465 personas remuneradas

In the final years of the twentieth century, Santiago Sierra established a practice that, more than exposing concepts of works of art or phenomenological sculptural relationships, confronted the viewer with acts of submission derived from wage exploitation. With Línea de 30 cm tatuada sobre una persona remunerada [30-cm Line Tattooed on a Remunerated Person, 1998] and Desmontaje y montaje de un lavamanos [Disassembly and Assembly of a Sink, 1998] he instated a means of social intervention, hiring people for actions without any use or practical justification—and which were sometimes outright degrading—as a form of artistic output. The radical nature of these proceedings exposed the utter lack of freedom in contemporary capitalism, exacerbated by the poverty and exploitation that predominated in the country from which Sierra had emigrated years prior.

The most ambitious of Sierra’s early “remunerated actions” was the one he organized at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City: through a staffing agency, he hired 465 men between 30 and 40 years of age to stand in place as objects on display. The piece propelled Sierra’s practice into a new form of institutional critique, confronting a largely petit bourgeois public with their own fears of violence rooted in class, race, and sex. In the austere register of the action, the artist documents the twisted way in which the staffing company secured participants. Contradictions and all, the provocative nature of the piece has already made it a touchstone of contemporary art.


SANTIAGO SIERRA (1966)
465 personas remuneradas. Museo Rufino Tamayo, Sala 7. México D.F. Octubre de 1999, 1999
465 Paid People: Rufino Tamayo Museum, Sala 7. Mexico City, October 1999
2 prints. B/W photography
Gift of Francis Alÿs de Smedt, in process, 2019