Serving up cardboard

Rirkrit Tiravanija: Untitled (Pay attention)
One Day Sculpture
New Zealand, nationwide
Today

For this event Rirkrit Tiravanija and his assistants will not be serving up Pad Thai - as is usually the case in many of his performances. Instead the artwork is the posted out invitation that has been sent to those on ARTSPACE’s mailing list – to be held on the date stated: TODAY, and as no mention is made of any specific date, probably yesterday and Saturday too, when people went to their letterboxes.

Look at how this unusual occurrence is contextualised. Click on the ODS website and check out the two paragraphs from Brian Butler (ex ARTSPACE director) and Clare Doherty (guiding instigator of ODS). Their explanatory comments seem so crucial it is almost as if they are co-artists. All three elements lock together.

The slipperiness of focussing the event on ‘TODAY’ is compounded by Butler’s slyly cheeky criticism of mediation. Ostensibly in his anecdote he is referring to Tiravanija’s blank slide that accompanied a verbal description of an early work, but really Butler seems to be talking about his own text, his own participation. He is warning the reader through relating an account of Tiravanija’s anxiety about mediation. He uses the artist’s story to swing discussion back towards the website audience, as if saying: Hey you out there, figure it out for yourself. Don’t rely on middle people like Clare and me. Nevertheless he still contributes - by subverting his own discussion.

Doherty’s text is partially about art history, setting the stage by explaining precedents for Tiravanija’s mail action. More importantly - and contra to Butler - it also discusses the image the artist is circulating: those bright orange circles on poles. Yet we still don’t really know Tiravanija’s motivation in photographing them. Why the interest in the flat fluorescent discs that over recent years have replaced illuminated spheres at New Zealand’s pedestrian crossings? He obviously discovered them during his visit last year.

Does he, like some of us, find them aesthetically repulsive, almost a horrid joke? Is he angered because they might be a cost cutting measure that at night is totally ineffective? That they are invisible and cannot save pedestrian lives.

Or is his interest more general and focussed on the work's title - about attention? Does he worry about what these signs stand for, that they warn us to be ready for people who might suddenly step out from the curb? Or is he like John Cage, and is trying to show us something much much wider - that all sorts of things around us in our environment are worthy of our interest.

Whatever the reasons the artist might have, what of those looking at the photograph? Will any of the recipients getting the card think about zebra crossings at all? Until they look at the ODS website (as currently instructed by text), they could think that one of the houses by the pedestrian crossing will be hosting a free Thai meal with lots of conversation and beer – and be busy looking at that Auckland Street sign on the corner with a magnifying glass.

(The teaching of) House Painting as Art

Night Art School at Gambia Castle
Andrew Barber lecture: How to paint a window frame in three easy stages
Held in conjunction with Rirkrit Tiravanija: magazine station no.5, ARTSPACE, NZ
Monday 11 August 2008 7-9 pm.


Night Art School is a collective of energetic Auckland artists that often use for lectures the Grey Lynn Community Hall, a building I can see - when I look over my computer and out my window – across the Western Motorway. They often do classes on wet wintery Tuesday nights.

One of their friends, Andrew Barber, is an accomplished painter well known in Auckland for his shows at Gambia Castle and Starkwhite. He is also a part time barman and a skilled professional house painter. Last night he gave a demonstration of the finer points of the latter, as part of the preparation of the Gambia Castle space for Kit Lawrence’s show, the next one after Kate Newby. Newby had painted the walls and windows overlooking K’ Rd bright yellow. Barber very thoroughly went through all the nuanced details of surface preparation, sanding, dusting, undercoating and paint application - shimmying up and down a ladder and illustrating techniques while talking.

I came along because I was curious. Any DIY ‘handyman’ renovation-type activity is something I will do only if blackmailed by somebody I desperately want to impress. It’s activity I ordinarily loathe, and will usually disappear if I ever get the slightest inkling of its impending occurrence. I came only because I thought maybe there is a science to such work, and Andrew could educate me. In the sense of ‘knowing that’ more than ‘knowing how’. I’ve no intention of ever applying such knowledge to beautify a living space. The idea is absurd.

I also turned up because of a bigger meta-issue. Perhaps this stuff was really meant to be art? Some sort of relational project that was a provider of community services (teaching being like free music or cooking) and which broke down the distinction between life and art. Something in the tradition of Cage or Beuys. After all it was being presented in a gallery as part of a programme under the auspices of an internationally esteemed art star - someone known for focussing on simple acts of social generosity as art - and all the people on the Night Art School’s mailing list are artists and art students.

This meant that if it was art, its conceptual membrane as such wasn’t being totally dissolved. This was knowledge only partially being provided as a public service – it was still strictly within the art community, not outside it in the ‘life’ world. To go beyond that parameter would mean renouncing art, the provider purging all ‘artistic’ thoughts from their mind, and severing all social connections to the art world and aspirations for artistic kudos. It would be a sort of potlatch devoid of ulterior motive tainted with careerism. It would involve radiating an altruism that has in its core a purity extraordinarily hard to imagine.