WELL HE IS a lot neater than that Tracey — whose famous Bed, strewn with more than smeary suggestion, would have had Kim and Aggie reaching for the Valium. But “ooo, tidy!” is the biggest compliment I can give to the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who, for his first British solo show, has re-created his New York flat twice over in the Serpentine Gallery in London — with working bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms for visitors to use.

Other features of the exhibition include a table laden with jigsaw pieces at the entrance and, farther in, a replica of his passport with a show-off number of exotic visa stamps. Tiravanija has also created a studio in the gallery to broadcast a radio show about his life and art. Radios are dotted around the space blasting out the programme, so turgid and badly executed it would never have got on to a decent station. Reading the full script in the tatty catalogue (£15, ker-ching!) only cements this fact — and then your eyelids together. Where did he say the bed was again?

Ah, nearly there. I find one of the “apartments”. In the kitchen a man with cruelly topiaried hair is cutting onions. Are you excited about being part of this artwork, I wonder? “I’m just making dinner,” he says, eyes to the chopping board. “Tomato and bean sauce,” he says, to nobody in particular.

A young man with vintage NHS specs, sitting at the kitchen table, offers me a Terry’s All Gold with an ironic raise of the eyebrows. Art student. In the sitting room a lounger is watching the cricket. “My girlfriend is buying a postcard,” he says.

I go to the bedroom in search of an art revolution, pull back the duvet half-hoping to catch John and Yoko underneath, holding a sleep-in. Instead I find newly washed sheets and some nervous graffiti on the surrounding walls.

“I’d rather drink here coffee than in Cafe Nero (sic). It tastes better and its quite cheaper (sic),” writes “Natalie (Spain)”. Others are more cautious: “I hope I am allowed to write here,” braves a spidery hand. One couple, who are having their shower refitted at home thank him for giving them somewhere to take a bath.

It is not the first time that the artist has provided. He is often found feeding visitors green curry and, in a collaboration with the artist Andrea Zittel in New York, Tiravanija exhibited a saucepan and a bowl of eggs while Zittel exhibited one of her chickens. People were invited to boil the eggs.

Tiravanija recently won the respected Hugo Boss prize and, in its blurb, the Serpentine Gallery calls him “one of the most influential [artists] to have emerged in the early 1990s”. So, it seems the artworld knows something I don’t. Tiravanija says that he “started to make things so that people could use them . . . [my work] is not meant to be put out with other sculpture or like another relic to be looked at, but you have to use it”.

Nicolas Bourriaud, the French art theorist, dubbed it “relational art”, a movement apparently characterised by taking “as its starting point human relations and their starting point, as opposed to autonomous or exclusive art”. That is the sort of tired polytechnic Marxism that could only stay alive in the mentally lazy world of the British art school.

There is an excellent reason why many galleries hang art on the walls, rather than creating a place where students can cook instant noodles: if you do the latter the people that come are those that are more interested in opening their sauce sachet than their minds to the art. There is a reason why visitors don’t touch things in art galleries and that is because we like them the way they are.

On my way out I ask a gallery assistant how the show is going. “Some people are so messy and there are certain sorts who just won’t leave.” She looks exasperated. “We wonder about them. Their sanity.” Oh right. So you get lots of crazies whom you have to chuck out at closing time? “If you want to know any more ask the press office, because I’ll get into trouble”, she says, nervously.

Clearly, no one told the Serpentine staff about the art-world’s new movement that declares human relations, however messy, in; exclusivity, the art school crowd, out. Come in. Make yourself at home, so long as you don’t hang round too long and clean the worktop before you leave. Kim and Aggie for the Turner Prize, anyone?

Alex O’Connell is Arts Editor of The Times

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