‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to begin.'

Peter Brook, The Empty Space

"This is how Peter Brook began The Empty Space and this is how Santiago Sierra has also found an empty space, an empty museum, for actors to start coming onstage, in this case the workers who are to install the pieces that will comprise the exhibition and whom visitors will be able to observe as they work, as they perform their work action. The result of that action will be the first solo show held at MARCO, which will remain on exhibit until the end of September. The exhibition, titled Installation of 54 Cement Breakwater Tetrapods and an Epilogue on Police and Worker Sensitivity, is one of the most ambitious projects the artist has presented in Spain.

Much has been written about Santiago Sierra's work in recent years, and ‘serialisation' and ‘minimalism' are two of the terms to which the critics often have resorted when discussing it. Since his earliest pieces with containers and elemental geometric forms, however, Sierra has surpassed the legacy of minimal art, whose formal postulates he takes on but whose conceptual reductionism and semantic content he constantly questions. Throughout all these years the artist has developed one of the most solid bodies of work in the international arena and he has done so remaining coherent with his own method.

Ten years ago, in 1999, he presented in Los Angeles the work titled 24 Blocks of Concrete Constantly Moved During a Day's Work by Paid Workers, one of the interventions that best encapsulates the artist's interests and that most resembles the new piece created for the MARCO: Installation of 54 Cement Breakwater Tetrapods. In both there is an industrially manufactured object and the action of paying people to perform physical labour. After that day in which the workers moved the blocks around the gallery spaces, the result was shown to the public during the exhibition period with the marks made on the floor of the gallery and the traces left by the workers.

In the show presented at the MARCO, which occupies all the exhibition spaces on the lower floor, the elements used are tetrapods, concrete pieces consisting of a central core from which four truncated cone feet extend, forming 120º angles with each other. These blocks are customarily used as breakwater blocks and due to their shape they hook together when turning over each other, like Tetris pieces, thus achieving greater resistance to waves than other prefabricated concrete models. During the three days in which the workers are placing the tetrapods in the exhibition halls, visitors are denied access into the halls where the actual exhibition is to take place -a resource used by the artist on other occasions- but they are invited to see how the work is done from the upper floor of the museum, throughout the labourer's workday.

Prior to the action, the halls were intentionally left in disrepair after the previous exhibition was dismantled. The remnants of works by other artists (painted walls, wires, holes...) were left in sight and the spaces have been stripped of all the added elements that have been accumulated over the years in the museum halls, exhibition after exhibition -drywall partitions, patches, drop ceilings, even artificial lighting- so that for the first time they appear just as they had been originally conceived by the architects, allowing circulation through some of the halls that have never before been seen, as they had been closed off for the MARCO's opening exhibition and never opened again afterwards. All these elements were not removed but left leaning on the walls or spread about the floor of the halls in anticipation of the installation of the tetrapods. The entire floor has been covered with white plastic to visually unify the space, hiding from view the different floor surfaces made of wood, granite and marble. Jeremy Bentham, the ideologue of panoptic architecture, recommended that ‘...if the floor of the cells is made of stone or brick it should be covered with a layer of plaster, for not having cracks it will not conceal filth or breed disease..." In this case it will be white plastic that will collect all the dirt accumulated during the months of the exhibition, since the halls will not be cleaned and all traces of the visitors will be left on the plastic.

The repetition of the form, an industrially mass-produced object, and its placement in an artistic context, introduce the Duchampian coordinates of the ready-made, but it turns out to be a perversion of those statements when we add the principal reading Sierra's works elicits by revealing the social dimension of the performative act. Santiago Sierra's work is very different from Duchamp's, and its scope can only be fully appreciated when his entire career is considered. Plays on words, semiotic quips, absence of colour with the use of black and white, repetition, and the literal explanation of the works in their descriptive titles all structure a body of work in which the processual condition of the actions are the fundamental part of the works, or are the works strictly speaking. The voyeurism of the viewer, who watches the action from a previously established point of view, leads us once again to evoke the Duchamp of Étant donnés, an assemblage only visible through some small holes drilled in a wooden door. In the actions planned by Sierra, the movement of the objects becomes the work, at the specific time defined by the artist.

He recently presented at the Helga de Alvear gallery in Madrid The Penetrated, perhaps one of Santiago Sierra's most complex works, a video in eight acts that shows hired men and women of white and black race, performing all the possible combinations of anal penetration between each other. The projection insists on the repetition of an act with a surprising and not at all arbitrary treatment. The sordid quality of the action is camouflaged in a choreography that distracts us from the pornographic connotation by showing us the couples copulating in a fixed frame, without sound and in black and white, reducing them to almost geometric moving forms. The projection was accompanied by a series of photographs of the action taken from above, in the same way that the placement of the tetrapods in the MARCO halls will be recorded from the same point of view as that from which the visitors will watch the action. Whereas in The Penetrated the action was private, at the MARCO it becomes public.

The combination of geometric forms and the hiring of workers serves for us as an example to illustrate the respect for the purest minimalism and the social connotation these works contain. 111 Constructions Made with 10 Modules and 10 Workers, presented at the Peter Kilchmann gallery in Zurich in 2004, is perhaps the closest formal referent. To this reading, we must add that which spurns the established power relations, reiterating an account of the pyramidal structure, marginalisation and cultural prejudices. In the documentation of The Penetrated it is observed how, depending on the races and the combinations, there are more or fewer people willing to be hired to fulfil certain sexual roles.

Some of Santiago Sierra's pieces are very well-known, particularly those in which people, either prostitutes, the destitute or illegal aliens, are paid in exchange for specific jobs that are determined by the artist. At the MARCO, the workforce commissioned to move the 54 cement tetrapods, hired by a company that usually does this kind of job, has an exchange value determined by the law of supply and demand. What is being addressed here is work in a system of the production of goods, as opposed to other pieces in which what is questioned is the type of work being paid for or who does it, preferably workers in precarious situations.

In his intervention at the MARCO, the workers are what are shown to the audience, which is invited to watch the action. The spectator participates, as voyeur, but now establishing a game of relations with the panoptic floor of the museum, recalling its past as a prison. As we observe the development of the action from the upper floor of the museum, we assume the functions of the guard, unconsciously checking whether the will of power is carried out. ‘It is more profitable to guard than to punish' wrote Foucault; guarding facilitated by the panoptic and that Sierra takes into account when determining the location of the 54 tetrapods, following the radial arrangement of the building's rooms. The leisurely visitors are those who guard the workers and who can express their opinions about the way in which they are doing their job, as in any street scene where workers are observed by passers by. These workers have been hired by the museum to set up the exhibition with some specific instructions, but it is the company -rather than the artist or the museum- that has determined how many days, in what shifts and how many workers were necessary to distribute the tetrapods throughout the space in an arrangement previously agreed upon by the artist and the museum. They also have instructions not to pick up or clean the remnants of their work or the footprints made on the floor during the movement and handling of the tetrapods in the exhibition halls.

The action takes place during the days preceding May Day, the day the result is presented to the public. It is no coincidence that the artist has chosen International Worker's Day, as a gesture of respect for the union organisations that demonstrate that day all over the world since its inception at the Socialist Workers Congress of the Second International (Paris, 1889). In 2003 the artist had already used the date May 1st when he documented, without an audience, the work Hooded Woman Seated Facing the Wall, at the Spanish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, an iconography referring to punishment, to the image of the executioner or to work as penitence, direct heir of the moral oppression imposed by the Spanish Catholic Church.

Handing Over the Exhibition Space to the Authorities for the Announcement and Display of Confiscated Goods is a work that functions as an epilogue, closing the process and at the same time prolonging it in time. For a year MARCO's conference room -a space where the press conferences, other conferences, concerts, courses, projections and even presentations of commercial products are usually held- will be turned over to the National Police for them to display the goods or consignments confiscated in the city. These presentations will be held by surprise; here the artist does not aim to modify the times or the way in which the National Police usually displays the confiscated goods, acknowledging police sensitivity in arranging the objects (drugs, falsifications of clothing or documents, pirated copies of discs, etc.) in the same way in which we arrange the works of art in a museum showcase or upon a pedestal.

These presentations will be photographed by the artist and they will therefore embody an archive of police activity in the city during a one-year period. It is no coincidence that this process is taking place in the MARCO building, which was a courthouse as well as a prison before it was a museum, so it is not really all that strange that law officers should be demonstrating the evidence of crimes in our facilities. The communications, exhibitions, mounting and security personnel will collaborate with the corresponding departments of the National Police to make this photographic series that will directly depend on the police activity during this one-year period.

As a second epilogue of the exhibition, on May Day, coinciding with the opening, a video found on the Internet will be shown in the conference room. The video is of the conference given by José Luis Velasco approximately a year ago, titled ‘For Workers There Is Always a Crisis'".

Iñaki Martínez Antelo
Curator of the exhibition