ART-PREVIEW: Rirkrit Tiravanija-Fear Eats The Soul
Rirkrit Tiravanija changed the paradigm of art making 20 years ago and that change began with the challenge and simple temptation of food. He released the pungent aromas of spices and fish sauce into the white cube, made a crack in our perceived freedom to reveal a new liberty of open and unending possibilities. The sensual and messy reality of food preparation and consumption were literally displayed before us. In one spoonful he swept away notions of the timeless masterpiece and the instant cultural artifact.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gavin Brown’s Enterprise Archive
The mixed-media installation “Fear Eats the Soul” (201) by Rirkrit Tiravanija, occupies the whole of the Gallery building of Glenstone Museum. “Fear Eats the Soul” is a new presentation of a work the artist first installed in 2011 at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York. It is a major expression of Tiravanija’s practice of blurring the boundaries between art and life, a goal that has led him at times to abandon the art object altogether in favor of creating shared experiences in immersive environments. The son of a diplomat, Tiravanija was exposed to a variety of cultures and lifestyles early in life and was instilled with a strong commitment to social responsibility. These traits informed an approach to art that melds Eastern and Western sensibilities and often seeks to break through the limitations of conventional gallery spaces. The act of “freeing” a space from its original purpose by removing walls, windows, and doors is one of Tiravanija’s signatures. In the Gallery at Glenstone, abandoned wall frames will be placed inside spaces they might previously have divided, in keeping with Tiravanija’s instinct to invert the expected function of an interior space. Tiravanija is also known as one of the first artists to expand on Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the “readymade” by treating food as art. The presentation at Glenstone of Fear Eats the Soul will offer a suite of activities with which visitors can engage, including a soup kitchen serving recipes provided by the artist, a silk-screening T-shirt factory, a facsimile of the artist’s first one-person gallery show in New York installed with ceramic sculptures, and the words FEAR EATS THE SOUL spray-painted by Tiravanija directly on a Gallery wall, in characters that will be obscured over time under layers of graffiti by local artists. In 1992, Rirkrit Tiravanija made “Untitled (Free)”. The body of the gallery was stripped and laid bare. Its inventory, its files, its doors, its blinds, its people – everything it contained – were stuffed into the main exhibition space inpragmatic rows. In the office was an improvised kitchen with a fridge, a gallery door as table for a preparation, burners, rice cooker, pots, tables and stools. In 1994, Tiravanija made/curated a two person show with his other half, Andy Warhol. It was a hybrid retrospective of sorts for each artist. Tiravanija created a binary set up of three pairs of work, with one work by each artist in each pair: A Mao and a stack of beer bottles; a Brillo box and a wok; a bed and a pile of books and movies. Each pair created a metaphysical and cultural bridge across time and space from one world to another. Each side looking at the other in the mirror and being disgusted at themselves. One side surface and mediated, the other dirty and touched, but both steeped in melancholia and necrophilia. In 1999, he made a plywood twin of his apartment on E7th Street, with working toilet shower and kitchen. This is an apartment he has lived in for more than 30 years and its contours and spaces are known to him intimately. The’ apartment’ in the gallery was well used. It was open 24 hours a day and birthdays were celebrated, beds were slept in, baths were taken and meals were cooked and eaten. It became a vessel for two months of unedited and diverse human activity.
Info: Glenstone Museum, 12100 Glen Road, Potomac, Duration: 26/9/19-26/8/20, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.glenstone.org
