Rirkrit Tiravanija
After two decades of supplying gallery visitors with pad thai and curries, Rirkrit Tiravanija knows that a free meal and cheap clothing are an easy way to win over a New York audience. In his exhibition ‘FEAR EATS THE SOUL’, what surrounded these two offerings seemed almost beside the point. On a brisk Saturday afternoon, the cavernous spaces of Gavin Brown’s enterprise were empty, and emptied out. The usual front door was locked, but the gallery’s front walls were completely removed, with the door frames leaned up inside, and floor-to-ceiling spray-paint lettering spelling out the exhibition’s title. Despite the space being accessible 24 hours a day, no acts of vandalism could be seen; shovels, tools and piles of dirt were lined up perfectly, undisturbed. While the gallery itself took on a superficial sense of transparency, its staff was made even more inaccessible than usual: the entryways into the offices and reception area were completely bricked up. An assumption was made that the information conventionally offered via press release or checklist was unnecessary, that the exhibition and its production were self-explanatory.
Not surprisingly, most visitors could be found in the shelter of the soup kitchen. Customers lined up to be served or perched on stools, and the red walls were covered with witty paintings by gallery artist Spencer Sweeney, highbrow versions of bad café art. (The back room, in which the soup kitchen was located, hosts The Museum of Spencer Sweeney, an ongoing installation.) People could also be found clustered in the T-shirt shop where, for 20 dollars, you could purchase a freshly silk-screened T-shirt with a choice of slogans ranging from the generally banal to the specifically political, many taken from past works by Tiravanija: ‘I HAVE DONUTS AT HOME’; ‘IRAN, IRAQ, IKEA, I’M BUSY’; ‘BRING ME THE HEAD OF THAKSIN SHINAWATRA’. Perhaps most pointed within the context of work-obsessed New York, though, was the May ’68 Situationist motto ‘NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS’. There was something for everyone, but each statement also collectively contributed to the constructed identity of the artist himself. In these two spaces of exchange and distribution, people were talking, interacting and generally inhabiting the roles that Tiravanija has encouraged visitors to take on throughout his work.
Yet there was one conspicuously locked door in the exhibition, behind which was a plywood replica of Gavin Brown’s original SoHo space, containing a restaging of Tiravanija’s first exhibition there in 1994. Almost comically dwarfed inside Brown’s current gallery, the recreation served as a literal comparison of how far both artist and dealer had come. Originally, Tiravanija had paired his everyday objects with works by Andy Warhol; a wok next to a Brillo box, stacks of glass beer bottles beneath a Mao silkscreen. The updated version, however, cast each piece in chrome, monumentalizing the coming-together of art-world megastars. These sequestered, precious sculptures acted as shrine to a mythic past, but also to the idea of the luxury art object. Functioning as the only works of visible commercial value in the entire exhibition, these objects were preserved as fossils, whereas the liberated experience of the open gallery, the free soup and the affordable T-shirt belonged to the present moment. While visitors took advantage of the unconventional accessibility to the gallery, the artist, and the work (so much so that during the exhibition’s run, Brown’s car had been taken for a joyride by two visitors when it was parked inside the gallery, keys in the ignition), it still felt like business as usual, an exaggerated display of democratic art processes to the usual contemporary art audience. The title’s reference to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s celebrated 1974 film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, in which a couple prevails against discrimination, suggested only the vaguest association with the humanist idealism of works like the soup kitchen, but felt ambiguously powerful when rendered in three-metre-high lettering. Undoubtedly, the title also looked great on a souvenir T-shirt.
