Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s I Am An Artist (He Said) plumbs the space between word and image – via postmodernism, macho artists, and Thailand’s ‘Art for Life’ movement
At a 2017 exhibition by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, a Thai sign mounted on the gallery wall announced: ‘The artist is trying to return to being a writer’. New works – sculptures modelled on herself and her pet dogs and attesting to a decades-long fixation on mortality – suggested she was still an object-oriented artist, but behind the scenes, I was informed, the ‘return’ was well underway: a novel was being penned during the show’s duration. In 2020 extracts from that novel were juxtaposed with sculptures of dogs and a flower vase at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York. The insinuation being that, far from replacing artmaking, writing is – for her – a facet of it.
This translation of Rasdjarmrearnsook’s mid-2000s columns for Thailand’s Matichon Weekly magazine deepens the mystique surrounding the playful, performative ‘return’ of her writing practice while also clarifying it. Both a rare social document and a reflexive self-examination, I Am An Artist (He Said) reveals that she has long been an accomplished writer – English readers just didn’t know it yet – and that the reclusive sixty-five-year-old’s artmaking and writing have long been causally intertwined. Albeit complexly so: ‘Artmaking is different from writing. I don’t think anybody can write on behalf of somebody else,’ she writes at one point.
Art and literature form just one zone of animated discussion in this mischievous book: a restless amalgam of gossipy art-scene recollections, prickly cultural criticism and experimental autofiction. Some of the artworld topics occupying the 29 chapters include postmodernism, macho artists, Thailand’s ‘Art for Life’ movement and art competitions, to name just a few. Although it quickly becomes clear that the overarching subject is the mercurial quality of what she calls her nai manut, or inner human – and the roving, self-sustaining, internalised nature of the many discussions driving it.
Internationally, Rasdjarmrearnsook is perhaps best known for reading poetry or playing teacher in front of real cadavers in makeshift classrooms. As the book’s editors note, the dialogue in this infamous video series is, in fact, a dialogue with herself – a conceit that continues here but is complicated by how two Rasdjarmrearnsooks make their presence felt. From the title onwards, the book is a conversation between He and She, often bickering male and female versions of the artist. He holds court at some points; interrupts at others. ‘You, Artmakers, Are you Immune?’ opens with She recounting the digging of a hole in her garden with a view to eventually being buried alongside her dogs, ‘two of my dearest ladies, so we three could lie there together…’. He interjects: ‘Without me, this chapter would have been accompanied by a funereal drum.’
This queering of the female voice – a cipher, perhaps, for her experiences of a male-dominated literary and artistic sphere – is rarely as blunt or abrupt as that example might suggest (for the most, She and He seem indistinguishable). And somehow, I Am An Artist (He Said) manages to pack in passages of high-flown poeticism and lyricised emotions, and challenge us with feminist undertows and unsettled existential ambiguities (such as, did she really dig a shallow grave for her and her favourite dogs? Personally, I wouldn’t put it past her – the ongoing ‘exchange life-art’ project puthertosleepsaveusandours.com centres on her apparently genuine, but as-yet-unsuccessful, euthanasia applications), and still be endearing and funny: this is a sly, provocative book of considerable comedic, as well as academic, merits.
Expertly hewn out of the original columns by translator Kong Rithdee – himself an acclaimed prose stylist – it is also the fullest insider account of the Thai art scene to date. Whether distilling the collective ripples of grief upon figurehead Montien Boonma’s death in 2000, dissecting Rirkrit Tiravanija’s pad thai cookups with snarky bemusement or describing the bureaucratic struggles and methodological gains of Thai artist-teachers, Rasdjarmrearnsook is a perceptive witness as well as a pioneer.
I Am An Artist (He Said) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, translated by Kong Rithdee
National Gallery Singapore, SG$37.45 (softcover)
