Since the early 1990s, Rirkrit Tiravanija (b. 1961) insists on positioning “a lot of people” at the center of his projects, which are conceived as open frameworks for collective engagement. A LOT OF PEOPLE is also the title of his 2024 comprehensive retrospective (featuring over a hundred works), held at MoMA PS1 in New York and LUMA Arles. In this conversation, Tiravanija reflects on the urgency of slowing down our gazes, relearning how to remember in detail, inscribing and erasing memories, and looking at collective manifestations as a key element of being human. He considers possible ways to build and sustain “that kind of energy required for everyone to move together.”
BARBARA CASAVECCHIA
The fall issue of Mousse magazine revolves around the idea of taking time, making time, and taking time off as collective tools to slow down our emotional responses and make room for reflection. After seeing your exhibition A LOT OF PEOPLE at LUMA in Arles, France [which originated at MoMA PS1, New York],1 my first question is: Do you think that over the years, you’ve developed a pedagogy of resisting speed? As I’ve heard you saying in a number of conversations, did it become a “method”?
RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA
Yes, it did. Or it tried to. It’s like trying to move slowly when you’re in a fast river: you can try, but it will still drag you along. Of course, though, it’s a changing and shifting method. I’m starting to look at it as slowing down the gaze. Because there’s so much information, maybe we need to slow down what we’re looking at in order to take time to actually see things. I think that’s what I find quite important now. I try to address it, at least, in what I’m trying to do—which is to say, I work a lot on the details and make things kind of on the edges, in the shadow, so that one has to pay attention.
BARBARA
I ask about your method for resisting speed because I think artistic practices have the power to create spaces for doing, undoing, and redoing the transmission of knowledge. You are a teacher, and that, I would imagine, became an important part of your overall process. Among the works on view was this charming video from 1998 of a long road trip in an Ultra Van motor home across the United States, from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, that you took with a group of five students from Chiang Mai University: Untitled 1998 (on the road with Jiew Jeaw Jieb Sri and Moo).
RIRKRIT
Yes, we were traveling to visit works of Land art. I shot some footage, and the students were blogging about their days on a website, where the public could also track us. The project was then presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, alongside an artist’s book.
BARBARA
There are moments in the video where everybody is looking very open, very surprised, and genuinely happy. It shows, I think, a possibility for real joy in that pedagogical relation.
RIRKRIT
In teaching, particularly, that’s where I try to direct people. I’ve been doing it—I don’t even remember exactly, for more than twenty years. Of course the young artists who come to the classes change over time. Nowadays I’m very concerned about details and memory. In the past, they would say things like, Oh, we just saw a great show. And I would say, Describe it. Now they can’t describe it. Then I ask, Who’s the artist? And they don’t remember the name of the artist unless they Google it. And of course they have to Google it. That’s what I mean by slowing down the gaze: being able to say that you like something also needs to mean that you can remember it in words. You should be able to remember the story. You should be able to remember its details. That’s what I very much want to stress now.
About twenty years ago, I had a retrospective survey in a few museums, including the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. I asked to keep the spaces empty. We just had docents taking people around and describing what they were supposed to look at—basically, describing the works— via a script. That’s really where it’s at now. It’s like I don’t need to make anything. I just need to make very good and precise descriptions of what I would like to make.
BARBARA
I didn’t get to see that exhibition, but I remember reading a lot about it at the time, as well as fantasizing about how I would feel in that situation. It made me think about an amazing story I was told by a guide at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg: during the famous siege of World War II, when paintings and artworks had been stored miles away from Leningrad in safe places, many galleries and rooms were bare other than empty frames on the walls. But because so many soldiers were willing to take a day off by seeing the museum, the director and some guides would still perform their tour by memory: Here you have Caravaggio, here is Poussin, here are the Rembrandts. It was an extraordinary way of dealing with the situation, I think. Those famous paintings you’ve been dreaming about forever you won’t get to see, but you’ll still get that storytelling, bringing them to life against all odds and such violence.
RIRKRIT
Well, my source isn’t quite as elegant. It was a combination of two visits. One was to Elvis Presley’s Graceland in Memphis, where to see the house, you have to go on a tour with a small group of around ten people. It felt like having a human audio guide. The guy would stop and say, Now look to your right, and there’s Elvis’s piano—and then his music would come on. When I experienced that, I thought, this is the best! Because with music, space, and storytelling, you could stand there and really picture—well, at least I would picture—whatever story they were narrating. The other visit was to the Jewish Museum in Berlin when it was still empty. Before the collection was installed, they let people tour the building. And they would say things like, Here we’re going to have a case with the hair and the shoes. And that proved also amazing, to me. It felt even more powerful than actually seeing the real thing because our imagination is so much bigger. It’s something we don’t seem to use so much anymore. For me, it points to the necessity of slowing down.
I think in the future, everything will be chrome—that’s an idea I got from an old SpongeBob episode and a title I’ve been using often, ever since. Chrome is interesting because it reflects everything around it, such that boundaries are blurred. At the same time, we will also need a lot of slower information, meaning, information with more detail.
BARBARA
Drawings feature quite prominently in your show. Personally, I associate drawing with memory exercises. When I was writing my dissertation, I would sit in front of the paintings I was studying and sketch them for a long time. I was pretty bad at it, but that way of looking ensured I wouldn’t forget any detail. Today, I would probably just snap a picture with my phone. When you engage young artists to redraw photos of public demonstrations taken from news clippings, as you did for the monumental charcoal drawing untitled 2023 (up against the wall motherfuckers) (2023–24), focused on the protests against book bans in US schools,or for the series untitled (demonstration drawings) (2007), sketched in graphite,are you also activating an alternative possibility for inscribing them in their/our memories? Human brains and emotions work differently when hands are involved. The intimate act of touching—food, tools, objects, artifacts—has always had a key role in your work.
RIRKRIT
There’s a time element, for sure. And yes, I think that is very true about drawing. But of course, there is also the installation Untitled 2011 (erased Rirkrit Tiravanija demonstration drawing) (2011), which is somehow the reverse, but also points to the fact that it takes a lot of time and effort to erase memories.
BARBARA
While visiting the exhibition, I had an in-depth conversation with the person who was both guarding the room with the charcoal mural and inviting me into it. We spoke for a long time about growing up on different sides of the Atlantic and about protests in our respective countries. For how many years have you been collecting materials related to demonstrations?
RIRKRIT
Since 2000. I started under the first Bush administration, also as a response to an overall feeling of “no future” that seemed quite present in society back then.
BARBARA
A quarter of a century! Public demonstrations, at least in my experience, are forgotten very quickly from one decade or one generation to another. That presence of a shared form of dissent involving “a lot of people” at a specific point in time—it’s hardly historicized. Only seldom do official chronologies include the actions of the multitudes that keep erupting across the planet.
RIRKRIT
That kind of collective manifestation is an important part of being human. Again, when I say we need to slow down the gaze, it’s because we don’t always want to see or recall things that are unpleasant, or that remind us of bad things that happened. Of course, it’s also because we like to remember successful things and forget those that were not. Today, it seems like there are not as many successes as we would wish for, or that we thought were possible.
BARBARA
The fragments also make it hard to understand immediately what we are looking at, where it’s happening, and when. We inhabit a time of unlearning and rewriting past histories, as well as trying to rebuild monocratic versions of them. By documenting protests over the decades, as you do, you are also creating possible chronologies for future memory. Do you attach context-specific references to works when you exhibit them in different places? Or do you just leave it open?
RIRKRIT
I leave it open because it’s scrambled, right? You have to pay attention, which means reading the signs, noticing how people dress, guessing where they are from—different elements that you slowly decipher. But you need to do the reading, first. And we mostly don’t anymore.
I love the easel designed by Lina Bo Bardi in 1968 for the MASP in São Paulo—a glass pane supported by a concrete cube. I think every museum should install their collection like that, because when you stand in front of it, you understand immediately that history is not linear, but a dispersed labyrinth in space and time. I see things like that. And I don’t. I mean, because I’m coming from the other world, I also see the other histories, or the other possibilities, or the other peripheries.
BARBARA
I’d relate various elements of your practice to ways of thinking that took shape in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I’m not referring only to relational aesthetics, but rather to a punk, DIY attitude about how to do things, and grassroots movements that attempted to reshape how global reality is narrated.
RIRKRIT
I don’t think that ever went away. It’s happening over and over and over. For example, in Thailand today, young people are very hopeful about certain changes. We may pay less attention to what happens outside Europe and the West, but it does happen. I’m very patient with change, which is another slow thing. But one can see it a little bit, that minimal shifting. I’m patient also because I’m just persistently waiting for, or enforcing, some kind of a will to move the very heavy things, to generate the kind of energy required for everyone to move together.
BARBARA
In one of the videos in your show, Untitled 2014–2016 (Curry for the soul of the forgotten) (two) (2014–16), the camera follows the incredibly slow movement of a large bronze cooking pot on top of a burner, across a patch of land, surrounded by many people, who finally gather to solemnly eat its contents: a Thai curry. It took me a while to even notice that the pot was moving. I thought of it as a self-portrait, but I don’t know exactly why.
RIRKRIT
Well, I think everything I do is a self-portrait, because it’s the result of my experience. I make films, but I never point the camera at myself. I’m always trying to not appear. But on the other hand, it’s totally me.
BARBARA
In that film, I think what’s captivating is the combination of so many people’s silent presence and how language comes into play with the T-shirts worn by some of the participants, bearing slogans like “Freedom cannot be simulated.” They operate as unexpected captions to the action, in a rather unusual format. Is this how you like to use texts? By layering them over other contexts, as in your paintings on newspapers?
RIRKRIT
The young people I work with in Chiang Mai are extremely aware. In the film, that young man intentionally wore that T-shirt because he knew he was going to be visible. There’s no real direction from my side, except for the fact that we are going to start cooking, put everything into the pot, light a fire below it. At the end of that long camera movement, the food is ready, and then it’s served.
BARBARA
More and more artists and activists are using food to rewire communities and raise ecological awareness. I have the impression that these slow practices are resurfacing in so many ways—people walking, eating together, sitting around a table, practicing alternative pedagogies—all to open up spaces to connect. Do you think it’s a cyclical thing?
RIRKRIT
Of course it is. There is always an awareness of the need for change. For instance, consider foraging, which is fundamentally about learning how to live with and recognize things that are immediately around you. In a weird way, it’s very futuristic, because we may soon need that form of survival. What will people who have never cooked or made their own food do the day everything stops and there is no more delivery? But now there are magazines about foraging, even television shows about it, so there is the impression of a new consciousness forming. But I think it’s always been there, across the world.
In the original exhibition at PS1, I presented the film Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbors (2011), about an old farmer who came to work at my house. I was always watching him because of his personality, so I asked if I could film him, and he said yes. I followed him around Chiang Mai. As he walked, he picked things up. It’s that kind of life and slowness. He never uses a bike, and he eats things he finds along his path, or fishes from the water in front of the house. His existence is entirely based on what nature makes available.
BARBARA
In the exhibition, there are many examples of how you recontextualize—even musealize—your own history. For instance the installation Untitled 2011 (558 Broome Street, the future is chrome) (2011), which restages a 1994 exhibition of yours at Gavin Brown’s in New York. When you remake certain spaces where something originally happened, you also change the materials used for that wall or piece of furniture, and recast the artworks. Why do you choose that language?
RIRKRIT
On a basic level, I would say it’s about space—a space that means something has a context that needs to be addressed, so that you understand that you’re not sitting just anywhere. I’ve always figured that I’m making things for a given context, for a specific condition and situation. In a sense, if it shifts, it could mean something else. And, of course it shifts.
I’m always trying to refocus on life rather than on objects, since the very beginning, but in this Western and museological context, the focus is always on the object. Histories and even memories are classified through objects. I very much try to find a way out of that problem
BARBARA
It’s going to be interesting to see how museums rethink their own operations, going forward. How the structure and the mechanisms of the museum, which is a basically a memory-building machine, will transform. Or maybe not.
RIRKRIT
Museums may operate under very different conditions from those that we’ve experienced recently. Many museums have been criticized for not moving quickly enough to keep up with the speed of things—critical conditions, movements of protest, and so forth. Museums are so slow. But this slowness is something I like about them. I think we need to build spaces for both the slow and the fast. We have to build platforms that operate at shifting speeds. LUMA is interesting in this respect because they host so many variations of exhibitions in a single place. Private structures are capable of letting things happen way faster than museums. We just need to understand them as different types of platforms.
BARBARA
Fear eats the soul,2 as you repeat often on banners, T-shirts, paintings, wall paintings, over and over. In Arles, it was written in gigantic letters on the facade of Les Forges. Everything is so polarized these days, with so much censorship exercised on all sides. How does one develop a language that suggests words of resistance without necessarily falling under anybody’s flag?
RIRKRIT
That’s a question I’m often asked, especially by Asian students: How do we address things? And I say, we have to make poetry. It’s about using poetry, by which I mean, you can make resistance through beauty. It lasts. It’s capable of rendering itself into a different time and space.
BARBARA
Can you think of an example of an artistic practice that works along similar lines?
RIRKRIT
Philip Guston is, to me, an example of that kind of poetry and language. All good art probably has that, anyway. I guess I’m old, old from the good old days, and I get inspired by seeing certain things that still hit the mark. When I filmed John Giorno for ten hours [for Untitled 2008 (John Giorno reads) (2008)], it was because I really wanted young people to be able to see him. I just said, Look, we have to put this down now because of the energy that comes off him, even in the film.
As I was saying earlier, we need to build, and sustain, a certain kind of energy that gives everyone the will to resist. To go on is a kind of resistance.
Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires in 1961. He lives and works in New York, Berlin and Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Tiravanija is best known for his intimate, participatory installations, inviting people from all walks of life to inhabit the spaces that he constructs and to communally engage in shared rituals and actions. His art and installations incorporate a wide variety of media, including painting, printmaking, video, photography, mixed-media assemblage, and music.
The son of a Thai diplomat, he moved frequently during his youth, growing up primarily in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada. He received his BA from the Ontario College of Art, Toronto, in 1984, and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. From 1985 to 1986, he participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York.
Tiravanija was the subject of two major retrospectives in the 2000s: Nothing: A Retrospective, at Chiang Mai University Art Museum, Thailand (2004), and A Retrospective (tomorrow is another fine day), which was presented simultaneously at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2004), and later at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2005).
In 2019, Fear Eats the Soul, a major solo exhibition featuring several interactive and participatory elements, was presented at Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland. Also in 2019, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, hosted Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Green.
A major survey of Tiravanija’s work, the artist’s largest to date, Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE, was on view at MoMA PS1, New York, from October 12, 2023 until March 4, 2024 and at LUMA, Arles, from June 1 to November 3, 2024. The solo exhibition Rirkrit Tiravanija: DAS GLÜCK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG (HAPPINESS IS NOT ALWAYS FUN) is currently held at the Gropius Bau, Berlin, until January 12, 2025.
Other solo exhibitions have been presented at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (1996); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1998); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (1999); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1999); Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan (2000); Portikus, Frankfurt (2001 and 2004); Kunsthall Oslo (2001); Secession, Vienna (2002); Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany (2003); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2005); The Drawing Center, New York (2008); Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (2009); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2009); Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2009); Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2012); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2012); Centre d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona (2014); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2014); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2015); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasília (2015); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); and National Gallery of Singapore (2018).
The artist’s work was featured in the Venice Biennale in 1993, 1999, 2011, and 2015. He also exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial in 2006, and the Whitney Biennial in 1995 and 2006. At the 2012 Paris Triennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, Tiravanija presented Soup/No Soup (2011–12), a twelve-hour banquet that was open to all visitors at the Grand Palais. Among his many awards and honors, Tiravanija was the recipient of the 2004 Hugo Boss Prize from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Barbara Casavecchia is a writer, independent curator and educator based in Milan, Italy. She is the editor-in-chief of Mousse magazine.