The Serpentine gallery is London's best gallery of contemporary art. It's everything the ICA should be. Here the curating team put on ambitious and faultessly installed solo shows by the most important international contemporary artists. These artists may be truly great, merely interesting or even a bit thin. But they are always "important."
Rirkrit Tiravanija, of Thai descent, who splits his time between New York, Berlin and Chiang Mai, is one such important artist. Within the definitions of art that we have today, he is producing extreme works. At the Serpentine, he has exhibited two reconstructions of the interior of his own apartment, including two kitchens, Thai condiments, two flatscreen televisions and two double futons—a play on the fashion for seriality in art (think of Warhol's repeating Marilyns). The simple metal cylinders of an oriental kitchen become a geometric sculpture. Visitors can come and use Tiravanija's apartments, and that constitutes the work of art. There's another work here too: inside a third room, Tiravanija has installed a studio. From here, he broadcasts live on Resonance FM, an alternative arts radio station, episodes of a radio soap about time travel that he has written. Around the walls of the gallery, the artist has hung calendars at neat intervals. Time is his favourite subject.
This type of art form emerged in the 1990s and was christened "relational aesthetics" by a French curator. It says that a work of art can consist of relations between people; it serves up feelings of wellbeing, community, happiness. That's new(ish), but is it good? The Serpentine's director Julia Peyton Jones told me, almost convincingly, what was significant about Tiravanija: "It's very inspiring for people to be able to come to the gallery and say 'this is mine.' They sit down in the apartment and take over. Everything is so distant in our other exhibitions. There are so many rules when we borrow paintings to exhibit. We can't even open the windows on to the park. But with this exhibition the artist is saying 'our house is your house,' and the means he uses to do this is through his apartment."
It's nice for the Serpentine to be able to open its french windows—but that may be because there is nothing inside worth stealing. As I walked around the show, I suddenly thought of those stickers you used to see on the escalators in the tube which said "this advert degrades women." I wanted to plaster the gallery with my own set of labels, saying: "This work of art degrades radio stations." It is insulting to imply, as these works do, that ordinary things need to be in an art gallery in order for us to understand their value. This is a readymade too far.
Tiravanija, a charming, highly regarded 44-year-old artist, won last year's Hugo Boss award, America's version of the Turner prize. He has exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York and had a retrospective at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. He made a name for himself in the 1990s by cooking and throwing parties in art galleries as—you guessed it— works of art. It was handy for curators to find that the catering they provided for openings could become another catalogue entry—the public could be tempted with free grub; the artistically dead space of the café could become another installation. After his "performances," Tiravanija exhibited the dirty pots, plates and pans as an installation, or arranged empty beer bottles in a tall geometric sculpture. This exercise in art-world narcissism nevertheless recalled Warhol's soup cans and celebrated a new theme of hospitality. A familiar refrain of art criticism is the praise automatically bestowed on an artist for being the first person to put something in an art gallery, with no consideration of whether that thing was fine where it was, and was there for a reason.
What this show reveals is the trite assumption of most art theory that under capitalism, relations between people are overwhelmingly mediated by money. This theory permits Tiravanija to create works of art in which he gives people things for free (though of course he's paid to do it)—a free meal, a rehearsal space for bands—and in which this act of giving leads strangers to talk to each other, thereby rupturing the isolation of capitalist society. While it is true that most people in art galleries are stuck-up and unfriendly, the drawback to Tiravanija's general theory is that it is not true. Under capitalism there are plenty of exchanges between people that have nothing to do with money, and this makes his art pointless.
The best way of looking at Tiravanija's work is through the idea of "readymades," those found objects (famously a wine rack and a urinal) that Duchamp exhibited as works of art. Tiravanija's interpreters argue that he has turned the readymade into a stage. Duchamp took useful objects and turned them into art; Tiravanija is taking life itself as a readymade, and he is also making the readymade useful again. But Tiravanija's readymades are a betrayal of the original idea. Duchamp submitted his urinal for exhibition because he wanted to offer something which the selection committee was certain to reject. It was an ironic comment on definitions of art. Tiravanija's art is entirely straight-faced; it fails to provoke the requisite smirk.
