a visit to the rirkrit tiravanija show at the moma ps1
‘WE THINK OF LIFE AS ART ITSELF”
That is the first thing I wrote in my notebook when visiting the Rirkrit Tiravanija show at the MOMA PS1. Rirkrit Tiravanija b. 1961 is a Thai contemporary artist who brought cooking into the gallery, who brought his kitchen into the gallery, as I thought of it. I am walking around in his kitchen, in his leftover foods, in his “trash”, as I wrote down. “I am just in his kitchen.” How much of our existence can we call art?
The question follows me around. And I need a place to rest. I see a bench across a video and sit there. I don’t know what captured my attention, the video or the bench, yet I was there watching gestures and expressions of quotidian activity. “It is just a really bad video” was the first thing I wrote down, yet we consider it art; what is the art in it?
I am in there for a while, and I start becoming part of the video. I am present in the movement of the man walking around, and I start to follow him. I am now part of the narrative. I am choosing my fruit and vegetables from the market, and my fish. Oh, now there’s colour. I am following a couple enjoying the beauty of themselves and their beauty in the space. I follow their hands, their movement, their touch and their feeling. So much I forget to see, yet I can clearly see now on the magical plane of the video. I follow a little girl riding her scooter. I see her smile, the playfulness in her expression, the excitement in her palms, grabbing tightly her scooter. I get to be there by her, consumed by the art of the simple human gesture.
The room is now filled with people; at first, we were two, then three, four, five. The bench is full, and two are standing up. Did they all just want to feel the beauty of sitting down? Did they all have the same question as me? I believe we all are questioning what we see, but we are moreover captivated by it. It's just the simplicity of human experience that we all seem to miss in our everyday lives. We are not in Rirkrit Tiravanija's show on the PS1 anymore; we are now in the everyday life of his camera. We are all in the simple gestures and expressions of quotidian activity, and I now see it around me. I see the man beside me scratching his nose, the woman on my left being bothered by her socks, and the man standing up, having trouble in his posture.
And that is where I see the art. The art of human gesture, the art of human beauty. The art of interaction, the art of energy. The art of capturing, the art of creating evidence. That is the ultimate art of human experience.
