Rirkrit Tiravanija. Installation view of A Retrospective
(tomorrow is another fine day) at Museum Boijmans Van
Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands. 2004.
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
AND GAVIN BROWN ENTERPRISE.

Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires, raised in Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada, educated in Chicago and now lives between Berlin, New York and Thailand. In keeping with this diversity, his work, spanning a range of media, is difficult to classify. Tiravanija transforms the viewer into a participant, whose experiences activate the artwork, giving it meaning and form. Considered one of the most significant international artists to emerge in the 1990s, Tiravanija works within the space of inter-personal relationships, deals with ideas of place and unsettles cultural symbols. Among other initiatives, he has made installations using rice and cooked Thai food for gallery visitors. He was one of the ten artists to be selected for theanyspacewhatever, a group exhibition concentrating on Relational Aesthetics, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, from October 24th, 2008, to January 7th, 2009. Jordan Troeller tunes in to Tiravanija's latest projects.

JORDAN TROELLER: YOU COME FROM A PARTICULARLY MULTICULTURAL background, growing up in a number of different countries. Does this influence your work?

Rirkrit Tiravanija: It does come into play, perhaps unconsciously. I do make works about my identity, but they are more existential - in so far as they address issues everyone has.

Rirkrit Tiravanija. Chew The Fat. Installation view at
Guggenheim Museum, New York. 2008.

In a way, I negotiate cultural difference by not dealing with it - or at least, by not focusing my work on it. When I first started working in New York, there were artist-initiative groups like Godzilla, an Asian-American artists' collective. I don't consider myself Asian-American, just Thai. In the 1980s, there was a shift in terms of how groups of artists culturally participated in the art world. More Asian-Americans were going to art school and becoming artists, for instance. There was also the bubble of Multiculturalism, which came out of Feminism as well as African-American movements. If you were an Asian-American artist you were still an outsider in terms of representation. People wanted to self-organize to exchange ideas and make themselves more visible. But becoming more visible also becomes more problematic, because then your ethnicity becomes the focus, whereas your work might not necessarily be just about that.

J.T.: Do you see your practice evolving increasingly in Thailand?

R.T.: Definitely. Although I'm teaching here in New York, which I don't need to do. I like being involved.

J.T.: You recently spoke at the New Museum, in New York, on the land. This collaborative project, initiated in 1998, is located near a village in Thailand and involves a group of artists cultivating a plot of farmland for social engagement. How does the land relate to your larger involvement with Thailand?

R.T.: I try to break a hole in the white cube to get out. I began going back to Thailand more seriously over the last 10 years. It was about going home. The first works answered the questions like - What am I going to say to everyone in Thailand? How would they understand what I was doing? Going back, I realized that what I was doing in the West was already there in Thailand: I was using things from daily life and re-contextualizing them. I knew I couldn't work in Thailand in the same way. I couldn't have an exhibition and cook Pad Thai; it would be ridiculous.

the land developed parallel to the magazine [(O)ver Magazine, 2000], through discussions between friends in the West and Thailand. This was the beginning of finding ways to work within Thailand.

In Thailand, I met other, mostly younger, artists. There were no museums or galleries that could really support their work. They were about to get out of school and talked about forming an agency to do something around commercial practices like photography or advertising in order to survive but also because it was possible to artistically intervene in these contexts. The magazine came out of this. It consists of pictures and the rest of the content is audio-based and on a CD that comes with it. The sound relates in some way to the images. It is always kept in the original language. I'm still working on this but it is self-funded and self-organized. We don't really make money. Once we gather enough images and content, we make 3,000 issues and send them to New York, Bangkok and Berlin, always through people we know directly. They are then put up for sale at commercial venues such as Tower Records or bookshops. We publish whatever people send in. People send in amazing stuff!

the land, of course, is the opposite of the magazine, which is completely within the structure of cultural production. To deal with the image, is to open up another kind of platform, one with a more definite form. the land is not a fixed thing. I don't know where it will go, which is part of its importance. It is adaptable, depending on what is needed. The residency program is an example of this. Rather than have an exhibition, we give artists, especially young artists, a space to think about art; to grow rice but to do so in ways that create ideas about art-making. the land is a place to re-think our daily structures.

J.T.: The navigation of public and private spaces seems to take precedence in your work over explicit explorations of cultural difference. Since it functions at a distance from the Western art audience, in the land you really challenge the way people think about public and private space - whether they know it or not.

R.T.: That's really very true of the land. The line between public and private can be stretched much more than you might think. So, having a piece of land that everyone can use extends the idea of property.

I knew this would be difficult to achieve in the West for bureaucratic and economic reasons. Actually, I find these structures stopping a lot of the creativity in the West. In Thailand as well, we had to go through this whole legal process to make the land a place that wasn't owned by anyone. We didn't want it to be owned, but someone's name had to be linked to the land. We finally made it a foundation, which we were reluctant to do. But, it was the only way out. Occasionally, we lapse into this kind of bureaucratic thinking, though we continually resist it. Still, it's good for younger artists to learn to navigate this area. I'm fairly established and know how to work with institutions, but younger artists in Thailand rarely get shows.

J.T.: Neither the land nor the magazine were planned for a specific festival or biennial. Do you usually have time to pursue this kind of work?

R.T.: Yes, more so now that I am visiting Thailand regularly. Going back is also a way of looking at the system from the outside. I give talks to young artists about stopping work to rethink their practice. In the last 7 or 8 years, the market demand for exhibitions has been hyper. So, I think that one has to constantly rethink one's position. For me, this involved making work that would slow things down. I made the documentary film Chew the Fat (2008) for the Guggenheim exhibition theanyspacewhatever, for example.