La incertidumbre del contexto. Entrevista a Rirkrit Tiravanija

A.- I created the version of this retrospective for Thailand with another artist and, since it was in Thailand, in a kind of museum that had no structure, we had no money. In order to present the work, which was actually presented very officially, we created it again as a copy produced locally with local material. There the context is different and the way people approach art is also different. There are many people in Thailand who have never seen my work before and, when they see them, they do not see them as works of art. For instance, for my "cooking pieces," people just went out and started cooking, and that artistic activity quickly became a social thing, which is very normal in that culture. The work I created was completely absent, because people were very present, because people know how to deal with the works without necessarily knowing how to deal with art. Here, in Europe, it is exactly the other way around: people have so much information in terms of what they should see, read and think that it makes that approach much more difficult. When the retrospective was shown in London, for example, it became something else completely; it became something I would call "science fiction," a radio play about time travelling to see the work. It was really a story about trying to look for the artist...

Q.- In fact, and even though it is a retrospective, Tomorrow ... once again made viewers part of the work, thus breaking the isolation with the individual experience of art.

A.- Yes, that was also connected to the actual idea of experience, because the work is about being inside an experiential structure, either alone or sharing it with someone. In a funny way, the experience also makes me think about Disneyland: seeing it in the cartoon is better than seeing it in real life, because in this case the cartoon is more real than the real thing. I also recall Félix González-Torres' work, or Carl Andre's oeuvre: one can walk across them and not even think about it, or one can stop and think, and then walk around it. There are different ways to approach these works and different ways to "experience" them, both voluntarily and involuntarily. I wanted people to feel a new experience with my work, I wanted it to be more than just a replay, a reconstitution or a recreation, which would not really contribute any more understanding than not seeing it at all.

Q.- What stage is the group project you started a few years ago in Thailand called The Land currently in?

A.- The Land has become a "foundation," in the sense that, after seven years working on it, it has become something "neutral." In the beginning, it emerged from the idea of creating a meeting place for friends from all around the world, a kind of "communal" structure that we would share, maybe also like a sort of "bar" where you can always find somebody you know when you arrive. It is not like living there: you can spend a lot of time there, but never live there, that's why I use the metaphor of the bar. My position there is to be the bartender. It is a place to live and a place to meet, but that is only one layer of it. It is an open place, not only for artists: cyclists from Denmark, biking all over the world, can come and stay there, for instance. A lot of young artists come too, like Alexander Périgord, who has been creating a project on the communal situation over the three months during which certain events have been staged. We also have a program that started slightly over a year and a half ago that is called "The One Year Project," that basically means that young people can go and live there for a year, develop their ideas and take care of the place. It is like a residence or a school where people have to face the others' experiences, which they may or may not use in the future. We have also created another space in the city that will be used as an exhibition place for young artists. There are also seminars and even a yogi who goes during the week and teaches yoga. I could not say what The Land is now because, in a sense, it is nothing, but at the same time something is happening there, although I cannot tell you what it is.

Q.- As regards your commitment with the development of artistic activity in your country, what effect does it have on the young Thai population that wants to get into the art world?

A.- I am not the only person involved in that development; there are also other people as well as a younger generation of artists interested in the possibilities they find in alternative structures. There is no cultural structure in Thailand, but there are institutions like the Art University, as well as other organisations, that you inevitably have to deal with. We are the alternative space, we are an open space, although this does not mean that we have an answer. We would like to give people as many different ideas or opinions on the artistic practice as possible, but we are also interested in agricultural practices and sustainable production, and there are people around us who are also interested in these things. There is a kind of "lab aspect" in our initiative, and that leads to there being projects that are not always artistic. Thai society needs this kind of structures to deal with these contemporary issues.

Q.- How do you make this type of open projects compatible, in the framework of everyday life, with the rest of the activities you perform as an artist? To what extent is the connection between them purely "Utopian"?

A.- Well, I have already said that utopia is chaos. I do not find an order in it because, often, when you try to rationalise it, it fails. The Utopian structure comes from the distance from which people regard it. A lot of people talk about The Land , but nobody has seen it, for example. People confuse the ideas of "utopia" and "hope" in order to give up some of their responsibility. Utopia is not a place, or a building, it is inside each of us. I do not think my works are "inside" or "outside," or "against" something, but simply there .