Rirkrit Tiravanija and the Banality of Boring Art

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work is about pushing artistic boundaries, blurring the distinctions between the viewer and the art-making participant, bringing art down to earth, into a convivial space of human interaction. He is setting his work in contradistinction to the formal, sterile, authoritarian structure, present in museums and much of the art world. He is perhaps best known for works in which, within the gallery space, he prepares food and then feeds it to his audience – things like Pad Thai, Vegetable Curry, or even Cup O’Noodles. This work is part of a greater trend within contemporary art in which the art draws attention to, or literally is, some aspect of daily life.

As interesting as this may be in concept, in its form, it seems banal at best. It blurs the boundaries of art so much that it makes everything art – it is tautological and, as any logician with tell you, tautologies are meaningless. If Rirkrit is trying so hard to undermine the historical traditions of what art is and how it is supposed to be experienced, why show it in a gallery at all? Why have an artist at all? If convivial interaction is all one needs to experience art, then why not just go to the local Starbucks and chill with a friend, or, for that matter, why not get drunk at the local dive bar?

Although I’ve never first-hand experienced his work, I am quite certain that my Friday night will always be more interesting than one of his shows. What he should do instead is simply place a sign outside of any random bar in town that reads, “Art Making in Progress.” If all he cares about is the exchange between people, then why have a gallery show, why call himself an artist, when really, he is just the mediator of an experience which anyone and everyone does on a daily basis?

Good art teaches us about human nature, the human experience, but does so in a way that is also interesting and profound. Tiravanija’s work is one-dimensional. Artists have been pointing to the experience of daily life long before he came on the scene. One of the single greatest examples of this is in James Joyce’s Ulysses. This book deals with daily life but not in a way to trivialize it. It reveals the heroic in the everyday, the beauty and transcendence of the quotidian – however, as with all good literature, this is not explicitly stated, it is revealed via Joyce’s literary genius, his technical virtuosity. Much of contemporary art and especially work within the vein of Relational Aesthetics tries to eschew these ‘outdated,’ ostensibly fascistic notions of the transcendent, the genius, the Romantic hero.

If you trace the recent history of art and the world itself, one notices that once man climbed to the top of Maslow’s Pyramid, once Positivism and the subsequent demystification of the world took place, it didn’t seem important or relevant to make work with such lofty airs. Since people don’t believe in anything anymore, why make art that seems meaningful? Why make art, which through its attention to technique, would belie its creator’s belief that it was indeed meaningless? Work done by artists, like those of the aesthetic ethos of Joyce, believe in art’s ability to point to or reveal profound truths about humanity – they show, not tell, letting the one experiencing the work take away what they can glean. As Stephen proclaims in Portrait of the Artist, the goal of an artist should be "transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life." Next to the work of someone like Joyce, Picasso, or El Greco for that matter, Tiravanija’s work looks utterly vacuous and banal. What’s more, by the tautological way it is defined, it would be, in the words of Wittgenstein, mere “nonsense.”