Month: December 2023

Rirkrit Tiravanija : NO MORE REALITY

Installation at 1301 PE, Los Angeles 

September-December 2023

by Rosanna Albertini

No More Reality and my despair having lost the certainty about what words bring to us. What about thinking? Based on words? Not entirely, our primitive ancestors were thinking and acting before human language broke out from the brain.

Our whole body is a thinking machine: chemical conversation between cells, well organized behavior of organs : a musical score mysterious and impossible to decipher : there is no control on our body’s intelligence. AI is a technological dream. 

Yet, I keep dearly in me the burst of gratitude I felt walking through the entrance space of Brian Butler’s gallery. Those big black words over the newspapers’ face looked like animals who open up when humidity comes, they talked to the air. In dryness, they go back being flat again as if curling like leaves was their artificial nature. It’s so true – I thought, newspapers are no more reality. It is in the nature of Rirkrit’s art to let things happen once the piece is installed, giving the visitors the freedom to react. I was the one flattening the two layers one over the other, not the artist. 

I never met Tiravanija. I read about him and his art for years. By chance, I happen to meet this work of his as a reader, and as a writer for daily newspapers (in the past of my life). At first I felt the black characters obliterating the flat surface of papers were a gesture kicking out of the window trust and expectations: more talking than writing, hypothesis rather than facts, a lot of ‘what if …’ instead of what happened, an invasion of advertisement.  Every day we realize how much is missing from the news and try to select the reliable from the too fast, often wrong. As if reality (feminine in Italian) had been put in a drawer and only her echo was resonating through the media. Really? Stupid me. Not so simple. 

I went back to the gallery where the black giants were resting flat on the walls. My slow brain saw a different scene. “The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” (Oscar Wilde)

As my old conceptual friend Allen Ruppersberg said or wrote, or both:

“It had to unfold gradually so that the common themes and ideas would naturally reveal themselves just as one story generates another.”

“I want to reveal the quality of a moment in passing. When something is recognized and acknowledged but remains mysterious and undefined.  You continue on your way, but have been subtly changed from that point on.” (From The Secret of Life and Death, 1969-84)

Only by writing I can try to disclose my switch of vision. Maybe ideas need to become visible in words in order to exist. My passing awareness starts with Rirkrit saying he doesn’t need to be in the same spaces as his art. Better out, on the sidewalk. Unknown, ignored. He is Thai: he likes to feel like a bonefish in the ocean, everybody knows bonefish are there, but where they are nobody knows. 

Reality is not what’s written in dictionaries: “absolute, self-sufficient, and not subject to human decisions or conventions.” It is a field of forces infinitely different and intermingled -thanks for your help Emmanuel Levinas- it is the impersonal infinity of existing, for things or people. A continuous cacophony of voices, stories all true, kept together by the endless sequence of present moments.

My new story is physical: becoming a fish in my present I see better: NO MORE REALITY, in tall black fonts, is a physical dance with the same reality spread on pages, which is already no more reality, daily reports between dawn and dusk, fading along the lines of numbers that we pretend are real and call them time. 

The three black words, the little words, the printed images, our sprouts of words messed up by surprise, frenetically leaving our eyes like humming birds, are a triple dance, different every time we meet the art piece. 

Words are not REALITY equal TRUTH equal FOREVER equal ESSENCE. They are our messengers, the innocent angels bringing broken sticks to the pages and to their readers, whatever the medium. Partial, imperfect as any human.

As we are approaching Christmas, I ask them to become music for Rirkrit Tiravanija, for Brian Butler, for Allen Ruppersberg and all the readers I never met. Shall We Dance? Thank you.

PHOTOS : I made the first three (RA), the others are Marten Elder’s photos. They have been kindly provided by Brian Butler, 1301PE.

FIONA CONNOR : Continuous Sidewalk

ChateauShatto – August-November 2023

Photo Peter Kirby

621 Ruberta Ave. #3 Glendale CA 91201

On Tuesday November 28 the art piece Continuous Sidewalk was still there, completely covering the floor of Fiona’s studio.   A DISPLACED DUPLICATE, that’s what it is.  It’s gone, demolished three days later, gone with the end of the artist’s residence in that studio, fallen victim to the real estate logistics. Was it the artist’s last grateful thanking to the place? A solid, physical goodbye? The Continuous Sidewalk just happened to disappear, like everything else in life. I walk all around, crossing the puzzle made with reproduced sidewalks in fragments, my eyes dropping vertically on cracks and lines, holes, arrows, colors, grids and marks of every kind. At first tricked by the images I am trodding on, somehow hesitant, than feeling safe: they are invulnerable. My feet are grateful. ( A smile comes from them.) The puzzle slides into my brain: the 4 inches thick concrete blanket leaves the floor, floats in the air like a magic carpet moving away from the soil, and the tapestry of damages embedded in it looks defiant at the sun from many faces.

The Continuous Sidewalk  was conceived to exist and stay. It will stay for sure inside the visitors who felt the strength of the compact, unified and continuous flat surface made by the artist. As if they were walking on a solidified Burri, watching and touching the joints along with the multiple scars caused by humans and nature on the sidewalk’s skin.

Fiona Connor has replicated steps, walls, museum benches, fountains, bulletin boards, bricks. The reverse engineering of the objects -that are very accurately remade- makes it hard to distinguish them from the original. The originals would be surprised facing the archival translation of their body. 

PHYSICALITY –  The sculpture is a solid carpet of concrete poured and shaped by a professional company. The artist placed on the not yet hardened mixture of gravel, stone, sand and cement, the single islands of sidewalk she had prepared separately, giving form to a continuous collage of sculpted parts, exactly the same size and look of those she had found in downtown Los Angeles, in a limited area around her gallery. It would be misleading to compare this collage to a painting, or to a sort of corrugated tapestry lying on the floor. I thought about it, the visual composition is intriguing, but surface is not the only point. Besides, the replica of many pieces of sidewalk in one, displaced in an interior space with roof and door, is technically perfect. An absurd marvel.

The Continuous Sidewalk is a body, a body that reveals nonsense and meaningful messages, that brings together marks left by people we don’t know with the moments Fiona Connor spent observing them and picking up their image despite, or rather because of their fleeting, unstable, incoherent quality. These undervalued qualities are the veins of all her art pieces. She has even duplicated small pieces of floor in the shape of ceramic plates. So in the end, the hidden sidewalk is also her self-portrait. A written one in the way she prefers: free from the verbal. Art protected in her studio, as she had been for a few years.

Fiona is not a reader of marks on paper, my husband Peter’s favorite expression. I observed her for many years putting her full body at work when she makes a new piece. She explored Los Angeles by foot, or on the bus, to find places and printers willing to comply her request: “Would you please print for me 100 pages with your name and address?” The final work was a book, hand made with some volunteers at the Red Cat, 100 copies. She reads the world around her. At times, she calls for small communities of friends to stick around her cocoon. She is moved by a power that opens up her dialogue with people, objects, signs, forms not at all for what they are in their isolated existence: they tell her human stories and gestures in their constant mutation. Like Philip Guston, she rewrites her own sensations through the moment and place she is in: where she feels her existing. 

The first time I met her, it was after a performance by Simone Forti at the Barnsdall Municipal Gallery. Fiona had picked up a bunch of shredded newspaper tossed around by Simone. Her attention to the floor always alert. Walking behind Fiona I realized she had lost one of those papers. I picked it up and returned it to her. Our first face to face. “I’m a friend of Simone” – I added. “Good” she replied, “Simone is coming to my house for dinner, join us please, also your husband.” She wrote the address on that same piece of paper, gave it back to me. New Zealand, her country, is a beloved place for us. We had a solid ground in common, something on which it was worth building friendship.  

My effort here, half lost in the middle of innumerable stories, is to reduce as much as I can the distance between my words and what I am writing about.  Forgive me please, it’s my attempt at friendly ugliness.  RA

Interior photos: RA