Rirkrit Tiravanija:
Place and
a Time
Over the past thirty years, Rirkrit Tiravanija has held a mirror to our disorientation, offering short, sharp accounts of human relations.
Much of modern art history is marked by manifestoes, militant supporters and competing visions of art that propelled artists to innovate and meld together different styles, mediums and ideas. However, by the 1960s this model had reached its apex, and utopian hopes for a better future, the avant-garde and definable styles lost momentum as cornerstone ideas in Western art history. The conditions of globalisation dramatically altered this Modernist trajectory. Communication technologies like the mobile phone and internet, market liberalisation and the flow of travellers shaped a new set of socio-political circumstances unrecognisable to the Modernists of yesteryear. Instead, these conditions gave rise to a new generation
of artists, critics and curators who employed new strategies to articulate polemical insight into the late 1980s and 1990s.
New York-based Rirkrit Tiravanija is one of the artists who defined this period. With a career spanning installation, video, print, painting and text, Tiravanija and his role in what became known as the Relational Aesthetics movement offered art history a new ‘ism’. Relational Art, explains American art critic Jerry Saltz in 2013, “reengineered art over the past fifteen years or so.”1 French art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term in 1998 to describe and interpret the work of artists like Tiravanija, Liam Gillick and Pierre Huyghe, who linked their art to politics by creating encounters where audience members could relate to each other and build potentially transformative experiences. Bourriaud used the term ‘microtopia’ – a fusion of ‘micro’ and ‘utopia’ – to describe these moments of social exchange.
In relational works, social exchange saw the art and the artist – who had historically . .. Subscribe to read this article in full
