santiago sierra : 7 trabajos / 7 works - lisson gallery
NOT IN MY NAME, REALITY AND ETHICS IN THE WORK OF SANTIAGO SIERRA - Pilar
Villela Mascaró
P.21 The equation is quite clear : Minimalism and ‘forms’ are on one side,
up there in the ethereal art world, and down here there is nothing but a
dirty life awaiting meaning. This equation is not only held by San Martin,
but it is the most common interpretation art critics make of the specific
relation between the work of Sierra and the art of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Some critics consider that these references help disguise the political as
artistic, that, in the words of Hilke Wagner, ‘Sierra clothes his actions in
the aesthetic trappings of a formal Minimalism. He conceals its directness
behind utterly provocative objective titles whose plainness corresponds to
the designations of conceptual works’. Other critics present the opposition
equation, where the Minimalist construction becomes political once ‘real’
elements — such as ‘real’ people — have been included in the artwork.
P.23 What he is saying over and over again is that he is able to sell
thin-air, bus-rides, pictures of empty buildings, blocks of shit. Or gold
necklaces because someone, somewhere, (as the poor scavengers from India)
was forced — usually through violent means — to work for a pittance, and
someone somewhere else, was willing and able to pay a lot of money for them.
But if we were to go back to the Marxist statement, at least regarding a
notion of what a commodity is, we would find that what I missing between
both beliefs — between the wages of the persons hired as performers and the
seemingly random value of his works as art — is the uncomfortable mediation
of the totality. In this case, the crux of the statement is that the value
of this particular thing is not a result of the work of the person who has
been directly hired to do it (her, here, now) ; but of the work of someone,
somewhere else who, by definition, within capitalism, and in relation to
commodities, becomes invisible.
P.29 Where then lies the trick? It is in literalism, in the fact that there
is nothing ‘neutral’ on either side of the equation. The title and the
description, the sober anthropometric modules, belong to a tradition that
already says something : namely, it commands us to look elsewhere, towards
the ‘real action’, to our ‘real’ perception of time and space …
⠀Of course we know — as matter fact we are reminded all the time —
that there is misery and injustice in this world, usually an unimaginable
misery. The assumption is that by putting it ‘as it is’ before our eyes,
instead of representing it or merely documenting it, Sierra multiplies it.
P.31 … there is no point in denouncing a situation to someone who already
knows it exists, especially if it is one that is already deemed as
undesirable, if a verdict has already been passed on it. That is why, in
Sierra’s work, this knowledge is taken not as a goal, but as a point of
departure.
P.35 Always on the wining side, we have no reason to complain, and the only
room for improvement is given in the life of others who are not so well off
as we are. That position of authority (what a difference!) is the one that
allows us to feel pity for those less fortunate than ourselves. … the
problem is that everybody already knows that, and adding insult to injury is
not going to improve anything. The pieces are built in relation to an
‘ethical’ judgment which has already been passed on the situation, and
because this kind of painful situation is only to be presented if it issued
as propaganda, as a matter of convincing an audience that a verdict has been
passed and that it is fair, their public staging without the caption is
interpreted as obscene. In forcing the audience to judge, through the
opposition of ‘neutral’ artistic formats to ‘real’ elements in each piece,
Sierra’s work is deliberately ‘theatre’ : by re-enacting the crime it stages
a trial, and by conflating the re-enactment with the cliché it naturalises
the scene.
SUBMISSION - Mariana David
P.143 The border is not only a geopolitical limit, but also a social
condition : while some people are admitted into a state of wellbeing, others
— most of them — are left outside.