Can Rirkrit Tiravanija Fry Globalization By Serving Bastardized Thai Food At MoMA PS1?

It was a dinner to remember. On February 7, 1990, visitors to the Paula Allen Gallery in New York City were handed plates of pad Thai, served fresh from the wok. At first nobody noticed that the caterer was the featured artist, Rirkrit Tiravanija. Nor did they realize that their emptied plates were being kept, or expect that unwashed dishes from that evening would go on display for the duration of Tiravanija’s exhibition. This month, those dirty dishes and woks can be viewed again in an extensive Tiravanija retrospective at MoMA PS1, the memory of that 1990 dinner perfectly preserved.

If the act of retrospectively exhibiting a meal seems awkward, it coincides with Tiravanija’s intention. As he later explained, he was “questioning the idea of making things.” Cooking for people, he made something that had to be consumed. Almost immediately, he understood that the substance of the work was to be found in the interactions between strangers eating together. The perfect preservation of remnants, befitting a museum, was perfectly absurd. Seeing the encased artifacts paradoxically emphasized the irretrievable moment, memorializing the point that, well, you had to be there.

Tiravanija was not the first to make these moves. Decades earlier, Joseph Beuys developed the concept of social sculpture, creating conditions intended to shape the body politic. Beuys pursued his mission through polemical acts, often theatrical, such as his Boxing Match for Direct Democracy, a fight between advocates of different political systems staged in 1972. Preserved in a zinc display case, remnants of the match are now in the permanent collection of the Museum Für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt.

The formal parallels between the two artists are undeniable and the influence of Beuys has been acknowledged by Tiravanija. But the difference in tone made all the difference. Tiravanija’s culinary provocations were not explicitly confrontational. They deemphasized his artistic role, in contrast to Beuys’s intellectual bullying. Tiravanija’s artworks were participatory, focused on connecting people. Instead of social sculpture, and the treatment of humans as raw material, his work entailed relationships. His approach has been aptly described as relational aesthetics.

Although Tiravanija has done a lot since 1990, cooking has remained his signature practice, and his retrospective takes its title from the most important ingredient: “a lot of people”. If he was effectively anonymous in the first iteration of this work, today he need not even be present. Much as Marina Abramović did for her 2010 MoMA retrospective, he has trained others to perform on his behalf. A series of “plays” restage past cooking events, giving lots of people the opportunity to taste the foods he once prepared and to interact with each other in a gallery setting.

For the first month of the retrospective, Tiravanija staged a version of untitled 1990 (pad thai). Currently he’s staging untitled 1992-1995 (free/still), a performance that offers two different versions of Thai green curry. The first uses authentic Thai ingredients. The second is bastardized, substituting ingredients sourced from a local New York supermarket. If not quite as aggressive as a boxing match, the juxtaposition gives untitled 1992-1995 (free/still) a more political edge than untitled 1990 (pad thai). Or at least the political edge is more overt, adjusting for the fact that foods such as pad Thai are no longer deemed ‘exotic’, as they were in the early ‘90s. On the PS1 website, Tiravanija claims always to have “used the kitchen and cooking as the base from which to conduct an assault on the cultural aesthetics of Western attitudes toward life and living.”

What makes untitled 1992-1995 (free/still) more compelling than untitled 1990 (pad thai) given the present context is that the bastardized Thai curry is performing in its own right, awkwardly playing the role of the real thing. This inevitably leads to a reconsideration of what the people in the room are doing as they eat. Visitors to PS1 are also performing.

The staged nature of the retrospective cooking events might be grounds for critique, a line taken by the New York Times in a recent review questioning the political potency of Tiravanija’s relational aesthetics. But it also serves to distinguish the retrospective from Tiravanija’s past work, making it more complex.

Tiravanija’s plays are not, on reflection, quite equivalent to Abramović’s restagings. (Nor are they quite like Fluxus scores that call for constant reinterpretation as a playful form of participation.) Tiravanija’s work needs to be considered in terms of its content, not only its formal qualities. His artworks involve foods from his native Thailand, and his decision to use food as an “assault” is hardly arbitrary. His art asks important questions about cultural heritage, and how that heritage is sustained in the messy conditions of globalized cultural intermixing. With subtle irony, he hinted at this in 1990 when he chose to cook pad Thai, a modern Thai dish invented specifically to represent Thai identity, distinguishing Thailand from other parts of Asia. His Thai curry food fight more explicitly took on the conditions of globalization by asking whether foods can authentically be toured.

What does it mean to perform Thai cuisine? In a sense, every enactment of a recipe is a performance, and recipes endure only by being regularly restaged, subtlely changing according to available ingredients and human needs. Yet the time and place of staging impacts the performance. At a certain point, the communal quality of culture goes missing. Akin to the nationalist function of pad Thai, it becomes a matter of ‘identity’ rather than identity.

We are living in an age when climate change is decimating traditional ingredient availability and technology is erasing geography. This is also a time of assimilation and cultural forgetting (or encasement of culture in climate-controlled museums). The multidimensional problem space in which Tiravanija’s work operates requires that we consider our future together. Collectively finding foodways that can sustain our sense of community – counteracting the social disintegration that accompanies the loss of food security – may be the redemption of relational aesthetics and the social sculpture of our era.