![]() ![]() Still, as Tomas Vu, the Neiman Center’s artistic director and master printer, observes, “Rirkrit’s is certainly the most ambitious project the center has ever undertaken.”2 The center is known for producing time-consuming, often materially innovative prints by artists such as Ellen Gallagher, Sarah Sze and William Kentridge. In addition, because it is a teaching institution, there is always a ready supply, through work-study, of student labor. Subsidized, in part, by an endowment from the artist and printmaker LeRoy Neiman, the center has deeper reserves than many private workshops. It is currently on view in New York at Pace Prints Chelsea, in an exhibition of recent editions from Columbia University’s LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, where it was created. Made up of three single-sheet scrolls that are meant to be displayed end to end, it is an elaborate montage of inkjet printing, offset lithography and screenprinting, and was produced in an edition of 40 (plus 10 artist’s and two printer’s proofs). Signed in April 2011, Tiravanija’s print, Untitled 2008-2011 (the map of the land of feeling) I-III, is 3 feet high and 84 feet long. ![]() Here, however, “sociability” has yielded a marketable, and potentially profitable, commodity. “Art is a site that produces a specific sociability,” wrote the curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud, whose essays and shows on Relational Aesthetics have often embraced Tiravanija’s projects. Still, for Tiravanija, who enlists the participation of many people in the realization of his works, collaborative printmaking on a grand scale is not an entirely illogical step. So it is no mean irony that this quintessential anti-object artist has just completed a monumental print project-among the most adventurous in the recent history of the medium-demanding three years’ work, dozens of laborers, a generously furnished shop and a small forest’s worth of paper, and requiring, for its ideal viewing, a considerable stretch of wall space. At his show this spring at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, for example, he set up a room where an assistant screenprinted white T-shirts with his signature terse, block-print headlines, ranging in tone from vaguely political (LESS OIL MORE COURAGE) to hospitably absurd (I HAVE DOUGHNUTS AT HOME). When Tiravanija does make objects, they are generally of a modest nature-most often multiples and ephemera connected with exhibitions. At two of the three venues for his 2004 retrospective, the “display” consisted of a sequence of empty rooms referencing (in their proportions and an accompanying audio) his selected exhibitions over the years.1 At galleries and museums around the world, he has prepared meals and fed visitors, broadcast live radio programs, installed social spaces for instruction and discussion, set up apartments-where he or visitors might live for the duration of a show-and dismantled doors and windows, leaning them against walls. In a market-riven art world, he has remained, since the early ’90s, a steadfast conceptualist whose immaterial projects, enmeshing daily life and creative practice, have earned him a key role in the development of relational art. ![]() Rirkrit Tiravanija has never been known as a maker of elaborate objects. ![]()
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