Rirkrit Tiravanija Would Prefer Not To

His new retrospective at MoMA PS1 celebrates avoiding making art

- Carl Swanson

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA is an artist without a studio. "I don't have those expenses and overheads," he tells me. So he takes what he calls his "studio visits" at Cafe Mogador, the venerably bohemian Moroccan restaurant on St. Marks Place in the East Village. "My favorite place," he says. Mogador opened in 1983, the same year Rirkrit-everyone just calls him that; the middle r is not pronounced-moved to New York from Toronto, where he had gone to art school. He signed a lease for $290 a month on the same four-room rent-stabilized apartment on East 7th Street, between Avenues B and C, that he still has today (he also has homes in Berlin and his native Thailand). He has kept his costs low ever since, which has enabled him, rare among artists of his renowna biennial fixture with museum shows around the world who has taught at Columbia for more than 20 years to be mostly free from having to make art, at least the type that rich people invest in. "I could hit all the right notes," he says of making expensive objects. "I'd rather not."

He is most famous for cooking Thai food in art spaces. These communal experiences were deemed revelatory in the 1990s and early aughts, when he first came to prominence. “To have any food in museums is unusual,” notes the performance artist Marina Abramovi . “It is forbidden.” Now he is preparing for a long-simmering career retrospective at MoMA PS1 called “A Lot of People,” named after the “materials” needed for his best-known art: conceptually driven, participatory, and ephemeral. There will be cooking at PS1, and tea-making and -drinking, as well as the restaging of a work in which he had invited strangers to do the galloping “Shall We Dance” waltz from the musical