The artist Rikki T steps onto the terrace of the Lido Café at the Serpentine in Hyde Park balancing a tray with an espresso and a slice of cake. She is early. Curator C will not be there for a good 15 minutes. Just as well, she thinks. She settles at a table close to the lake, enjoying the sun and the view. It is going to be a working meeting to discuss the catalogue for her upcoming show at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Rikki T is pleased the curator was open to suggestions and enthusiastically ran with her ideas. They have decided on an experimental approach to the exhibition catalogue. It will be a key, stand-alone text that is creative in its own right. Rikki takes the draft of the curator’s prologue from her bag. She begins to read.
This is a catalogue, or rather a book, about a fictitious exhibition by a fictitious artist. It is also about many other things, such as relational aesthetics, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Amazon designs, women’s street art in India, globalization, anthropology, Guattari’s ecosophy and Guattarean aesthetics. More fundamentally, however, it presents a questioning of, reflecting on and experimenting with what it may mean to engage with art at this present moment.
Views differ about the (w)here and now in relation to art. There is consensus, however, that art has entered a new, global phase. For some this means that art has entered a cultural world where differences and geographies have been liberated into a smooth, inclusive global world of art. Others point to a worrying trend of cultural homogenization and marketization. Rikki T’s project sets out from a place in-between. It recognizes the potential as well as the pitfalls of art’s global turn and acknowledges that its current articulation leaves the project of decolonization incomplete. However, it also takes the view that while undoubtedly market-driven and only superficially generous, the global in art could yet be an initiatory rumble of a seismic shift to come. For the artist the challenge is to work towards unfolding the potential of the global and to address the renegotiations of art, culture and modes of artistic address it may entail.
Current art criticism often foregrounds travel and displacement in response to art’s shift towards the global. Rikki T’s work opts for a different tack. It focuses on intercultural encounters, probes relational aesthetics in view of cultural difference and explores issues of cultural translation with an emphasis on minoritarian cultures. Art writing is a further, central concern. For the artist, art’s textual arena needs to actively participate in the global turn if its potentiality is to unfold.
This project, then, comes along in a different guise. It performatively engages with modes of criticality, notions of art and cultural encounter, and approaches art writing co-constitutively, creatively and with artistic licence. It stages encounters between cultures, art worlds and academic disciplines that involve a cast of real and imagined characters to test the inclusivity of art’s global turn, and challenges the global contemporary to encompass visual practices that do not readily fit the invariably Eurocentric ‘bill’ of internationally recognized art.1
Rikki T’s phone beeps, a text message. The curator is running late. Rikki does not mind. It gives her time to gather more thoughts. Should she maybe add a list of the ‘cast’ to let readers know what they are in for? A dramatis personae of sorts? Who would need to be featured? She starts making a list, scribbling away.
Amélie – central character in the 2001 film of the same name directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and played by Audrey Tatou. She works as a waitress in the Café des Deux Moulins in Paris. In this volume her claim to fame is that she transforms her father’s garden gnome into a traveller-cum-anthropologist-cum-activist and is invited to cook Pad Thai for Rirkrit Tiravanija (which sends her into a panic).
Nicolas Bourriaud – French curator and art critic, author of Relational Aesthetics. This volume challenges Bourriaud’s conception of relational aesthetics to pay more heed to the cultural other in contemporary art. It also takes liberties with his culinary preferences and has him frequent the Café des Deux Moulins.
Brown Stagemaker – a bird brought to international attention in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. It is, however, not just any old bird but hails from Australia, a circumstance held to be of significance. But who would have thought its simple turning of leaves had implications for Tamil threshold designs and the global contemporary? It is not known what it makes of noodles. Would it turn them upside down? Perhaps.
James Clifford – anthropologist and author of many seminal books, among them Predicament of Culture (1988) and, together with George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). This discussion suggests he is rather partial to Pad Thai, especially if cooked by Rirkrit Tiravanija, and that he challenged Rikki T to read anthropological material and thus go beyond art’s ethnography-light ethnographic turn.
Gilles Deleuze – philosopher who wrote a great number of influential books taken up widely in the arts. Key volumes for this project are Bergsonism (1988), What Is Philosophy? (1994) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). The last two are co-authored with Félix Guattari and introduce the brown stagemaker, an Australian bird that engages in acts of territory- producing expressiveness by turning leaves upside down. For the purposes of this project, Deleuze also had a ‘noodle moment’ and not just anywhere, but in Venice!
Renate Dohmen – art historian, author of texts on Tamil threshold designs,2 the present volume and creator of Rikki T. She proposes the alter-relational as a post-productively3 remixed and reinscribed notion of Bourriaudean relational aesthetics expanded into culture and is indebted to Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics, the Antipodean bird and to noodles, of course.
Garden Gnome – a character from Amélie who likes to travel. But who knew he had a liking for Shipibo-Conibo ceramic art, was a connoisseur of Tamil threshold drawings and took issue with the Musée du Quai Branly? But did he share Pad Thai with art-world aficionados?
Angelika Gebhart-Sayer – anthropologist who worked extensively on Shipibo-Conibo ceramics. She unwittingly changed Shipibo-Conibo culture with her proposition of an aesthetic-curative paradigm that was lapped up as eagerly by anthropologists, drug tourists and art collectors as by the Indians themselves. It is not known what she makes of noodles.
Félix Guattari – psychotherapist and philosopher who co-authored several books with Gilles Deleuze, most notably What Is Philosophy? (1994) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). His single-authored texts include Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1995) and The Three Ecologies (2000), which are key to this discussion. He shared in Deleuze’s Venetian noodle extravaganza, naturally.
Bruno Illius – anthropologist who worked extensively on Shipibo- Conibo shamanism and culture. He takes the contingencies of authorship in the anthropological field seriously and had his two books on Shipibo language and culture approved by Shipibo-Conibo representatives. He mixes an excellent mojito, was surprised to find out about his Venetian noodle encounter and says it was not just noodles that were put in his mouth.
Marco Polo – famous thirteenth-century – Venetian traveller whose claim to fame is his encounter with the Chinese-Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. Yet he most likely never travelled to China, but spins a good yarn.4 It is also rumoured that he introduced noodles to Venice and that the famous Italian pasta might really be Chinese. He teaches us a thing or two about Venice in Italo Calvino’s incarnation cited in this volume.
Rikki T – a fictitious artist created for this discussion as a partial foil to Rirkrit Tiravanija. Rikki is female, and neither from an exotic nor privileged or international background. In this volume she had a formative encounter with the anthropologist James Clifford (Jim) over a bowl of Pad Thai. It changed her attitude to traditional visual practices as presented in her show ‘The Raw and the Cooked in Common Places’ held at the Serpentine Gallery in London. She likes to travel by Eurostar and prefers cake to noodles.
Rirkrit Tiravanija – global art-nomad of Thai extraction, also referred to as the ‘poster boy of relational aesthetics’. His claim to fame is his trade-mark cooking of Pad Thai in gallery spaces around the globe. His work was instrumental for Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics. Yet the latter never mentioned Tiravanija’s Thai Buddhist background and its connection to relational aesthetics, an omission the proposed alter-relational reconception of Bourriaud’s framework seeks to put right. Does Tiravanija still like noodles? One wonders.
Sangama – a Piro Indian5 who impressed on his cousin Moran Zumaeta, one of the first assuredly literate Piro, that he too could read newspapers ‘like the white man’ (in the outhouse), using shamanic metaphors for his description of how to read. The story was recorded by a missionary and acquired anthropological significance for the interpretation of Amazon designs. There is no known connection to noodles.
José Santos – a powerful Shipibo-Conibo shaman and one of the main native associates of Illius. He entered history not just in Illius’s books but also because, as Gebhart-Sayer reports, he moved his hand horizontally across designs anthropologists were enquiring about. This simple gesture became a weighty argument that has haunted anthropological literature since. In this volume he acquired, incongruously perhaps, a taste for noodles. And not just anywhere but – you guessed it – in Venice.
Tamil women – they collectively challenge European notions of visual practice, avant-gardism and originality with their twice-daily routine of drawing threshold designs. They also take Deleuze–Guattari6 to task for their gendered predilection for famous, modern, male, white European artists. They were found to be in league with the Australian bird. And yes, there is a natural connection with noodles: their looping lines7 were traditionally made with rice powder to feed the ants and add a distinctive spin to Tiravanija’s dispensing of food in the gallery.
Another text message. This time from Jim.8 He wants to know how the project at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris is coming along. Rikki sighs. It is a rather tight schedule, first the show in Paris and then this much larger one in London more or less immediately afterwards. How is she going to manage it all? Jim wants visuals of the show for his upcoming keynote speech about contemporary art and anthropology and wonders whether it will be up in time for his talk. He intends to present Rikki T as an artist who has taken an informed ethnographic turn. Rikki replies it may just work but will be tight.
With the curator still at large, Rikki T is beginning to get restless. She has been waiting for nearly an hour now. Productively so, yes, but still waiting. She checks her email. Scrolling through her inbox, she finds, to her surprise, an email from Okwui Enwezor, the director of the next Venice Biennale. He wants to meet. He will be in Paris on the day of the opening at the Musée du Quai Branly, and wonders whether she will have time for lunch at the Café des Deux Moulins. Before Rikki can respond, Curator C approaches in energetic strides. Apologetic but full of enthusiasm, she takes a draft of the proposed catalogue from her leather tote. They get to work.