In 1998, the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, an artist born in Argentina of Thai origin, was at the heart of the thinking of the now famous essay Relational aesthetics by French critic Nicolas Bourriaud. One of Tiravanija’s participatory works, Untitled, 1996 (One Revolution per Minute), was also the cover of this work translated into around fifteen languages. It was an installation which addressed, among other things, the ever-accelerating mechanics of our mode of production and consumption.
What remains of this approach 25 years later? This aesthetic was often summarized, reduced and impoverished to a somewhat childish playfulness, which pleased many museums which do not have the courage to affirm the value of an art which requires time for reflection. We must submit to a distracting and profitable vision of the museum, to the dictatorship of the turnstile… However, for Bourriaud, it was a question of establishing an art creating a social interstice escaping the capitalist structure.
For the exhibition which is currently dedicated to the Phi Foundation in Rirkrit Tiravanija, we nevertheless chose the simplifying title Play/Play. For the artist, this notion of play is certainly important, because it speaks of “interaction, of making decisions”, something “that we can all understand, even if we refuse to participate”. That said, we have the feeling that in his works, it is rather a form of destabilizing interaction than a fun game that prevails.
Does Tiravanija still define his work thanks to this label invented by Bourriaud? What relationship does it have with this aesthetic? “ Most of my peers who were named in this book and I wanted to challenge the conditions of categorization. Nevertheless, I think that my work is relational or, more precisely, it expresses a possibility of relationality,” expresses the artist. He adds that the idea of an “aesthetic is a Western philosophical imposition”. “I don’t think in aesthetic categories. For me, the notions of otherness or difference are more important. Naming, categorizing and thus making significant/insignificant is a Western perspective of knowledge. I just don’t think in those terms, I don’t value those perspectives.” After the exhibition on Colombian art which, recently, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, called into question the notion of dating works for the history of indigenous art, here is an approach decategorizing imposed artistic movements by the West…
Tiravanija/Fassbinder
Of the three works exhibited, it is certainly Untitled 2017 (skip the bruising…) (2017) which is most destabilizing. Tiravanija has rebuilt a bar there where you can sit and sometimes have a drink (see the schedule on the Foundation website), a bar where you can see a video appropriation, a remake carried out plan by plan Angst essen Seele auf (All others are called Alitranslated into English as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) film directed by Rainer Fassbinder in 1974. In a mise en abyme effect, the bar installed by Tiravanija at the Phi Foundation is the one present in his remakewhich itself evoked that of Fassbinder’s film…
The German filmmaker told the story of a lonely widow — played by Brigitte Mira — who meets a young immigrant man, a Moroccan — played by El Hedi Ben Salem — whom she marries despite the prevailing racism… Tiravanija plays here the role of the widow to a man – the artist Karl Holmqvist -, nevertheless described as a woman in the unchanged story, amplifying, updating the issues of the 1974 film… For Tiravanija, “Fassbinder made films on otherness in a society which considered itself hegemonic and pure, in which all otherness was perceived as a threat and where all differences had to be swept away towards uniformity and assimilation. I think we should be wary of such manipulations and not succumb to such fears.”
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