Rirkrit TIRAVANIJA's 'Untitled (demonstration drawings)' seek to engage with the viewer's experiences of our contemporary world. Comprising a series of drawings based on newspaper photographs the work replicates the profusion of images of strife, hardship and protest we are daily faced with in the media. Commissioning other artists to create the drawings and thereby removing himself from the role of author of the work, Tiravanija enacts a sense of distance not unlike that we may feel when faced with images of people, events and problems so far removed from our own lives. Bringing the two together, Tiravanija offers his viewers the opportunity to engage with difficulties involved in 'reading' these contemporary representations. In the artists own words 'I would like to make something, which can confront this, moving toward another way of thinking.(1) Born in Buenos Aires, the son of a Thai diplomat, Tiravanija's childhood was one of constant movement and change with time spent in Argentina, Ethiopia and Thailand. Whilst he attended high school in Bangkok, it was at an American catholic school, and it wasn't until he moved to Canada and then the United States to pursue tertiary studies in art that he realised that he knew very little about his own culture. As the artist recalls, 'So I am growing up in this contemporary modern structure to be fragmented, influenced, and subconsciously colonized. So all the things I have been doing are about getting myself back. And getting myself back is just to relax and do what you would do, like breath. It is not trying to make a Buddha painting, but this points to the contemporary Thai artist's struggle, to be a Buddhist and an artist.'(2) Central to this process was understanding art as a creative space where you are free to decide what to do and the realisation that very objective Western attitudes towards art and living inhibited this. Tiravanija began to create works that bridged the gap between art and life, involving viewers in experiential situations. Of his early work, Tiravanija has stated, 'I grew up around the kitchen of my grandmother, who was a well known teacher of both Thai and Continental cuisine; besides teaching, she had her own restaurant and her own television show. This became a significant factor in my development as an artist. I learned the arts of sharing and giving. This sharing and giving came in the form my grandmother knew best: the preparation of food and the sharing of meals. In my work of the last ten years, I have become known as the "cook" of the art world. I have, more or less, used the kitchen and cooking as the base from which to conduct an assault on the cultural aesthetics of Western attitudes toward life and living. I have found food to be a common medium for creating conditions and experiences for communicating that does not always entail language, but has a spiritual dimension. In the communal act of cooking and eating together, I hope that it is possible to cross physical and imaginary boundaries.'(3) Tiravanija's emphasis on non-objectivity, his gentle challenge to the institutional space of the gallery and desire to provide new paradigms for interactivity, can be likened to the transformative works of Brazilian artists Lygia Clark (1920-88) and Helio Oiticica (1937-80). All three artists, have refused to 'author' objects, creating spaces and objects that gain meaning only in relation to the participant's/viewer's interaction. Bringing together art and life, the artist and the spectator in a creative dialogue, Tiravanija's work also intersects with other key contemporary Thai artists, including Montien Boonma and Kamin Letchaiprasert, both of whom he has worked with. Characteristically Tiravanija's collaborative projects seek to provide spaces of exploration and communication. 'The Land Project', initiated with Kamin Letchaiprasert in Sanpathong, Thailand in 1998 is perhaps the most well known. Comprising a piece of farmland in rural Thailand, 'The Land' was envisaged as an 'openspace or community free from ownership'.(4) Here artists, scientists and architects work with local farmers to realise projects necessary to the sustainability of the environment, its productivity and its role as a social field in which artistic practices can be discussed and tested. 'Because the land is empty of expectation, it is truly open to possibility, and in this openness, science, architecture, art, religion, technology, and the environment all play a part in determining the design and function of the space. In a sense, it is through this complete lack of determination that so many experiments and discoveries are engendered: emptiness as an incubator, of sorts.'(5) 'Untitled (demonstration drawings)' is one of Tiravanija's most recent collaborative projects to engage its viewers in dialogue about aspects of contemporary life. The series of drawings were created by Thai artists that Tiravanija has commissioned and are based on photographs we are all familiar with, of protest scenes published in the pages of the International Herald Tribune. When Tiravanija chose to transform the original photographs into drawings made by many different hands, he was not seeking to personalise the images or create a more emotionally charged representation. As David Reiff has noted, 'for all of their engagement, the works have their own distance, their own estrangement from what they depict'.(6) It is this distance, echoed in the remove Tiravanija himself takes from the role of author, that is the work's allegorical content. Tiravanija 'improvises' on the press photographs to 'illuminate' our often very objective relations to contemporary representations.(7) Bearing witness to a kind of cultural forgetting that reduces so many social and historical events to an image easily flipped over and discarded, as well as acknowledging the profusion of images we are bombarded with, Tiravanija reveals the difficulties involved in looking today. The gentle and open way in which he does this offers opportunities to look again: both at the images and our own responses to them. It is here Tirivanija succeeds, once more to move his viewers from the passive position of spectator to the active role of being the subject of their own experience. 1. Tiravanija, Rirkrit. 'In Conversation with Delia Bajo and Brainard Carey' in 'The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture', Feb. 2004, , viewed Oct. 2009. 2. Ibid. 3. Tiravanija, Rirkrit. 'Artists statement', , viewed Oct. 2009. 4. UC Berkley's Centre for New Media, viewed Oct. 2009. 5. Ibid. 6. Rieff, David. 'Making the news again' in 'Rirkrit Tiravanija: Demonstration Drawings' (exhibition catalogue). The Drawing Centre, New York, 2008, p.37. 7. Ulmer, Greg in his 'The Object of Post-Criticism' proposes that allegorical possibilities of a text come about through its dramatisation or improvisation in Foster, Hal (ed.). 'Postmodern Culture', Pluto Press, London, 1985, pp.95-99. Biographical details Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in Argentina in 1961, the son of a Thai diplomat. Educated in Thailand, he moved to North America in to pursue tertiary studies in art at the Ontario College of Art, Toronto; Banff Centre School of Fine Arts, Banff, Canada; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Independent Study Program, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Tiravanija transforms the flux his personal history and life of movement, with its negotiation of different cultures and people into an engaged and engaging art practice. Concerned with bridging the gap between art and life, Tiravanija's projects have involved cooking and serving food, creating environments for the pursuit of leisure activities and pursuing collaborative projects with fellow artists and students. Always seeking to change the terms of reference for making art, Tiravanija has in recent years engaged with curating and was part of the collaborative team responsible for 'Utopia station' a cornerstone of the 2003 Venice Biennale. He has exhibited widely at museums and galleries throughout the world and has recently staged major solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 2009; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2004 and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK, 2003-04. His work was also represented in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 and the International Sydney Biennale in 1998. Essay and biographical details by Ruth McDougall, Curatorial Assistant, Asian and Pacific Art, Nov. 2009.

In today's image-saturated world, every time we turn on the television, open the newspaper or surf the internet we are bombarded with images of people, events and problems often far removed from our own lives. Since the early 1990s, Rirkrit Tiravanija's art practice has involved shifting his audience from passive spectators to active subjects.

For Untitled (demonstration drawings) 2001, Tiravanija commissioned Thai artists to reproduce images representating the strife, hardship and protest we see daily in the media in a new context and form. By involving other artists in creating these drawings, Tiravanija underlines the distance and estrangement we feel from the images they depict, and makes us aware of our passive relationship to them.