Rikrit Tiravanija is included in the group exhibition, Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology organised by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and co-curated by Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, and Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum. The exhibition is the first large-scale exhibition to focus on the intersection of appropriation and institutional critique, bringing together works by thirty-six American artists who came to prominence between the late 1970s and the early 1990s.
Expanding on the work of earlier conceptual artists committed to exploring the very definition of art, the artists featured in Take It or Leave It believe that art cannot be fully understood or experienced without acknowledging the contexts in which it is produced, viewed, and distributed. They point to the links between art institutions and the other organizations that make up our society, asserting that to separate art from aspects of our daily experience—whether education or medicine, marriage or war, parenting or advertising—is to reinscribe arbitrary and false divisions between art and society, between our aesthetic lives and our everyday lives.
Showcasing a historical period of the recent past, the exhibition also features recent work, arguing for the continued relevance of these artists’ practices while revealing their sustained commitment to both historically recognisable and emerging strategies of appropriation and institutional critique. In doing so, Take It or Leave It seeks to revive and participate in the meaningful debates that the artists have fostered over time and to instill a desire for critique, in its many forms, to remain a cornerstone of American Art.
Participating artists include: Judith Barry, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Nayland Blake, Tom Burr, Mark Dion, Mark Dion & Jason Simon, Jimmie Durham, Andrea Fraser, Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Renée Green, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, William Leavitt, Zoe Leonard, Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, Paul McCarthy, Allan McCollum, John Miller, Matt Mullican, Cady Noland, Adrian Piper, Stephen Prina, Martha Rosler, Haim Steinbach, Rirkrit Tiravanija , Christopher Williams, Sue Williams, Fred Wilson, and David Wojnarowicz.
Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology
9 February – 18 May 2014
The Hammer Museum at UCLA
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024
USA
+1 310-443-7000