Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.02.2012, Qupperneq 10

10
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 2 — 2012
Spanish artist Santiago Sierra
brings with him a giant NO to Reyk-
javík. It's the main piece of the
‘NO: Global Tour,’ which has finally
reached Reykjavík. It's simply two
giant letters, N and O, each twice
the size of a grown man, that travel
the world, to places where there is
a reason for saying NO. “It works
perfectly in every context. It's like a
magnetic field. It attracts attention
and attracts its own context,” San-
tiago tells me when we sit down at
Hafnarhúsið, which will host his ex-
hibition until April 15. “This island
had a silent revolution. People were
saying no to a lot of things,” he con-
tinues and when I tell him that per-
haps the main anti-establishment
website during the protest was
called “The Daily No” (Dagblaðið
Nei.), he smiles and says: "Perfect."
While he's now bringing us a giant No,
Sierra has made a career out of making
people say yes to the strangest requests,
often using money to persuade people
to do things that most of us would al-
ways say no to. There are almost fifty
videos and photographs of his work at
the exhibition (and also on santiago-
sierra.com) and often the description of
the work says it all:
Eight people paid to remain inside card-
board boxes in Guatemala.
Sixty-eight people paid to block a mu-
seum entrance in South-Korea.
Veterans of the wars of Afghanistan, Iraq
and Northern Ireland facing the corner
in a Manchester gallery.
Ten inch line shaved on the heads of two
junkies who received a shot of heroin as
payment in Puerto Rico.
Ten black men penetrate 10 white men.
Six unemployed young men from Old
Havana were hired for $30 in exchange
for being tattooed.
Ten people paid to masturbate in Ha-
vana, Cuba.
And in Iceland he's looking for a
bank employee with a guilt complex,
but when we met nobody had applied
yet. “All he has to do is stand facing a
corner, just like in detention,” Santiago
says.
THE ARM OF LIFE
For him this is all a way to make art
connect with real life. “To pay people
is nothing new, it's always being done.
When you enter an art gallery a lot of
people have been there, cleaning, hang-
ing up lights, selling tickets, getting
things ready. Art is part of the world
and everybody participates, whether
they are inside the gallery or not," he
says. He mentions a piece that illus-
trates this, described as "A worker’s
arm passing through the ceiling of an
art space from a dwelling.” Says San-
tiago: “Behind every work of art there
is life and in that case, the life was the
people living above the art museum.
There is always some connection, the
people at the museum are no different
to those outside it."
This is something most people will
agree on, but what about exploiting
people for art–is that any better than
exploiting them for capitalism?
"We don't hire people forever, just
for a day. I'm trying to make things
look worse than they are. And what
we're doing is symbolic—but I also live
in the capitalist world, I have to sell my
art. In Cuba I paid men 30 dollars to
masturbate—30 dollars are a decent
monthly wage in Cuba."
But isn't that the same argument
Western companies use when they pay
people much less, say, in Chinese facto-
ries then in Western ones, that they're
still getting better paid then the average
Chinese farmworker? "If I pay more I'll
look like a good person—but that is not
the purpose of my work, to make my-
self look like a good person. It's to talk
about how things are, which is why I
cannot pay with equality or fairly."
PAID HUMILIATION
And the amount of pay is actually
crucial to many of his works. Some-
times the subjects realise this. One of
the pieces is described thusly: "Two
women took turns during a week, for
three hours each day, tied down from
their ankles to a wooden block. They
were paid 5.000 pesetas an hour, some
$24, the equivalent to the fixed price
for sexual services in the streets of this
zone. One of them, aware of the pos-
sible commercial workings of the piece,
requested, as a condition for doing the
job, 10% of the profits the artist might
receive."
And sometimes the artist puts the
words in their mouth, as he did when
he hired a beggar in Birmingham to say
the following words to the video cam-
era: "My participation in this project
could generate a $72.000 profit. I am
paid $5."
Yet, what is the justification for get-
ting people to humiliate themselves for
the sake of art? "This is very common.
To feel humiliated working—to work
is humiliation in itself," he says. "You
have to convince yourself that what
you're doing is wonderful, meaning-
ful... maybe for you it's terrible to mas-
turbate in front of a camera, but others
do far worse things and call it work."
Does that apply to Santiago’s work?
"I'm not a worker, I haven't worked
since 1995. I'm not working. A person
who's working has to depend on a sal-
ary, has to work to make somebody else
rich, and that is humiliating. I think
that the dictatorship is the workplace.
The only way is to find a collaborative
system, with equality. You have a boss,
there is a structure there and exploita-
tion, even if we have different ways of
hiding it."
And how does he manage not to
work? "It's all about organisation, to
work for oneself instead of having a
boss to answer to. Those who work
manual labour could structure their
work so that they take turns. There re-
ally isn't that much work to be done, it
just has to be evenly distributed. Some
call it anarchism, but I think it's just
about doing what's right."
So I ask him if he is doing what’s
right. "I try to, with my ideas and what
I do,” he says. “But I live in this society
and you don't always have a choice. But
the goal is always to do right and be true
to myself."
MEDIA DISTORTION
But how do others feel about his work?
"I often get criticised in the media. Not
because of the works, but because the
media has a preconception of what they
should say. And they are not always in-
dependent; there are often advertisers
and owners to answer to. And the me-
dia often creates hype around my work
when there is none, when everything
is peaceful around the exhibition they
make up a drama. Which is a shame, I
want to have a dialogue with the media,
but it's not going too well."
But outside the mainstream the
reaction is different. "I find that inde-
pendent media are the best—bloggers
etc. There I find voices that I connect to.
And the people that come to my shows
are well educated and they understand.
That's not the problem but the distor-
tion in the media," he says, leaving
The Grapevine very nervous that it
will somehow distort his work and his
words.
Work Is Humiliation
Santiago Sierra comes to Iceland and brings a giant NO with him
Art | Of the political kind
Words
Ásgeir H. Ingólfsson
Photography
Alísa Kalyanova
You have to
convince yourself
that what you're
doing is wonderful,
meaningful...
THE NUMBER 1 MUSIC STORE
IN EUROPE ACCORDING TO
LONELY PLANET
SKÓLAVÖRÐUSTÍG 15, 101 REYKJAVÍK AND HARPA CONCERT HALL