La incertidumbre del contexto. Entrevista a Rirkrit Tiravanija

R.- Bueno, ya he dicho que la utopía es caos. No le encuentro orden porque, a menudo, cuando uno intenta racionalizarla, fracasa. La estructura utópica viene de la distancia desde la que las personas la miran. Mucha gente habla del proyecto The Land , pero nadie lo ha visto, por ejemplo. La gente confunde los conceptos de "utopía" y "esperanza" para desprenderse un poco de su parte de responsabilidad. La utopía no es un lugar, ni un edificio; está dentro de cada uno. No creo que mis obras estén "dentro", ni "fuera", ni "en contra" de algo, sino que simplemente están allí.

Traducción: Laura F. Farhall y Vivianne Loría

interview with rirkrit tiravanija

Manuel Cirauqui

The notion of "relational aesthetics" seemed like it was going to prevail a few years ago, more than as a criterion for artistic production (since in truth it contained nothing new), as a criterion for interpreting a certain genre of installations, attempting to result not in a mere subjective experience, but in an experimental exchange between the people involved. Yet the opening of the field of the exhibition that those works provided to the experience contained hope and disappointment in equal measures: taking something unyieldingly real as an artistic material involves assuming that said nucleus of reality is already equivalent to its own copy or effigy. Perhaps the final destination of the concept relational aesthetics is to remain indefinitely on the test bed, before being forgotten. Yet this fact, far from involving the disappearance of certain works, allows us to perceive their exquisite lack of definition. This is the case of the oeuvre of Rikrit Tiravanija (1961), often taken as the model for said non-existent avant-guard. His installations are the paradigm of that attempt to "democratise" the structure of the work of art, forcing its perception solely via its use as an ordinary object or as an "inverted" ready-made, thus confusing the living, seeing and producing both of the work of art and of the space that is foreign to it. Buying a piece by Tiravanija is not buying "a relationship with the world" (Nicolas Bourriaud), but a new piece of it, which is both part of it and represents it. Yet it is funny to see how the old and initial issue of representation seems to have slid into Tiravanija's work to mark the beginning of a stage of maturity. In his first retrospective, entitled Tomorrow is another fine day and presented in different European cities last year, Tiravanija made visitors uncomfortably realise that the event -and also, and most importantly, the event that a work of art wants to be- is unrepeatable, and perhaps unrepeatable since forever : its first appearance is perhaps already a memory, a quote, a simulation. Tomorrow is another fine day did not present former works; there was nothing to see there, literally, except the guide who, pretended to present each installation referring to a place where there was nothing but a white space, rendering a complete description, that was devoid of a referent and just as "white" as the surrounding area. Tiravanija's last exhibition in Paris (between January and February this year, at the Chantal Crousel gallery) seems to have taken the previous experience into consideration, without letting the dialectics drag him towards an even greater void. In a space "decorated" with plants and mural photographs of the Pacific beaches, Tiravanija installed a large table suggesting the reconstruction of Delacroix's Freedom Guiding the People , as a puzzle, and not far from there, a "painting" bearing the sentence "Freedom cannot be simulated." The third adjacent element was a wood and iron latrine entitled Asian style , inside which there was a small immigration office at the foot of the septic tank. A space, bridge or interstice in which our way of occupying the exhibition, and also the world, is translated into the language of doubt. We asked Rirkrit Tiravanija about these concerns, as well as about the immediate past and future, which lie somewhere between utopia and representation.

Question .- Your latest exhibition at the Chantal Crousel gallery in Paris seems to reveal a certain "change of direction": although we are once again confronted with a device for getting together and performing collective work (the giant puzzle of Freedom Guiding the People ), there is something that we could call "frontal" about the installation, something the visitor perceives as completed.

Answer .- Well, there are issues I am trying to address and moments when I can do nothing but just address them. What you are saying in this case is very true, it appears very clearly in this show, but I think those issues have always been in my work, only I had not given them that shape. I have recently been at a conference on Marcel Broodthaers, who founded a fictional museum [ Musée des Aigles , 1968], and, towards the end of his life, when he organized a kind of retrospective, started to use the word décor . This means that Broodthaers went from a kind of "active" to a "passive" structure. As regards the idea of this show, somehow there is an "activity," albeit different, which also refers to that same "décor" spirit that appears in the last works Broodthaers created. It is like a bridge between those two points of view, the active and the passive. The retrospective organised last year in Paris already dealt with that situation: appearing completely active, but also being, in a certain way, in a very passive position. I think this active-passive relationship stems from an observation of the actual condition of that observation-interaction with the work.

Q.- As regards the retrospective Tomorrow is another fine day at the mamvp , there does seem to be a return to the real world, and to problems that are not only artistic -like Delacroix's Freedom painting-, but that are also related to the perennial issue of representation.

A.- Yes, the image of Freedom is problematic. I think it is not really "reconstructible." It is impossible to put all the pieces "back together." Even if you know the image well, you are not able to reassemble it. I would like to address precisely that inability , even if the work of reconstruction of the image is collective, because it is not the image that we need to rebuild , it is actually the real relationship between us, and not its representation.

Q.- Your work has always been presented as a drive for positive situations, for encounters. However, in your recent works, there seems to be a certain amount of negativity or bitterness.

A.- Yes, I think you are right, but actually that has always angered me. People have a wrong impression of me [laughter]. Nevertheless, in this case it is true that I am referring more clearly to what I am thinking, although maybe that is just old age, which makes me feel as if I were about to retire and allows me to express myself in this way... Speaking more seriously, I think there comes a time when we have to say things openly, and nowadays too many things go unsaid.

Q.- The treatment of the issue of migrations in your installation Untitled (House) is very interesting, as this is a very serious issue which is also, in a way, artistically "obvious."