Ne travaillez jamais seeks a peripheral position beyond familiar viewpoints while promising to create individual perceptions amidst process-driven and lively participation.
For Rirkrit Tiravanija’s first major solo exhibition in China is titled after an iconic phrase that has appeared in many of the artist’s past projects: including untitled 2001 (no fire no ashes) in Neugerriemschneider, in Berlin, 2001 and a neon sign work made for the Shenzhen Biennial 2003. The phrase also resurfaced in an exhibition in 2007 where it was graffitied across a constructed wall at the Ontario College of Art, where he studied in the '90s.
A new home to global capitalism, China today has all eyes focused on its economic miracle, which has subsequently become the country’s proudest commercial and public relations achievement. Rapid development and speculation have whetted the population’s appetite for a better future. A strong work ethos has persisted in this environment and China’s current prosperity further stimulates materialist desires among the masses. Bolstered by the collectively shared belief in hard work and industriousness, the Chinese place great emphasis on material and economic conditions as indices of value and significance in their lives. Although this is an Asia-wide phenomenon, the world’s attention is currently hovering around what is being produced in and out of China right now.
Contemporary manifestations of China’s perceptive nature have inspired Tiravanija to deliberate his exhibition, once again, as an occasion to orientate and engage, with its meaningful focus grounded in the context of what is happening in this country that has tended to believe, since opening up globally that society can only serve a single life purpose: the building of a betterment.
The gallery has taken a number of steps to create a context for questioning so great and admirable an automaton as the transformative People’s Republic of China. The exhibition has engendered the non-stop act of building and making—a continuous work pattern that embraces us visually, takes us into intense discourse about human positions, and a mediation reflecting upon living and being. It is comprised of an actual brick-manufacturing machine that is slated to produce and sell 14086 bricks during the course of the exhibition, the quantity needed to build an ordinary house for a small family; a life-size Mercedes Benz built sculpturally as a celebrity car of its day and icon of affluence; a local stall providing breakfast sweets (Tofu Nao), to the public on a weekly basis; and finally, office towers to be constructed and built out of birdcages constantly throughout the duration of the exhibition.
The exhibition also calls for a narrative about the condition and relevance of locality, understood in terms of both the physical and psychological ethos of the specific area where the exhibition is situated. Where the interrogation of the context of the value in contemporary art is set, appropriately, within the densely populated 798 Art District—the art ‘Mecca’ of Beijing. As the artist puts it, “I was interested in the local situation of the art district, and how that can perhaps be seen as a parallel world to the real (greater) world, or the reality outside the compound, conceptualized as hyper-production and hyper-consumption.”
Like his past projects, Tiravanija produces strategic interplay with the surrounding environment. Using familiar items and tools that have strong local association, the artist’s work is grounded in the condition of evoking and creating awareness; forming a responsive context that situates itself in social as well as individual relations, both within and beyond the gallery. He insists on direct experience, on the here and now, on being there. He seeks to facilitate a social connectivity wherein action becomes possible, and that action, however momentary, can establish relationships.
Defining no more than necessary, the exhibition suggests a re-ordering of our physical world and in this case, the new China as the artist, and perhaps, all of us witness it today. He seeks to reveal interconnecting systems reminiscent of the local reality outside—the contradictory occurrences of the everyday. Whatever makes us reflect on the significance and value of everyday life, the in-between spaces of encounters, of contexts, of moments to be reminded of our reality, Tiravanija’s intention for this exhibition is to declare a Ne travaillez jamais.
Note: “Ne Travaillez Jamais”, translated widely as “Never Work”, was a graffiti slogan painted on the wall on Rue de Seine by renowned critic and theorist Guy Debord in 1953. The graffiti was also widely referenced as to relate to the 1968 springtime riots in Paris.
