Shown by Gladstone at Art Basel Hong Kong, his latest works speak of artists' responsibility to bear witness writes Mark Godfrey

How Rirkrit Tiravanija appropriates Philip Guston's vocabulary to address contemporary political crises

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Ever since he has been making art,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7088/Rirkrit-Tiravanija" target="_blank">Rirkrit Tiravanija</a> has allowed ideas, images, and texts developed by his predecessors to resurface in his own works so as to better direct his practice toward the questions he faces in the present time. This is not Appropriation in the manner of figures from the Pictures Generation (<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/search?q=Sherrie%20Levine" target="_blank">Sherrie Levine</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7373/Richard-Prince" target="_blank">Richard Prince</a>, and others), who were prominent when he was becoming an artist: Tiravanija’s borrowings are not motivated by questions about authorship or originality, or the deconstruction of the art historical canon. Rather, he repurposes what seems useful to him, just as Gretchen Bender, for whom he once worked, recycled adverts and logos as a way of deconstructing the image world of Reaganite America.

Tiravanija’s tendency to reuse other artists’ works comes from two principal ideas: First, his acknowledgment that the most effective way to address political questions as an artist is to be ‘poetic.’ A work that is too direct would have too narrow an impact, targeting a particular concern of particular viewers in a specific moment. A work that is more ‘oblique’ can be thought-provoking for more people in more places over a longer time; it can open itself to their experiences. One way that Tiravanija has found to make ‘oblique’ or ‘poetic’ work is to include elements repurposed from other, older artworks.

His other key conviction is that artworks from the past are not dead things that can only commune with other contemporaneous artworks from across a room in a museum display, in the way that a painting in the Louvre by Géricault might speak to its neighbor by Delacroix. Tiravanija believes, instead, that one artist’s work has a potential that can be unlocked by another artist at a new moment of time – indeed, an important role of the contemporary artist is to unleash this potential. This belief – which recalls Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘seiz[ing] hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ – lies behind Tiravanija’s earlier decisions to create a cinematic installation at an intersection of streets in Glasgow, borrowing from a proposed monument by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7047/Claes-Oldenburg" target="_blank">Claes Oldenburg</a>, in 1999; to rebuild the frame of Rudolf Schindler’s house in shiny stainless steel in the Secession gallery in Vienna in 2002; to pair his work with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/11143/Gordon-Matta-Clark" target="_blank">Gordon Matta-Clark</a>’s in New York and to reconfigure Situationist texts by Guy Debord in 2007; and to take various forms from the work of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6739/Jasper-Johns" target="_blank">Jasper Johns&nbsp;</a>as a way of addressing questions of nationalism in Paris in 2020.

Prior to the election of Donald Trump and the four years of his presidency, Thailand witnessed a similarly depressing period of political crisis and regression. The National Council for Peace and Order took power in 2014 after a coup, displacing a democratically elected government; it put in place martial law in an attempt to quell calls for democracy and institutional change. Under Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, freedoms were restricted and opponents of the regime were sent to ‘attitude adjustment’ camps. Thinking about this situation, in 2019 Tiravanija embarked on a project at Washington D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum, re-creating a work first staged some years earlier: a huge mural that covered three walls and that went up in front of the visiting public. This started with images of protests against the Thai government, but the artist added further scenes, current and historical, from feminist rallies, environmental protests, and BLM marches. To name the work, he tweaked a title of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10067/Barnett-Newman" target="_blank">Barnett Newman</a>’s, calling the installation ‘(who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green)’, referencing colors worn by Thai activists and the vandalism of one of Newman’s paintings that occurred in 1982 in Berlin. With political events worsening in Thailand and the United States, as Trump stirred up the passions of white supremacists and attempted to construct a wall along the Mexican border, dividing migrant families and caging children, Tiravanija’s mind moved from Newman to Newman’s one-time friend in the New York School, Philip Guston. Reading the newspapers emerging from Thailand, as well as those in the United States, Tiravanija probably felt a similar frustration to one articulated by Guston when, 50 years earlier, he asked himself, ‘What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?’

When Guston said this, he was struggling with a crisis in his own practice. He had been working with abstraction for about 20 years, but felt that it was increasingly disconnected from the world; after all, when he began to make art (back when he was known as Philip Goldstein), he had been involved in painting murals that directly addressed contemporary events. At first, Guston worked in a very direct and illustrative way, such as when he painted a Black American being whipped by a Klansman for a mural in 1932. He soon took a less direct route, realizing that a more compelling way to respond to current crises was to link them with historical ones, just as Tiravanija would do with his Hirshhorn mural. As fascism was spreading across Europe, Guston combined contemporary images with scenes of the Spanish Inquisition in his mural The Struggle Against Terrorism (1934–35). He also increasingly borrowed from old and then-recent art and used forms and images from Piero and Uccello, as well as de&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7975/Giorgio-de-Chirico" target="_blank">Chirico</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6746/Pablo-Picasso" target="_blank">Picasso</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7357/Max-Ernst" target="_blank">Max Ernst</a>.

More than 30 years later, when Guston saw peace activists being beaten on the streets of Chicago on the orders of the anti-Semitic Republican mayor, Richard Daley, rather than depicting these scenes, he drew from his memories and images of the 1930s: This is what led him back to the Klansmen. The hooded figures served as a symbol for concealed evil and white supremacy in more expansive ways than if he had directly depicted the Chicago police. Guston could link Nixon’s most virulent supporters to historical thugs and he could address global, not just American, racism. A few years later, appalled by events outside America (the escalation of the Vietnam War; the devastation in Cambodia; the coup in Chile), he turned back to the images he had seen in the 1940s of the Nazi concentration camps: the walls where bodies were lined up to be shot, the crematoria, the piles of limbs and shoes. These made their way into his darkest paintings, such as Pit (1976). This is how Guston’s imagination worked in his final years: Horrific images that he had seen or used decades before were hidden away yet swirling around in his mind, and when current events caused them to reemerge, he recognized that by bringing them back to the surface, producing an authentic response to the world that troubled him. This would be his way of fulfilling what he understood was his moral responsibility as an artist – ‘to bear witness’ to a world of catastrophe. As he wrote to his friend Bill Berkson, ‘Our whole lives (since I can remember) are made up of the most extreme cruelties of holocausts. We are the witnesses to the hell. When I think of the victims it is unbearable. To paint, to write, to teach in the most dedicated sincere way is the most intimate affirmation of the creative life we possess in these despairing years.’

As we have seen, Guston and Tiravanija share ways of working – the idea of overlaying images from different moments when forming a response to political crisis, and the preparedness to draw from vocabularies developed by artist-predecessors. Tiravanija – who, though based in New York, has been described as a nomadic artist – must also be drawn to Guston’s own sense of himself as a wandering Jew, which was clear from his 1977 paintings of migrant salesmen’s overcoats. But the connection goes much deeper still. ‘In Guston one finds an artist not just of craft and skill but of total commitment to doubt and criticality, an artist of possibilities and at the same time the confluence of impossibilities.’ This statement of Tiravanija’s, in a text for the Philip Guston Now catalogue, which I co-edited, speaks to his own position too and gets to the heart of the older artist’s appeal. The two artists share a commitment to criticality, a belief in the possibilities of art; at the same time, they acknowledge art’s limitations, its impossibilities. They experience doubt about the impact it can have, but equally they know that the true artist has to work from the position of doubt, not of certainty.

All this is the background to the pieces being presented here. Since 2018, Tiravanija has painted elements of Guston’s works from the 1970s over American and Thai newspaper pages in two remarkable series. The first group of works was made in 2018 over grids of New York Times pages, and in some, one can see, top left, that these are from the very moment of Trump’s election. In these works, Tiravanija combined elements of Guston’s late paintings (walls, bottles, piles of limbs) with symbols of Trumpism – the red MAGA cap – so that Guston’s wall began to read as Trump’s wall and so that Trump’s victims were aligned with the victims of history whose fates Guston witnessed in his art. In the second series of works, Tiravanija has taken single sheets from the Bangkok Post and commissioned Thai painters to render, much more carefully, specific paintings by Guston over their surfaces, leaving out the backgrounds so that the Bangkok Post articles are clearly legible. Whereas in the first series, the elements are merely ‘Guston-like,’ in the second group, the textures and tones of Guston’s paintings are retained.

Tiravanija redeploys Guston’s vocabulary, which itself was forged at a moment of crisis, to shape a complex response to another moment of crisis. Guston’s images appear like ghosts, and they beckon us to link the era of Trump and Prayuth to that of Nixon, just as Guston linked Nixon’s era to the fascisms of the 1930s. Perhaps Tiravanija knows that when these works circulate, many of his viewers, recognizing the Guston imagery, will quickly link Trump and Nixon, but they will be less aware of circumstances in Thailand; through Guston, Tiravanija might grant these circumstances a greater recognition. But why do these works feel so poignant? It’s because built into them is the dynamic of doubt and criticality, of impossibility and possibility that Tiravanija recognized in Guston: The works are palpably fragile, many very small, as if in acknowledgment of the limitations of art when faced with the repressive power of dictators. Yet they hold out for the possibility that art can and must have some kind of impact by witnessing the world in which it is produced, and by connecting images, geographies, and moments of history in the most unpredictable of ways.Mark Godfrey is an independent curator and art historian based in London.Top image:&nbsp;Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2018 (MARCH ON UNTIL IT RAINS GLASS no. 1) (detail), 2018. Copyright Rirkrit Tiravanija. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York City and Brussels.

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Shown by Gladstone at Art Basel Hong Kong, his latest works speak of artists' responsibility to bear witness writes Mark Godfrey

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How Rirkrit Tiravanija appropriates Philip Guston's vocabulary to address contemporary political crises

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