Santiago Sierra’s work belongs
to a set of critical operations which call into question the belief
that art is an autonomous, sublime and unselfish activity. Reviewing
his works over the last twelve years, what stands out is the persistence
of certain subjects - recurring lines of action which end up pointing
to a basic obsession: that of deconstructing minimalism as the
hegemonic language, associating it with the dictatorship of production
and profit.
In his actions, people become ‘performative ready-mades’
that shape ‘situated stories’, extending the classical
idea of site specificity. Connecting the semantic charges personified
by his actors to socio-economic and geopolitical conditions is
an effective way of linking the personal to the political, the
local to the global. Some fundamental lines of his poetics converge
in his projects at the Spanish Pavilion in Venice - obstruction,
linguistic provocation and the reflection on work as punishment.
Wall enclosing a space points to the technologies of mediation
and restricted access posed by borders and by limits, whether
visible or invisible, which place people in different geographical,
social or ideological territories. The wall polarises the Biennial
spectators on either side of a hypothetical stage and formalises
physical and political tensions evocative of that strange territory
of sealed cities and countries defined by contemporary exclusions.
Unlike Beckett’s absurd existentialist ‘wall of nothing’,
Sierra builds walls that show how frontiers have not been abolished
but reinforced. Inside the Pavilion, by staging the remains of
construction work on the wall, disorder and abandonment, he proposes
an exercise in denuding reality and refers to other remains and
other twilight zones.
Covered word is a simple sculpture made of poor materials. Here,
Sierra acts by omission. By covering the word ‘España’,
he momentarily truncates its multiple historical and symbolic
connotations, thus prefiguring a controversial emergence of sentimental
reactions, ideological interpretations and aesthetic assessments.
The action, Hooded woman seated facing the wall took place in
the physical location of the Spanish Pavilion interior, with no
audience, on 1 May 2003. For an hour, a woman wearing a black
hood remained seated, still and in silence. This work, which the
artist documented in photographs and on video, dwelt on the idea
of labour as a technology of domination and punishment, bearing
witness to the violence of disciplinary processes and the objectualising
power of money. The iconographic connections with Goya’s
works, and with torture by the Inquisition, link up with manyother
contemporary iconological references. |
