First published in Australian Art Collector,

Issue 50 October-December 2009

COMMERCIAL
TRANSACTIONS
SANTIAGO SIERRA HAS BEEN CALLED CALLOUS AND MONSTROUS.
REGULARLY OPERATING IN THE RARELY ACKNOWLEDGED REALM OF
CONSENSUAL EXPLOITATION, ITS NO WONDER HE RECEIVES SUCH A
VISCERAL RESPONSE WRITES EDWARD COLLESS.

F
ew artists today can sport the title of agent provocateur with as much authority and as much irony
as the Spanish-born, Mexico City resident but global artist-at-large Santiago Sierra. Sierra is
notorious for his allegedly callous use of the homeless, unemployed, prostitutes, destitute beggars
and addicts in performances that shockingly exploit their degradation. He may be best known for
spraying with toxic polyurethane the bodies, huddled and pressed against a wall and cowering under
black plastic, of 10 Iraqis whom he hired off a London street in a gesture that alarming enacted not
just represented prison punishment and torture in order to create a post-minimalist sculptural form.
Even more pointedly cruel in its aesthetic manipulation was his use of anonymous female junkies
(employed for the price of heroin fix) to sit topless in a row facing the wall and have a single
continuous line tattooed across their backs.
Hes paid people usually identifiably from some ethnic or social category of underclass, and
always remunerated at the barest minimum to sit in cramped cardboard boxes for the duration of
an exhibition; to uselessly hold up a portion of a demolished wall for hours; to live behind a wall with
only a food slot as access for 360 hours; and to shift concrete blocks pointlessly from one part of a
gallery to another. Hes paid Cuban hustlers to masturbate repeatedly on camera. Hes paid black
illegal immigrant street hawkers in Venice to have their hair dyed blonde, to mark them out as
distinctive targets. They were all willing subjects, Sierra explained, to a commercial transaction that
was transparent. They all were employed to produce his art. Were used to hearing, in the past
decade, relational artists speak guiltlessly of how they use people as their materials to induce micro-
communities and convivial exchanges. Sierras work is an obscene undercurrent to that idiom. One
Irish beggar was required to wear a sign stating: My participation in this piece could generate a
profit of 72,000 dollars. I am being paid 5 pounds. What appals us, Sierra might argue, is the
exposure of that exchange in its brutal literalism, not as a symbol but as a consensual rather than
coercive act of exploitation.
Sierras rocketing career path since the mid 1990s is a problematic vector of this conceptual

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ingenuity skewed by chicanery, and of political imposture confused
with critical acuity. Of course, theres no such thing as bad publicity,
and Sierras reputation has boomed with both the applause and
denunciations. Where his work hasnt been defended as political
satire or dismissed as facile scandal, its often generated hostility and
contempt. When he piped car exhaust fumes into a disused
synagogue on the outskirts of Cologne, which was casually dubbed a
DIY gas chamber (visitors could enter only wearing gas masks after
signing a disclaimer), the city authority bent to public pressure that
the work banalised the Holocaust, and closed the exhibition. But what
is scandalous about the best of this work and the best would have to
be marked by its more sadistic aspects is its undeniable aesthetic
allure. With a suggestively sinister theatricality, 10 homeless women
(offered a night in a hostel) stood silently in a line facing a wall as if
waiting execution, among the milling crowds arriving in the Turbine
Hall of the Tate Modern. For all its monstrosity, work like this is also
lucid and macabrely clever, and its often grotesquely, nastily,
appallingly comic.
At its most facile, Sierras work can be reduced to an unchallenging
intervention in and almost customary allegation about the
privileged, self-legitimising value accorded to art in a capitalist
economy. Filling an emptied gallery space with tonnes of mud; closing
up a fashionable London gallery with corrugated iron across its street
frontage to leave its VIP guests homeless and unfed for the evening;
bricking up the entrance to Spains pavilion at the Venice Biennale; or
194
For all its monstrosity, work like this
is also lucid and macabrely clever,
and its often grotesquely, nastily,
appallingly comic.
converting a Caracas gallery into a car showroom, with four idling
luxury cars pumping their exhaust into the street just outside. These
admittedly slick satirical gestures have the wry mockery of a
sophomoric prank, at the expense of a market that can easily and
happily pay for it. But the same London gallery that uncomplainingly
let itself be boarded up on its opening night recently housed 21
monolithic blocks of human excrement, collected from the open
sewers of New Delhi and Jaipur by the untouchable caste (who scrape
a bare living from this unimaginably sordid work). Crated and
dispatched like vengefully poisoned archaeological cargo from the
third world, these solidified minimalist geometric sarcophagi of shit
are simultaneously outrageous jokes and the most unfunny testimony
of social inequality.
Theres too much cynicism in Sierras work to treat it as political
invective let alone incitement. But that may well be its artistry: a grim
sort of comedy thinly masking despair, its provocations are intolerably
responseless. I
www.ar tcollector.net.au
NICHOLAS LOGSDAIL
DIRECTOR, LISSON GALLERY
It was a warmish, sunny evening and in response to our cryptic invitation
people began to congregate, perplexed, standing around outside in the street,
recalls Nicholas Logsdail, director of Londons Lisson Gallery, which had been
boarded up with corrugated iron by Santiago Sierra. The work referred to
what had been happening when the Argentine economy collapsed and people
starting physically attacking the banks out of sheer frustration and anger, says
Logsdail. The banks responded by blocking their street frontages up with
corrugated iron. The political connection, however, wasnt explicit. There was
only a label on one of the columns outside the gallery giving the title of the work,
but no explanation. Santiago doesnt want to provide explanations himself; he
wants people to think about the experience.
For the audience that night, it would have been a contradictory experience
of cultural privilege and being locked out exactly at the same time. This
Previous page:
strategy of confusing advantage with exclusion seems a principle for much of Santiago Sierra, POLYURETHANE SPRAYED ON THE BACKS OF 10
Sierras work. Yes, agrees Logsdail, using art ironically, he wants to provoke WORKERS, 2004. Installation view, Lisson Gallery, London.
people to ask: why would someone do this to me? Why is it done to others? This page from far left:
And Logsdail adds emphatically this is not simply to shock. Sierra is not a Santiago Sierra, HOUSE IN MUD, 2005. Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover.
prankster but a sombre, indeed melancholic, poetic person who is deeply Santiago Sierra, Person facing into a corner, 2002. Installation view,
Lisson Gallery, London.
passionate about his beliefs. He is an artist who wishes to draw our attention
Santiago Sierra, 21 ANTHROPOMETRIC MODULES MADE FROM
to unjust social situations in a challenging artistic way, and in that respect Id HUMAN FAECES BY THE PEOPLE OF SULABH INTERNATIONAL, INDIA.
say he is the type of artist who makes history. New Delhi / Jaipur, India.
Edward Colless COURTESY: THE ARTIST AND LISSON GALLERY, LONDON
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