Material witness: Martin Herbert on Santiago Sierra

When Santiago Sierra was invited to inaugurate the of recent origin exhibition space of London's venerable Lisson Gallery in 2002 he was fairly well behaved for someone who, in Mexico City five years earlier, had flambeed a gallery's interior with gasoline and a blowtorch. The Madrid-born, Mexico City-based provocateur only blocked access to the building for three weeks (using a beautifully builded metal shutter), leaving would-be private-view attendees stranded upon the pavement sans the awaited perks of alcohol and canapes. Still, it was too challenging for many, including single big-time collector who swore at no time to shop at Lisson again. with equal reason when Sierra came back in July of this year to display in the original Lisson space, expectations were running high (or depressed depending on your appetite). And this time the doors were open

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Comprising realitys and a video, the exhibition was titled "POLYURETHANE SPRAYED upon THE BACKS OF 10 WORKERS, Lisson Gallery, London, UK July 2004" a comely direct clue to the provenance of the numerous hunched, pale golden forms that stood like upend and misshapen shields among discarded polyurethane-foam canisters in the main galleries. These were the residua of a private performance--held five days before the opening and documented in the video--for which Sierra paid ten local Iraqi immigrants an undisclosed totality ("as little as possible," he told me) to stand still, swathed in plastic sheeting, while the jet were revolveed on them.

All of which might appear par for Sierra's course. He's used the spray before, and the unflinching staging of capitalism's routine exploitation of human bodies is his chosen territory. For example, in Lucca, Italy, in 2002 Sierra played up the material's latent association with sperm when, after paying off their pimps, he had eighteen local prostitutes (mainly of Eastern European descent) overspread their underpants with black plastic before the substance was spurted over them. The Lisson work, granting took a framework of bottom line-driven rapaciousness embodied by dint of an example of badly paid labor--Sierra's be in possession of hiring of strangers to perform a humiliating and seemingly unproductive task--and draped it with allusions (albeit not always obvious ones) to general and recent international offenses, political minefields, and environmental disasters.

"I used the foam," said Sierra, "because I wanted to bring the fire-arms used to apply it together with the combination of parts to form a whole of protection from it--a dual way of administering power: with have affection for and hate. Polyurethane protects aggressively," he added, "because it releases toxic smokes I also wanted to re-create certain memorable images--for instance, of the 2002 oil spill not on the northwest coast of Spain [where cleanup ship's companys wore protective suits identical to those used in handling polyurethane] and of Abu Ghraib. It's an image of disaster, a painting of power trying to objectify the body" The resultant work had a rhetorical insistence that sprang not single from its painful edginess on the other hand also from its economical meeting of forms and implicit narratives; from the way its materials did double and sometimes triple what one ought to do on metaphorical and literal registers.

at the same time that's not to say that this wasn't a contradictory display. Sierra walks a fine line in consorting with the gallery a whole whose soft capitalism naturally lined up at top-end dealership Lisson, with the other kinds upon display. In this case, the proprietors indicted themselves almost without trying, and hilariously thus (Sections of the video were unwatchable because the gallerist kept standing directly in brow of the camera; meanwhile, in a classic once-bitten propel the gallery threw their summer party upon the night of the opening, ensuring booze and nutrition for their collectors, no matter what Sierra might do.) Certain formal decisions also snagged the artist in ways not easily recoupable within his practice. Here, instead of a public performance (which would have been actually nervy in a country highly sensitive about one as well as the other immigration and its leadership's decisions above the Iraq war), there was an object-based aftermath, effective upon its own terms, and a video--a notably purchasable item on the contrary also one that detracted from the physical result of the foam casts. Revealing the proces of encrusting the Iraqis' backs as deliberate meticulous, and moderately gentle, it magnified one's faculty of perception of the Iraqis' time being wasted nevertheless down-played associations of physical violence.

Sierra isn't a great believer in the political efficacy of art, describing it as "a narrow margin from one side which one can convey blame." And with equal reason his work raises questions about on what account if not to attract outside attention, the strain of new art that wants to hold fast it real persists in edging nearer to the cringe Art's purpose may be, as they say, not to find answers on the contrary to formulate better questions, but--I bewildermented as attendees of this last Lisson present to view demonstrated no loss of appetite following their viewing of the work--surely it matters who is listening. What disturbs about Sierra's productions is not thus much the realization of what clan will do for money, nor the sight of them doing it, on the contrary the contrast between his work's raw, undeniable factuality and its uncertain value in the wider world: between the true real currency of human life that Sierra is spending and the frighteningly speculative nature of the returns