Rirkrit Tiravanija: A Condition for Experience

Over three days at the Galleria Civica d’arte moderna e contemporanea in Turin in 2001, Rirkrit Tiravanija and his assistants cooked tom kha gai —a spicy and sour chicken soup that is a signature of Thai cuisine—and served it to visitors. He installed seven cooking stations in the space, each consisting of a propane cooker, a pot, a cutting board, bowls, and forks. As visitors finished eating, they placed their bowls and utensils down on the floor, and these items remained there as an installation. Future visitors to the exhibition would see the remnants from the cooking event and be invited to reconstruct in their minds what had taken place. The son of a diplomat, Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires and raised in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada. This experience informed his interest in the transnational movement of ideas and the processes of communication and translation that take place across cultures.

The title of this installation and its seven cooking stations refer to The Magnificent Seven, a 1960 Hollywood Western directed by John Sturges that reinterprets Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film Seven Samurai. The title also invokes the spaghetti Western, a genre of films that emerged in 1960s Italy comprising narratives set in the American Old West. These cross-cultural cinematic relationships provide the key to understanding the installation’s conceptual framework. The universal language of cooking is a way to express an image of cultural specificity. Tiravanija’s work uncovers the associations embedded within Thai food, particularly ‘national’ dishes such as pad Thai and, in this case, tom kha gai.

He first incorporated cooking into his artistic practice with untitled 1990 (pad thai), staged at Paula Allen Gallery in New York in 1990. Pad Thai was invented in the late 1930s as part of the nationalist identity-building project of Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram of Thailand, and the context of its deliberate construction exemplifies Tiravanija’s approach to food as a tool for articulating a specific cultural idea.

Similarly, in Untitled 2001 (the magnificent seven, spaghetti western), the artist draws attention to how food can be used to create a cultural space through the preparation of a legibly Thai dish in a global context. In addition to his fascination with food, Tiravanija also weaves in coded messages through his use of specific objects and materials. The seven propane tanks of Untitled 2001 (the magnificent seven, spaghetti western) sit upon large steel plates. The colour of the tanks—a bright saffron frequently seen in Tiravanija’s work—recalls the robes of Thai Buddhist monks. Tiravanija’s practice raises pointed questions around art-making, identity, and the space of everyday life by merging communal acts of cooking with object-based installations and serendipity with pre-determined intention.