Ivana Dizdar
Columbia University
Abstract
Spanish artist Santiago Sierra pays groups of people — notably those in socioeconomically precarious positions, such as illegal immigrants, homeless people, unemployed laborers, drug addicts, and sex workers — to enact tedious, physically demanding, painful, dangerous, or humiliating tasks. In 2000, he hired four heroin-addicted sex workers to sit in a row and get a line tattooed across their backs. Aptly titled 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People, the piece was performed for a live audience at Salamanca’s El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo. In exchange for their participation in the performance, each sex worker received 12,000 pesetas: the price of a single shot of heroin.
Taking 160 cm Line as its focus, this paper considers Sierra’s practice and its proximity to practices of torture. The artist has been described as both socially-minded and abusive, as well as various corresponding and equally antithetical terms, attesting to the ethically complex nature of his practice. This paper concentrates on Sierra’s performances, the artist and his subjects, and constitutions of consent, agency, and power in the artist’s work. Using Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain as a primary theoretical source on torture, I argue that Sierra’s practice occupies a grey zone between art and torture, problematizing the distinction between the two.
The paper outlines, first, the ways in which Sierra’s practice diverges from the domain of torture through site, legal contracts, transparency, visibility, documentation, intention, adherence to certain social standards, and the non-limitation of freedom. Second — through considerations of power and subordination, the infliction of pain, psychological trauma, and the use or abuse of precarious life — the paper addresses Sierra’s work as it aligns with practice of torture. Occupying the slight but nevertheless existent margin where art and torture meet, Sierra’s work complicates the limits of art. If art shouldn’t approach torture, how can art reconcile this and its freedom?
Toward Art, Toward Torture:
Drawing the Line in the Work of Santiago Sierra
Four black chairs have been pushed against a white wall in the high-contrast video. All but one are occupied: three women sit as though waiting for something. They converse, perhaps somewhat nervously. As a fourth woman walks in and takes a seat, the others look around for a brief moment until their eyes settle on something beyond the scope of our vision, beyond the frame. We soon find out what: a tall figure in black, almost like a silhouette, walks into the shot holding what appears to be a long, slender metal rod. The positioning of the women makes the rod look less like an innocuous tool and more like an instrument to be used on someone. There is a looming sense of threat until, unexpectedly, all four women let out a simultaneous laugh. On closer inspection, though, we notice that one is rocking back and forth, another fretfully scratches her arms, and a third has placed her hand on her stomach as the look on her face shifts to an expression of uneasy anticipation. The laugh, we might presume, has been elicited by tension or anxiety.
Instructed by the figure in black, the women turn their backs to the camera and remove their tops. Now naked from the waist up, they straddle the chairs in a row, their faces against the wall. More people, most also dressed in black, now walk in and out of the frame, directing and adjusting the women as they settle into place. Two men, one bald and one in a leather jacket, and a woman in red extend a measuring tape and stretch it across the women’s backs, which are now curved, making the women appear smaller than before (Fig. 1). Although we cannot discern the men’s words, they are clearly discussing measurements, as though about to conduct a sinister experiment. According to their measurements, they make marks on the women’s skin. Next, the woman in red pulls up a portable table, topped with utensils, gauze, and a spray bottle. She will spend the next half hour tattooing a line across the women’s backs.
Figure 1. Santiago Sierra, Línea de 160 cm tatuada sobre 4 personas (160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People), 2000, El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo, Salamanca, Spain, still image from 63min. performance documentation video. Courtesy Estudio Santiago Sierra, Madrid.
This action constitutes a work by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, aptly titled 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People, which was performed and filmed in 2000 at El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo in Salamanca, Spain (Fig. 2). We learn that the women are sex workers with heroin addictions, whom the artist has hired to receive tattoos in a gallery in exchange for the price of a single shot of the narcotic. The artist comments that while the sex workers usually “charge 2,000 or 3,000 pesetas, between 15 and 17 dollars, for fellatio… the price of a shot of heroin is around 12,000 pesetas, about 67 dollars.”[1] They now earn that amount in a half-hour sitting, during which they acquire a new and permanent mark on their bodies.
Figure 2. Santiago Sierra, Línea de 160 cm tatuada sobre 4 personas (160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People), 2000, El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo, Salamanca, Spain, still image from 63min. performance documentation video. Courtesy Estudio Santiago Sierra, Madrid.
In other works, too, Sierra pays groups of people—notably those in socioeconomically precarious positions, such as illegal immigrants, homeless people, and unemployed laborers—to enact tedious, physically demanding, painful, dangerous, or humiliating tasks. The artist has been described as controversial, polemic, provoking, radical, and extreme—and, more interestingly, as both socially minded and abusive, and a host of equally antithetical terms.[2] These descriptions attest to the ethically complex nature of his practice.
160 cm Line recalls the torture in Franz Kafka’s short story In the Penal Colony.[3] In the story, people living in a penal colony have been routinely condemned for failing to conduct a relatively trivial task, such as saluting their commander in the appropriate fashion. Without knowing what will happen to them—as the officer speaks French and they do not—they are taken to be tortured by an apparatus that drills into their backs, impressing their sentence into their bodies. A glass wall allows anyone to watch as the victims bleed to death. Even the harrow, the part of the machine that holds the needle, is made of glass, so as not to obstruct the view of the torture from any angle. In Sierra’s work, meanwhile, it is sex workers specifically whose backs are inscribed: the artist marks bodies already marked by stigma, permanently labeling and grouping them together. It is as though the women have committed a crime, and the artist is impressing a visual sentence, or life sentence, onto their bodies. Why are the sex workers in 160 cm Line being punished? What is their crime? The use of a needle, which penetrates their skin to deposit ink, attests to a primary offense: the injection of heroin.
In this article, I consider how Sierra’s work, especially 160 cm Line, both differs from and aligns with practices of torture. I turn to Elaine Scarry’s discussion of torture in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, referring to her analysis of the dichotomy between civilization (where art belongs) and decivilization (where torture belongs). Civilization and decivilization, according to Scarry, appear on the same path but move in opposite directions. They cannot coexist: “the very existence of each requires the other’s elimination.”[4] However, as Scarry delineates, civilization can be reversed into decivilization. She provides, among others, the examples of medicine and law. Medicine and medical research can be used to save lives or, on the other hand, to inflict suffering in the context of torture. Similarly, law can be employed in the service of torture—for instance, when punishment is used to generate evidence.[5] Although Scarry claims these two states are distinct and “mutually exclusive,”[6] she complicates this notion by describing a particular moment wherein “the distance separating them is less, a moment in which they are not yet radically distinct but are only in the process of distinguishing themselves.”[7]
It is this moment that interests me and to which, I will argue, Sierra’s work relates. If, as Scarry claims, there exists the potential for a reversal of civilization, then art too has the capacity, as do medicine and law, to move in the opposite direction: from civilization to decivilization. Sierra plays with this potential, deliberately positioning his work in a moment in which civilization and decivilization are “not yet radically distinct.”[8] The artist occupies this complex conceptual space, problematizing the distinction between art and torture.
Toward Art
The differences between Sierra’s art practice and practices of torture must not be disregarded. Perhaps the most obvious element that distinguishes Sierra’s work from the realm of torture proper is that of site. Scarry claims that the room, a protective extension of the body, becomes a weapon in the context of torture. The room’s function as a shelter, a place of safety, is annihilated in the service of destruction: it is decivilized and converted “into an agent of pain.”[9] In 160 cm Line, the women are not directly threatened by the space they occupy and may leave at the expense of their impending compensation. Unlike the torture room, a space of danger and captivity, the museum is generally a safe place—a culturally recognized and regulated institution with legal jurisdiction, rules, insurance, medical access, and general adherence to public standards of propriety.
It is not merely the physical location that serves as Sierra’s site: the artist also addresses local and otherwise relevant sociopolitical conditions, making much of his work distinctly site-specific. In museums throughout the United States, he has shown American veterans of the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam wars standing for hours in gallery corners, their backs to the audience (2013); he did the same in a Bogotá gallery with veterans of the Colombian conflict (2011). In 245 Cubic Meters, the artist constructed a gas chamber inside a former synagogue in Pulheim, Germany (2006). The list of projects goes on, each more disturbing than the last.
As troubling as a performance may be, however, the artist always defines its conditions and makes them clear to the performer-participants. Torture often involves long-lasting or permanent detention and confinement; moreover, the length of detention is usually indefinite or undisclosed to detainees.[10] This, in and of itself, is a form of psychological torture. Sierra’s works, on the other hand, encompass planned and transparently outlined temporal delineations and do not constitute true detention or even confinement. The freedom of the sex workers in 160 cm Line is not threatened: reevaluating or withdrawing her initial commitment to the artist, a woman may walk away from the scene with no (new) back tattoo, risking only the loss of financial compensation. Her participation is temporary and conditional on her continual commitment to stay and to carry on with the instructions she initially accepted.
While, per Scarry, torture does not involve consent, Sierra’s subjects consent to participating in his performances.[11] The artist communicates transparently with the participants, not only regarding performance duration but also with respect to the forthcoming instructions, demands, actions, conditions, and compensation. The participants acknowledge the parameters he defines and agree to participate in exchange for some form of compensation. In fact, Sierra’s works employ legal contracts and are multi-consensual activities, involving the consent of several parties: the artist, the museum or gallery, and the participant-performers.
Sierra’s performances also diverge from torture in their intention. Sierra’s objective—artistic, conceptual, and above all critical—is antithetical to the torturer’s objectives, one of which, widely acknowledged by political scholars, is the extraction of information through interrogation.[12] Such extraction, according to Scarry, actually serves as a pretense for other aims: she notes that the true objective of interrogation is the exertion of power, humiliation, and destruction.[13] Sierra has no desire for information; instead, his outrageous instructions to his subjects, which result in outrageous performances, contribute to artistic production, social commentary, or the relaying of some counter-narrative—perhaps even an alternate route (or detour) to rectification.
In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2012, Sierra commented, “Art is always a good friend of power, and has always been very helpful in maintaining the structures of power. But in my case, it’s not what I pretend to do. I’m not obsessed with being an activist because while I admire activists, I can change nothing. But I can talk—this is something that not everybody can do.”[14] His intent, then, relates to the raising of consciousness, and perhaps also to a desire to provoke potentially concrete responses. If this is true, then his work may align with a utilitarian approach: the artist has a greater good in mind when he puts his performer-participants, as well as his viewers, in uncomfortable or distressing situations.
In Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, Claire Bishop compares Sierra to Rirkrit Tiravanija, who in 1992 famously turned a New York gallery into an open house and served visitors free meals of rice and curry (Fig. 3).[15] Unlike Tiravanija, who fosters supposed social inclusion, constructing a kind of “microtopia,” Sierra produces and foregrounds blatantly asymmetrical social situations that deliberately generate tension. Sierra’s work, Bishop argues, holds greater democratic potential precisely because it does not attempt to reconcile social divisions and instead functions as an agent of productive antagonism, which allows for conflict and change.[16] “While Tiravanija celebrates the gift,” Bishop writes, “Sierra knows that there’s no such thing as a free meal: everything and everyone has a price.”[17]
Figure 3. Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 1992 (free), 1992, 303 Gallery, New York, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York.
Beyond its potential social value, Sierra’s work differs from torture on a material level: it produces and preserves evidence. Whereas perpetrators of torture seek to destroy evidence—those objects, spaces, and bodies that may signal what has occurred—Sierra exhibits and documents his performances, and then makes his documentation available for further exhibition.[18] The artist recorded 160 cm Line on video: it is available for free viewing on YouTube and has been included in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions.[19] Not only do we witness the actions and conditions of Sierra’s performances but we are also given access to participants’ comments and expressions: in 160 cm Line, the women speak among themselves throughout the piece, freely discussing their experience. The fact of their speech is in contrast to torture, which, as Scarry argues, attests to an inherent incompatibility between language and pain: language cannot properly express or explicate pain because pain is “language-destroying.”[20] It is not Sierra’s intention to destroy his subjects’ capacity for language, nor does he attempt to prevent their expression of pain or anything else.
In torture, the destruction of language aids the destruction of evidence, but the opposite is also true. Judith Butler discusses the fact that countless poems written by Guantánamo Bay detainees in the early 2000s were destroyed by the military, while only a couple dozen survived and were eventually published.[21] Their disappearance demonstrates that, in the context of torture, even if the subject’s capacity for language and expression exists, the destruction of evidence will—in most cases—extinguish it. The perpetrators of torture not only destroy but also manipulate or produce evidence: Butler is particularly concerned with the way events and conditions are positioned or framed through, for instance, photography. The photograph, through its very existence, through its inclusions and exclusions, presents a specific perspective: “in framing reality, the photograph has already determined what will count within the frame—and this act of delimitation is surely interpretive.”[22] Sierra, on the other hand, documents his performances straightforwardly, aligning the camera with the perspective of a gallery visitor, refraining from cutting and editing. Moreover, he reproduces and shares the performances in multiple forms, including video, photography, and texts that describe the performances matter-of-factly.
In some ways, however, Sierra’s documentation may itself be problematic. The fact that the artist sells these materials is complex and troubling: while his subjects endure humiliation, exertion, or pain over a limited period of time, for which they are minimally (or not at all) compensated, Sierra continues to profit from their actions years—even decades—later.
Toward Torture
The sex workers in 160 cm Line each receive a tattoo, an unavoidably painful experience: a needle pierces the skin, causing a sharp sensation that is especially agonizing on certain areas of the body, such as the spine.[23] Human hurt, according to Scarry, has always held an important place in the formation of civilization and the regression into decivilization. The beginning of civilization was marked by a significant change with respect to pain: in the context of sacrificial rituals, human hurt was replaced by animal hurt and, later, by no hurt.[24] But in torture this progression reverses: there is a return to hurt, to human hurt—a manifestation of decivilization.[25]
Furthermore, Scarry argues that torture possesses a structure consisting of three simultaneous parts: the infliction of pain, the objectification of that pain, and the conversion of the victim’s pain into the perpetrator’s power.[26] These three elements, continually reflected in Sierra’s work, also appear in 160 cm Line. First, pain is a necessary condition of the work: the artist literally inflicts pain on the sex workers in order to realize his project. The work requires the use of a weapon—the tattoo needle, that “external agent of pain” that penetrates the women’s skin—and involves the production of a wound, “bodily damage” in the form of a tattooed line on each woman’s back.[27] There exists an immense contrast between what the sex workers feel and what the artist feels: they, the subjects, are in physical pain while he, the perpetrator of their pain, “is utterly without pain.”[28] Second, the work objectifies the women’s pain: Sierra does not push their pain into invisibility, but renders it deliberately and explicitly visible, evoking public torture. The artist makes visible, in Scarry’s words, that which is “usually private and incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of the sufferer’s body.”[29] Third, in Sierra’s work, as in the context of torture, the subjects’ pain is tacitly understood as the power of the perpetrator: one naturally interprets the women’s pain as an expression of Sierra’s implicit dominance and control.[30]
In Sierra’s work, power comes in many forms, some of its exertions preceding pain. A preliminary manifestation of control within the artist’s performances entails the organization of bodies.[31] Sierra not only arranges his subjects’ bodies in space but also determines their positioning in relation to one another and to museum or gallery visitors. In 160 cm Line, the women are pushed against the wall, their faces away from the center of the room, with limited mobility and opportunity to look around and see what is behind them; meanwhile, visitors may observe them from almost any angle, fixing their gaze on their naked torsos. In Sierra’s work, just as in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, there exists what Michel Foucault refers to as “dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference” between the observer and the observed.[32]
We might be tempted to believe that, in this situation, power rests fully with the artist and the viewers. However, Foucault argues that the “efficiency of power, its constraining force [has], in a sense, passed over to the other side—to the side of its surface of application.”[33] In accordance with Foucault, we might say that the sex workers in 160 cm Line play a dual role in their subjection—that of the subjected but also that of key players in their own subjection.[34]
In his essay The Law of Genre, Jacques Derrida discusses the same kind of transfer of power. He offers an analysis of Maurice Blanchot’s story La Folie du jour, in which two dictatorial doctors interrogate the protagonist, demanding from him a detailed account of his day. The protagonist, also the story’s narrator, finds himself in what Derrida describes as a “panoptic” situation in which a fascinating paradox arises.[35] He is the doctors’ subject, subjected to their authority and power; and yet, as a subject, he assumes power, which they now must draw from him. They depend on him. In Blanchot’s story, the protagonist relates:
They interpellated my story: Speak! And it placed itself at their service. In haste, I stripped myself of myself. I distributed my blood, my privacy among them, I offered them the universe, I brought them forth to the light of day. Under their unblinking gaze, I became a water drop, an ink blot. I was shrinking into them, I was held entirely in their view and when, finally, I no longer had anything but my perfect nullity present and no longer had anything to see, they, too, ceased to see me, most annoyed, they rose, shouting: Well, where are you?[36]
Although this transfer of power occurs in the context of subjection, it is certainly not favorable for the subjected. Unequal circumstances, intertwined with the problems of privilege and precarity, make subjection possible in the first place. Foucault lists a number of conditions that we can recognize in Sierra, including “status” and the “accumulation of profits.”[37] Other descriptions pertain to the relationship or differences between Sierra and the women in 160 cm Line: “economic disparities,” “cultural differences,” and “differing positions within the process of production.”[38] In this game of power and transference, Sierra and the women become partners in the Foucauldian sense: theirs is a relationship in which, ultimately, one individual exercises power over others.[39]
Drawing from Foucault, Butler highlights a paradox of subjection, or a vicious circle, wherein the subject’s agency is the consequence of his or her subjection.[40] She argues that not only is the subject formed by the transfer of power entailed by the subjection but also that this transfer is a condition of the subject’s very existence.[41] Such dependency is one “we never chose,” but “that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency.”[42] Following Butler’s line of thinking, Sierra transfers his agency to the women in 160 cm Line, who become instruments of that agency during the process of their subordination. They are dispossessed of their own agency, which they must give up and, in turn, assume the agency Sierra gives them as their own.[43] Furthermore, the sex workers’ desire to survive, to live, is—as Butler would describe—“a pervasively exploitable desire.”[44] Sierra plays on their desire to obtain heroin, to fulfill a craving that, for them, may be tantamount to life. Their attitude seems to fall in line with Butler’s formulation: “I would rather exist in subordination than not exist.”[45]
Perhaps this is why the women in 160 cm Line agree to participate not only in Sierra’s work but in a public performance, one that evokes public displays of humiliation and the infliction of pain that characterize certain kinds of torture. We might recall the opening section of Discipline & Punish, in which Foucault describes the public torture of Robert-François Damiens—hanged, drawn, and quartered.[46] In her book, Scarry emphasizes spectacle’s central role in the violence of torture: torture, she says, is built on “repeated acts of display.”[47] In 160 cm Line, everyone plays a role: the artist, the perpetrator, impels the sex workers to participate in a painful activity, self-consciously hurting and humiliating the women at least in part for the sake of spectacle.[48]
What is in it for them? Sierra’s subjects clearly participate because they need whatever it is he offers in return. This premise is no different than from why most people work: out of necessity, to earn money, to support themselves, to live. Perhaps a more appropriate problem to consider is whether the participants consent because they have only worse, or nonexistent, alternatives—because they have to. If this is the case, we might interpret their consent as forced.
More precisely, the problem may not be whether the participants are able to choose freely but whether they are free agents to begin with. John Locke famously argued that, in order to be truly free, an agent must be able to exercise his or her preference. If that condition is not met, the agent acts out of necessity.[49] The women who participate in 160 cm Line, we can reasonably assume, would not opt to participate in Sierra’s performance under preferable conditions. Their substance addiction further complicates their agreement to participate: Locke contends that the ability to suspend one’s desires is inextricably tied to one’s freedom. Since the sex workers are guided by their desire for heroin, what the philosopher would call an absent good, the value of their consent may be questionable.[50] To quote an internet blogger who published a post titled “Santiago Sierra you are a cunt”:
This massive wanker pays the likes of drug addicted prostitutes enough money for their drug of choice to allow him [to] tattoo a foot long black line across their backs. Basically forever branding them as Junkies. When confronted about this sick, so called artwork, Sierra tells us that these participants have given their consent, therefore, leave him the fuck alone. How the hell he believes that these women are or were in any state of mind to consent leads me to believe he actually lives on Mars.[51]
The blog post points to Sierra’s use, or abuse, of his subjects’ precarious lives. The artist specifically seeks and employs people in socioeconomically precarious positions to participate in his works. He capitalizes on the participants’ disadvantages to compel them to participate and to meet his needs; in exchange for their “labor,” he offers small sums of money or other, invariably meager, compensation. While the artist is a financially stable, successful, well-respected, white European male, most of his subjects are struggling with little or no income and are possibly desperate people—most of them people of color.
Take, for example, the work Polyurethane Sprayed on the Backs of Ten Workers (2004). Ten men have been lined up against a wall. They stand remarkably still, as though they have been instructed—or threatened—not to move. A man in a facemask, hired by Sierra or possibly Sierra himself, approaches the men and sprays them from head to toe with polyurethane foam. As the material hardens, they become a multi-bodied entity, completely immobilized under a thick, heavy, and possibly toxic layer of foam. Although the men appear protected to an extent, it is only plastic bags that cover their heads; it is not difficult to imagine how this protective measure could lead to suffocation. The men are Iraqi immigrant workers, hired by the artist for a performance shown at London’s Lisson Gallery. The performance appears unlike what one would expect to find in a gallery, however, and instead evokes acts of torture committed in Abu Ghraib.
Like the Iraqi immigrant workers, many of Sierra’s participants have an unstable or nonexistent legal status, existing on the periphery of or beyond the law. The artist seems to choose his participants from those whose lives are, in the words of Giorgio Agamben, near or past “the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant.”[52] The women in 160 cm Line, we can suppose, are on the margins of society and lack social protection: they do not likely enjoy the same degree of societal support as those in more socially respected roles. Why are they, the heroin-addicted sex workers or the Iraqi immigrants, here in the first place? We can only imagine that severe circumstances have led them to a place where their paths cross Sierra’s. Their very misfortune makes them suitable candidates for his work: they are in a state of exception, included precisely by virtue of their “own exclusion” from mainstream society.[53]
In many of Sierra’s works, including Polyurethane and 160 cm Line, subjects must face a wall, their backs to the audience: the artist does not emphasize their individuality but rather renders them anonymous. Sierra’s preoccupation with the line as a motif further emphasizes the subjects’ de-individualization and anonymity: the artist orders his subjects to evoke lined up criminals or prisoners, prime examples of people legally stripped of agency. The artist tattoos a line on the sex workers, and on a row of young men in another iteration of 160 cm Line. In another work, performed at Tate Modern, he instructs a group of homeless women to stand in a line facing a wall (2002). Sierra’s participant-performers appear as categories, and although a museum viewer might be sympathetic to a general issue or a specific predicament, it is not the individual participants he or she grieves.
Additionally, we may question the degree to which the participants’ lives are acknowledged as such: as Butler notes, “specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living.”[54] Sierra actively seeks people in precarious positions in order to put them into even more precarious positions, thus Othering Others, exploiting the already exploited. Sierra opts for this approach to make a statement, instead of enabling the participants by compensating them for non-demeaning work or life-affirming activities. In the case of 160 cm Line, he enables only the sex workers’ addictions.
The alternative approach is taken by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn who has constructed several outdoor immersive sculptures, or built environments, meant to encourage communal contribution and engagement. The artist paid low-income South Bronx residents to help him build Gramsci Monument (2013), which was installed in the area, amid a block of housing projects. Years earlier, for Documenta XI, Hirschhorn created Bataille Monument (2002, Fig. 4) in a suburb of Kassel largely occupied by socioeconomically underprivileged Germans and Turks. Both projects included libraries, one a radio station, and one a bar, among various other public and shared social and intellectual spaces. Some criticized the projects for being “inappropriate and patronizing,”[55] and they indeed fall in line with the artist-as-savior phenomenon; yet they produced concrete (albeit temporary) positive effects in their respective communities and, in any case, resulted from an intent to uplift and empower.[56]
Figure 4. Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument (2002, Library), for Documenta XI, Kassel, 2002. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.
By contrast, Sierra employs Iraqi immigrants only to render them faceless, both figuratively and literally, under polyurethane foam. He hires the sex workers in 160 cm Line, only to give them a mark that has no use; it could, on the contrary, conceivably hinder them in their work. The women’s lives are doubly precarious: they are not only sex workers—arguably already subject to some form of exploitation in their daily lives—but also drug addicts, dependent on a substance that is harmful and possibly fatal.[57]
Drawing the Line
These performances maximize precarity for some, such as the women in 160 cm Line, and minimize it for others, such as Sierra. It is the women who enter a painful, potentially risky situation.[58] We might consider that, because the body is exhaustible, Sierra pushes the sex workers further along in the inevitable process of depletion. Certainly, the work involves extravasation: the women lose lymph and blood, giving more than time and energy. In another work, the artist paid low-income Cuban men twenty dollars each to masturbate and ejaculate on camera (2000), and the tapes were subsequently shown at a Havana gallery. Sierra is interested not only in using the body but also in extracting from it.
The bodily extraction in these works relates to what Julia Kristeva defines as the expulsion of an abject: no longer the subject but not an object either. Abjection entails a disregard or disruption of borders, of structure, of order: what is meant to be unseen is made visible, revealed, breaking down the boundary between inside and outside.[59] Scarry describes the collapsing of the same kind of boundary, an “almost obscene conflation of private and public,” as an integral aspect of physical pain.[60] In Sierra’s work, bodily fluids, waste, and residual matter—such as blood and sperm—are extracted from the (ruptured) body. The women in 160 cm Line endure the disruption of bodily margins precisely because they live on, or beyond, social margins: taking her lead from Mary Douglas, who contends that bodily and other margins are highly linked, Kristeva argues that abjection has always corresponded with the “social and symbolic order.”[61] Throughout the course of the performance, the women are pushed further beyond social margins by virtue of the visible abjection of their bodily secretion, their bleeding backs. Sierra’s work aligns with abject art, described by Hal Foster as art “drawn to the broken boundaries of the violated body.”[62]
An exhibition on participatory art at the Tate Modern in 2018 paired, in one gallery, video documentation of 160 cm Line and an installation replicating the table setup in Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0.[63] For her 1974 gallery performance, Abramović laid out a series of objects—including thorny roses, scissors, nails, metal chains, knives, and a gun—positioning herself, too, as an “object” and allowing viewers to treat her body as they wished. For several hours, the viewers did just that: they used the objects and manipulated the artist’s body, undressing her, cutting her. In such a context, what does it mean to have actual pain inflicted on a body? It may be a work of art, but it is always also something else: it is pain—enacted and felt, material and real.
When it comes to the real, Abramović’s and Sierra’s works go beyond what Foster describes as art that “rejects illusionism” and instead strives to “evoke the real as such.”[64] Foster cites Robert Gober and Kiki Smith (Fig. 5), whose sculptures—abject artworks—represent the damaged or violated body. The works of Abramović and Sierra already occupy the domain of the real: they put live bodies on display—some damaged to begin with, all subject to scrutiny and the potential of physical violation. Scarry notes that pain, for the sufferer, is undeniably real; whereas, for others, the sufferer’s pain remains unreal unless and until it is made visible.[65] The horror of pain is “redoubled, multiplied, and magnified in torture because instead of the person’s pain being subjectively real but un-objectified and invisible to all others, it is now hugely objectified, everywhere visible, as incontestably present in the external as in the internal world.”[66]
Figure 5. Kiki Smith, Untitled, 1992, wax and pigment, 19 ½ x 24 x 50 in. Courtesy Pace Gallery, New York.
Artwork that involves visible pain testifies to the instability of another boundary easily collapsed: the one between art and life. Rhythm 0 would not be the last time Abramović put herself at risk—she would do so in Rhythm 5 in 1974 and Rest Energy in 1980, among others. Nor was 160 cm Line the only time Sierra put at risk the bodies of others. This is the primary difference between the work of Abramović (and other artists such as Gina Pane and Chris Burden) and that of Sierra: self-inflicted or self-organized pain versus the infliction of physical discomfort or pain on the other.
In her book Artificial Hells, Bishop cites Oscar Bony’s La Familia Obrera (The Worker’s Family) as a precedent for contemporary art’s use of live human subjects.[67] In 1968, Bony hired a working-class Argentinian family to sit, eight hours a day, atop a plinth in a gallery.[68] The work spurred outrage. More recently, the artist commented that he himself could not place the work in a single, stable category—it was not simply performance or body art, per se—and that he considered its liminality important.[69] Both the inability to categorize the work and this liminality, Bishop writes, persist “in the critical queasiness that accompanies the exhibition of people in works of art today.”[70] A history of human exhibitions echoes in Bishop’s description of Sierra as an artist who creates “a kind of ethnographic realism.”[71]
In Sierra’s work, as in Bony’s, the use, or abuse, of the human body is essential. Liminality, categorical uncertainty, is essential too: Is it art? Is it torture? The infliction of physical pain on other people notably complicates Sierra’s as an art practice proper. This dynamic suggests a relationship, or possibly an overlap, between his work and practices of torture. Sierra’s position—or direction—on what Scarry calls the path of civilization and decivilization is an ambiguous one: always shifting, never stable. While his approaches and objectives differ from those of torture to varying degrees, we cannot draw a clear line that excludes the artist’s work from the domain of torture entirely.
Sierra’s work then, as I have argued, occupies the slim but nevertheless existent margin where art and torture meet. But what does it mean for a practice to occupy this strange, ambiguous place? What does it mean that the work exists, perhaps unresolvably, on the line between art and torture? Certainly, the artist tests the boundaries of art: Sierra’s work forces us to reconsider art’s capacity and its limitations, or its conceivably dangerous non-limitations. If a central task of civilization is to distinguish itself from decivilization, if works of art should not be acts of torture, how can we reconcile this and art’s freedom?
Endnotes
[1] Fabio Cavallucci and Carlos Jiménez, eds., Santiago Sierra, (Trento: Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, 2005), 164.
[2] See Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110 (Fall 2004) in contrast with Tom Eccles, quoted in Phoebe Hoban, “How Far Is Too Far?” in ARTnews 107, no. 7 (Summer 2018), http://www.artnews.com/2008/07/01/how-far-is-too-far/.
[3] Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony (London: Penguin, 2011).
[4] Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),166.
[5] Scarry, Body in Pain, 48–49.
[6] Scarry, Body in Pain, 166.
[7] Scarry, Body in Pain, 166.
[8] Scarry, Body in Pain, 166.
[9] Scarry, Body in Pain, 46.
[10] See Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
[11] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 28.
[12] Ibid., 41. See also McCoy’s A Question of Torture.
[13] Scarry, Body in Pain, 26.
[14] Santiago Sierra, interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews: Santiago Sierra, ed. Juan Albarrán and Francisco Javier San Martín (Logroño: Pepitas de calabaza, 2016), 219–220.
[15] Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 55–58.
[16] Bishop draws from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s writings on antagonism, as well as Rosalyn Deutsche’s work on antagonism as an essential aspect of democracy. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 72.
[17] Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 70.
[18] Scarry, Body in Pain, 18.
[19] In addition to the video documentation, Sierra’s performance was photographed. The prints are available for purchase through at least one of Sierra’s gallery representatives, Lisson in London, and an edition of ten was recently at auction on the online commercial art database Artsy.
[20] Scarry, Body in Pain, 26–27.
[21] Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2015), 65.
[22] Butler, Frames of War, 66–67.
[23] However, although pain is immeasurable, it is reasonable to assume that, because Sierra’s participants are free to walk away if they so choose, the participants’ pain is not intolerable. People get tattoos of their own free will, and pay to do so, every day. Sierra seems to be prodding, among other things, the line between tolerable and intolerable pain.
[24] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 169.
[25] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 168.
[26] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 59.
[27] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 21.
[28] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 41–42. The italics are mine.
[29] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 32.
[30] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 43–44.
[31] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 2012), 202.
[32] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 202.
[33] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 202.
[34] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 202–203.
[35] Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Glyph, no. 7 (Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1980), 224.
[36] Derrida, “Law of Genre,” 224.
[37] Derrida, “Law of Genre,” 344.
[38] Derrida, “Law of Genre,” 344.
[39] Derrida, “Law of Genre,” 337.
[40] Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 13.
[41] Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 2.
[42] Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 2.
[43] Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 6.
[44] Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 7.
[45] Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 7.
[46] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 2–6.
[47] Scarry, Body in Pain, 32. The italics are mine.
[48] Scarry, Body in Pain, 41–42.
[49] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Book II, Chapter XXI, § 8. Accessed online: J. W. Yolton (Ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (2013). doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198243861.book.1
[50] Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XXI, § 47.
[51] Brogan, “Santiago Sierra you are a cunt,” News from Nowhere, March 16, 2011, https://brogananneramm.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/santiago-sierra-you-are-a-cunt/.
[52] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 89.
[53] Agamben, Homo Sacer, 109.
[54] Butler, Frames of War, 1.
[55] Bishop commends Sierra’s for producing a productive antagonism lacking in Hirschhorn’s. Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 62.
[56] Whitney Kimball, “How Do People Feel About the Gramsci Monument, One Year Later?,” Artfcity, August 20, 2014, http://artfcity.com/2014/08/20/how-do-people-feel-about-the-gramsci-monument-one-year-later/.
[57] They are, of course, additionally precarious by virtue of their status as women. The scope of this essay does not allow me to go into depth about women and precarity, women and pain, or women and agency. I recommend Lois McNay’s Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
[58] “Tattoos: Understand risks and precautions,” Mayo Clinic, updated March 3, 2018, https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/tattoos-and-piercings/art-20045067.
[59] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3–4, 53.
[60] Scarry, Body in Pain, 61.
[61] Anthropologists have studied primitive societies’ use of religious rites and practices of purification—the prohibition of filth—to shape the separation, or exclusion, of certain social groups. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 65– 69.
[62] Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 152.
[63] The exhibition was titled The Art of Participation.
[64] Foster, Return of the Real, 152.
[65] Scarry, Body in Pain, 56.
[66] Scarry, Body in Pain, 56.
[67] Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London; New York: Verso, 2012), 117.
[68] Bishop, Artificial Hells, 113–117.
[69] Bishop, Artificial Hells, 117.
[70] Bishop, Artificial Hells, 117.
[71] Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 70.
Author Bio:
Ivana Dizdar is a scholar and artist whose work explores the intersections of art, politics, and law. She is a recipient of a PepsiCo Research Fellowship from the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. Recent appearances include talks at Princeton University, New York University, the University of Toronto, and the International Consortium for Asian and African Studies at INALCO, Paris. Her eponymous performance persona is a pseudo-liberal art world magnate and Founding Director & CEO of Ivana Dizdar Projects, a multi-million dollar commercial gallery franchise with locations in North America, East Asia, Western Europe, and Central Africa. She may be reached at info at ivanadizdar.com.
