DRAWINGS
Tiravanija, Rirkrit
Argentina /Thailand (1961 - )
Untitled (Demonstration no. 146)
2006
Pencil drawing on paper
5 7/16 x 8 13/16 in. (13.8 x 22.4 cm) image size; 7 1/2 x 10 11/16 in. (19.1 x 27.1 cm) sheet size; 9 11/16 x 12 3/4 x 3/4 in. (24.6 x 32.4 x 1.9 cm) frame size
Gift of David Hoberman, Los Angeles
FA 2014.286

Since the 1990s, Rikrit Tiravanija has been a maker of situations and experiences that invite audience participation and catalyze social interactions, blurring the distinction between art and the everyday, and between viewer and artwork. Tiravanija’s practice extends to objects and text-based works that question the exploitation and alienation carried out through the systems and conditions of contemporary life.

The work is part of a larger series of hundreds of drawings based on images of protest sourced from the International Herald Tribune. The protest depicted here represents Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, in 2004. As a group, the drawings include diverse, and sometimes conflicting, causes functioning together as a global study in resistance against the mechanisms of power. Translating press photographs through the intimate medium of pencil, these drawings reframe mass-circulated images, inviting a fresh look and raising questions about how the genre of the protest image does or does not facilitate global consciousness about complex social movements.

Tiravanija commissioned Thai artists, including some of his former students, to make the Demonstration Drawings, bringing the form of their making into the collective realm. However, subsuming the identities of the makers under Tiravanija’s authorship is not without contradiction, and there is a tension between the hand-made nature of the drawings, and the concealment of the hands that made them.

Label copy for The Time. The Place. Contemporary Art from the Collection, November 4, 2017 to April 22, 2018.

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