no inner resources

God, please, will someone give me something to write about?  I'm dying out here, day after day of nothing interesting and nothing seen.  Wait, that reminds me of . . . Jerry Saltz's recent article in Artnet about Rirkrit Tiravanija and a rehash of relational aesthetics in New York.  A generous excerpt:

For Rirkrit Tiravanija, art is what you eat. This Thai born, New York-Chang Mai-and-Berlin based artist became famous, starting in 1992, when he made "Untitled 1992 (Free)." This sculptural-performance consisted of Tiravanija (pronounced Tea-rah-vah-nit) removing all the contents of the office of the 303 Gallery on Greene Street in SoHo -- including its intrepid dealer, Lisa Spellman -- and setting up a makeshift kitchen complete with a refrigerator, pots, hot plates, rice steamers, folding tables and stools. He then cooked Thai curry; anyone who happened by could serve themselves, sit down and eat. For free.

Back then it was disconcerting and thrilling to be this casual in an art gallery, to go from being a passive viewer to an active participant, and doing it all for free. With this simple, almost metaphysical gesture, Tiravanija transformed the transaction of being in a gallery as viewers came to realize that the art was in them, not just because they ate it, but because all the relations they had there were theirs. In this very tangible, immediate way, Tiravanija seemed to bridge a mind-body gap that often exists in Western art; he was a medicine man artist who literalized art’s primitive functions as sustenance, healing and communion.

Tiravanija subsequently repeated this cooking-as-art sculpture all over the world. So much that by the late 1990s he was in danger of branding himself as the happy Thai guy who cooks. This obscured the latent identity-politics prickliness in his work. Often, Tiravanija prepares food the first day of an event then substitutes a Thai cook thereafter. All this is not only reminiscent of the cagy ways Andy Warhol sent surrogates to give lectures for him and let himself be thought of as a village idiot, the disordered highly social situations Tiravanija sets up also mimic Warhol’s Factory in that they provide unstable, clubby environments where people can act out, and every kind of behavior is sanctioned.

Far be it from me to harsh on free food.  And I haven't seen the exhibition, or anything by Tiravanija.  But this strikes me as less "disconcerting and thrilling" than really dull, the acting out of ideas that weren't new when John Cage explored them decades ago.  At least Robert Rauschenberg had the decency to "act in the gap between life and art" rather than just give us the former.  Saltz's comparison to Warhol doesn't in my mind complicate matters in the way he thinks it does; there's a great difference between hoaxing the rubes by sending an impostor and having a real cook serve gallery visitors.  While at some point in time, generally adolescence, everyone needs an environment to "act out," one would hope that Saltz would be more clear minded than to gush over one in which "every kind of behavior is sanctioned"--if he, or the artist, meant that seriously, which I suspect they do not.

But all that gets away from the main point, which is, to borrow from John Berryman, that "Life, friends, is boring."  We must not say so, of course, now more than ever apparently, but it remains true: add some art to it if you want me to care.  Serving up trivialities as epiphanies doesn't impress.  W.  J. T. Mitchell, I think in an essay in this volume, tried to turn Berryman to his own purposes by declaring that "Landscape, friends, is boring."  Quite apart from the fact that Mitchell didn't seem to notice that Berryman's poem immediately turned to landscape imagery, undermining his appropriation, landscapes could not possibly be any duller than some dude cooking rice.  Of course, Berryman wrote that literature and art bored, too, but he had problems.  Anyway, the more I read Saltz's article, the more unintentional comedy I see; maybe I was wrong--the artworld has humor after all, just not on purpose.