Santiago Sierra
Encyclopedia
Santiago Sierra is a Spanish artist. He lives in Madrid
.
Sierra's most well-known works involve hired laborers completing menial tasks. These works are seen to speak to the nature of the laborer within Capitalism, how the laborer sells his physical labor and thus his body, political issues such as immigration and continual immigrant poverty in Capitalist countries, the nature of work in Capitalist society, and the isolation of economic classes. He achieves this through a number of techniques that present these themes and also question the nature of the art institution. Margolles, Teresa http://bombsite.com/issues/86/articles/2606 “Santiago Sierra” BOMB Magazine
Winter, 2004. Retrieved August 9, 2011 While Sierra is critical of capitalism and the institutions within it, he is also considered a successful artist. He seems to be aware of this contradiction when he says, “Self-criticism makes you feel morally superior, and I give high society and high culture the mechanisms to unload their morality and their guilt.” Margolles, Teresa http://bombsite.com/issues/86/articles/2606 “Santiago Sierra” BOMB Magazine
Winter, 2004. Retrieved August 9, 2011
Some of Sierra's most famous works have involved paying a man to live behind a brick wall for 15 days, paying Iraqi immigrants to wear protective clothing and be coated in hardening polyetherane foam as “free form” sculptures, Searle, Adrian http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2004/jul/13/1 “Buried Alive” The Guardian
13 July, 2001. Retrieved August 9, 2011 blocking the entrance of Lisson Gallery with a metal wall on opening night, sealing the entrance of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, only to allow Spanish citizens in to see an exhibition of left over pieces of the previous year’s exhibition. Another of his well known projects is a room of mud in Hanover
, Germany
, commemorating the job-creation measure origin of the Maschsee
. In 2006, he provoked controversy with his installation "245 cubic metres", a gas chamber created inside a former synagogue in Pulheim
, Germany. About the Biennale piece, Sierra said, “In the context of the biennial we are all playing at national pride, and I wanted to reveal that as the principal system of every pavilion...you can’t forget that the countries that participate in the Biennale are the most powerful ones in the world. I mean, there’s no pavilion for Ethiopia. So the theme was already a given.” About his conception of nationalism for this work, Sierra has said “A nation is actually nothing; countries don’t exist. When astronauts went into space they did not see a line between France and Spain; France is not painted pink and Spain blue. They are political constructions, and what’s inside a construction? Whatever you want to put there.”
About his aims and his work Sierra has said, “What I do is refuse to deny the principles that underlie the creation of an object of luxury: from the watchman who sits next to a Monet for eight hours a day, to the doorman who controls who comes in, to the source of the funds used to buy the collection. I try to include all this, and therein lies the little commotion about remuneration that my pieces have caused.” More specific to his questioning of art institutions and capitalism, he said “At the Kunstwerke in Berlin they criticized me because I had people sitting for four hours a day, but they didn’t realize that a little further up the hallway the guard spends eight hours a day on his feet...any of the people who make those criticisms have never worked in their lives; if they think it’s a horror to sit hidden in a cardboard box for four hours, they don’t know what work is...And of course extreme labor relations shed much more light on how the labor system actually works.” Sierra has a displayed interest in visibility and invisibility. He explains the result of his work that pursues these interests, saying “The museum watchman I paid to live for 365 hours behind a wall at P.S.1 in New York told me that no one had ever been so interested in him and that he had never met so many people. I realized that hiding something is a very effective working technique. The forgotten people want to communicate...”
Santiago Sierra on hub_01
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
.
Sierra's most well-known works involve hired laborers completing menial tasks. These works are seen to speak to the nature of the laborer within Capitalism, how the laborer sells his physical labor and thus his body, political issues such as immigration and continual immigrant poverty in Capitalist countries, the nature of work in Capitalist society, and the isolation of economic classes. He achieves this through a number of techniques that present these themes and also question the nature of the art institution. Margolles, Teresa http://bombsite.com/issues/86/articles/2606 “Santiago Sierra” BOMB Magazine
Bomb Magazine
BOMB is a quarterly magazine edited by artists and writers. It is composed, primarily, of interviews between creative people working in a variety of disciplines — visual art, literature, music, film, theater and architecture....
Winter, 2004. Retrieved August 9, 2011 While Sierra is critical of capitalism and the institutions within it, he is also considered a successful artist. He seems to be aware of this contradiction when he says, “Self-criticism makes you feel morally superior, and I give high society and high culture the mechanisms to unload their morality and their guilt.” Margolles, Teresa http://bombsite.com/issues/86/articles/2606 “Santiago Sierra” BOMB Magazine
Bomb Magazine
BOMB is a quarterly magazine edited by artists and writers. It is composed, primarily, of interviews between creative people working in a variety of disciplines — visual art, literature, music, film, theater and architecture....
Winter, 2004. Retrieved August 9, 2011
Some of Sierra's most famous works have involved paying a man to live behind a brick wall for 15 days, paying Iraqi immigrants to wear protective clothing and be coated in hardening polyetherane foam as “free form” sculptures, Searle, Adrian http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2004/jul/13/1 “Buried Alive” The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
13 July, 2001. Retrieved August 9, 2011 blocking the entrance of Lisson Gallery with a metal wall on opening night, sealing the entrance of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, only to allow Spanish citizens in to see an exhibition of left over pieces of the previous year’s exhibition. Another of his well known projects is a room of mud in Hanover
Hanover
Hanover or Hannover, on the river Leine, is the capital of the federal state of Lower Saxony , Germany and was once by personal union the family seat of the Hanoverian Kings of Great Britain, under their title as the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, commemorating the job-creation measure origin of the Maschsee
Maschsee
Maschsee is an artificial lake in Hanover, Lower Saxony, Germany. At an elevation of 53.20 m, its surface area is . It was created in the 1930s....
. In 2006, he provoked controversy with his installation "245 cubic metres", a gas chamber created inside a former synagogue in Pulheim
Pulheim
Pulheim is a city in the Rhein-Erft-Kreis, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.Since the 1920s, a large substation of the RWE has been sited at Pulheim...
, Germany. About the Biennale piece, Sierra said, “In the context of the biennial we are all playing at national pride, and I wanted to reveal that as the principal system of every pavilion...you can’t forget that the countries that participate in the Biennale are the most powerful ones in the world. I mean, there’s no pavilion for Ethiopia. So the theme was already a given.” About his conception of nationalism for this work, Sierra has said “A nation is actually nothing; countries don’t exist. When astronauts went into space they did not see a line between France and Spain; France is not painted pink and Spain blue. They are political constructions, and what’s inside a construction? Whatever you want to put there.”
About his aims and his work Sierra has said, “What I do is refuse to deny the principles that underlie the creation of an object of luxury: from the watchman who sits next to a Monet for eight hours a day, to the doorman who controls who comes in, to the source of the funds used to buy the collection. I try to include all this, and therein lies the little commotion about remuneration that my pieces have caused.” More specific to his questioning of art institutions and capitalism, he said “At the Kunstwerke in Berlin they criticized me because I had people sitting for four hours a day, but they didn’t realize that a little further up the hallway the guard spends eight hours a day on his feet...any of the people who make those criticisms have never worked in their lives; if they think it’s a horror to sit hidden in a cardboard box for four hours, they don’t know what work is...And of course extreme labor relations shed much more light on how the labor system actually works.” Sierra has a displayed interest in visibility and invisibility. He explains the result of his work that pursues these interests, saying “The museum watchman I paid to live for 365 hours behind a wall at P.S.1 in New York told me that no one had ever been so interested in him and that he had never met so many people. I realized that hiding something is a very effective working technique. The forgotten people want to communicate...”
External links
- Official site of Santiago Sierra
- Reference page and artist ranking on Artfacts.net
- Santiago Sierra at NMAC Foundation
Santiago Sierra on hub_01