Like an elephant's tail: process and instruction in the work of Michael Rakowitz, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Yoko Ono

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Content LIKE AN ELEPHANT’S TAIL:
PROCESS AND INSTRUCTION IN THE WORK OF MICHAEL RAKOWITZ,
RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA AND YOKO ONO

by

Megan Sallabedra

________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2012

Copyright 2012 Megan Sallabedra
ii
Dedication
For Agnes. And
for my audience: Karen Moss.
iii
Acknowledgements
I would like to offer thanks for the support from Ilana Milch, my family, and Sean
Ludan.
Acknowledgements are due to my readers and to the individuals affiliated with
the MPAS/Art and Curatorial Practices for the Public Sphere program: Rhea
Anastas, Joshua Decter, Chris Kraus, Elizabeth Lovins, Karen Moss, Rochelle
Steiner, and Noura Wedell.
Additional thanks to Michael Rakowitz and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
iv
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract v
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: The Chair in Your Mind 9
Chapter 2: Messy Poetics 21
Chapter 3: Letting Things Burn and Cook and Boil 33
Chapter 4: Let the Work Grow 43
Postscript: The Vitrine, the Video and the Truck 49
Bibliography 56

v
Abstract
This thesis critically examines the material qualities in process-based works by
Yoko Ono, Rirkrit Travanija, and Michael Rakowitz, with a specific focus on
Rakowitz’s ongoing project Enemy Kitchen. Enemy Kitchen’s process of cooking
results in a social construction of dialogical space. Like Tiravanija, whose Untitled
(Pad Thai) and similar projects form a parallel to Enemy Kitchen, the importance
of the work lies in an understanding of its material as process and the space of
dialogue. The material components of Rakowitz's project-based works point
toward characteristically messy poetics, fostering dialogical exchange over
contentious cultural categorizations. As a precedent, Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit
provides a model for experience through instruction. Ono's proposition, "Isn't a
construction a beginning of a thing like a seed? Isn't it a segment of a larger
totality, like an elephant's tail?" points toward the necessary materials used as
vehicles to foster a larger totality in these works.
1
Introduction
In her address “To the Wesleyan People,” (1966) later published in her book
Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings (1970) Yoko Ono proposed:
Isn't a construction a beginning of a thing like a seed? Isn't it a
segment of a larger totality, like an elephant's tail? Isn't it something
just about to emerge – not quite structured – never quite
structured… like an unfinished church with a sky ceiling?
1

In keeping with Ono’s proposition, Michael Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen, begun in
2004, represents something just about to emerge, not quite structured – never
quite structured. The premise of Enemy Kitchen is to cook traditional Baghdadi
recipes compiled in collaboration with the artist’s mother – and notably the family
recipe for Kubba Bamia, a rice flour dumpling stuffed with spiced ground meat
and simmered in a tomato-okra sauce. Enemy Kitchen is an ongoing work. As
Rakowitz himself puts it, “The art works represent a problem in the world. The
problems have not been solved, so the art works keep going."
2
Drawing from
Rakowitz’s extension of real-world problems into the realm of art making, this
thesis looks to the complexities and concrete materialities within Enemy Kitchen
as an examination of the problematic discourse surrounding participatory art.
Like an elephant’s tail, Enemy Kitchen points to larger implications – that
of the US’s tumultuous relationship with Iraq, one no longer in official sanctioned
conflict but still fraught with tensions. As Ono proposes, the specific construction

1
Yoko Ono, “To The Wesleyan People,” Grapefruit (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1970), n.p.
2
Michael Rakowitz, interview with the author, January 17, 2012.
2
of a work – a physical object or the manifest form of a performative event –
creates a container for an idea that represents a larger totality. The discussion
surrounding Enemy Kitchen, like the discourse that has formed surrounding
many works featuring cooking as a medium, privileges the relational aspect of
the work as paramount. However, the specific recipes and their subsequent
manifested forms utilized in Enemy Kitchen are important objects and the
resulting materials are seeds that act as containers for a larger totality of issues
to emerge through their husk.
Enemy Kitchen demonstrates a complexity lying somewhere between the
polar opposites derived through mainstream readings blaring sensationalism and
art-world readings proclaiming a message of conviviality. Where mainstream
news media has written off Rakowitz’s work in many cases to the sensationalism
of its relationship to Iraq, this does not fully consider the dialogical environment
his work is intended to foster. Conversely, where the art world fixates on
dialogical atmospheres and the relational aspect of such projects – often lauding
artist Rirkrit Tiravanija as a beacon in such practices – this strictly relational
approach denies the strong cultural and political implications of the materiality
utilized in Rakowitz’s work.
Enemy Kitchen aims to open up discussion surrounding attitudes toward
Iraqi culture through the everyday practice of cooking and eating. Enemy
Kitchen exists as a set of instructions – recipes. The project has no one physical
anchor point, an element that highlights the dislocation and derision of Iraqi
3
culture. To date, the project has been performed with the participation of multiple
audiences in and outside the art world, including Iraq Veterans Against the War
and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Enemy Kitchen has been presented in
various locations including New York City,
3
Chicago,
4
and Saratoga, California.
5

Most recently, the project premiered as a food truck on February 15, 2012 at
Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art at the University of Chicago’s
Smart Museum of Art. Like Ono’s characterization, these iterations demonstrate
different facets of the project’s totality.
Ono’s 1970 edition of Grapefruit was the first edition widely available to a
mass audience, and, like Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen, it speaks to a broad
audience through this sense of dialogical circulation. Each section contains
instructions for completing the works scored by Ono, more than one hundred in
all. Providing various levels of experiencing performative and participatory
works, Grapefruit allows for the work to be re-enacted through instruction just as
Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen relays instruction through recipes and hands-on
cooking sessions, providing a model for re-creation, re-experience, and ongoing
re-interpretation. As a precedent, Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit – a book of instructions,
like recipes – provides a model for experience looking to the complex and
categorically defiant nature of Rakowitz’s work. Ono’s Grapefruit provides a

3
Various locations, including the project’s first iteration with the Hudson Guild
Community Center in the Chelsea neighborhood
4
At The National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in 2009; the project’s most
recent iteration at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art
5
As part of Montalvo Arts Center’s 2007-2008 initiative Iraq: Reframe
4
reference point for discussing the many facets of Rakowitz’s iterative works, in
particular the mode of circulation and distribution inherent in Enemy Kitchen.
Following Enemy Kitchen’s trope of the specificity of Iraqi food as a
vehicle for discussion, Rakowitz’s 2011 project Spoils, produced through
Creative Time in conjunction with the seasonal restaurant Park Avenue,
presented a dish of cardamom-spiced venison served with pomegranate seeds,
pine nuts, and Debes wa Rashi, a traditional Iraqi date-and-tahini sauce. The
dish was served on flatware looted from Saddam Hussein's palace and
purchased by Creative Time on behalf of Rakowitz from an eBay auction. Spoils
represents the complications inherent in the US's relationship to Iraq, asking the
audience to assimilate the opulent accoutrements over which the ousted leader
fell. Forced to reconcile a close proximity – what could be closer than sharing
plates? – the project challenges the audience to think critically and extensively
about the materiality presented even more literally than in Rakowitz’s Enemy
Kitchen. As an American artist of Jewish-Iraqi descent, projects such as Spoils
and Enemy Kitchen along with many other works in Rakowitz’s oeuvre, are
deeply embedded in his own complex relationship to cultures in conflict that
amalgamate to his own. Reading these food-based projects within Rakowitz’s
larger practice identifies the complexity written out of discussions focused solely
on the relational aspect fostered by food as a medium.
5
Even within the insular art world
6
the tendency is to reduce works that
function through food (and presented in a restaurant and not a gallery, no less,
as is Rakowitz’s Spoils and some of Enemy Kitchen’s iterations) to little more
than idyllic communal moments. In his seminal book Relational Aesthetics
Nicolas Bourriaud describes the eponymous term, citing artist Rirkrit Tiravanija
and his cooking works often as an example of his descriptor. He begins his
chapter “Art of the 1990s” with an account of Tiravanija’s Untitled 1993 (twelve
seventy one) in the service of questioning,
This piece […] remains around the edge of any definition: is it a
sculpture? an installation? a performance? an example of social
activism? In the last few years, pieces such as this have increased
considerably. In international exhibitions we have seen a growing
number of stands offering a range of services, works proposing a
precise contract to viewers, and more or less tangible models of
sociability. Spectator “participation”, theorized by Fluxus
happenings and performances, has become a constant feature of
artistic practice.
7

Through his expository use of Tiravanija’s work Bourriaud creates a frame with
which to surround such participatory practices. Though he nods toward the
complexity of relationships and sense of multiplicity within the work’s content (“is
it a sculpture? an installation? a performance? an example of social activism?”)

6
Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 10, Fall
2004): 67, critiques the insularity of the art world community, citing how artist
Rirkrit Tiravanija's supposedly convivial and utopic work caters to a specific
entrenched community. She cites Jerry Saltz’s description of Tiravanija’s first
solo exhibition as problematic because it considers the work good only in that,
“it permits networking among a group of art dealers and like-minded art
lovers…”
7
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance & Fronza
Woods (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002), 25.
6
the resulting practice described by Bourriaud as relational aesthetics is situated
squarely within the lineage of Fluxus and other 1960s performance art. As such,
this thesis will examine the event score as characteristic of the Fluxus lineage in
relationship to the instructive nature of works described herein, further unpacking
Ono’s Grapefruit, Tiravanija’s cooking works, and ultimately Rakowitz’s Enemy
Kitchen.
Essentially characterizing participatory events as overwhelmingly
convivial, whose content is relational in nature, Bourriaud’s discursive tactic
exhibits a set of interpretations that creates a pole to the sensational attention
Rakowitz’s work has received from the mainstream media, a set of
interpretations that no better reflect the complexity of the work at hand. The
dominant discourse surrounding such works – as exemplified by discussions of
artist Rirkrit Tiravanija in his myriad cooking works – are overwhelmingly
reductive in their idyllic read of the relational nature of such situations. Looking
to Tiravanija’s early Untitled (Pad Thai) (1990) and more recent Cook Book: Just
Smile and Don’t Talk (2010), this thesis examines these works from among
Tiravanija’s oeuvre as a method for unpacking the instructional and iterative
nature of cooking as an artistic practice in relationship to Rakowitz’s Enemy
Kitchen.
Tiravanija’s Cook Book: Just Smile and Don’t Talk attempts to solve the
conundrum of exhibiting and discussing the ephemeral nature of food-related
work. In detailing the recipes for works he has cooked over the course of his
7
career, Tiravanija provides the instructions for re-creating the works. Created in
relationship to his series of cooking works begun in the 1990s, Cook Book
provides an example for reading the limited discussions surrounding works such
as those like Enemy Kitchen within the prevalent art world discourse based in
relational aesthetics. The 2010 publication includes recipes cooked by Tiravanija
throughout the course of his career to date, including one for Pad Thai – a dish
that kicked off his career when he first cooked and served it as art at the Paula
Allen Gallery in New York City in 1990.
Though Ono’s practice at the time of Grapefruit’s first publishing was
situated within the Fluxus milieu, the book belies a complex construction beyond
the narrative of conviviality Bourriaud fashions around the notion of participatory
art. This thesis looks to the evolution of forms from Grapefruit to Cook Book to
Enemy Kitchen along with a constellation of Rakowitz’s works to discuss the
complexity now evident in the nature of ongoing participatory practices.
Establishing Enemy Kitchen as an instructive work like a score, Ono’s work
provides a paradigm for interpreting the content of this process among
Rakowitz’s larger body of work. Identified as "an unfinished process of concept
transmission,"
8
the instruction works within Ono's oeuvre make this process
explicit. Reading Enemy Kitchen as a score, the importance of the physical
material becomes secondary to an understanding of the work's material as

8
Alexandra Munroe, “Spirit of YES: The Art and Life of Yoko Ono,” in Yes Yoko
Ono, Alexandra Munroe, Yoko Ono, Jon Hendricks, and Bruce Altshuler (New
York: Japan Society, 2000), 13.
8
process, networks, and revelation. Examining the work through this methodology
underscores the fact that the work should not be prefaced solely as its material
manifestation – not just as the food. Enemy Kitchen is about food inasmuch as
Ono’s Grapefruit utilizes the eponymous fruit as a symbol. The specific foods
utilized as concepts in Enemy Kitchen – dates, kubba bamia and venison –
remain, however, an important attribute of the ideas they represent. Rather, the
manifestation is comprised of the act of making, and like the tail of an elephant
the manifestation of Enemy Kitchen is a seed (the seed of a date, let’s say in this
case) that points to a larger, complex web of ideas and issues beyond the scope
of its own existence.
9
Chapter 1: The Chair in Your Mind
The score became a mere simplification of the natural sounds
without its original intricate beauty. Of course, you could make a
whole complex world of musical order, entirely separate from
sounds of nature. But if you wished to bring in the beauty of natural
sounds into music, suddenly you noticed that the traditional way we
scored music in the west was not the way. So I decided to combine
notes with instructions […] It was a natural step from there to
creating events and instructions for paintings and sculptures.
9

Like Ono’s above explication of her use of the score, the notes and instructions
that make up the recipes presented in Enemy Kitchen act as scores for events.
Further, Rakowitz’s characterization of Enemy Kitchen as a “social sculpture,” a
term borrowed from Joseph Beuys,
10
brings form to the project, fashioned out of
the messy poetics that characterizes Rakowitz’s work. The following discussion
of Ono’s early training and relationship to Fluxus opens up an examination of the
score as a method of reading Enemy Kitchen’s iterative continuation.
Ono’s affiliations with composer John Cage early in her career as an artist
integrates into her background beginning with composition in her pre-school
education. With her artistic work of the late 1950s moving toward their eventual
form as event scores in the 1960s and 1970s, Ono observes later that:
Artists, whether they are composers or visual artists, always want
their work to exist in eternity exactly how they have created it. But it
is impossible for their work to maintain its original condition and in

9
Yoko Ono and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Yoko Ono (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther König, 2009), 9.
10
First published in English by Caroline Tisdall, Art into Society, Society into Art
(London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1974), 48. Beuys discusses the notion
in several instances, most notably when he proclaimed “a social organism as a
work of art.” In “I am Searching for a Field Character.”
10
the case of music, it has to be performed exactly in the way they
intended.
11

The act of interpretation described by Ono is integral to the discussion at hand as
it relates to works by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Michael Rakowitz. The works each of
these artists score – in Tiravanija's Cook Book, and in Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen
– completes the works. Interpretation is not, in these cases, merely a subjective
and passive act. As each viewer of a painting has his/her own interpretation of
that painting, this interpretation does not change the form of the painting.
However, as each viewer/audience member/participant has his/her own
interpretation of the score – the instructions set out in the recipes delineated by
Rakowitz – the form of the work does indeed change. The form of the work is
manifested differently for each viewer as he/she sees best fit for it to be.
Pinpointing the source of instructional scores within Cage's body of work, scholar
Liz Kotz writes:
This peculiar type of "event" notation arguably derives from Cage's
work of the 1950s, appearing in its most condensed form in his
landmark composition 4'33" (1952), which directs the performer to
remain silent during three "movements" of chance-determined
durations. Replacing conventional musical notation with a
condensed set of typewritten numbers and words, 4'33" (in its first
published version) effectively inaugurates the model of the score as
an independent graphic/textual object, inseparably words to be
read and actions to be performed. While this model is initiated by
Cage, it is left to others to develop in a series of projects from 1959-
1962.
12

11
Yoko Ono and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Yoko Ono (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther König, 2009), 9.
12
Kotz, Liz. “Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the ‘Event’ Score.” October 95, Winter
2001: 57.
11

4'33" epitomizes what Kotz calls "the programmatic chaos"
13
in Cage's work –
letting all that happens surrounding "the work" become the content of the work
itself, recalling Ono's pre-school homework of scoring the sounds of the day.
Whereas Cage's determined silence draws attention to the sounds surrounding
the performer's concentrated stillness, Ono's attempts to score a set of sounds
among the many directed her to the realization of the impossibility of the task.
Ono's earliest training was in music. The pre-school she attended taught
pitch, harmony, and provided musical instruction in piano and composition. She
recalls,
We received homework in which you were supposed to listen to the
sound of the day, and translate each sound into musical notes. This
made me into a person who constantly translated the sounds
around her into musical notes as a habit.
14

From her realization of this difficulty, Ono moved onto her event scores beginning
in 1961, much in the vein of Cage's scores and similar works by his students.
Proceeding from her conclusion to begin working with scores, Ono continues
that,
In music you write the score and the performer interprets to perform
it as closely as possible to the score, but the outcome is always
merely an interpretation.
15

13
Ibid, 73.
14
Yoko Ono and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Yoko Ono (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther König, 2009), 9.
15
Ibid.
12
Drawing from Ono's recognition of the impossibility of utilizing the score to re-
create the inherent totality in nature, we see the possibilities that unfold from the
score as just a source for infinite manifestations through interpretation.
After attending school concentrating on philosophy and literature in Japan
and the US, moving between the two countries with her family, Ono established
herself in New York in the 1950s. Her then-husband Ichiyanagi Toshi attended
John Cage's seminal composition workshop at the New School for Social
Research in the late 1950s, introducing Ono to the circle including the individuals
who would become major players in the Fluxus group – Dick Higgins, La Monte
Young, and George Brecht among them. Following Cage's philosophy, several
strains of thought were solidified to become core traits in works by members of
Fluxus and their outliers (Ono among the latter).
16
In particular, the score
became a model for performative and ideological works that could manifest in
any number of manners, depending on the performer.
17

16
Ibid, 13. Ono herself describes her position as outside of any movement,
school, or other thematic associations (like Fluxus), calling herself instead a “lone
wolf.”
17
Alexandra Munroe, Yoko Ono, Jon Hendricks, and Bruce Altshuler, Yes Yoko
Ono (New York: Japan Society, 2000) details Ono’s history, training and
influences. Depending on who is writing, Ono’s influence in and relationship to
Fluxus changes drastically. In Yes Yoko Ono she is practically credited with
founding the group along with George Maciunas. In other cases Ono is a
tangential figure, as in Kotz’ “Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the ‘Event’ Score,”
October 95 (Winter 2001): 54-89. Ono is usually acknowledged for co-organizing
the Chambers Street concert series with La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow
in 1960-61, a seminal precedent to Fluxus, officially founded one year later in
1962.
13
Ono's statement that, "artists... always want their work to exist in eternity
exactly how they have created it,"
18
nevertheless has weight and provides insight
complicating our view of these ever-evolving works. Because the content of
these works is ultimately conceptual, the actual physical manifestation of the
work holds less weight than the concept the manifestation acts as container for.
It is the in the various forms works manifest that provide context for them. It is in
the discussion sparked by these forms, and the understanding fostered,
relationships forged, the spectral manifestation of the networks that comprise the
work. The work that is only possible through but not dependent upon the
physical form of the work. It is the journey and not the destination, though the
journey requires a destination in order for it to be a journey at all. Their works do
exist in eternity exactly how they have created them, because the works are
ideas that, once set forth, are not altered, and indeed are made ever more hardy
as their forms are created, re-created, re-imagined.
Writing in 1972, Lucy Lippard’s Six years: the dematerialization of the art
object attempts to define the move away from object-based work as is evident in
the art-making trends among the specific milieu in which she was situated. The
book, first published in 1973, details Lippard’s characterization of the emerging
conceptual-based practice in art, defining it as "work in which the idea is
paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap,

18
Yoko Ono and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Yoko Ono (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther König, 2009), 9.
14
unpretentious and/or 'dematerialized.'"
19
This definition of dematerialized works
and practices applies to the works included in the discussion at hand in a very
broad understanding of the term – the ideas in the works presented here are
indeed paramount, with the necessary materials existing as secondary to this
consideration.
Among the characters included in Lippard’s Six Years, Lawrence Weiner
stands out as one of Ono’s contemporaries.
20
As Alexandra Munroe notes of
Ono’s relationship to Conceptual artists of her generation,
[a]lthough she was the first to make concept literally the material of
art with her exhibition of Instructions for Paintings in Tokyo in 1962
– years ahead of those whose names would become associated
with Conceptual artists, like Lawrence Weiner or Joseph Kosuth –
she cannot be strictly categorized as a Conceptual artist. […] While
the Conceptualists embrace an aesthetics of negation (critique), to
arrive at art’s radical dematerialization, Ono arrives at the same
intangible, idea-based form of art by embracing an experience of
affirmation (imagination).
21

19
Lucy R. Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the
Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), vii.
While the trajectories of Conceptualism and Fluxus quickly depart from one
another, it is important to note this early moment in which Yoko Ono in particular
was referenced in both courses of practice. Indeed, Ono’s Grapefruit as well as
her influential “To The Wesleyan People” are both cited in Six Years.
20
Along with Sol LeWitt, whose Paragraphs on Conceptual Art [LeWitt, Sol.
“Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 79-83.] utilized
language as both a descriptive written work as well as theorization of the practice
outlined.
21
Alexandra Munroe, “Spirit of YES: The Art and Life of Yoko Ono,” in Yes Yoko
Ono, Alexandra Munroe, Yoko Ono, Jon Hendricks, and Bruce Altshuler (New
York: Japan Society, 2000), 13.
15
The radical dematerialization outlined in Weiner’s Statements (October 12, 1969)
emphasizes the primacy of the idea rather than the execution of a piece and the
importance of the conditions of its reception:
The artist may construct the piece;
the piece may be fabricated;
the piece need not be built.

Each being equal and consistent
with the intent of the artist
the decision as to condition
rests with the receiver upon the
occasion of receivership.
22

The progression from “The artist may construct the piece;” to “the piece may be
fabricated;” to “the piece need not be built.” demonstrates a negation, as Munroe
describes it, in its focus on the subtraction of the artist’s hand from the creation of
the work. This intangible, idea-based form of art is epitomized in Grapefruit’s
epigraph. Opening with the instructions to "Burn this book after you've read it,"
23

anchors the conceptual content of the book to her statement in "To The
Wesleyan People" as existing in eternity exactly as she has created it: “I think it
is possible to see a chair as it is. But when you burn the chair, you suddenly
realize that the chair in your mind did not burn or disappear.”
24
However

22
Lawrence Weiner, Statements (October 12, 1969) first published in
Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art (New York: Dutton) 1972, 217-218; the
specifications articulated without accompanying expository text (as cited here)
first appeared is a catalog and artists’ book as January 5-31, 1969, Seth
Siegelaub, New York.
23
Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), book front jacket.
24
Yoko Ono, “To The Wesleyan People,” Grapefruit (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1970), n.p.
16
destructive this statement may seem, in its specific language instructing the
reader to burn, to carry out an action as opposed to Weiner’s subtraction of an
action, sustains Monroe’s assertion that Ono’s Conceptualism is one if
affirmation and imagination. The specific distinctions aside, in both cases the
ultimate goal for both Ono and Weiner is in maintaining the eminence of the idea.
While it is safe to say that a good number of the printed copies of Grapefruit have
not been burned after Ono's instructions (I, for one, have not burned mine), the
fact remains that even if I had burned my copy, the Grapefruit in my mind would
not have disappeared, would remain unburned and intact.
Pre-dating the first published instance of Weiner’s Statements Ono's
painting, included in Grapefruit,
PAINTING TO BE CONSTRUCTED IN YOUR HEAD

Observe three paintings carefully.
Mix them well in your head.

1962 spring
25

underscores the complicated notion of the object as it exists per the artist’s
intentions. It is an object that need not be built or can be burned because it is the
concept and not the object that matters. But whereas many of Ono's instructions
are for actions that can be carried out in the mind, the burning of the book can
similarly be carried out by the imagination, leaving Grapefruit's pages whole with
the burned book, or lack of book, also existing in the mind. This further

25
Yoko Ono, “4. Painting,” Grapefruit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), n.p.
17
underscores that it is not the book that is important. It can exist, or not exist; it
can exist whole in the imagination, while disappearing in life, or whole in life while
disappearing in the imagination. It is the movement, carrying out the action
either real or imaginary as interpreted by the audience, that is important. What
seems of the utmost importance is the fact that both will be carried out in both
ways, and possibly with variations between the two – burning the book could
merely singe the edges, just as imagining singed edges would keep the object
itself intact while creating the image of the singed book in memory – as is
interpreted individually by each viewer. So the question is no longer just, where
does the work of art begin and where does it end, does the artist have to make
its material manifestation or can that be done by the audience, but becomes, is
the art more authentic in the mind?
The instructional scores included within Grapefruit follow a standard
format regardless of the genre they are purported to delineate: title listed in
capital letters, followed by the instructions for constructing the work, and noted by
the year and time of year (season) in which the work was conceived. Thus, works
appear following the formula:
TITLE

Instruction

[year] season

18
The following painting:
PAINTING TO EXIST ONLY WHEN IT’S
COPIED OR PHOTOGRAPHED

Let People copy or photograph your
paintings.
Destroy the originals.

1964 Spring
26

bears identical construction to the following event:
CONVERSATION PIECE

Talk about the death of an imaginary
person.
If somebody is interested, bring out
a black framed photograph of the
deceased and show.
If friends invite you, excuse yourself
by explaining about the death of the
person.

1963 Summer
27

Both works are based on an original – the painting existing only to be copied in
Painting To Exist Only When It’s Copied Or Photographed, or the death of an
imaginary person in Conversation Piece – that serve as vehicles for conveying
the action that constitutes the work. These individual pieces compiled together
among the others included in Grapefruit to make up the body of Grapefruit as a
total work. Grapefruit exists thus on several levels – as an object, the book, as a

26
Yoko Ono, “2. Painting,” Grapefruit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), n.p.
27
Yoko Ono, “3. Event,” Grapefruit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), n.p.
19
record of works Ono has performed (physically or conceptually), and as a total
concept in itself, comprised of all of the ideas put forth in the scores she offers.
To begin a further explication of Grapefruit, the book has several
published editions – iterations. Ono herself first published the book in 1964 while
living in Japan. This first edition of the book had a very small run of two hundred.
The petite, unpaginated volume is separated into five sections: “Music,”
“Painting,” “Event,” “Poetry,” and “Object.” Rooted in the methodology of Fluxus
events the scores contained within Grapefruit belie a playful call to action. Like
La Monte Young’s illustrious Composition 1960 #10 (To Bob Morris), scored with
instructions simply to “Draw a straight line and follow it,”
28
the scores included
within Ono’s Grapefruit are constructed with ambiguity, allowing the audience to
complete the instructions in any number of ways. Subsequent editions were
published in with the inclusion of additional scores and sections – the 1970
edition contained sections for “Film” and “Dance” as well as records of
documents and letters, the text “To The Wesleyan People,” and an introduction
by her husband and collaborator John Lennon. As in the limitless nature of
Young’s 1960 score and much like the many facets of Ono’s instructions,
Rakowitz has stated of his work that, “for me there are no material limits. The
entire project is framed within a poetic gesture and thus everything contained

28
La Monte Young, An Anthology of Chance Operations (Bronx, New York: L.
Young and J. Mac Low) 1963, n.p.
20
within it becomes an element of the work.”
29
Many of the works included in
Grapefruit defy their categorization – scores for paintings resembling scores for
events and the resulting constructions often just as ambiguous – complicating
our notions about what constitutes music, painting, events, poetry, and objects.
Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen similarly defies characterization. Though it is always
referred to under the auspices of an artist, the many services it presents –
discursive, pedagogical, and very concretely offering food – presents difficulty in
the way it has been written about.

29
Peter Eleey in conversation with Michael Rakowitz, "We Sell Iraqi Dates," in
Uovo Magazine 14, ed. Latitudes (Summer 2007): 272-297.
21
Chapter 2: Messy Poetics
Born and raised in Long Island, New York of Jewish-Iraqi descent, Michael
Rakowitz’s family history has a strong bearing on the work he creates that often
deals with Iraqi history and is regularly shown in New York. Rakowitz entered
college at the State University of New York Purchase studying graphic design
before switching to fine arts and concentrating on sculpture and installation.
Culminating his studies, Rakowitz received his Master of Fine Arts from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998. Rakowitz’s early interest in
design finds a place in his practice, with the issues of engagement, the multiple
and distribution, reinforced through his graduate studies at MIT, remaining
integral aspects of his work.
30
The shared space of dialogue, specifically
surrounding cultural stereotypes is an integral component of Rakowitz’s work.
Rakowitz distinguishes two strains of work within his practice – one for and within
the public and the other for and within commercial galleries.
31
While the
distinctions between “public” and “commercial” often overlap (indeed, the
commercial gallery space is open to the public), the specific implications of
commodification resound within the separate intentionalities of these two
spheres. Working for the public, without the gallery as a mediator, Rakowitz’s

30
Harrell Fletcher and Michael Rakowitz, Harrell Fletcher, Michael Rakowitz
(New York: A.R.T. Press, 2008), 6.
31
Michael Rakowitz, interview with the author, January 17, 2012. In an interview
with the artist, Rakowitz noted the necessity of having to create work for two sets
of constraints – within and without the specific constraints dealing with both
projects “for” the public and projects for the gallery.
22
work utilizes material as a vehicle. Where the opposite is the case – working
through the gallery with the public as a secondary conduit – the work tends to
focus on the material commodity, collectible though no less eligible to act as a
vehicle through which to foster a dialogical space.
Enemy Kitchen's series of events manifests differently each time it
appears based on the necessary parameters surrounding its situation. In some
cases Rakowitz instructs groups from the public on Iraqi cooking, as in its
formative iteration with the Hudson Guild Community Center in the Chelsea
neighborhood of New York City. In other cases he (and sometimes along with
his mother) provides Jewish-Iraqi dishes for an event. In some iterations of the
project, food is prepared and distributed by other individuals altogether, as in the
Veterans Against the War Memorial Day barbecue in Washington, D.C., or at the
food truck presented as part of Feast in Chicago. The crew staffing the food
truck presented as part of Feast is comprised mainly of Iraqi cooks doling out
instructions to American veterans acting as soux chefs and serving the food to
customers. This reversal of roles in the project’s most recent iteration presents a
further complication to the issues presented at its core. Rakowitz’s recipe for
Kubba Bamia as presented in Enemy Kitchen has appeared in print on at least
two occasions, reinforcing the iterative and re-creational aspects of the project.
32

32
For recipe, see: Michael Rakowitz, “Enemy Kitchen: Artist Michael Rakowitz
and the politics of (Iraqi) food,” Bidoun, "Rumor" Issue 09 (Winter 2006-2007):
95-99; and Michael Rakowitz, “Appendix 2: Kubba Bamia,” Who Cares?, Anne
Pasternak and Doug Ashford (New York: Creative Time, 2006), 150-151.
23
Rakowitz’s practice for the public is largely project-based, as is
demonstrated through a large number of works including paraSITE (begun
1998), Enemy Kitchen (begun 2004) and Return (begun 2004). As in Enemy
Kitchen, the project-based nature of his ongoing projects give life to the work
beyond their initial manifested form. In paraSITE, Rakowitz works with homeless
individuals to construct shelters that affix to the heating ducts of existing
buildings, effectively providing not just shelter but warmth for homeless in need of
it. paraSITE shelters are constructed of inexpensive materials – trash bags,
Ziploc bags and clear packing tape, and tailored to each individual’s needs.
While the project is ongoing, it manifests differently each time based on the
necessary parameters for living required by the individual participant. The
practicality with which paraSITE presents itself speaks to the necessity for
intervention into this aspect of daily life, to the effect that it requires art as a
beacon to herald its required state.
Where Rakowitz’s work is focused on creating a shared space of dialogue,
the dynamic fostered by this environment is sometimes mistaken as the only
point of the work. However eloquently characterizing the work through its "messy
poetics of [...] transactions rather than in [...] overt politics or ethics,"
33
some
critical reception of the work misses the point altogether. As with the overbearing
read through Relational Aesthetics on Tiravanija's work or through the

33
Peter Eleey, "Focus - Michael Rakowitz," Frieze: Contemporary Art and
Culture. no. 99 (2006): 150.
24
sensational and reductive reading as evidenced by the sensationalism with which
the news media takes on Enemy Kitchen, even this reception glosses over the
very potent political implications of the work though it points toward a necessary
tone in the work. The messiness of the poetics of the transactions involved in
works such as paraSITE and Enemy Kitchen, wherein conversations are not
always pleasant or arriving at a satisfactory product. This is often the case – as
when students in the first iteration of his Enemy Kitchen workshop came up with
a recipe for Iraqi Fried Chicken, effectively bridging two cultures through the
product of cooking – though as Rakowitz has remarked, his projects are ongoing
because the very potent issues he addresses – specifically, cultural stereotypes
– are ongoing.
34
The messy poetics are integral, they nod to the problem, often
wrapped up in politics as with the messy relationship between the US and Iraq.
The invisible enemy should not exist (begun 2007), another ongoing work,
takes the form of an exhibition comprised of individual parts – an assembly of
drawings, cardboard and newspaper sculptures, museum labels, and sound. In
this work Rakowitz attempts to recreate all of the objects looted from the Iraqi
National Museum – over five thousand objects in all. Surrogate objects are
created out of packaging from Middle-eastern food packaging, and Arabic
newspapers from the United States. The drawings presented alongside the

34
Christine Lagorio, “How To Get A Date – From Iraq,” CBS News, February 26,
2009, accessed November 20, 2011,
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/05/national/main2231675.shtml?tag=m
ncol;lst;1.
25
surrogate objects illustrate the story of Dr. George, the Iraqi National Museum’s
curator, now residing in the United States. A commissioned soundtrack covering
Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” by the New York-based Arabic band
Ayyoub sets the tone of the exhibition.
35

The invisible enemy should not exist derives its name from the ancient
Babylonian processional way that ran through the Ishtar Gate in present-day
Baghdad – a direct translation from the gates Arabic name Aj-ibur-shapu. The
work is a product of cultural constructions, like Enemy Kitchen it is loaded with
implications as it forces the viewer to identify an enemy and reconcile what that
means. In the case of The invisible enemy should not exist the project’s subject
– the Ishtar Gate – has its own loaded connotations as it relates to the recent
conflict in Iraq and the displacement of Iraqi culture. The gate itself was removed
from Iraq and currently resides at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. A
reconstruction of the gate was commissioned by Saddam Hussein in the 1950s
as a monument to his own sovereignty; the reconstructed gate is currently the
site most photographed by and with US servicemen in Iraq. The many iterations
of the Ishtar Gate and various (dis)placements as represented through The
invisible enemy should not exist convey the kind of decentered participation
requisite in the project’s subject that is similarly demonstrated in the content of
Enemy Kitchen.

35
The exhibition’s protagonist Dr. George played in a Deep Purple cover band in
Iraq.
26
Another gallery project, The worst condition is to pass under a sword
which is not one's own, is comprised of a collection of objects, paintings and
drawings. The objects included are inspired by the strange relationship between
Iraqi military garb and the science fiction saga Star Wars. The press release
for the show at Lombard-Fried Projects notes that this exhibition is in keeping
with Rakowitz’s “conceptual practice of conveying meaning through the recycling
of materials…”
36
Here, especially as is the case related to the specificity of Star
Wars, the materiality of the objects themselves are inherent components of the
project pointing toward larger cultural implications. Behind the narrative of the
missing artifacts from the Iraqi National Museum, the story of Dr. George in The
invisible enemy should not exist and the implications of Science Fiction in The
worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own on our
understanding of Iraqi militarism, the space for dialogue may not be in the gallery
but is present nonetheless.
One critique of Rakowitz’s gallery work in discussing his installation Dull
Roar (2005),
37
an exhibition in which a reconstruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing
project inflates and deflates, re-enacting the actual implosion of the St. Louis
housing project in 1972, notes that, "the focus on objects in a gallery seems to
cramp his natural style. I look forward to seeing him at work again, back out in

36
Lombard-Fried Projects, Press Release, “The worst condition is to pass
under a sword which is not one’s own,” March 2009.
37
Presented at Lombard-Fried projects in 2005.
27
the world."
38
This critique overlooks the bridge in these two aspects – gallery
and "out in the world" – of Rakowitz’s work through objects as a vehicle for
dialogue. In his public projects objects serve as necessary vehicle for facilitating
the dialogical center of the project though they are not central to the emphasis of
the project’s reception. Understanding the gallery space as ultimately
commercial, the place of objects in the specificity of the white cube space must
be made more present, though the dialogue they foster is no less important.
In Return, which in its first iteration was presented in a commercial gallery
space at the Longwood Art Gallery in 2005 before receiving funding from
Creative Time to be presented as a public project in 2006, Rakowitz operated a
store offering free shipping to Iraq. In its 2006 iteration the project attempted to
import dates from Iraq, finally managing to import a mere nine boxes through the
red tape binding off borders outbound from Iraq and inbound through US
customs. In speaking of the difficulty of the project, Rakowitz notes that “[a]ll
along, the project was meant to interrogate the prohibitive laws and agencies that
make this type of transaction impossible. But suddenly, I was hoping that I would
be proven wrong.”
39
The few dates that finally managed to make their way to
Davisons & Co. became precious commodities, selling out quickly from a waiting
list that had formed in anticipation of the shipment. Part of the project’s success

38
Holland Cotter, “Art In Review: Michael Rakowitz – ‘Dull Roar,’” New York
Times, May 27, 2005, E34.
39
Peter Eleey in conversation with Michael Rakowitz, "We Sell Iraqi Dates," in
Uovo Magazine 14, ed. Latitudes (Summer 2007): 272-297.
28
as marked by Rakowitz comes from the dialogue fostered by the storefront in
which Return operated. With a certain amount of sensationalism,
‘Free Shipping to Iraq’ and ‘We Sell Iraqi Dates’ were loudly
broadcast to the public in the window signage. Like the dates
interrogating the governmental bureaucracies that impede their
entry to the US, the word ‘Iraq’ on a commercial establishment
instigated a moment of delay for the pedestrian who suddenly
would stop and try to figure out why a business would print that
word on its masthead. The next step usually involved entering the
store and asking what this was all about.
40

This sensationalism acts as a conduit in Return – asking the audience to
question and engage rather than just acknowledge and move on. This
difference serves as an essential frame around which the messy poetics
of Rakowitz’s gesture serves its purpose, providing a place for dialogue
fostered by the Iraqi dates that act as seeds through which the project can
grow.
An impetus behind the ongoing nature of many of Rakowitz’s projects, the
artist states that, "The art works represent a problem in the world. The problems
have not been solved, so the art works keep going."
41
These public projects
exist also to foster dialogical exchange, the participation of the audience's
discussions with each other and with the artist are integral to the realization of
the work.

40
Peter Eleey in conversation with Michael Rakowitz, "We Sell Iraqi Dates," in
Uovo Magazine 14, ed. Latitudes (Summer 2007): 272-297.
41
Michael Rakowitz, interview with the author, January 17, 2012.
29
As evidenced in Rakowitz’s most recently completed public project, Spoils,
the work manifested itself as a provocative hybrid of art with other practices. In a
collaborative setup much like his Enemy Kitchen, Rakowitz worked with a
restaurant in New York City to present a course consisting of American
ingredients – venison – with traditionally middle-eastern ones – a sauce made of
Iraqi date syrup and tahini. The extremity of the gesture to serve the dish on
Saddam Hussein’s own flatware opened up a floodgate for the messy poetics we
now see as a thread in Rakowitz’s body of work, but also makes plain the overt
politics inherent within his practice.
The sensationalism with which MSNBC liberal commentator Rachel
Maddow presented Rakowitz’s Spoils on December 15, 2011 had everything to
do with the work's relationship to the ending of the war in Iraq and little to do with
the complexities the project was intended to bring to the surface. Spoils was in
its final weekend at Park Avenue Autumn in December when it was announced
that the US's war with Iraq had ended. That the dish was being served on
Saddam Hussein's flatware merited enough attention in relationship to current
events as to be featured in a national news story on the ending of the Iraq war,
without much ado for the who or why behind the project. The mention in such
national news media as MSNBC demonstrates the importance of Rakowitz’s
work to a public of individuals existing outside of the art world however narrowly
focused reading may be, relegating its importance to just one sensational aspect
of the project. Fixating on the origin of the plates, seemingly “contraband,”
30
vacated the meaning behind their specific use in the project. Their own journey,
like the similarly seeming “contraband” dates from Iraq, mirrored the journey of
Iraqi refugees.
42
From the hands of the ousted leader to the hands of the Iraqi
refugee and American soldier who sold the plates through authorized
transactions on eBay, to the hands and mouths of American diners in New York
City, the journey of the plates reveal the power dynamics pervading through the
conflict between Iraq and the US.
Maddow, noting a quote from the project's mention in T, the New York
Times Style magazine, alludes briefly to the artist’s own sentiments regarding the
intentions of the work: "[the artist] insists he wants diners to think deeply about
how these plates got to their tables."
43
Along with her description of the project
as, "an ambitious, big-thinking art project,"
44
the tone with which Maddow
presents the work seems to explain it as though explaining to an individual who
had not only never heard of art but who might not otherwise think that anything
related to Iraq could be considered art. Indeed, much of the writing surrounding
this project come from news media sources, and while reports allude to Rakowitz
as an artist, they fail to discuss the messy poetics identified by Eleey as
characteristic of Rakowitz's work. Further, discussions pointing toward the

42
Items originating in Iraq are indeed not contraband. The embargo on items
shipped from Iraq was lifted in 2003.
43
Rachel Maddow, “Victory a dish served cold in Iraq,” The Rachel Maddow
Show, MSNBC.com, December 15, 2011,
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#45692193 (accessed December 16,
2011).
44
Ibid.
31
intended space of dialogue, and the especially tense and difficult one fostered by
Spoils, leave out the "bitterness,"
45
as Rakowitz himself calls it, of the necessary
decisions and dialogue the project presents. To eat or not to eat off of the
insidious plates? Rakowitz recounts that one visitor to Park Autumn was
outraged at the restaurant's use of the plates, but, intrigued by the venison dish,
adorned with Iraqi flavors, he ordered it. Ultimately the customer enjoyed the
food, and his initial reaction to the inclusion of contraband with his meal fueled
his own personal dialogue in dealing with the issue of the enemy.
46

The material components of the work serve as a metaphor, a vehicle
pointing to the politics and ethics addressed through the dialogue they foster.
Describing the fundamental necessity of the material components within
Rakowitz’s work, pointing to the example of his project Return, Brian Boucher
notes that, "the legendary Iraqi date serves as a metaphor for the country's
tragedy."
47
The necessary materials used to foster dialogue as a material in
itself situates Rakowitz’s practice in what Boucher calls "a provocative hybrid of
art with other practices,"
48
the art carried out through the auspices of Rakowitz as
an artist, the "other practices" often made up of the methods and materials used

45
Rakowitz, Michael. Interview with the author. January 17, 2012.
46
Ibid.
47
Brian Boucher, "Babylon Without Borders - Michael Rakowitz’s Project of
Importing Dates from Iraq Blended Art, Commerce and Politics," Art in America
(April 2007): 126.
48
Brian Boucher, "Babylon Without Borders - Michael Rakowitz’s Project of
Importing Dates from Iraq Blended Art, Commerce and Politics," Art in America
(April 2007): 126.
32
in cooking (Enemy Kitchen) and constructing (paraSITE) with the hybrid resulting
from the dialogical space occurring between.
33
Chapter 3: Letting Things Burn and Cook and Boil
As many of his works exist bound within a specific moment of their conception,
his Cook Book: Just Smile and Don’t Talk chronicles past works into an
instructive format that gives the method for their material construction.
Tiravanija’s Cook Book tackles the issue of engagement, or lack of, by allowing
the audience to engage with the work after its moment of activation within a
gallery space. Because, like each iteration of Rakowtiz’ ongoing Enemy Kitchen,
Tiravanija’s works are constructed around their specific material variables, the
problem of the work’s legacy becomes how it is documented and in what ways it
can live on beyond the specific moment and place for which it was created.
Unlike with a static object that can be transported from place to place, the
parameters of an experience cannot necessarily be simply transposed from place
to place.
Cook Book was published to accompany an exhibition of his work at the
Kunsthalle Bielefeld, from July 11 to October 10, 2010. Designed to exist
alongside an exhibition of his work, Cook Book exemplifies the importance of
process within the act of re-creation necessitated in the use of the book as a set
of instructions. The recipes included in Cook Book are not simply intended to
serve as illustrations of works presented. The book itself is additionally and in
lieu of a more traditional exhibition catalog and as such, the book contains a
record of other works by the artist following the recipes, mainly photographs.
Interestingly, the works contained in this latter portion of the book are not just
34
works from the exhibition, but a comprehensive selection from among
Tiravanija's expansive career over two decades. This mirrors the content of
recipes included in Cook Book, a selection from the works Tiravanija has cooked
over the course of his career, not necessarily representing any one concrete
thing from the exhibition. Because the work is about the process, the act of re-
creating and thereby requiring the audience to interpret the written word into
literal action, the recipe stands in as a representation of the process, giving
instructions for carrying it out.
Cook Book’s frontispiece is a black-and-white photograph of Tiravanija
cooking in his Chiang Mai home, subtitled with a quote from Tiravanija: “Letting
things burn and cook and boil, that’s great.”
49
Tiravanija’s evocation of burning
and boiling recalls Ono’s frontispiece asking the reader to "Burn this book after
you've read it." While not so focused on the act of destruction, this epigraph sets
the tone for reading Cook Book – to let things burn and cook and boil. As in
Ono’s epigraph it’s not about the book, it is about the actions outlined within it. It
is about the burning (in the mind). In the case of Cook Book, it’s not about the
book, it’s about the burning and cooking and boiling. This, like La Monte Young’s
Composition 1960 No. 10 with the instruction to: “Draw a straight line and follow
it,” provides just enough direction to give the reader a sense of what to do –
those actions that are involved in making a meal – without telling them the

49
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cook Book: Just Smile and Don’t Talk (London: River Books,
2010), n.p.
35
specifics of how to execute it. After Ono’s proposition in reference to the score
that “it is impossible for their work to maintain its original condition and in the
case of music, it has to be performed exactly in the way they intended,”
50
here
Tiravanija’s ambiguous intention will always be performed exactly in the way he
intended because it was intended to be performed not to his exact specifications
but to the specifications best suited to his audience.
The recipe for Pad Thai as Tiravanija cooked it at the Paula Allen Gallery
in 1990 was included in the press release for his show in the gallery’s project
room:
Heat the oil on a wok and fry the garlic until golden. Quickly add the
shrimp and stir-fry until heated through. Add the sugar, fish sauce
and ketchup and stir until dissolved. Add beaten eggs, letting them
set slightly, then stir to scramble. Add the noodles and toss and stir
for about 2 minutes. Reserving about 4 tablespoons of the bean
sprouts, add the remainder to the wok. Stir over heat until the bean
sprouts are barely cooked. Turn the Pat Thai onto a platter, placing
the reserved, raw bean sprouts on one side.

Presentation: Sprinkle the noodles with the garnish ingredients in
the following order: Shrimp powder, peanuts, chili flakes, green
onions, coriander leaves. Ring the platter with the lime slices and
serve.
51

As described by Tiravanija, Pad Thai,
[…] is typically Thai. It was invented by Thais as a kind of
nationalistic idea, at the moment of a nation building post World
War II and with the perceived notions of democracy. The notion of

50
Yoko Ono and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Yoko Ono (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther König, 2009), 9.
51
Paula Allen Gallery, Press Release, “’Pad Thai’ A Project by Rirkrit Tiravanija,”
February 1990.
36
creating a national identity lay behind the invention of our own
noodles.
52

Like Rakowitz’s use of the quintessential Debes wa Rashi in his project Spoils,
Tiravanija’s use of Pad Thai in particular represents a specific notion of national
identification in this work. Pad Thai, as it was intended in 1990, was, “conceived
as an event that addresses the perception and notion of cultural reception, and
its transformation from object to idea.”
53
Where the object – the Pad Thai –
stands in as a specifically Thai construct, the audience must literally receive and
consume this cultural object. Through this act of consumption, the
transformation from object to idea is manifested. Borrowing from the trope of
Fluxus scores, Tiravanija provides the instructions – in this case a recipe for Pad
Thai – to create an event. Thus the recipe acts as an event score, wherein the
product is both the object created – Pad Thai – and the event, relations, and
metaphorical transformations based on the consumption of the object itself. This
variable existence further demonstrates the importance of the underlying process
of the work, even more so than the fact that the work is comprised of food. The
themes inherent in the work are best accessed through a dynamic interaction
with the symbolic material – the country’s national noodles – around which the
work revolves. Whether in a gallery space where the material is presented by
the artist or elsewhere where the material is recreated by the audience itself, the

52
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cook Book: Just Smile and Don’t Talk (London: River Books,
2010), 14.
53
Paula Allen Gallery, Press Release, “’Pad Thai’ A Project by Rirkrit Tiravanija,”
February 1990.
37
process and materials that are most accessible for a given work is chosen to
align with the work’s immediate environment.
The recipe appearing for Pad Thai in Cook Book is not the same one as
that given by the Paula Allen Gallery’s press release in 1990.
54
The following
recipe:
1. 300 gram rice vermicelli noodles (sen lek) / 2. 50 gram pork loin
diced into small pieces / 3. 3 eggs / 4. 500 gram bean sprouts / 5.
50 gram preserved turnip (finely chopped) / 6. 50 gram Chinese
chives / 7. 1 block firm tofu / 8. ½ cup chopped roasted peanuts / 9.
1 teaspoon chili powder (preferably Thai) (cayenne can be used as
substitute) / 10. 1 tablespoon chopped garlic / 11. 6 tablespoons
vegetable oil / 12. 3 tablespoons fish sauce / 13. 4 tablespoons
palm sugar / 14. 4 tablespoons tamarind puree / 15. 1 lime / In a
wok stir-fry garlic in 3 tablespoons of oil, add chili powder, palm
sugar, tamarind puree, stir in well to mix and melt the sugar. Add to
the mixture 2 tablespoons chopped peanuts, tofu, the preserved
turnip, Chinese chives, and fish sauce, then the diced pork and stir
until the pork is cooked. // Add remaining oil and the softened
noodles to the mixture, stir and turn the noodles into the sauce until
the noodles are well coated. // In the middle of the wok (and
noodles) add the three eggs and stir the eggs to scramble, then stir
and fry the mixture of eggs onto the noodles until all the eggy liquid
is cooked. // Remove from heat. // Add the remaining chopped
peanuts on top of the noodles and stir the peanuts into the noodle
mixture. // Served with garnish of raw bean sprouts and slices of
lime (to be squeezed over the noodles).
55

is markedly different in its list of ingredients, though its method is similar. To be
sure, the first recipe calls for shrimp but not pork, while the recipe included in
Cook Book calls for pork but not shrimp. Yet another iteration of the recipe

54
Compared with Rakowitz’s recipe for Kubba Bamia, which appeared exactly
the same in its presentation in Bidoun magazine and the book Who Cares?
55
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cook Book: Just Smile and Don’t Talk (London: River Books,
2010), 20-25.
38
appears in the 2006 publication Rirkrit Tiravanija's Soccer Half-Time Cookery
Book, calling for both shrimp and pork.
56
Through a similar process, a product is
achieved that represents the cultural specificity of the work, though it is no one
instance is a replica of the specific materials utilized in any other. Tiravanija
notes, “I use both traditional recipes, which can be found in many places, and I
have on occasions invented or modified certain aspect of the recipes to address
the contents and ideas of the work itself.”
57
This change in the particularity of his
recipe represents the way the artist himself imagines the work being realized
through the process of re-creation following his instructions – modified as is
required for the particularity of each circumstance. Through the process of
ongoing re-creation, resulting manifestations may not appear the same, though
like Ono’s example of the burning chair, it is the chair in your head – here, the
Pad Thai in your head, that symbol of national identity – that remains the same.
Tiravanija's New York gallerist Gavin Brown remarks of his cooking works:
Of course there is still a heartening thrill in eating a meal in a
gallery. One has that elusive real moment. But in the end I always
leave Rirkrit's work feeling depressed. Where was the hope and
feeling of community? [...] While it is an ungainly, grotesque,
exquisitely embarrassing experience to be forced to eat with
strangers, in the end we are within his structure, his world – a frame
generally made from the cheapest plywood. But the baseness of
eating brings our attention back to some other fundamentals – in a

56
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Rirkrit Tiravanija's Soccer Half-Time Cookery Book =
Kochbuch für die Halbzeit Pause (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2006),
54.
57
Rirkrit Tiravanija, email to the author, February 21, 2012.
39
few hours we'll be shitting it all out again. Even when it's rice &
curry you can't take it with you.
58

Pointing out the actual alienating experience – not consuming a meal with
friends, but rather, the "ungainly, grotesque, exquisitely embarrassing
experience" of eating among strangers in a confined and constructed space – is
also applicable to Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen.
As many of Tiravanija’s cooking works are represented within the gallery
space through their detritus, the moment of engagement in which the work was
constructed becomes obscured during the course of the work’s exhibition. As
viewers enter the exhibition space, the work becomes less and less about the
moment of encounter and more and more about what remains. In some case, as
with Tiravanjija’s early Untitled (Pad Thai), the work is further removed from its
moment of conception it appears less and less as the active encounter presented
at the work’s opening and more and more like a party you missed out on. Even
in cases like his recent Soup No Soup presented in 2011 at Gavin Brown’s
Enterprise in New York, which served soup daily, the material reality of the work
is gone after it’s run in the gallery. If you missed the show, you missed the soup
and unless it is presented again elsewhere the work cannot again be
experienced in material form.

58
Gavin Brown, “Gavin Brown” in Rirkrit Tiravanija, Frank Hyde-Antwi, Rein
Wolfs, and Jean-Noël Jetzer, Supermarket: Migros Museum Für
Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Ohio State University,
Columbus, De Appel, Amsterdam, Le Consortium, Centre D'art Contemporain,
Dijon (Zürich: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 1998), 72.

40
The temporal constraints presented by performance- and participation-
based works require a consideration of what constitutes the work itself if we are
to continue a discussion of the works at all. If a work is completed and no longer
legitimate after the moment of its performance, then only those present would be
qualified to speak of it. So the discussion would become rather small. We need
to find new ways of experiencing works with such limitations, so that the content
contained within their presence can remain legitimate. In his statement, "I do not
care about the craft of cooking,"
59
Tiravanija further complicates this notion of the
work as process. In denying the specific action taking place Tiravanija removes
emphasis on this action. It is the specific action – cooking – that Tiravanija
dismisses, and not the active processing of an idea.
In the manifestation of Cook Book, Tiranvanija literally draws upon the
elements of the multiple and the necessity of distribution. As a widely circulated
book, Cook Book exists through the totality of its distribution. The distribution of
Cook Book manifests through circulation, as the book is carried to various sites
of sale, purchased and finally brought into the private space of the purchaser.
Even, in some cases, circulated through multiple hands as it is traded among
friends or more formally loaned out through a library.
While Tiravanija plays the protagonist throughout Bourriaud’s argument on
relational aesthetics, this characterization is at odds with Brown’s

59
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cook Book: Just Smile and Don’t Talk (London: River Books,
2010), 8.
41
characterization of Tiravanija’s work – you can’t take it with you, we all end up
shitting it out within the confines of our independent and private space. What
remains of Tiravanija’s “dematerialized”
60
practice is in fact only one aspect of the
situations Tiravanija creates. Bourriaud’s definition fails to address the specific
content of the work it proposes to delineate. And in both Lippard’s
characterization of a dematerialized art and Bourriaud’s of relational aesthetics,
these practices deny the importance and place of objects within works where the
objects are not conceived of as the work’s final product. However secondary
objects may be to “dematerialized,” “relational” or “social” practices, their use is
nevertheless integral to a work’s conception.
In remarking, "...what Tiravanija cooks, how and for whom, are less
important to Bourriaud than the fact that he gives away the results of his cooking
for free,"
61
Bishop elucidates a typical in a description of Tiravanija's work. While
it may be true that indeed the results of the cooking are paramount in Tiravanija's
practice, this kind of statement – found in the discussions from both his
detractors and champions (Claire Bishop and Nicolas Bourriaud, respectively) –
overlooks the importance and nuance of the components making up Tiravanija's
cooking sessions. Like the elephant's tail referred to by Ono, the components
making up one of Tiravanija's cooking sessions are the seed from which the

60
Indeed not dematerialized – the detritus of Tiravanija’s cooking events is
often left as an installation throughout the show’s tenure.
61
Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 10 (Fall 2004):
64.
42
experience emerges. The distinction between curries – red, yellow or green –
from Pad Thai, to Cup O’ Noodles
62
are each integral, intentional components of
the overarching work in which they are presented. Each of these components is
an essential vehicle serving to set up specific tones within the work beyond the
conviviality of just eating together within the shared space of a gallery.
Bishop’s identification of Tiravanija’s work and similar practices
characterizes the work as prohibitive because of the limited access they present.
Indeed, those few within the immediate sphere of camaraderie privileging them to
the where and when is a limitation of the work because it privileges only a small,
insular audience to Tiravanija’s initial performative moments as the only
moments in which the work can exist. Following the instructive, iterative nature
of Ono’s Grapefruit, Tiravanija's Cook Book acts as an archive and broadens
access to his work allowing those of us not present at the precious first moments
of cooking works to experience the works for ourselves. As in Enemy Kitchen,
the ability to follow a recipe taught by Tiravanija or Rakowitz has the effect of
privileging not just the initial dialogical moment in which the cooking, eating and
resulting discussion takes place, but the discussions resulting from the recipe, or
score, manifest as cogent iterations long after the events occur.

62
As in Untitled 1993 (twelve seventy one), the work described by Bourriad in his
introduction to “Art of the 1990s” (participation and transitivity) wherein an
aluminum canoe is set with two pots filled with water (boiling) along with Cup
O’Noodles for visitors to help themselves to.
43
Chapter 4: Let the Work Grow
Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen is iterative and durational, unfolding over time. Each
occasion on which the work is re-created constitutes a specific iteration of the
work adding to the amalgamation making up its entirety. Because Enemy
Kitchen is social in nature, meant to foster real and imaginary networks, the
works are contingent on new participants and new spaces each time they occur,
and the feelings and relations they foster cannot be replicated. There is no
single original instance – each instant is original. Each individual in each instant
of the work’s re-creation is a participant, an integral component of the medium
through which the artist crafts the work. Yoko Ono, in speaking with Hans Ulrich
Obrist, remarks,
Static life seemed innately false to me. It was a fact that statues
and paintings deteriorated in time, or were destroyed by political
considerations. I knew that no matter how much you wanted it to,
the work never stayed the same. So, as an artist, instead of trying
to hold on to what was impossible to hold on to, I wanted to make
"change" into a positive move: let the work grow by asking people
to participate and add their efforts.
63

Ono’s description of a work's ever-changing form, encouraged “by asking people
to participate and add their efforts,” specifically reveals the particular
manifestations of how works of this nature, as they are re-created over time,
constitute the overall form of the work, represented through compilation. Like

63
Yoko Ono and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Yoko Ono (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther König, 2009), 8.
44
John Cage’s notion that repetition is impossible,
64
every re-created or re-
imagined act is inherently different based on its new set of circumstances (day,
time, weather…). As in the iterative nature of Enemy Kitchen, each performed or
imagined instance is both a unique manifestation and a single iterative
component of the works’ whole.
Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen cooking sessions present the moment as
material as did Tiravanija in his cooking-art-openings in the early 1990s.
However, the moment – comprised of the environment in which the interaction
between artist and audience, and the audience amongst themselves – is a
manifestation of the concept that constitutes the work. While the work is made
material through specific moments, and arguably could not be completed without
the moment in which it manifests, the work is nevertheless present whether you
are one of the lucky few who was there to experience it in person or not.
In works that manifest as very particular, fleeting moments in time, it is the
case that access to the work is limited. While documentary photographs exist of
Tiravanija’s Untitled (Pad Thai), these cannot comprise the interactions or
symbolic nature that constitute the work, making access to it very difficult for
those of us who happen to not have been present at the time of the work’s
performance. While it is unwise to attempt a judgment of a work’s content

64
Ina Bloom, “Boredom and Oblivion,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman
(Chicester, West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1998), 80.
45
without having experienced it, when the access to experience is so limited we
must find other ways to approach an understanding of it.
Various forms of authorship exist in Rakowitz’s work, setting a precedent
for exploring multiple sites of experience. Because the content of the work is
removed from the work’s physical manifestation, it matters little if you learn a
recipe from Rakowitz, one of Rakowitz’s students, or a student of his student.
Because the intention of the work, as Rakowitz puts it, is to open dialogue about
Iraqi culture, it does not need to be carried out in the artist’s presence.
Referring to Lippard's characterization of works as "dematerialized," Grant
Kester further elaborates this notion in his seminal book on social practice,
Conversation Pieces,
65
that it "must be understood […] also as a positive or
creative moment, marked by an increasing emphasis on art as a process of
collaborative interaction. This interactive orientation implies, in turn, an art
experience that extends over time."
66
Here, Kester's defining factor of
interaction is even more present, as all of the works included in this discussion
require the audience to interact with the work itself, or with other members of the
audience in order for the work to exist in completion. An interaction existing over
time is, essentially, an event. Event-based works are performative in nature, and
while actions are performed in the cases of Rakowitz’s cooking sessions with

65
Owing its title to Ono’s Conversation Piece in “3. Event,” Grapefruit (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1970), n.p.
66
Grant H. Kester, “Duration, Performativity, And Critique,” in Conversation
Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004), 53.
46
Enemy Kitchen, the works themselves are not performance-based – again, here,
conceptual as opposed to material-based.
Taking Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen as an example, engagement with the
audience is multiple, and the notion of multiplicity functions also in several
capacities – in the first place by creating multiple objects for distribution. There is
no one original kofta from which the others are modeled, it is the totality of kofta
created, and moreover the idea behind the composition of this totality, that
constitutes the multiple material manifestation of the work. Second, the
authorship of the material manifestation is distributed among the many
individuals cooking and distributing kofta. However Rakowitz remains the sole
author of Enemy Kitchen in the overall scope of the work as an ongoing project,
each instance in which the project is enacted disperses the authorship of that
particular enacted iteration. The project itself outside the scope of each of its
particular enacted iterations is also a multiple. Though the project has concrete
origins in its 2004 conception for the Hudson Guild Community Center in the
Chelsea neighborhood of New York, each enacted iteration is specific to its
situation in time and particular to its location. Because each occurrence is
specifically crafted for its set of variables, Enemy Kitchen has no original after
which each instance is copied. Each instance is original, a multiple making up
the project’s whole.
As with the dissemination of knowledge utilized by Rakowitz through
cooking sessions, Cook Book conveys the necessary instructions for recreating
47
the moments that encompass the material manifestation of the work. As in some
iterations of Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen, Tiravanija distributes the knowledge to
his audience, via recipes, for re-enacting his cooking works and provides a
multiple of these. The works are not simply copied originals because they allow
for the audience’s subjective improvisations. In giving the recipes for the works
he has created, Tiravanija engages the audience in a way separate from the
engagement-with-the-artist that audience members would receive at a cooking
opening of one of his works. In providing the recipes for his works Tiravanija also
redistributes the role of authorship in creating the material manifestation of the
work. Though, again as in the case of Rakowitz, Tiravanija remains sole author
of the project of multiples, the overseeing vision behind the multiple existence of
the audience-engaged work.
If we can imagine the performative event, at one of Tiravanija’s openings
or Rakowitz’s cooking sessions, as a concrete moment whose material nature
constitutes its objecthood, then borrowing from Ono’s characterization of the real
nature of art we can see what lies behind these moments: “I think it is possible to
see a chair as it is. But when you burn the chair, you suddenly realize that the
chair in your mind did not burn or disappear.”
67
Recalling Ono’s paradigm of the
elephant’s tail, the concrete moments constructed through the performative
events that make up Tiravanija’s cooking-openings or Rakowitz’s cooking

67
Yoko Ono, “To The Wesleyan People,” Grapefruit (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1970), n.p.
48
sessions point to the totality of all of the ways that the works do and can exist.
They are the seeds through which the work grows.

49
Postscript: The Vitrine, the Video and the Truck
My colleague and I arrive at the opening for Feast: Radical Hospitality in
Contemporary Art at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art five
minutes before nine p.m. Luckily, knowing art parties never end quite when
they're supposed to, we had a good forty-five minutes ahead of us. The first
thing we see is the truck – a big, green truck with an Iraqi flag flying high above it.
There's a short line of people in front. It's dark outside but the courtyard is
illuminated by the interior lights shining from within Enemy Kitchen’s vehicular
space and emanating from beyond the glass walls of the Smart Museum.
We manage to snag the last plate of food the truck has to offer for the
night.
68
We take our plate inside where we grab a couple of Pacificos, part of
Tom Marioni's The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends, his ongoing performance
begun in 1970. Gavin Brown's observation on the ungainly, grotesque
experience of being forced to eat with strangers comes to mind. There we are,
the two of us scarfing the last remnants of food from the Enemy Kitchen food

68
Nicole Caruth, “Gastro-Vision: Iraqi Cuisine Goes Mobile,” Art: 21 Blog,
February 17, 2012, http://blog.art21.org/2012/02/17/gastro-vision-iraqi-cuisine-
goes-mobile/ (accessed February 17, 2012). Because of Chicago’s regulations
on food service, trucks are only able to serve food that has been prepared ahead
of time and reheated on the truck. This gray area is a tangential though potent
aspect of this iteration of Rakowitz’ project: “the truck is for me a way of engaging
with a kind of contested culture here in Chicago, where food trucks are under
attack essentially … There’s something about that that’s kind of nice as a way of
indirectly referencing territorial contest or a certain tension around where you are
and are not allowed to be.” As of the completion of writing this thesis, a permit
for the food truck to serve food independently had not yet been issued.

50
truck, guzzling a couple of Pacificos, practically alone with our own company
amid the bustling crowd.
The food is good, served on paper plates styled after those used by
Saddam Hussein to entertain guests, the same plates used by Rakowitz in
Spoils. White in the middle, with a broad border of black bounded by gold
stripes, the plate's fluted, scalloped edges raised slightly from the plates flat
bottom belies the flatware's humble nature, recalling at once the Dixie plates
we're all accustomed to eating off of at picnics, barbecues, and, of course, food
trucks. These plates litter the lobby of the Smart Museum, detritus that, unlike in
Rirkrit Tiravanija's works, will not remain as remnants of the work. A good
number of the plates have been dropped haphazardly into trash bags (I wonder if
they'll be recycled or composted, or even saved for a museological archive?).
When it seems the crowd is finally dispersing we trudge off with the rest of them
to find warmth in our lodgings in Chicago.
We return to the Smart Museum the following day. I snap some photos on
my phone of the Enemy Kitchen food truck, afraid I’ll forget the precious details of
the vehicle still parked in the courtyard in front of the museum. I notice one of
the previous night's plates discarded in an ashtray topped with a cigarette butt.
Gavin Brown's observation seems to be ringing in my ears. I'm sure last night's
pita has now passed through most of us ensuring that, no, we had not taken it
with us. After last night all that's left of that radical hospitality is a silent, empty

51
food truck, an almost-deserted exhibition space (though it is only a weekday
afternoon), and a lone royal Iraqi-replica paper plate discarded in an ashtray.
In speaking of the plates' first appearance in Spoils, Rakowitz states his
intention that diners would have to “perform their ethics,”
69
implicating the
audience's participation as an integral component in the work. To eat or not to
eat off the plates, so loaded with feelings – anger, pity, desperation, sadness,
guilt, an embedded cultural contempt – any, all, or a glut of other feelings surface
in relationship to these objects. Whatever the feeling, it is certain that the plates
are loaded objects. Though the plates used in Enemy Kitchen's Chicago food
truck are made of paper, their relationship to Hussein’s plates is patent and they
evoke a potent response.
Tiravanija similarly creates works in the interest of evoke a similar potent
response. After making my way through the space, I find Tiravanija's installation
midway through the maze-like exhibition. A Westbend electric wok on a pedestal
in the center of one room's floor, the Paula Allen press release detailing his 1990
recipe for Pad Thai placed in a vitrine suspended waist-height from the wall, and
three cans of curry paste (red, yellow and green) also under plexiglass, waist-
height from the wall. The Westbend electric wok is presented in its box,
underscoring that it is a mass-produced everyday object. Utilized by the artist as

69
Smart Museum of Art. "Michael Rakowitz: Saddam's Plates." Smart Museum of
Art Vimeo. February 14, 2012. http://vimeo.com/36770990 (accessed February
17, 2012).
52
a vehicle to speak of the differences and deployment of Eastern objects for a
Western audience, the wok becomes a potent carrier of meaning.
70

We arrive finally at the exhibition's end, where Rakowitz's work is situated.
Under a vitrine we find remnants of Enemy Kitchen, Return, The invisible enemy
should not exist and Spoils presented together as an amalgamation uniting them
together as Enemies and Kitchens. A video documenting the delivery of Saddam
Hussein's plates to the Iraq Mission in New York City culminating Spoils loops on
a monitor to the right of the vitrine, next to the clear glass exit doors. Through
the doors, past the glass-walled museum lobby the Enemy Kitchen food truck is
visible. This view frames Rakowitz's presence in the exhibition space, perhaps
most successfully among all of the projects in the show.
The vitrine, the video, and the truck each serve to animate Enemy Kitchen
in a specific way. The works presented together inside the vitrine elucidate their
interconnectedness. In this case as in Rakowitz's use of Saddam Hussein's
plates, the objects once again relate to Ono's parable of the elephant's tail –
pointing to something larger, these objects require the audience to connect the
metaphorical dots lined up by way of the objects presented. Further evidence of
the relationships between his projects are substantiated in their presentation

70
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cook Book: Just Smile and Don’t Talk (London: River Books,
2010), 14. “Next to her deconstructing of the relationship of East and West, of
cultural crossing and of consumerism, I saw Martha’s [Rosler] video [The East is
Red The West is Bending] and the Westbend electric wok in my own piece as a
key of what to use in the work. The Westbend, as an image, as a consumerist
object, as well as an electric utensil being red and black, was a complete
product. […] I was using it to cook, perhaps to further extend the recipe.”
53
together as one arrangement – Enemies and Kitchens. The video chronicling the
saga of Spoils animates the politics and very real-world reverberations the work
is intended to cultivate. The Enemy Kitchen food truck, Rakowitz's most literally
dynamic piece presented with the exhibition, represents the opportunity for
material experience and dialogue the project is intended to foster.
Rakowitz notes of his intention for this most recent iteration of the project,
"I liked the idea of the truck being this kind of dangerous ice cream truck parked
outside of the military academies and presenting another kind of narrative to
these kids who might be buying lunch from the truck."
71
This kind of danger
exactly evoking the sentiments wound up in the word “enemy.” But as the work
attempts to point out, there are complicated notions wound up into that word, and
the individuals associated as “enemies,” are not necessarily dangerous. Among
the few responses to this most recent iteration of Enemy Kitchen, Christopher
Borrelli poses the question: “Do they know [...] that a food truck is also intended
as a profound act of geopolitical poetry?”
72
to which Rakowitz responds, “I see
the truck as a potentially healing gesture, not that it has to be. I don't have
delusions that it will perform the hard work of healing traumas. I do believe there

71
Nicole Caruth, “Gastro-Vision: Iraqi Cuisine Goes Mobile,” Art: 21 Blog,
February 17, 2012, http://blog.art21.org/2012/02/17/gastro-vision-iraqi-cuisine-
goes-mobile/ (accessed February 17, 2012).
72
Christopher Borrelli, “The Complicated Art of Michael Rakowitz: Politically
minded and shaped by Iraqi heritage and intersection of art and life, the artist’s
works are conversation pieces by design,” Chicago Tribune, March 9, 2012,
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/art/ct-ae-0311-michael-rakowitz-
20120308,0,116111,full.story (accessed March 9, 2012).

54
can be an aesthetic of good intentions, but I'm leery of saying what those are.
No, I'm not going to tell anyone it's art.”
73
Continuing with Eleey’s
characterization of Rakowitz’s work as a messy poetic, Borrelli highlights the
difficulty of audience in the slippery territory inhabited by the Enemy Kitchen food
truck. Existing as both an art work and a viable service leads to some confusion
as to the appropriate place and audience for the work.
Confined to the museum, the work falls flat, it is safe. But flying in from
Los Angeles and being there in Chicago seems unfitting for a work that is
associated with the trauma of exile. Instead of traveling far to find a longed-for
familiar, the exposure to the exotic does seem glib – not because of the inherent
nature of the work – but because of the way it is served up in a sterile
environment. Seeing the work in person, being served by the artist at the
opening, stepping up to the vitrine in the exhibition space, spending the afternoon
in proximity to the work reinforced that the importance of the materiality of the
work had to do with one's own – my own – relationship to it.
Asking that the audience perform their ethics, this work demonstrates a
dialogical space wherein artist and audience engage in a conversation through
the tangible media presented. Even while the audience at Feast's opening lined
up for Enemy eats from the Enemy Kitchen food truck without much attempt at
conversation, the dialogue resides through the leftovers of what has passed as a

73
Ibid.

55
mutual experience. The very fact that a throng of hungry (albeit art-audience)
individuals was willing to consume the supposed enemy's food elucidates each
individual's role in unraveling terms like "enemy" and "hospitality." Like the
polarity of Rachel Maddow's sensationalism related to the "enemy" and
Bourriaud's placidism related to the hospitable and convivial nature of relational
art, the everyday nature of Enemy Kitchen illuminates aspects of both and
requires of the audience that the work’s position straddling these two things be
considered.
Returning to Yoko Ono's "To The Wesleyan People," she observes, "To
assimilate art in life is different from art duplicating life."
74
Assimilating the work
Rakowitz has constructed into my own life, into the life of any audience member's
kitchen and consciousness, into the belly of the beast, is indeed very different
from attempting to duplicate the experience Rakowitz creates within the confines
of a specific museum site. Where the museum concentrates the materiality
inside a somewhat untouchable container, the ability for the work to exist outside
the sanctioned spaces for art emanates outward into the world, to be felt,
touched, tasted and experienced.

74
Yoko Ono, “To The Wesleyan People,” Grapefruit (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1970), n.p.
56
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58
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis critically examines the material qualities in process-based works by Yoko Ono, Rirkrit Travanija, and Michael Rakowitz, with a specific focus on Rakowitz’s ongoing project Enemy Kitchen. Enemy Kitchen’s process of cooking results in a social construction of dialogical space. Like Tiravanija, whose Untitled (Pad Thai) and similar projects form a parallel to Enemy Kitchen, the importance of the work lies in an understanding of its material as process and the space of dialogue. The material components of Rakowitz's project-based works point toward characteristically messy poetics, fostering dialogical exchange over contentious cultural categorizations. As a precedent, Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit provides a model for experience through instruction. Ono's proposition, ""Isn't a construction a beginning of a thing like a seed? Isn't it a segment of a larger totality, like an elephant's tail?"" points toward the necessary materials used as vehicles to foster a larger totality in these works.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Power performance: benevolence and violence in the work of Chris Burden, Barbara T. Smith, Yoko Ono and Wafaa Bilal

Asset Metadata

Creator Sallabedra, Megan (author)

Core Title Like an elephant's tail: process and instruction in the work of Michael Rakowitz, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Yoko Ono

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/02/2012

Defense Date 05/01/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,contemporary art,Cooking,Enemy Kitchen,Food,food truck,instruction,Iraqi,Michael Rakowitz,OAI-PMH Harvest,participation,participatory art,recipe,Rirkrit Tiravanija,Yoko Ono

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Moss, Karen (committee chair), Kraus, Chris (committee member), Steiner, Rochelle (committee member)

Creator Email m.sallabedra@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-21738

Unique identifier UC11289224

Identifier usctheses-c3-21738 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Sallabedra-714.pdf

Dmrecord 21738

Document Type Thesis

Rights Sallabedra, Megan

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA