Danger: artist at work

11 April 2012

I was one of the hopeful punters who pitched up last week for art activist Santiago Sierra's private view at the Lisson Gallery. The whole place was - now infamously - boarded up. There was (and still is) a sign by the door, spelling it out quite clearly: "Space closed by corrugated metal." Most of the gallery guests, however, seemed unable to read. They poked and pushed, rang every doorbell of the neighbouring buildings, as if desperate for that free glass of wine often available at such gatherings. I sat on the wall across the street to observe.

What struck me was how few paused long enough to think about what was going on. The sign tells you everything, or almost. My favourite was the glam Euro couple, one of whom snapped at the other: "I told you we should have come earlier." The comic humanity of the comings and bemused goings, combined with a rugged, industrial, minimal aesthetic, made it one of the most pleasant private views I have been to in a long while. I think it's a great piece.

But Santiago Sierra, 36, Spanish-born and based in Mexico, is a shocking artist, the most psychologically and politically dangerous one I can think of. He goes beyond the limits of reasonable human interaction. He implicates the viewer and doesn't account for the effect. I am not sure I can handle it. I certainly don't approve of it. But here and there, through the shock of it, there is a superb formalist trying to get out.

Whether we should let him out is another matter. The world is a cruel place. Sierra's solution is not just to comment on injustice and liberal apathy, but somehow to enter situations too delicate for the politically correct commentator. His projects, which start as performances or "actions" and are regularly documented on film or photograph, invariably engage the unemployed and disempowered.

A list of his most outlandish performances might indicate just what he's up to. The junkie prostitutes who, for the price of a heroin fix, agreed to be tattooed with a line that would connect one body to another when they stood side by side. The 10 men in Havana paid $20 each to masturbate on camera. The homeless man in Helsinki paid to sit in a ditch for hours. Political refugees paid to sit in a box in a German gallery.

In New York, last July, Sierra instructed a gallery to employ a group of Mexicans - notoriously the most exploited workers in America - to hold up a series of solid forms, each a metre wide, against the gallery wall for several hours at a time. Real back-breaking labour for the New York State minimum wage. The employment agency sent some workers who were not Mexican. Sierra wasn't pleased. To cut a long story short, these workers resisted their degrading position and after a few hours laid down their loads for good.

But, too often, the workers do not rebel and just go along with it. I need to know what obligations the artist has after he has given out the cash. What is the real price of the indignities? Is it simply an aesthetic wheeze that 200 illegal street vendors in Venice, whose features were specified by the artist to be dark, are given a peroxide hairdo?

I could read the racial stereotyping in more than one way, and Sierra knows this. And who but an illegal worker would be prepared to be secluded behind a brick wall in a gallery, with only a small hole at ground level for food or any kind of access, for 360 hours to pick up a minimum-wage pay-packet?

Sierra has a good eye for the shape of things. His early works arranged imponderably heavy industrial materials into minimal configurations to stunning effect: lifting chunks of road up, or propping 30 metres of steel against a wall. He constructs shapes in the gallery and in the street that are brilliantly choreographed.

There are the architect-designed benches in the Munich Kunsthalle lifted off the ground by workers for a couple of hours a day. Or the Mexican gallery completely burnt out with a blowtorch. The projects make you look at how you do your looking. And there is the truck driver paid to block the road of Mexico City's busiest highway. It's absurd, but it has a massive sculptural shape.

In a similar way, the Lisson project, titled Closure, is more than just a closed shop - it is a physical encounter. The closed gallery concept is nothing new: Robert Barry held a series of such lock-outs in 1969. But there is a darker purpose to the frustration that the artist sets up here. The boarding-over refers obliquely to the way that, owing to the economic crisis, Argentinian banks have been sealed up. A ritual emerges, enacted by outraged, impoverished customers desperately trying to get in or at least make as much noise as possible by beating against the hoardings. Sierra has made a CD of the racket (called Displacement of a Cacerolada, after the pots banged in demonstration by Argentinians), which he asked people around the world to play at full blast at a fixed time last week.

There is an elegance to Sierra's dovetailing of formalism and politics in that piece, but not all of the work follows through the uncertain implications it sets up. While I don't believe that the artist has an obligation to control the interpretation of his work, he does, to my mind, have an obligation to those people he uses within it. He might argue that they are being paid for the job, and that it is sufficient comment that they are prepared to accept the humiliation of doing it for such paltry sums. That is not argument enough, when the actions must surely leave some mental or physical scars.

By provoking these situations he becomes complicit with the very economic flow he is trying to attack. The trouble with Sierra is that he doesn't disrupt the flow enough. Am I too cosy a liberal to suggest that the project might gain from following through the implications of the interventions? I understand that the action works like a momentary flourish, but I need to know its consequences.

The tattoo on the prostitute's back will stay with her for the rest of her (probably short) life. Its permanence works like an artist's signature. And a signature for me is a contractual, ongoing obligation. But the artist has long since left the scene, and his tragic human canvas almost certainly will not be seen again.

? Santiago Sierra's Closure (Part 1) remains at the Lisson Gallery, 29 Bell Street, NW1 (020 7724 2739), until 10 October. Part 2 runs from 16 October to 6 November. Documentation of Displacement of a Cacerolada will be included in the group show 20 Million Mexicans Can't be Wrong at the South London Gallery, 65 Peckham Road, SE5 (020 7703 6120), from tomorrow until 17 November.

Danger: artist at work

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