INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION REVIEWS

Santiago Sierra: The Penetrated, performance at Ei Trax, Terrassa, Spain, Oct, 12, 2008: at Helga de Alvear,

MADRiD

SANTIAGO SIERRA HELGA DE ALVEAR

Spanish artist Santiago Sierra has a long history of creating controversial works that explore issues of capitalism and exploitation in various historical and social contexts. His art often combines installation and performance, and is usually documented by photography and video. Past projects include coating Iraqi immigrants in Polyurethane foam and letting it harden, paying drugaddicted prostitutes from Brazil with drugs to get tattoos of lines across their backs, installing a gas chamber in a German synagogue and setting a gaiiery in Mexico City on fire on its inaugural night. In this show, "Los Penetrados" [The Penetrated], a group of nine largescale black-and-white photos (all works 2008), including one diptych, depict a cavernous space occupied by multiple couples (a mix of black and white, homosexual and heterosexual) in various stages of anal penetration. All are positioned on gray blankets on the floor. A V-shaped wall of mirrors reflects the anonymous pairs, their loss of individuality conveyed by their blurry edges and digitally obscured faces, Initiaiiy striking for their sexual content, the photographs' rigid formalism and angular interiors, which contrast with the curves of the repetitiously copulating duos, ultimately negate any eroticism. In a second room, a blackand-white video displayed the same mechanical action: couples move
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together, heads and bodies bobbing and thrusting, as if on an assembly line. Neutrality of space and affect prevails. Another series of 55 smaller photographs arrayed in two rows and spanning three walls lined a room upstairs. In the center of the room was a plie of gray blankets, looking both forlorn and ominous, A number of these photos show orily the blankets, grim rectangles in a stark setting. Others portray the couples from various angies and distances. Sierra is working here with a complex project whose division into eight "Acts" of various combinations of partners and positions, according to the press release, parallels the "current reality of Spain." The racially and sexually diverse couples perhaps are meant to reflect the country's fractured society, while the act of penetration, associated with sexual dominance and submission, would refer to the larger arena of human relations and social conditions. Usually Sierra pays immigrant workers to perform the burdensome tasks he assigns: here he employed actors to do his bidding, though he seems to treat them as similarly disposable. He has created another enactment of the master/siave relationship in a capitalist society. The question of the artist's responsibility and the balance of power lingers: Sierra is treading a thin line between detached conceptual criticism and complicity with the very economic expioitation and human objectification he is critiquing. Amanda Church

PARIS

CLAIRE FONTAINE CHANTALCROUSEL

In the context of the abysmal global economy, the latest solo show of Claire Fontaine is disturbingly relevant. Titled "Feux de dtresse." or "Warning Lights" (like those on an automobile), it was conceived as an interrogation of the politics of labor, and an exploration of the world of work as a metaphcric prison for the human mind and body, A Paris-based collective founded in 2004 by an Italian woman with an advanced degree in phiiosophy and a Scotsman with a background in fine art, Claire Fontaine takes its name from the French paper suppiieran iconic brand famiiiar to schooichildren and office workers alike. The two 30-something collaborators are a self-described "readymade artist," ia Marcel Duchamp, and refer to themselves as "she," in trading their individual identities for an invented one based on a consumer product, Claire Fontaine raises questions regarding authorship and the interchangeability of the artist and the objects s/he creates, as well as the use value of both. In so doing, she is deeply indebted to Marx, Barthes and Foucault, not to mention conceptually oriented artists like Bruce Nauman, Jenny Hlzer and Pierre Huyghe. Fourteen works (all 2008) were on exhibit, including sculptures, neon and fluorescent signs, video, found objects and drawings, The pendant sculptures Optic (Whiskey) and Optic (Vodka) consist of watercoolers filled with freely availabie hard liquor (plastic cups faciii-