Maite Lorés
www.ikon-gallery.co.uk
Santiago Sierra’s work should come with the
warning ‘This art can seriously damage your political complacency’. Such is
the nature of the art market, however, that his work has already achieved
international acclaim despite – some would say because of – its painful
message. Born in Spain, and resident in Mexico City since 1996, Sierra has
become famous for his critique of the contractual economy through a series
of remunerated actions where people – usually immigrants, casual workers, or
even vagrants – are paid to perform some futile task which is then
documented on video and through black-and-white photographs. The
participants are invariably paid the local minimum wage, while Sierra’s
documentation of the event can generate considerable financial gain both for
the artist and the galleries that represent him. If that sounds questionable
or immoral, it is no more so, one could argue, than life itself, and that’s
precisely the point the work is making.
For his first exhibition in the UK, Sierra made a new work entitled Person
saying a phrase (2002). A beggar in Birmingham’s New Street was paid to say:
‘My participation in this piece could generate a profit of 72,000 dollars. I
am being paid five pounds.’ On video, the beggar didn’t appear unduly
worried about the political or artistic implications of the statement.
Cynical as it may sound, he was presumably quite happy to accept a fiver for
his efforts. In previous actions documented in this exhibition, Sierra has
had no shortage of workers willing to be paid to stand cheek by jowl inside
a gallery during the private view, to sit in an empty box, and even to
perform the more degrading tasks of masturbating in front of the camera or
having their backs tattooed. Many of these actions are not without irony: in
last year’s Venice Biennale, coloured immigrants were paid to dye their hair
blond; in Mexico City, a truck driver was paid to block one of the city’s
busiest freeways by positioning his white trailer across the road, thus
generating not only an almighty traffic jam, but also the ultimate
minimalist industrial object. At other times, our tolerance is more severely
tested, as when Sierra tattoos a line across the workers’ backs. And for how
much? Four prostitutes in Salamanca, Spain, were paid 12,000 pesetas each,
the price of a single heroin fix. Yet our horror as passive spectators is
diminished by the voyeuristic pleasure of watching these women casually
chatting to each other, while that other minimalist icon, a clean line, is
permanently scarring their backs.
Again and again, Sierra’s minimalist syntax comes to the rescue as a formal
basis for his work. His early works in his native Spain made use of heavy
industrial materials borrowed directly from the construction industry.
Commenting on the rampant property speculation in cities like Madrid,
Sierra’s industrial ready-mades soon started ‘perverting minimalism’, to use
the Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera’s term, with their unashamed social
content, and their lack of reverence for purely formal and semiotic games.
Had he stayed in Madrid, it is doubtful whether Sierra’s work would have
developed beyond this post-minimalist/neo-conceptualist aesthetic. Instead,
he found in Mexico a raw source of creativity derived, not from any romantic
notions of the Third World, but from the hard-boiled dynamics of violence
and social tension. Without doubt, he was able to turn this energy into one
of the most radical artistic visions of the moment, but whether his
deconstruction of Marx’s notion of labour as a socially useful tool can
truly answer the question of whether art can ever change anything is, as I’m
sure Sierra himself would agree, more openly debatable.
Santiago Sierra is at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 13 February – 7 April 2002.