Sierra is interested in the theme of oppression, often the oppression of the poorer, less fortunate members of society, such as immigrant workers or prostitutes, using the very things that oppress them, such a drugs and money to encourage them to take part in exploitative activities with little purposeful end result. In '160 cm line tattooed on four people' (2000) he paid four drug addicted prostitutes the price of a shot of heroin ($67) to have a line tattooed onto each of their backs, literally buying their bodies.
Another piece of work in Berlin involved hiring people to sit hidden in large boxes within the gallery space, their presence unknown (at least in theory) to the viewers who walked around the boxes- The inhabitants of the boxes had to be paid in secret as they were political exiles who were not allowed to work- essentially paid not to exist. Sierra believes that by creating these futile situations, and using money to validate and encourage the participation of those he recruits he is highlighting the futility of capitalism, and that any attempt to protest or resist it is pointless.
Even though Sierra sees the institution of the art gallery as also being a part of this system, he relies heavily on it as both a way of validating his created 'situations' as art, and as the subject of his work itself. He has made a number of works that challenge the way that the gallery space is used by both the artist and the viewer-‘Cylinders Each Measuring 250x250cm Composed Of Posters That Have Been Torn Down’ was a piece that comprised of billboard posters, torn down from old hoardings and derelict shop fronts, formed into cylinders, and placed within the space. The cylinders were so large that spectators within the gallery were prevented from moving around freely, ending up blocked into corners where the cylinders met the walls in the corners of the gallery spaces.
Generally, gallery spaces are free of obstruction, and can be walked around easily, and can flow from one space to the next, taking in the art as they go. With this piece it would be hard for the viewer to ever ‘flow’ from one point to another, or to get an idea of the piece as a whole. Generally, spectators are not used to having the viewing experience made difficult for them.
To someone who doesn't have a background or knowledge of art, the gallery can seem like an intimidating place, and Sierra takes this idea of exclusivity and intimidation as a theme in his work, often turning it back on itself, and those who would normally be a part of this world. In 2000, he paid 68 people to block an entrance to a museum in Korea as a protest against the low wages that museum workers were paid. It is off-putting and intimidating to see a large group of people blocking an entrance, and if something is obstructed or blocked off like this, then people are much less like to try to get into the space in the first place. The pristine, white and clinical nature of the contemporary gallery space has also been challenged by Sierra. ‘Gallery Burned With Gasoline’ was, as the name suggests a gallery (The Art Deposit Gallery in Mexico), which was torched and left that way for the opening of the space.
But why make viewing art in a gallery difficult when you can make it impossible? In September 2002, at the Lisson gallery in London, Sierra boarded up the front of the gallery with corrugated iron. People turned up for the private view and apparently got very frustrated when they couldn’t get inside. He thinks that it is interesting that the act of boarding up the gallery is not seen as a piece of work within itself, that spectators always want to look beyond that to what is INSIDE the gallery as the place that the artwork should be situated.
Sierra takes the idea of exclusivity and the art gallery to an extreme. In 2003 he was chosen to represent Spain in the Venice Biennale. He erected a brick wall at the entrance of the Spanish pavilion, and set up a customs style checkpoint. You could only enter the pavilion if you possessed a Spanish passport. Once inside, the gallery space was barren and empty, but the point of the piece was not the space itself, as with the Lisson piece, it was what access to the space symbolized. The idea that the art gallery was run on a closed set of values put forward in ‘Inside the White Cube’ is what Sierra put into question in this piece, swapping one value system, based around art, for another one, based around nationality and normally common at border controls.
Site specific work is something Sierra often engages in, and this gives him the opportunity to use the locations he is given to add significance to the meanings of the piece. In 2005 he was invited to create work in South Korea, and ended up digging two separate trenches, 6 metres long and 2 metres deep each, with a machine, and then refilled each trench with the excavated dirt from the other.
All of this was carried out under South Korean military supervision, and only those who were there actually saw the work. Most recently he caused uproar when he created '245 cubic metres', an installation in a disused synagogue in Pullheim, Germany. For this he attached six rubber tubes to six car exhausts which were running, and allowed the space to fill up with carbon monoxide. The public were allowed in one by one, with breathing apparatus, for five minutes at a time accompanied by a fireman. There was enough gas in the room to kill someone within 30 minutes. Sierra claimed that the work was a protest against the banalisation of the holocaust', but the protests within the local media, and the work was only shown for one week.
But for all of Santiago Sierra’s anti-establishment sentiment, how much does his work really make a statement about exploitation, or question dominant social systems and cultural norms? To get work into a gallery, generally the work has to be accepted by the curators and directors of the space. In the 2005 BBC4 show ‘Art Safari’ Sierra is filmed in Korea, where he is creating the aforementioned piece in the zone between the borders. The work he proposes is critical of the army, but the show is also government funded. Sierra is not afraid to lie about or play down any contentious meanings in his work to get it past the curators, but once it is in the space, he seems to play up these meanings. Is it subversive to trick people like this or is it just a bit of a cop out? The presenter of programme suggests that in the art world ‘everybody uses everyone else’ which fits with Santiago Sierra's idea that nothing can exist outside of the capitalist system, but seems defeatist none the less.
Sierra’s work could be seen as being very contradictory. To criticise a system, but then to work within it could be seen to endorse it. Of course, Sierra sees using the very mechanisms that control the institutions that he critiques as being the best way to do so. He believes that the exploitative nature of these structures are self evident and using the very means they use is the most direct form of critique there can be, However, this is easy to say and agree with when you know that this is the intention of the artist. Although the idea of creating 'situations' in which the artist can control events and realities is nothing new in art, to the untrained eye, it would seem that the situations Sierra creates to be literal as opposed to a comment on them. His work often has a high shock value which creates lots of initial interest and bluster, but beyond that initial shock, and under more stringent scrutiny, the meaning he proposes seems pretty diluted and weak.
On face value alone Santiago Sierra is successful in questioning the assumptions we have about the gallery space. He uses very direct methods of doing this. However his work could be seen as being very much a part of the art establishment. People that run the galleries and look at the artwork have a certain amount of tolerance for ‘transgressive’ work that questions and criticizes the system it works within. Santiago Sierra is feted by many curators and critics for his art, and spectators seem to enjoy looking at his work, even though it isn’t particularly easy to look at or enjoy. As Ben Lewis, the presenter of ‘Art Safari’ said ‘Anti-capitalism sells in the art world’ and this certainly seems to be the case for Santiago Sierra.
It is an interesting idea that you can work within a system, subvert its values to question its norms, but I don’t believe that it can work in the art world. The art world is too willing to incorporate subversiveness into its system for it ever to be really subversive, too willing to welcome ‘rebellion’. I think that if an artist made a piece of work that was critical of the gallery system beyond the comfort levels of the people who run it, then it would not get displayed and would not exist as a piece of art. Artists can only challenge the gallery system in this way as much as the gallery system will allow it to. In the case of Sierras piece at the Lisson gallery, he did manage to cause some upset amongst the viewers although, Sierra believes that this is because “It was as though they were saying: 'Just get me inside and give me a drink. That's what I've come for.”
rather than being annoyed that they were unable to get inside the gallery and look at the art there. This was probably due to the fact that the viewers were not aware of the meaning of the work. If they had been told what the piece consisted of, it is likely they would have been much less bemused by it, as it would have been readily accepted within the artistic tradition of the closed up gallery.
If Santiago Sierra’s work were situated outside of the gallery context, it would not be art; it would be the everyday- people working in bad jobs for little money. Sierra needs the gallery space to give his work context, and however much he rails against it, it is vital in validating the pieces he makes as being art, therefore however much Santiago Sierra claims to challenge and highlight exploitation and power structures he still relies on institutions and people with the power to give his work context. Although he appears to be than biting the hand that feeds, he's merely sucking at it with toothless gums.
If you read all of that well done. Here's a short clip from the 'Art Safari' TV show I mentioned. If you can track it down do watch it, because it's excellent, and says everything I attempted to say here in a much more clear and entertaining way. Here he is getting annoyed with Ben Lewis when he tries to pin him down about what he's going to install...haha.
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