In doing so, he pointed out a peculiar development. That is because the status of gift-giving had appreciably changed in the intervening years: gift-giving went from being a form of violence directed against this commercial order to being a positive gesture in its own right, as the social sciences evolved from holding a view radically opposed to commercial exchanges to representing gift-giving as an act that nevertheless fits neatly within commercial as well as noncommercial relations relations that structure and renew relationships based on mutual trust among social agents.
In this respect, it is tied to disinterestedness, a notion that has been central to artistic creativity and beauty since the time of Kantian aesthetics.
We may thus ask ourselves to what extent gift giving has become one of the artistic procedures to which artists have appealed, and particularly so when they have an eye toward finding alternatives to the primacy of economic value and to fetishization. Counterfeit Money, trans. Reprinted in ibid. This is the case with Rirkrit Tiravanija, who often places cooking utensils at the disposal of the public so that they might prepare a meal and thus transform his installations into sites for sharing.
The three platform floors harbor a kitchen and a living-room suite, then mattresses, and finally a sort of rooftop terrace. The viewer is invited to enter the structure. But does such an invitation amount to giving the work use value, as against exchange value and the abstraction thereof, in the tradition of Marxist theories? His Needs series captures in color photography the uncompensated actions he has performed to meet small needsβan indication that his performances have at once a utilitarian and a symbolic dimension.
These two schemes are, moreover, not so distinct, if we are to believe Pierre Bourdieu. His piles of candy, offered to people with sweet tooths, carry a heavy load when they match the weight of his AIDS-infected companion Portrait of Ross in L. This tension between bitter personal experience and the casual attitude of visitors testifies to an ambivalence of gifts not taken into consideration in the reflections of Bourriaud. Michel Journiac, Messe pour un corps , Mass for a body, A similar sort of violence, moreover, was expressed in a much more strident way in the performances of some s artists, such as the Messe pour un corps Mass for a body Michel Journiac organized on November 26, at the Daniel Templon Gallery in a co-production with the Martin Malburet Gallery.
