Art Metropole

#15227

ONCE UPON A TIME

Artist

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Date

2022

Publisher

Three Star Books

Format

Artists' Books

Rirkrit Tiravanija is an artist of many skills: he cooks, paints, sculpts, makes movies, builds houses, curates, teaches. He is also an artist of words. So many words that he needed his very own “corporate” font, the TIRAVANIJA ONE*, designed in 2007 by Chris Rehberger from Berlin’s design studio “Double Standards”. The font has since been used on all of Tiravanija works that involve text, such as paintings, prints, ping pong tables and even marble sculptures…

For Three Star Books, Tiravanija had the idea to make a book of stencil, the slogans die-cut on a hefty orange “Lustro” card, a specialty paper produced in France. In Thai culture the color orange or saffron represents simplicity and detachment from materiality, the perfect choice for this book of spiritual aphorisms.
In the style of a Bauhaus research book with its plain and functional design, ONCE UPON A TIME is composed of six slogans in English, followed by their French translations, arranged by the artist so as to create a “poem” to be read from page one to twelve.

The slogans composing this volume were selected from a series of works exhibited at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, in 2018. Most of the individual phrases —though sometimes misquoted as Rirkrit Tiravanija is happy to admit— can be easily tracked back to John Giorno’s poems, video games, high literature, TV shows or the artist’s everyday‘s wandering and procrastination…

Thanks to the binding rings, the die cut individual stencils are usable and can be sprayed to easily diffuse Tiravanija’s activist poetry.