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Santiago Sierra who, who has created projects such as Sechs Menschen, die für das Sitzen in Pappkartons nicht bezahlt werden dürfen (Six People Who Are not Allowed to Be Paid for Sitting in Cardboard Boxes), has a similarity to Tino Sehgal’s “Constructed Situations” has been informative to my practice. Sierra provides a significantly meaningful artwork which function to make viewer feel a sense of unease because their work ‘acknowledges the impossibility of a “microtopia” and instead sustains a tension’ (p110, Bishop, 2015). Stefan Heidenreich takes this argument further by suggesting that Sierra’s pieces create a dualism in their practice because they ignite a curiosity in the viewer to see something from outside of their comfort zone, creating an impulse within them to stay and watch, whilst at the same time, feeling the urge to leave because what they see ‘trigger(s) a private discomfort’ (2001) and therefore threatens their “microtopia”.

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This can be seen in Sierra’s remake of ‘group of persons facing the wall and person facing into a corner’ (2008) (Figure 1), displayed in the Tate, where a line of homeless women stood facing a blank brick wall with their backs to the audience. This piece created some controversy because of its use of contrast between the homeless women seemingly forced to stand ridged facing the wall, whilst the wealthy visitors to the Tate walked past, viewing them as a piece of art, rather than human beings. It forced the viewers to acknowledge how they act when walking past homeless people in the streets- do they ignore them too? The piece was a reflexion of the actions of the visitors to homelessness and created an uncomfortable and unsettling ‘portrait of themselves’ (Tate, 2008) which they were forced to face.  Sierra has been heavily criticized for its ‘unethical, exploitative or authoritative’ nature (Montenegro, n.d.) however the artists practice is contextually emotive and significant because it consciously extends to the rubric of political art, thus there are ‘poetics as well as a politics’ (Searle, 2004) to each piece suggesting how the controversy is the epicentre of the practice and not an external after thought. Sierra, who arguably creates “Constructed Situations” have been informative to my practice as a form of socially engaged art where each of my works have a carefully considered layered set of reflections. This is because each affinity between the multiple complex issues I address are integral to my work, thus each of my “Constructed Situations” have progressively developed into the next “Constructed Situation”.

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References

1. Bishop, C. 2015. Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. In: Beshty, W. ed. Documents of Contemporary Art: Ethics. London: Whitechapel Gallery, pp.109-113.

2. Heidenreich, S. 2001. Santiago Sierra. Frieze. [Online].  03 March, 57. Available from: https://www.frieze.com/article/santiago-sierra [Accessed 17 April 2021].

3. Montenegro, A. [n.d]. Locating work in Santiago Sierra’s artistic practice. Ephemera Journal. 13(1), p99-115.

4. Searle, A. 2004. Buried Alive. The Guardian. [Online]. 13 July. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2004/jul/13/1 [Accessed 17 April 2021].

5. Sierra, S. 2000. Sechs Menschen, die für das Sitzen in Pappkartons nicht bezahlt werden dürfen (Six People Who Are not Allowed to Be Paid for Sitting in Cardboard Boxes). [Performance art]. At Berlin: Kunst-Werke.

6. Sierra, S. 2008. Remake of ‘group of persons facing the wall and person facing into a corner’. [Performance art]. At London: Tate Modern. 

7. Tate. 2008. Santiago Sierra: Performance and Controversy. Tate [Online]. Available from: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/santiago-sierra-6878/santiago-sierra-performance-and-controversy [Accessed 17 April 2021].

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