DAS GLÜCK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG (Happiness is not always fun)
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Gropius Bau, Berlin
12 September 2024 – 12 January, 2025
[Published in Art Asia Pacific, January 2025]
There is something both thrilling and deflating about seeing historically significant relational or socially engaged artworks exhibited in a museum, long after they have entered the art landscape. This overview of more than three decades of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s practice presents such an experience, highlighting projects that speak to the cultural and political context of Germany, where he partly lives. Its title, “DAS GLÜCK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG” borrows a line from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a classic take on racism directed at migrant workers and the difficulties of integration, framing how audiences might approach tensions threading throughout the show.
The stately halls of Gropius Bau showcased over 80 works, many dating back to the 1980s and ’90s. One that resonated in its new setting was untitled 1991 (tom ka soup) (1991), an offering of hot tom kha (a Thai coconut soup) for lunchtime visitors, and gallery workers, at the entrance. This gesture forms part of a project by now replayed in countless variations worldwide, where Tiravanija—the son of a diplomat—or his students, or a paid worker, prepare and serve Thai food as art, creating pockets of messy, unpredictable sociality in otherwise static gallery settings. In another room untitled 1989 ( ) (1989/2004/2024) comprised an electric hotplate and pot on a plinth, surrounded by coconut milk cans, a bottle of fish sauce, and additional ingredients for making yellow curry. With framed photos of a similar post-/pre-cooking scene, untitled 1990 (for documentation only, fading polaroid) 1–3 (1990), in the background, the effect was one of coming too late to a party and having missed the action, or viewing a three-dimensional catalog. In the wall text, Tiravanija explains how Western institutions typically (mis)represent cultural objects (Buddha statues, vessels, even food traditions), dislocating them from their original meaning: “when I see Buddha I see something else, and what I see is missing in the museum display.” His response was simply and radically to “take the pot out of the case … and cook in it,” reinstating context and conviviality.
In some early works, this shift in use and visibility accompanied other forms of institutional critique. Untitled 1994 (der stand der dinge) (2004/2024) revisited a show at Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, for which Tiravanija moved objects from the museum storeroom to its gallery space, alongside the registrar’s entire office. Here in Berlin, a room lined with framed exhibition posters and furnished with such items as a tall indoor plant, a pinboard with a sketched exhibition floorplan, and a replica plate of noodles on a filing cabinet—apparently the relocated offices of Gropius Bau’s director and team—felt more like a cute peek than critical insight.
A quieter piece, untitled 1987 (text in red and black) (1987/2024), shown originally at the Art Institute of Chicago during Tiravanija’s studies there in the late 1980s, was restaged in the grand Schliemann-Saal. What could have been mistaken for an empty wall bore a tiny line of lettering politely if obliquely demanding that the Institute’s Museum return “our cultural artifacts … otherwise we will blow it up”, extending prior works in which Tiravanija questioned the provenance of Thai artefacts in the Museum’s collection. In this room where Ottoman treasures smuggled from the ancient ruins of Hisarlik to Berlin were displayed in the 1920s and ’30s, its address expanded outward to encompass wider discourse around the repatriation of ethnographic materials.
Elsewhere the exhibition invited guests to interact within the gallery in unorthodox ways: to rehearse or perform in a fully-equipped recording studio, rest on discretely placed bedding mats, drink Chinese tea inside a tent made of monks’ robes, or make calls from retro wall-mounted telephones to other rooms in the building. On a spiral wooden stage in the un-ticketed central atrium, untitled 2024 (demo station no. 8) (2024), groups and individuals hosted their own open ‘demonstrations’, presentations or talks of various kinds. Participants strained valiantly to hear above the patter from untitled 2024 (tomorrow is the question) (2024), a sea of free ping pong tables surrounding the structure that were in constant use.
At untitled 1993 (café Deutschland) (1993), one could sit down for a moment with a cup of Turkish coffee, brewed by an attendant on a portable stove. The makeshift cafe was first installed at Cologne’s Galerie Max Hetzler according to faxed instructions from Tiravanija, who could not make his first trip to Germany due to visa problems. Reacting to the recent deadly racist attack on Turkish communities in Mölln, it encouraged visitors to engage in productive conversations with one another around critical social issues. That such activity is now relatively unremarkable within a major institution shows how social interventions like Tiravanija’s have permeated standard museum practice. As with previous stagings, the new installation included a wall of exhibition catalogues from its host and a city view through the window. In today’s Berlin, unsettled by sweeping anti-immigration sentiment, cultural sector cuts and polarisation in general, chatting with a stranger while overlooking the Senate (where numerous political demonstrations have lately gathered) remains a useful way to ‘take the pot out of the case’ and confront what we might easier avoid.
Photo:
Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitles 2024 (tomorrow is the question) / untitled 2024 (demo station no. 8), 2024.
