, his grandmother had a garden restaurant.
Growing up, Rirkrit liked to watch her cook.
All that moving around left him with an unsettled relationship to his Thai identity.
Rirkrits starting point as an artist was his trips to big encyclopedic museums like the Met.
So then I decided to find a way to address this issue of use or misuse by reusing it.
Its a risk that anybody who works with him must be willing to take.
(The whole thing was restaged at MoMA in 2012.)
He makes a kind of Buddhist modernism.
He doesnt make anything.
It was a revelation for Brown.
The gallery is the illusion, he recalls realizing.
Its difficult to imagine, but at the time, pad Thai was not a takeout staple.
Its ingredients included ketchup, and it was made in a West Bend wok, a then-new appliance.
Brown and Rirkrit egged each other on to do memorably reckless things.
People slept there, claimed to have sex there.
If they make business sense, they dont make art sense.
(His gallery closedin 2020.)
Its this strange lark we started, says Brown.
It doesnt make money because its out of reach.
You have to cook with more confidence, Rirkrit told Dylan.
Tell the other people what to do.
Well, this is some sort of an art piece, suggested Rirkrit.
People thought I was the caterer.
(They all get paid.)
We went to Unclebrother when we didnt know each other at the beginning of class.
Thats how we bonded: standing together in the kitchen.
Many different things will happen there on different days.
Which show you see will depend in part on which day you come.
There will be an element of chaos to it, says co-curator Katrib.
program, tells me.
So much of what is meaningful to Rirkrit is, I realize, about his teaching.
The art world has changed.
The way we look and think about art or the reason for it has changed, he says.
Let me give you a little example.
The idea that young Asian people would take up art-making used to be strange.
Its become that also because the parents accept that.
Why do they accept that?
Because they see it as a profession now.
That to me is the opposite of what art-making should be.
There seems to be a restlessness to Rirkrit that is hard to square with his never-ever-stressed equanimity.
Early in his career, he was married to the painterElizabeth Peyton.
Peyton and Rirkrit remain close.
But I dont think its in him to.
She continues, The whole world is not a huge place for him.
Or maybe hes just putting the urinal back on the wall and inviting us all to piss in it.
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