Untitled(Tomorrow is Another Day),
Installation
view, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1996
Courtesy
neugerriemschneider, Berlin
For Ramakien,
a Rak Opera, Tiravanija carried his expanded art concept onto the
stage: "My background is visual arts; though I’m very interested in
theater, I never really did any work in that direction. A few people that
might have seen my work in New York know that I’m an artist who has
collaborated a lot and worked with the audience and a lot of people. That
is something that makes it interesting for me to get involved in the
situation. The whole set-up is about collaboration and being
collaborative." Which is how it was on July 28 of this year, when Ramakien,
a Rak Opera, a collaborative interpretation of an episode from a two
thousand year-old Hindu drama, premiered at New York’s Lincoln
Center under the artist’s direction. The Thai version of the
originally Indian material tells the story of Prince Rama, who with the
help of the shrewd monkey god Hanuman tries to free his kidnapped wife
Sita from the demon Totsukan.
"Ramakien,
a Rak Opera" at the Lincoln Center Festival,
Photo:
Chira Wichaisuthikul
The Thai word rak
means love; hence it’s a love opera. Pronounced with an American accent,
however, rak mutates through time and space to become rock,
the quintessential American musical form that can be traced back to a
blend of the highly disparate cultural influences of white country music
and African American blues. As a kind of cultural emissary from Thailand,
Tiravanija brought a number of different artists to New York for the
production: popular Thai rock bands shared the stage with the best known
orchestra for classical Thai music, famous dancers, deejays, and video
artists.
|
Tiravanija found his perfect counterpart for the project in
the American musicologist and composer Bruce
Gaston, who lives in Thailand: "He’s our only real Thai person on the
troop. He’s probably lived there longer than I have... It’s also quite
important for people to see that it’s possible to bring people together
from very different corners of the sphere and to put them into one place,
where they are coming together to make a project which will represent
those differences and, at the same time, still let us be in a particular
way ourselves."
"Ramakien,
a Rak Opera" at the Lincoln Center Festival,
Photo:
Chira Wichaisuthikul
The groups shared the
stage to play their various pieces simultaneously, but independently of
one another in a seemingly chaotic performance as an illustration of a
traditional Thai tenet that each person has to find and follow his own
rhythm. "You could probably say that art is integrated into everyday life
there. For Thai people, there’s no separation between themselves and
things," he told Dorothea Strauss.
Tiravanija is less
concerned with creating an absolute work of art than with focusing on
human relations, with enabling and encouraging them. This approach has
turned Rirkrit into a poster boy for the concept of "relational
aesthetics," as the French critic Nicolas
Bourriaud articulated it, distinguishing it from an art in the wake of
Modernism that merely allows for limited variation. According to
Bourriaud, the works of artists like Tiravanija – but also Tobias
Rehberger, Liam Gilick
, Carsten Höller,
and Andrea
Frazer – harbor a historical chance to “inhabit the world in a better
way,” because the works no longer merely represent imaginary or utopian
realities, but themselves exist as ways to live and behave.
The
open structure and relative formlessness of the works arising in this way
prepare the field for a synthesis of highly heterogeneous influences;
instead of an opposition arising between art and everyday life, art
becomes a social interstice, a juncture that connects disparate elements,
but remains a part of the global system – while allowing for alternatives.
Rirkrit Tiravanija sums up his work this way: “Being together in the same
space, letting people activate it through their own individualized
expressions is one of the things I’m interested in artistically.” The
quotes by Rirkrit Tiravanija used in this article stem from a radio
interview with the musicologist Rob Weisberg on July 22 on the program
WMFU Transpacific Sound Paradise: http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/19790
Translation:
Andrea Scrima
[1]
[2]
|
