Santiago Sierra

Santiago Sierra once described himself as a “minimalist with a guilt complex.”  This essay explores how he has addressed his socio-economic concerns within his art practice. Sierra’s interest appears to lie as much with 'work' as labour, as with the 'work' as art object.

Is it still possible today to call for the fulfillment of the historical avant-gardist objective to integrate art and life? This paper, partly grounded in Peter Bürger's seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde, considers the question by turning to the work of two contemporary artists: Thai biennial stalwart Rirkrit Tiravanija and Spanish provocateur Santiago Sierra. Providing a new angle from which we can analyze Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics, I argue that an artist like Tiravanija, in keeping his work within the bounded space of high art arenas, gives back to art a certain form of autonomy. This is in direct contradistinction to Santiago Sierra who can indeed be said to integrate art and life in his work, if only to evince its essential futility. Ultimately, this paper concludes that art—when integrated with an exploitative, degrading, neoliberal life—will manage to be nothing more than exploitative, degrading, neoliberal art. 2

In The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière asks artists to relinquish their role of stultifying pedagogues and allow spectators, considered by Rancière to be of equal intelligence, to engage themselves in the process of understanding art. Instead of assimilating what the director wants them to learn, see, and feel, spectators should be free to develop their own ideas based on what they see and feel. By comparing new data with previous information, spectators are thus able to offer their own interpretation acting in an emancipatory way. To introduce his idea of emancipation, Jacques Rancière dismisses earlier theories that consider only the physical act as proof of active engagement and disregard the mental process as indicative of active participation. Although The Corridor in the House of the People (2005) is not free of physical engagement, what stimulates viewers is their mental participation.

The Spanish artist Santiago Sierra (1966) initiates actions that refer to everyday social life. He intervenes directly in life, revealing political developments and social dynamics. Sierra's work shows how, with minimal intervention, systems and their ordered structures can be undermined and sensitively disturbed; for example when he uses a heavy goods vehicle to bring the traffic flow to a standstill at a busy intersection in Mexico City. His goal is to sharpen our perception of shortcomings and social inequities. Sierra will present a new work in situ for the project space as well as the show will present an overview of his ouevre. Kunsthalle Wien, 2002
Curator: Gabriele Mackert
http://kunsthallewien.at/#/en/exhibitions/santiago-sierra

Linje Manyozo begins by describing six schools of thought in the worldwide effort to improve lives in what used to be called the Third World—the Bretton Woods school, Latin American, Indian school, African, Los Baños, and communication for development and social change schools—and their approaches: media for development, media development, and participatory/community engagement. As development communication pioneer Nora Cruz Quebral has pointed out, the first two approaches are more media-oriented​, while the third relies more on interpersonal communication (Quebral in Manyozo, p.xv). This paper analyzes the nature of each approach.

“Pellegrino” per l'uomo del Medioevo era chiunque si trovasse fuori della sua terra natale, lontano dalla propria casa e da tutti i suoi comfort e le sue sicurezze, ma il termine indicava in senso stretto colui che compiva il pellegrinaggio verso Santiago de Compostela o ne stava tornando. Dante, poi, ricorda i tre tipi di pellegrini: i palmieri, che andavano oltremare, in Terra Santa, a visitare i luoghi della vita, della Passione e della Risurrezione di Gesù e tornavano recando una palma simbolo del compiuto pellegrinaggio; i peregrini veri e propri, che, appunto si recavano a Compostela, nel luogo più remoto d'Europa, e, infine, i romei, che visitavano le tombe di San Pietro e San Paolo a Roma e da quella città prendevano il nome. Un'ultima preziosa indicazione, fornitaci dal poeta è che i pellegrini sono “le genti che vanno al servigio dell'Altissimo”.

Performed Realness: On participatory Art and its Ethics

In my study, Performed Realness: On participatory Art and its Ethics, I address questions stemming from my artistic practice and concerning participatory art, the split between documentary and fiction, performed realness, the ethics of the abovementioned, and authorship. I discuss these topics in dialogue with other artists’ artworks and with theories. Nevertheless, my intent is not to execute a comprehensive study on works, that have the same traits as mine. Works with moving image, my own and other artists’, which leave me to wonder and perplex me were a starting point of my research. – Is this true? Are these people performing or are they just being themselves in front of the camera? Can one be in front of the camera without performing?



In this thesis, I also address the role of an artist conducting research. The work of an artist-researcher is often a balancing act between autobiographical and scholarly text. All artistic research does by no means concern the researcher’s own artistic production. In my work as an artist conducting research, I act in a double role: On one hand, when I conduct research, I consider the artwork with an outsider’s eyes; on the other, I use maker’s knowledge, which cannot be seen in the result. Art historians Katve-Kaisa Kontturi and Hanna Johansson write about similar methods, of doing research with art. The research springs from a dialogue with artwork. The method of writing vulnerably, which anthropologist Ruth Behar elaborates on—the relation between personal stories and ethnography, in which the vulnerable observer writes him/herself into the text—is also suitable for artistic research.



My research has followed the stages of my piece Story Café (2004–2011). The piece is divided into stages: a participatory café, in which I record on video stories that the participants tell; installations of the recorded stories; and dramatizations that are based on them. The aim of the café part was to collect stories from the participators. I have used the stories to in various ways dramatize works with moving images. The meetings in the café part of Story Café resemble participatory and social artwork. On account of Story Café, an inquiry into theories on participatory art and participatory artworks is emphasized in my research. I address questions that originate from the work in relation to, for example, curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of relational aesthetics, art researcher Miwon Kwon’s discussion on nomadic site-specific work, and art historian Grant Kester’s dialogical aesthetics. I also consider critic and curator Claire Bishop’s critique on relation aesthetics and art researcher Shannon Jackson’s analysis of the abovementioned. I present other artists who create participatory works, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Minna Heikinaho, because their work includes topics similar to mine.



How do the power relations between the artist and the participant manifest themselves, and how is authorship divided in participatory work? Who is the author if the audience’s contribution helps to produce a piece? I examine what kind of ethical questions an artist-researcher faces in his/her work. My artistic work is based on ethical principles with similarities to philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas’ thoughts of meeting the other. Filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s films and texts have influenced the handling of ethical questions in my thesis and in my artwork. I address ethical meetings in my analyses of my piece, Story Café, and of other artists’ work, such as Santiago Sierra’s pieces; Renzo Marten’s film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2009); and Miriam Bäckström’s film Kira Carpelan (2007). Kira Carpelan and Episode III: Enjoy Poverty blur the boundary between fiction and documentary in an interesting way.



I consider the dividing line between documentary and fiction through an analysis of my own and other artists’ work. I examine the split between them in works that include moving images. What is performance? How much direction, scriptwriting, framing and maker’s viewpoint does a documentary piece contain? I refer to filmmaker Susanna Helke’s research on style in documentary film and film theoretician Stella Bruzzi’s definition of performative documentary film, and I include the concept of a played documentary [documentarie joué], which philosopher François Niney uses for documentary film, into the context of art. I also discuss the relation of docufiction to my works and the works I have chosen to study. The variation between performing and realness plays a role in ethical scrutiny: I distinguish appearing in fiction from appearing in a recording. Nonetheless, the difference is not always clear.



In my study, Performed Realness: On participatory Art and its Ethics, I discuss gender performativity by means of gender theorist Judith Butler’s definition. Several of my dramatized works explore gender. Gender performance may form a vital part of a piece’s theme, as in There is a Lot of Joy, too (2005), in which a youth is concerned with his gender. Dramatized moving image pieces based on recordings from Story Café deal with girls’ aggression in its various forms in my solo show, The Cage (2013).



My thesis has followed the phases and topics that arose in my artistic practice. However, my artistic practice has proceeded in a different vein from the research, more organically and intuitively. A short tale that I have recorded in the meandering Story Café becomes a moving image; a verbally narrated character becomes flesh anew in a fictive world. In some of the of the works that I analyse, the split is explicit; a crevasse exists between the performed and the given depiction of reality. By contrast, in others, it is rather a drift, where the border between realness and performance is not clear.

This dissertation examines the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Doris Salcedo, Teresa Margolles, and Santiago Sierra, artists that redeploy the aesthetics of 1960s minimalism in relation to contemporary political crises. I argue that these artists make an important case for the political and ethical relevance of aesthetic abstraction, insofar as their work imagines forms of coexistence that resist the sovereign organization of human bodies.

In each chapter, I discuss a selection of major works by an individual artist, emphasizing theoretical analyses that privilege deconstruction, bio- and necropolitical theory, and continental philosophy. I situate artistic practices in relation to their social and political contexts to consider how Gonzalez-Torres, Salcedo, Margolles, and Sierra respond to issues such as the AIDS crisis, state violence, and socio-economic subjugation. Specifically, I consider how they use minimalist formal strategies to convey the socio-political abstraction of human life and, further, to address the conditions in which certain bodies fail to appear. These artists demonstrate how the body’s disappearance produces an abstraction: not the sign of a body but the index of its withdrawal from appearance (to invoke the etymological meaning of abstrahere). By portraying the material traces of the figure’s negation, they account for the aesthetic and political challenge of presenting anonymous bodies and beings. Their work thereby inverts minimalism’s concern with the relation of objective forms to embodied viewers, in that it reveals art’s contradictory relation to inaccessible bodies. This approach carries important aesthetico-ethical ramifications: it exposes viewers to unknowable and imperceptible beings, challenging dominant ethical models based on the inter-subjective relation of autonomous individuals; hence, it illustrates an ethics of coexistence that is irreducible to subject-object binaries and to the subjectivization of embodied life.

Ce mémoire se base sur l’économie générale développée par Georges Bataille (La notion de dépense, 1933; La part maudite, 1949) afin d’approfondir la notion de dépense improductive dans l’art actuel. L’objectif principal est d’y questionner la possibilité d’une dépense qui soit réalisée en pure perte, alors que Bataille associe une fonction de liant social aux dépenses anti-utilitaires.

À partir du constat qu’un pouvoir émane de la perte, il est question d’identifier si la mise en place de processus improductifs au sein de pratiques artistiques micropolitiques produit une critique de la société de croissance productiviste et de l’utilitarisme qui la sous-tend. En regard de différents phénomènes – notamment la consommation insubordonnée, l’expérience précaire et la transgression des valeurs morales – par lesquels semble se répercuter la dépense comme mécanisme de résistance en art actuel, l’analyse s’établit autour des pratiques artistiques de Michel de Broin, Thomas Hirschhorn et Santiago Sierra. Cette analyse comparative révèle un paradoxe au cœur de la pensée bataillenne : non seulement la dépense improductive ne se réalise jamais en pure perte puisqu’elle produit du sens et se signale dans la différence, mais elle semble de plus participer à la création de valeurs et à l’établissement de nouvelles autorités.

Ce mémoire tente de remettre en question l’orientation critique de la notion de dépense en lien avec les transformations récentes du capitalisme postindustriel (ou post-Fordiste). Il se conclut sur le constat que la dépense improductive agit comme force motrice du système économique actuel. Dans ce contexte, l’art de la dépense se voit réduit à une forme de mimétisme où s’accentuent les risques d’une assimilation à l’ordre dominant.

Art Takes Place. A Lucky Strike
Artists: atelier d’architecture autogérée, city.crime.control, Jeppe Hein, Lutz/Guggisberg, Aleksandra Mir, pureculture, Michael Rakowitz, Werner Reiterer, Santiago Sierra, Apolonia Sustersic/Meike Schalk
Curated by: Horst Griese and Gabriele Mackert 

The GAK has invited artists to respond to their impressions of Bremen. Hereby, the city becomes a resort for reality, a place for the direct confrontation with contemporary art, social structures and changes. Like other cities, Bremen currently has to face a fundamental structural change determining the confrontation with the urban self-image. Of central attention are here questions after the city’s identity and its effect to the outside and the inside.
A Lucky Strike – means also being aware of the risk of artistic interventions into the urban space. Not always a divine spark occurs. Some luck comes by chance, some is hard worked for. It is always subjective. And sometimes it needs patience to allow for the evaluation of consequences. The controversial discussions triggered by the artists are not seldom responsible for the considerable change in the perceptions and design of our living habitats.
The exhibition Art Takes Place. A Lucky Strike presents the results of the artists‘ research in Bremen at the GAK and with temporary works and actions at selected locations in the city as well: for instance, the re-staging of vacant shops in the city centre by the Bremen group city.crime.control or the „Entrance to the Centre of the Earth” a building-site by Austrian Werner Reiterer on the place in front of the central station. The narrative sound installation by the Swiss artist duo Lutz/Guggisberg creates a poetic resting place in the historic the city’s historic bulwark. Aleksandra Mir irritates the usual image of the city with a series of postcards re-inventing the Hanseatic city. The Romanian-French network of architects, artists and theoreticians, atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa), explores the relations between work, subject and public space with a workshop, a newspaper and a podium discussion. Apolonija Sustersic and Meike Schalk too, refer to special peculiarities of urban development in their video. pureculture (Emils Rode and Simona Weiland) from Lithuania developed a new ornament for Bremen. Jeppe Hein deals with the phenomenon of public furnishing and sets up dysfunctional benches. US-artist Michael Rakowitz thinks about re-interpretation of public parking space.

See http://www.gak-bremen.de/luckystrike.htm

Texts by atelier d'architecture autogérée, city.crime.control, Frauke Ellßel, Jeppe Hein, Horst Griese, Gabriele Mackert, Aleksandra Mir, pureculture, Michael Rakowitz, Werner Reiterer, Santiago Sierra, Apolonia Sustersic/Meike Schalk

During his stay in Athens at Kappatos Athens Art Residency, Santiago Sierra conceived of a new piece entitled “Athens Stray Dogs Project” that takes place in the public sphere of the center of Athens. The work is dedicated to the stray dogs Kanellos and Loukanikos that stood by the side of the Athenian demonstrators.

The twenty-five year career of Santiago Sierra constitutes an excellent starting point to focus on his work from a new perspective. Unlike most studies on Sierra’s artwork —structured around visual matters—, our approach is based on the study of the textual meanings of his installations, actions, and performances, which remain largely unexplored.
By analyzing Sierra’s minimalist works and his increasing interest in developing strategies that involve textual and narrative processes to unveil capitalism in art, this article provides an overview on how the artist uses the repetitiveness as a metaphor of postmodern labor exploitation.

Die Berlinale leistete in diesem Jahr eine verstärkte Annäherung zwischen Film und Kunst – mit Streifen wie The Future von der Performancekünstlerin Miranda July, Dirty Eyes des Konzeptkünstlers Lawrence Weiner oder The Host and the Cloud des Performance- und Videokünstlers Pierre Huyghe. Auch der spanische Aktionskünstler Santiago Sierra, Jahrgang 1966, ist in diesem Jahr mit seinem Erstling No, Global Tour beim „Forum Expanded" der Berlinale zu Gast.

En el siguiente documento vamos a analizar la obra del artista madrileño nacido en 1966, Santiago Sierra cuyas obras, acciones y performances, dentro de su mayoría se encuentra en la categoría de arte conceptual y donde aborda problemáticas socioeconómicas y los sistemas salariales.

Being a vocal proponent of leftist values and working in the contemporary arts is often compromising, not least for the constant contradictions that such a position entails. The artworld is complicit with the political and financial mechanisms that the principled artist rails against. As such any convincing representation of just social values requires that the given artist deals with the problematic nature of political art practice itself.

In the Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929), André Breton (1896-1966) claimed that the “simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd". This article assesses whether shooting somebody could ever be considered a work of art, by assessing loyalist paramilitary Michael Stone's claim that his attempted murder of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness (2006) was a work of "performance art"; Chris Burden's performance Shoot (1971), and Valerie Solanas' attempted murder of Andy Warhol (1968). The ethical implications of these acts are compared to the work of Santiago Sierra, and Christabel Pankhurst's defence of militancy. The acts are considered aesthetically by referring to Peter Bond's testimony at the Michael Stone trial, and the "institutional theory of art".

Exploring the link between postmodern art and capitalism through Santiago Sierra's artistic practice.

This thesis investigates contemporary approaches of postmodernism both in art and criticism, and the authenticity and possibility of voicing disagreement with a political order through art. The thesis seeks answers to questions such as:

a. Is Santiago Sierra’s work efficient as a criticism of capitalism and are  postmodern artistic practices efficient in criticising postmodern culture? 

b. Is ethical criticism relevant when evaluating politically concerned art?

c. What characteristics link Spanish political artist Santiago Sierra’s work to capitalism and postmodern culture?

Theories of Claire Bishop, Grant Kester, Jacques Rancière and Gabriel Rockhill are  juxtaposed in order to investigate current debates around the overlap of politics and aesthetics and the role of ethics in art-criticism.

Exploring the similarities between the patterns of lefty anti-capitalist artist Santiago Sierra’s work and the political order he opposes, the thesis disputes the validity of artistic practices that criticise an existing system by adopting end replicating its mechanisms. Sierra’s aim is to transform the system into its own criticism through displaying its coercive forces. The thesis proposes that the nihilistic character of Sierra’s approach might result in the reversal of his original aim and transform his work into propaganda for liberalism

What is a populist work of art? Updating the critical Workerist position on Italian populist literature of the Sixties, the article tackles the issue of a possible definition of populist (leftist) aesthetics in contemporary visual arts. As an alternative to populist and relational art practices, the text introduces the third term of alter-institutional aesthetics.

La exposición Un actor en la Casa Blanca: relaciones entre politica, celebridad y cultura popular tuvo lugar en Área: lugar de proyecto. La muestra reunió pinturas en gris, blanco y negro, mayormente basadas en fotografías de interacciones entre músicos, actores y políticos./The exhibition An Actor in the White House: Relations between Politics, Celebrity and Popular Culture (Un actor en la Casa Blanca: relaciones entre politica, celebridad y cultura popular) took place in Área: Lugar de proyectos. The exhibition brought together paintings in gray, black and white, mostly based on photographs of interactions between musicians, actors and politicians.

Isidori, Julia.-Nebulosa virtual. Verbo en suspensión alrededor de las obras de arte, Rigel revista de estética y filosofía del arte N° 5 (2018): Pp. 49-67.
Nebulosa virtual. Verbo en suspensión alrededor de las obras de arte
Virtual nebula. Space words around works of art Resumen: A partir de una obra reciente de Santiago Sierra, el artículo aborda la producción de discursos críticos e investigaciones teóricas sobre arte como un factor relevante en la persecución de autonomía. Específicamente se presentan tres formatos de estos discursos-el periodístico, el de la crítica especializada y el de la investigación académica-y se analiza cómo influyen en las posibilidades de las obras de ser autónomas. Así, se establece un diálogo con las propuestas modernas de separación del arte de otras esferas, y se problematiza en qué medida esa independencia es posible hoy, en que las obras circulan acompañadas de texto. La naturaleza de esos textos es también estudiada como contenido y para finalizar, se cuestiona la relevancia de la producción ante estas discursividades.
Abstract From a recent work by Santiago Sierra, the article studies the production of critical discourses and theoretical art research as a relevant factor in the pursuit of autonomy. Specifically, three formats in which these discourses appear-journalism, specialized criticism and academic research-are presented and it is analyzed how they influence the possibilities of an art piece of being autonomous. Thus, a dialogue is established with modern proposals of separation between art and other spheres, and it is problematized to what extent this independence is possible today, when the works circulate accompanied by text. The nature of these texts is also studied as content and in order to finish, the relevance of production in front of these discursiveness is questioned.

In this chapter I examine the work of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra in light of contemporary theories of biopolitics and ‘machinic capitalism’. I advance a new interpretation of this controversial artist’s oeuvre and I introduce two new notions in the context of performance studies and politics: performance of exposure and ethical interruption.

"In Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art, Mechtild Widrich examines the relationship of embodiment, memory making, and especially documentation to the meaning of monumental, performative, and audience-oriented art in post-World War II Europe. Ranging from former Yugoslavia to Austria and a split Germany during the Cold War, Widrich expertly discusses artists from each region, including VALIE EXPORT in Vienna, Marina Abramović in the former Yugoslavia, and Joseph Beuys in Germany. Widrich's art-historical exegesis of these artists' works and the history of their reception leads to a sophisticated and deft unfolding of historical events alongside analyses of documents, photographs, interviews, and theoretical debates around particular performance works (realized or imagined). Her argument centers on the premise that many of these famous performance works are debated within various forms of documentation, including the fact that some of them never took place at all. Widrich shows that their impact lies precisely in this space of contestation, which expands beyond the ephemeral quality of performance based on embodiment in a particular space and time to a more fluid manifestation depending on different audiences, the artist, history, and the contemporary moment."

The tendency of anti-representation in contemporary art has arguably led to the transformation of certain art spaces into concentrationary spaces of violence.

This paper will examine the problematic spaces in the artworks of Santiago Sierra and the art group AES+F. Both engage with non-representational violence. Sierra installs cardboard boxes with illegal workers inside, thus seeking to criticise the capitalist exploitation of immigrant labour in an increasingly globalised world. This, however, perpetuates the exploitative violence because the refugees are paid to remain for hours imprisoned in a confined and uncomfortable space. The violence of this art space is therefore not represented but brutally presented: it is the violence itself. In contrast, non-representational violence takes the form of a pure simulacrum in AES+F’s video Last Riot 2, which shows intensely aestheticised images of war and prison tortures in a fantasy landscape. Violence is sanitised (for e.g. no bloodshed occurs) and carried out by beautiful youths who express neither joy nor pain. Here, the question of ‘fascinating fascism’ arises again. If ‘for art there are no limits because the limits have already been passed’ (Sierra), then one needs to be aware of the concentrationary filtering into art’s very production and reception.
N.B. This essay is published by CentreCATH, University of Leeds, edited by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, University of Leeds, 2011

L'enjeu de cette conférence était de montrer en quoi les œuvres de ces trois artistes demandaient au spectateur de prendre une posture spécifique afin d'apprécier la portée artistique des réalisations. C'était entre autres l'occasion de montrer la pertinence de la notion de sublime dans certaines œuvres d'art contemporaines.