Santiago Sierra
El Trabajo Es La Dictadura
Madrid, Spain: Ivory Press, 2013
87 pp., 15 x 10.5 cm., soft cover
Edition of 1000
An artist book consisting of the title handwritten over and over again, by thirty workers recommended by the National Employment Service and paid minimum wage to fill out a thousand blank notebooks as a performance in January of 2013. The phrase El Trabajo Es La Dictadura translates to "Work is a Dictatorship".
Many of the artist's best known works involve the hiring of labourers to complete menial tasks.
"What I do is refuse to deny the principles that underlie the creation of an object of luxury: from the watchman who sits next to a Monet for eight hours a day, to the doorman who controls who comes in, to the source of the funds used to buy the collection. I try to include all this, and therein lies the little commotion about remuneration that my pieces have caused."[2] More specific to his questioning of art institutions and capitalism, he said "At the Kunstwerke in Berlin they criticized me because I had people sitting for four hours a day, but they didn't realize that a little further up the hallway the guard spends eight hours a day on his feet...any of the people who make those criticisms have never worked in their lives; if they think it's a horror to sit hidden in a cardboard box for four hours, they don't know what work is...And of course extreme labor relations shed much more light on how the labor system actually works."[2] Sierra has a displayed interest in visibility and invisibility. He explains the result of his work that pursues these interests, saying "The museum watchman I paid to live for 365 hours behind a wall at P.S.1 in New York told me that no one had ever been so interested in him and that he had never met so many people. I realized that hiding something is a very effective working technique. The forgotten people want to communicate..."
- Santiago Sierra
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