Nicolas Bourriaud and Rirkrit Tiravanija

I wanted to tie Bourriaud's article to the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija since a picture of his exhibition - Untitled, 1996 (One Revolution per Minute) was featured on Beaurriaud's book Relational Aesthetics so wanted to make some connections.

Rirkrit Tiravanija is an artist born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, of Thai origin - raised in Thailand, Ethipoia, and Canada. He lives between Berlin, New York and Thailand.


He became known in the 1990's for installations in which he cooks food for gallery goers making the social interaction his material.

"It is not what you see that is important but what takes place between people".

His work offers an opportunity or possibility for interaction and participation.

The Land (initiated in 1998) is a collaborative project on a former rice field in Thailand which is open for artists to use as a site.

Much of Rirkrit's work is to create instructions ("recipes") that other people interpret or carry out.

A project by Phillipe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija. A similar piece is on now at Bard College - CCS Bard Hessel Museum at an exhibition called At home/not at home - works from the collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg.

"A group of 5 puppets in the likenesses of Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pierre Hughye, Liam Gillick, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. This is part of an ongoing project in that the artists plan to use these characters for further scenarios in the future."

When asked about the art world rhetoric around his work (the social as the new modernism, relational aesthetics), he conveyed that the role as an artist was to explore and expose the territory, not to be the one to map it out. Critical discourse may be leading the artist but Rirkrit seems to avoid becoming a product of that.

I also found a link to a program at a Canadian University (OCAD - Ontario College of Art and Design) that connects what Bourriaud is stating and artists like Tiravanija are doing.

The Nomadic Residents residency program offers invited visiting artists and scholars an opportunity to explore, in a collegial and collaborative environment, issues of temporality, travel, location, belonging, identity and home.

bygone era (1940) - one unedited camera shot - great to watch

Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire tap dancing.

Imagine the clay spinning on the wheel.

The Margins and Altermodern

The title of the 2009 exhibition - The Margins: A Theory of Resistance in Contemporary Ceramics wants to recognize ceramics as an expanded field and to dissolve the margins of an art (craft?) steeped in tradition. The introduction points to clay as a component that runs through the works, but the materials are chosen to best realize an intention and the interest of the works lies in broader discourse.

The following three essays create a discourse on the margins laying some groundwork and I highlighted a few references that were of interest to me. The first is the vessel in contrast to ceramics as a broader category of art. I am also interested in the mapping or framework of art. In the Big Bang article, the Dean of ceramic studies at SAIC, said that her intent as teacher was to investigate two things - technical traditions and the process towards expertise, as well as to develop questions that take students down a personal path to develop a voice. She describes clay as a material with specific characteristics, histories and associations so it seems like ceramics has three forces - the technical, the history, and the concept.

Just a jotting down of interesting ceramic tie ins: prehistoric female effigy figures in clay thrown into the fire by the thousands to explode (performative gesture on the female?), WW1 pilots dropping practice ceramic bombs filled with talc or plaster, George Ohr, the Group of Seven (Canadian), La Loie Fuller.

Altermodern was an exhibition curated by french art critic Nicolas Bourriaud at the The Tate Triennial 2009 at Tate Britain. It was also presented at the time a collective discussion around the premise that postmodernism is coming to an end, and we are experiencing the emergence of a global altermodernity. It seems like Bourriaud has coined the next art movement from modernism (rejecting the past but in a Greenbergian timeline) to postmodernism (reaction against modernism but in a constant loop) to now (in a spiderweb mapping).

I like the eight continents of modernism (see website).

bouncing ball

Hi there,

Someone in class was interested in a bouncing ball - I think? Anyways, it's another short animated clip.

grizzly bear - ready, able music video

done by artist Allison Schulnik. Great stop animation with plasticine - but reminded me of working in wet clay.

grizzly bear - ready, able

Miwon Kwon article

Miwon Kwon One Place After Another; Site specific art and locational identity

The intro chapter was a good overview of "site-specific" work from the late 1960's to the present (see Kara and Ashley's presentation). I am most interested in what Kwon brings up as the shift from site specificity to community specificity in what is coined "new genre public art". This kind of art engages the audience, and the community as active participants in the conceptualization and production of the project.

I was living in Chicago the public art program “CULTURE IN ACTION” came out curated by Mary Jane Jacob. Organized for Sculpture Chicago, it took place over a two-year period (1991-93); artists worked in direct partnership with community members to explore the changing nature of public art, its relationship to social issues, and an expanded role of audience from spectator to participant and offered a new model for art in the urban context.

Kwon divided the works from that show into four different communities; the community of mythic unity, "sited" communities, invented communities (temporary), and invented communities (ongoing). It seems as if it is a difficult task to label public art as a coherent movement as Kwon states that there are numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in the field.

An interesting Project that was going on in NYC in June through Labor Day was by artist Paul Ramirez Jonas' Key to the City. It was a citywide public art project that allows every New Yorker and visitor to open spaces in all five boroughs.

1st project progress - handbuilt idea 2

My second idea was to create a series of small handheld objects that would be given away.

Inspiration - Wade figurines that were given away in a box of Red Rose Tea.


I've come up with a few series - animals, insects, and rocks, and am making 10 in each series.

issues: how to give away objects - generosity, where to give away objects, instructions on what to do with objects, do instruction follow object to new location, what to do if people just keep object.

1st thoughts were to ask people to take an object and find its color match and leave it in that new location leaving others to find object and do the same - so type instructions on bottom or type on a website.

1st project progress - handbuilt idea 1

Last summer I became interested in an article on early American gas stations and how they described them as a "porcelain box". These modular cubes were described as "a metal-and-glass shell with a porcelain enamel interior and a concrete floor".



My first step in the process is to make scaled down ceramic cubes of 5 of the earlier service stations. Above is the 12 x 18 metal portable service station, 1933 scaled down to 2 x 3

outdoor crit 09

ceramics 09 crit

some images from 09 ceramics studio

video of sal

admission portfolio

here's the portfolio I used to get into New Paltz:

http://gallery.me.com/karen.o.smyth#100045