Georg Imdahl

Ausbeute
Santiago Sierra und die Historizität der zeitgenössischen Kunst
VOLUME 221

Too Broad a Brush? Insights into a Controversial Oeuvre

It is hard to think of an oeuvre in contemporary art that more tenaciously makes exploitation its central motif than Santiago Sierra’s (b. Madrid, 1966). Georg Imdahl analyzes this leitmotif in its twofold orientation: as an artist’s critique of economic exploitation in the low-wage economy, and as a practice of appropriating key works of art since the 1960s. Sierra’s art proves contemporary in its ongoing reflection on economic, political, ethical, and aesthetic states of affairs as well as in the insistence with which he ties his own approach back to that incubation phase of contemporary art in the 1960s. In light of these observations, Imdahl’s essay offers discussions of selected exemplary works and comparative studies to explore the function and yields of references in an oeuvre that is arguably already a classic of an art conceived as inherently in conflict. He sorts out Sierra’s references to minimal, conceptual, and performance art and forms of participation. The controversy over Sierra’s intervention 245 Kubikmeter, which he staged at the former synagogue in Stommeln in Pulheim near Cologne in 2006, is the subject of a dedicated chapter.

Georg Imdahl (b. Münster, 1961) is an art critic and has written about contemporary art for a number of newspapers, primarily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeit, since the early 1990s. He completed a doctoral dissertation on Heidegger’s early writings in 1995 and subsequently taught contemporary art and art criticism at various universities in Germany. He has been professor for art and the public sphere at the University of Fine Arts Münster since 2011.