November 30, 2023
Rirkrit Tiravanija
No More Reality (For PP)
1301 PE
September 16 - December 16, 2023
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Rirkrit Tiravanija is an artist whose work has employed unusual and diverse mediums: cooking, staged readings and platforms for socializing. The forms and formats of his installations and presentations are participatory and unconventional, often involving the sharing of meals. That is not to say that Tiravanija does not also make objects and drawings that can hang on a wall or fill a conventional gallery space. In 2020, he covered the walls of The Drawing Center in New York with over 200 demonstration drawings — black and white works on paper derived from photographs of demonstrations published in the International Herald Tribune. World events and the propagation of news has long been an interest of his and for this installation, No More Reality (For PP), he covers the gallery walls with pages of daily American newspapers (collected in 2020).
The phrase "No More Reality" was used in a series of film and photographic works by Philippe Parreno in 1991-1993 and Tiravanija pays homage to Parreno by enlarging the words and painting them in black capital letters over the grid of newspaper pages. For this evocative and timely presentation, individual spreads from newspapers across the United States are mounted on linen and hung in four rows (from the ceiling almost to the floor) on the walls of the lower gallery. While it is possible to see the content of the newspaper through the washy paint, the installation is not about what can be read versus what is obscured but rather about the way "reality" is presented. With thousands of headlines and images to view, the varying agendas and perspectives of different regions becomes clear. In August 2020, Covid was raging, fires were burning, Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate, there were explosions in Beirut, religious clashes in India and myriad other local and international events that were reported by the various newspapers.
Because the phrase "No More Reality" takes up a lot of space, the individual words occupy different rooms: "NO" fills a corner and a grid of 40 pages. "REALITY" covers four different walls. Seeing through these giant letters prompts one to turn the phrase from statement to question and back again.
Upstairs, Tiravanija presents framed spreads (front and back page) of a selection of newspapers — The Keene Sentinel, The News Sun, The Sun Chronicle, Starkville Daily News, The Herald Republican — from mid-August 2020 and covers them with a smaller painted version of the same phrase. In these works, "No More Reality" is flush left and a rendered in a washy red, allowing what is printed below to remain visible. The headlines of the day, including "Woman' Suffrage Celebrated," "Voting Rites," "10th Annual Dog Paddle Calls for Sponsors," are interspersed with news about Covid 19, weather and sports to create a snapshot of the times and the priorities of these different locales. How these come together to depict the larger whole is what Tiravanija is ultimately interested in. Like in his previous projects, he mines popular culture and world events to create what becomes and archive of images and content that explores disparate presentations of truth.
No More Reality (For PP)
1301 PE
September 16 - December 16, 2023
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Rirkrit Tiravanija is an artist whose work has employed unusual and diverse mediums: cooking, staged readings and platforms for socializing. The forms and formats of his installations and presentations are participatory and unconventional, often involving the sharing of meals. That is not to say that Tiravanija does not also make objects and drawings that can hang on a wall or fill a conventional gallery space. In 2020, he covered the walls of The Drawing Center in New York with over 200 demonstration drawings — black and white works on paper derived from photographs of demonstrations published in the International Herald Tribune. World events and the propagation of news has long been an interest of his and for this installation, No More Reality (For PP), he covers the gallery walls with pages of daily American newspapers (collected in 2020).
The phrase "No More Reality" was used in a series of film and photographic works by Philippe Parreno in 1991-1993 and Tiravanija pays homage to Parreno by enlarging the words and painting them in black capital letters over the grid of newspaper pages. For this evocative and timely presentation, individual spreads from newspapers across the United States are mounted on linen and hung in four rows (from the ceiling almost to the floor) on the walls of the lower gallery. While it is possible to see the content of the newspaper through the washy paint, the installation is not about what can be read versus what is obscured but rather about the way "reality" is presented. With thousands of headlines and images to view, the varying agendas and perspectives of different regions becomes clear. In August 2020, Covid was raging, fires were burning, Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate, there were explosions in Beirut, religious clashes in India and myriad other local and international events that were reported by the various newspapers.
Because the phrase "No More Reality" takes up a lot of space, the individual words occupy different rooms: "NO" fills a corner and a grid of 40 pages. "REALITY" covers four different walls. Seeing through these giant letters prompts one to turn the phrase from statement to question and back again.
Upstairs, Tiravanija presents framed spreads (front and back page) of a selection of newspapers — The Keene Sentinel, The News Sun, The Sun Chronicle, Starkville Daily News, The Herald Republican — from mid-August 2020 and covers them with a smaller painted version of the same phrase. In these works, "No More Reality" is flush left and a rendered in a washy red, allowing what is printed below to remain visible. The headlines of the day, including "Woman' Suffrage Celebrated," "Voting Rites," "10th Annual Dog Paddle Calls for Sponsors," are interspersed with news about Covid 19, weather and sports to create a snapshot of the times and the priorities of these different locales. How these come together to depict the larger whole is what Tiravanija is ultimately interested in. Like in his previous projects, he mines popular culture and world events to create what becomes and archive of images and content that explores disparate presentations of truth.