
“A rotating menu of soups served to Glenstone’s visitors” is a phrase that sticks with me from the text Glenstone director/co-founder Emily Wei Rales contributed to Fear Eats The Soul, a 2023 publication from the private museum in Potomac, Maryland.
In 2011 Rirkrit Tiravanija’s exhibition of the same name at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise did not seem like the type of project to be easily collected. When the whole thing turned up in the older, smaller private museum building at Glenstone in 2019, I had to recognize “easily collected” was relative.
This book is a documentation of Glenstone’s 2019 installation of Fear Eats The Soul, including those elements of it which went unrealized [a performance of Rirkrit breaking through a cinderblock wall to reveal a stripped down Peugeot] due to the early pandemic shutdowns of March 2020. The full-scale plywood recreations of Gavin’s original Broome St. storefront were intact. Rather than leave their Gwathmey building unsecured and open to taggers, like on Greenwich St., the Raleses invited graffiti artists from the DMV to execute work in the space. Rather than sell T-shirts screenprinted to order—with proceeds paying the art students Rirkrit recuited for the show—Glenstone offered T-shirts in exchange for donations to local non-profits.
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