SANTIAGO SIERRA IS FRESH AND MARINA ABRAMOVIC IS TIRED: A BRIEF EXPLANATION
There is a similarity in the sort of performance constraints used by contemporary artists Sierra and Abramovic: a specifed duration in which a body will be in a certain space and perform a certain action -- often longer than is considered comfortable, usually without much talking, often sitting, or standing, or doing fairly simple things. Abramovic performs her own work, sometimes with collaborators. Or sometimes her work is re-performed by dancers. Usually thin people in art galleries. The conditions of these relations are rarely made explicit – how much the performers are paid, the conditions of the contract, and so forth. Her whole apparatus is cloaked in a sort of phenomenologo-mysticism - presence, reduction to experience, epoqué, the body, its boundaries, its potentiality.
Sierra, on the other hand, rarely performs his own pieces. He hires poor people to be in his work, often immigrants, people who are desperate for money. He makes the economic relation between himself and his performers explicit by including the term 'remunerated person' in the titles of his pieces and usually noting how much he has paid the person in the description of a work.
Abramovic gallivants her subjectivity around like it is something special, like something transcendent is happening in her pieces. When you sit across a table from her, it will be categorically unlike any other time you have sat across from someone, because she is an Artist. What goes unstated is the reliance of her work and her special artistic subjectivity upon a range of other unannounced performers, namely cops. In her performance of The Artist is Present at the MOMA, security guards protected the space that had been taped off as part of the 'art.' If anyone stepped into this space, they would be tackled by the 'security' mercenaries, which happened on numerous occasions. The presence of the security guards, their performance in the protection of the commodity form of art, was framed as outside the piece, an externality to the constraints of the performance. This allowed viewers to have mystical connections, to feel Abramovic's energy, to bracket the social world and be present with 'Art.'
Sierra deliberately undermines the performance of some kind of special artistic subjectivity and the fantasy of being able to bracket broader social relations from the aesthetic experience. He offers whatever subjectivities – the man on the street, the worker, the immigrant, the impoverished, the mass of faces, the mass of fesh – instead of the Artist. Rather than feeling an unadulterated 'presence,' Sierra's viewers are more likely to be profoundly ashamed, to be disgusted with themselves and art galleries which enable situations of humiliatingly useless toil. Sierra's work reminds its audience that that they are in culture, that they are in capitalism traversed by its racialized logics. Don't think that an art gallery is any different a sweatshop, a brothel, a marketing frm. Here as elsewhere, we are faced with the logic of capital and its demands on our bodies, our time, our lives.
We don't get anywhere by leaving, by trying to go to somewhere else, to some special or alternative space. This is a trap. To think that we have left, that we are in an autonomous domain is a fantasy. The logics (of capital, of race, of gender) will surface. These forces are not invincible, and our lives are full of moments of communization, of being together, of singularity. But let us be wary. Let us be vigilant. Rather than leaving, let us try to be here, be present – with security guards, pointless jobs, commodities, war. Let us watch bodies face the humiliatingly useless conditions of work. Anti-utopia. Presence sans mysticism. Presence avec disgust. May the new world emerge from the collective retching of our nausea.
by K Olive McKeon
