Rirkrit Tiravanija | Cultured Magazine
All photography of Rirkrit Tiravanija by Daniel Dorsa. All images courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.
By Kat Herriman
Digestion is never instantaneous. Its nature is process. It spans hours, sometimes centuries. For example, a meal of rice noodles dressed with tamarind sauce and peanut crumbs—served in February 1990 as one of artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s early food works, untitled 1990 (pad thai)—was probably extruded through the intestines of participating New Yorkers overnight.
But the radicality of the gesture remains deep in the guts of the art world, pervading our cultural biome and the way we see ourselves as artists and viewers. It is into these roiling bowels that curators Ruba Katrib and Yasmil Raymond dared to venture, bringing us “A LOT OF PEOPLE.” The MoMA PS1 show, opening tomorrow, will be the inaugural U.S. survey of an artist who, for four decades, has actively worked against the shelf life of facts, objects, and identity by destabilizing (and simultaneously elucidating) the fungible borders between author and audience, material and idea, biography and lived experience.