by Jerome du Bois
Almost three years ago (!) on this blog I posted a long piece about Spanish art-fascist Santiago Sierra. Not a word since, and I haven't followed his trajectory. Still, today my piece is the #5 Google for the guy, out of 140,000 citations.
Not bad. But it's had about as much effect on his trajectory as a sparrow fart in a hurricane. The sonofabitch is Teflon who can't lose, and who always gets to pocket his fee. In one of his latest pieces, he ordered hundreds of women to face each other in a long narrow corridor and repeat for hours, "Give me money, give me money." That is the kind of creep he is. [Update: Catherine reminds me these women were paid and they complied. Right on. It's on both them and him. We don't see them as victims, but whores for him.]
And now I resent feeling obliged to return to the little sadist again. But when anyone spits on the Jews and their worst tragedy --and even twists the motives for the Holocaust-- I can't let it go by. Can't anyone else hear the strained, anxious warble of the canary in the coal mine? Because it's not carbon monoxide --don't get distracted-- it's methane from the manure Santiago Sierra is shovelling.
As I mentioned, I've ignored this cruel clown's bullyings for years. Every once in awhile a sycophantic remora would send me a mean email defending him. But Tuesday the sitemeter alerted me that something new was going down. So I Google his name, and what do I see?
The rotten bastard continues to pour salt in our wounds --the Holocaust, this time-- while wearing the pious face of "promoting debate." What's there to debate about the Holocaust? Its "banalization," its "trivialization," apparently. And then he goes and contributes to those very conditions, the asshole. Which is his agenda, I'm convinced. The title's a tell: 245 Cubic Meters. Yawn your way to the death chamber. Let me be clearer: I believe he wouldn't mind if they went back, Jack, and did it again.
I'm not going to review the piece. Instead I want to step back and picture the whole scene, and review how everyone acted; and then I'll focus on the artist's statement, which proclaims a pernicious lie to hide a horrible truth.
The piece has been "suspended" now, but enough people experienced it on that Sunday opening for the artist to declare success and let the drama play out. He's already won. He's even going to leave his little petty kingdom as a privileged Spaniard in the class-conscious Mexican oligarchy --he's not exactly "street," you know-- and attend symposia in Pulheim convened obediently by the supine liberal tolerators, who are deeply drunk on the Rebarbarization Of The World. He's got his debate now, complete with city officials and art flacks and even Jewish protestors. (Oriana Fallaci calls them all "the rainbow-scarved ones." Perfect. The American version, perfectly coined by my wife Catherine King, is "The All-American Anti-American Success Story.")
Enough people in the area of interest -- I mean both geographically and politically-- knew the lineaments of this atrocity far in advance of its creation. For example, there must have been a series of permits, including from fire department officials. So my question, to all the officials, including Steven Kramer of the Jewish Council, is
Why didn't the debate take place before the Damned Thing was made, thus defusing it and preventing its realization?
Honestly, if they knew it was going to be protested and shut down, why did everyone let it happen? Everyone played along. The mayor was either clueless or slyly antisemitic. From what I've read, the previous installations in the synagogue ignored its religious reference. Sierra stabs it through the heart, and everyone let it happen. It's sick. They've gone stupid over there, to let a mere artist play the whole town like a cheap accordion.
Now, to the artist's statement, via a commenter on a BBC blog, with my emphases:
THE ARTIST POSTED THIS TEXT AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE SYNAGOGUE AT PULHEIM-STOMMELN:
The City Council of Pulheim extended an invitation for me to work in Stommeln's synagogue to honor the memory of the innumerable Jews who, in order to rob them of their possesions, were brutally murdered in the 20th Century. The result is a work I have called 245 m3 in allusion to the empty space of this synagogue, which is no longer used as a place of prayer. 245 m3 is a work against the trivialization of our memory of the Holocaust, a work about our chronic and exploited feeling of guilt, about the exploited and their exploiters. Above all, however, 245 m3 is meant to be a work about the industrialized and institutionalized Death from which [?] the European peoples of the world have lived and continue to live. [??] All of this in the conviction that this project cannot engender empathy, but only the consciousness and certainty of individual death.
It is dedicated to each and every victim of the State and Capital.
March 11, 2006. Santiago Sierra.
See the lies? The Jews were not killed for their money. If that had been the case, if the Nazis wanted riches, the Nazis would have exploited them, not exterminated them. They would have used the Jews the way Santiago Sierra uses everybody he can turn the dials on. Everyone knows or should know that the Nazis killed the Jews because they were Jews, but Santiago Sierra says, "Look over there! The evil culprit is capitalism!" He plays the anarcho-Marxist while pocketing euros and what's green and folds all over that self-benighted continent. The truth is that Santiago Sierra tries to hide the true motives of the Nazis, and to equate them with capitalism. That is evil. Capitalism is good. And Santiago Sierra is an evil hypocrite.
And he's gold over there. As the Jews like to say, "Go figure." Well, I just did.
Posted by Jerome at March 16, 2006 09:25 AM | TrackBack