When Rirkrit Tiravanija installed a new work called “The Umbrella Repair Shop” in David Zwirner’s Hong Kong gallery in 2023, its title was somewhat curtailed. “I was playing with the idea of unrest,” he says, referring to the city’s pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019, when protesters used umbrellas as a defence against tear gas. “But it turned out that even the word ‘umbrella’ had been politicised.” Instead, it was decided that “The Shop” would suffice as title.
Such reduction seems about right for Tiravanija, though. He is an artist who presents with delicacy, not dogma; his work is subtle and playful despite its political heft. “He does not make grand gestures that feel traumatic or cathartic,” says American artist Arthur Jafa in the doorstop of a catalogue that accompanies Tiravanija’s current retrospective in Arles, in the south of France.
“The Shop” is here in Arles — it is the first thing visitors discover in the exhibition — and this time it has the full title. The installation replicates the tiny repair stores found all over Hong Kong, packed to the rafters with rolled and telescopic umbrellas, brown cardboard boxes bound in gluey Sellotape and the idiosyncratic detritus of daily life — a kettle, a wall fan, a pot of glue with a woollen glove for a lid. Its original form was, however, deemed too tight a space for French health and safety regulations and has been installed on a bigger, slouchier floor plate.
Other artists might feel threatened or peeved by all these outside interventions. But Tiravanija, 63, is a calm man. “It’s about letting go, allowing someone else’s input,” he says as we take a leisurely walk through the show. He is dressed in navy right up to his baseball cap. “I don’t have anxiety. I think that’s just being Thai, being Buddhistic, letting things be, knowing that things come and go and change, and that there is always time.”
Tiravanija (pronounced Tir-AH-van-it) was born in Buenos Aires to Thai parents and grew up in Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada. In Ethiopia he learnt English and in Canada he began to study art. By the 1980s, he had moved to New York, where both further study and work as an art mover allowed him to slide into its downtown art world. Now he lives between Berlin and Thailand, where with friends he runs a not-for-profit sanctuary called The Land, which promotes both agriculture and creativity.
He was not keen on having a retrospective. In an ideal world, according to his Buddhist principles, his art would leave no trace. But when Ruba Katrib of New York’s PS1, where the exhibition started out, and Yasmil Raymond of Frankfurt’s Städelschule started their research in 2015, they found there was plenty to show. The presentation in Arles — hosted by Luma, the expansive contemporary art campus just outside the ancient city walls — is as much a self-portrait as a career survey.
In the early 1990s, Tiravanija became known as the creator of “Pad Thai”, in which he cooked one of his country’s most popular recipes in a New York commercial gallery for an American audience. Whether an act of cultural critique (he replaced the tamarind sauce with ketchup) or the assertion of a daily dish as an aesthetic artefact, “Pad Thai” established Tiravanija as an artist whose work was entirely participatory. While he perhaps had an antecedent in Food, a restaurant/experience space run by the artist Gordon Matta-Clark in New York in the 1970s, his peers developed other ways to engage. Carsten Höller encouraged visitors to whoosh down the steep slides he installed in art institutions, while Tino Sehgal invited them to tell their own stories. All blurred the boundaries of art, life and play.
“Food is an easy door to go through,” says the artist of his preferred medium of engagement. “It’s something we all do.” There will be no cooking here, but the influence of “Pad Thai” is all over the show. It is here in a series of woks that have been fetishised as art objets, while upstairs, in an area cordoned off with stacks of art books and catalogues, a man is making Turkish coffee on two electric rings. “It’s the opposite of an espresso,” says the barista, an Iranian drafted in from Luma’s catering staff. It is delicious, not strong but fruity and scented with just the right amount of rose water.
The work, called “Café Deutschland”, originated in the early 1990s as a response to xenophobic attacks on immigrants across Germany. Unable to travel there on his Thai passport, Tiravanija faxed instructions to a Cologne gallery for a memorial gesture: build an ad hoc space inside its white cube with a wall of boxes and books and offer Turkish coffee. The title is taken from a huge series of paintings by the German artist Jörg Immendorff which deliberated on the separation of East and West Germany after the second world war.
Tiravanija loves to borrow for his work. “I come from a copy culture,” he says. “In Thailand, we’re the producers of all sorts of western things, or reproducers. But hopefully we sample it and make something for ourselves.” In his case, he plays on the dominance of western art history while inserting himself into it.
This is a kind of greedy appropriation, and yes, of course, Marcel Duchamp is here. (A line of urinals, copies of those in the now-defunct New York club CBGB, pays tribute to the original inventor of ready-made art.) But Tiravanija takes us quietly to Thailand too. A weirdly moving film called “Curry for the Soul of the Forgotten” shows a huge cast-bronze cooking pot moving slowly towards a dish of rice, arriving when its contents are ready to eat, a funerary moment that suggests both life and death. In another compelling film, blazing tyres roll through a white-cube gallery, lighting up the room with fire. It commemorates a series of violent anti-government protests that took place in Thailand in 2010.
Perhaps the most beautiful work here is a 10-hour film of the performance poet and artist John Giorno made in 2008. “We did it in one day, just started the camera rolling,” says Tiravanija. “Whenever I saw John perform or read, it was so special and inspiring, I wanted to pass that on.” In the section I watched, Giorno performed a spirited piece about a spontaneous 10am orgy in the men’s room at Prince Street station. It was detailed, entrancing and, quite frankly, filthy. Tiravanija and I agree: the French might have intervened with “The Umbrella Repair Shop”, but so much the better that they let this one go.
‘Rirkrit Tiravanija: A Lot of People’ runs at Les Forges, Luma, Arles, until November 3, luma.org
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