Festival Ars Electronica 2006
There are now two worlds of art: fine art and media art. The most significant theoretical text to emerge out of fine art of the 1990s was Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics 2002.1 Bourriaud claims that art of the 1990s saw a successful elimination of the barrier between the viewer and the work of art evident in ‘relational art’ such as that of Rirkrit Tiravanija. What is significant about such a claim is that it maps onto an avant-gardist project to bring art into life that can be traced back to the radical art of the 1960s and ’70s and further to Duchamp, Dada and Surrealism. But the institutional fabric of fine art makes this long-standing and crucial ethico-aesthetic goal extremely difficult to attain. Media art, in contrast, finds the task relatively easy.
Tiravanija is best known for installations such as Untitled (Free), 1992, in which he made pad tai every day for a month in the 303 Gallery, New York. The gallery became an open house into which anyone could enter and have a meal with Tiravanija together with anyone else who turned up. The problem here is that this is an instance of an art game for artists. The giveaway lies in the fact that Tiravanija stages his get-togethers within the gallery/museum.
By the 1960s artists were well aware that the Duchampian Readymade proved that anything that could be exhibited within an art gallery became framed as art. Tiravanija’s ingenuity lies in framing everyday activities, such as a convivial gathering around a dining table, as a work of art. The Readymade art game depends upon acceptance into an institutional frame and so it is, in all its variations