effectively undermine the system, impersonating various people, or Adbusters, who staked out tents on Wall Street and staged symbolic provocations, and began protests that ranged across the whole of the United States. Bum Fights are also interesting, convincing people to tear out all their teeth for five dollars…
A bit like Santiago Sierra…
Exactly. But they are not as well known as Santiago Sierra, who make work for the moneyed elite, and above all, they don’t declare themselves to be art; it all ended in trials.
Santiago Sierra shows that interfering in social life from the standpoint of art leads to hypocrisy: art always objectifies the people it allegedly wants to help, condemns them to mere looking, but the positive effects it can evoke are ephemeral; while works meant to help marginalized groups end up in galleries, sold for large amounts of money.
Sierra shows how “vile” the public is in looking at his work. He does not try to go beyond this, however. For me this means that Santiago Sierra reached a certain moment in understanding what it means to be an artist – but only a gallery artist [laughs]. I adore such artists as Santiago Sierra, but to the same degree as he is dependent on the institution of the art world, I would like to cut myself off from it.
Is the project with the working title “Jasio one such attempt”?
Some time ago the body of a child was found in Cieszyński Lake. His identity was unknown, and a search was conducted in the whole
voivodeship. I was even interrogated in the affair, as I have a son the child’s age. I was interested in the theme of physicality we discussed earlier: the pure, undefined biology of the body found somewhere in the grass. The project concerns an attempt to reconstruct the identity of the boy using police renderings, and to make a hyper-realistic sculpture on their basis. The problem is that the police were unable to establish the identity of the boy based on DNA, as they would have had to compare a vast amount of blood from the blood banks, and there is no money for this. My idea involved entering the world of the art elite and traveling with the work through Europe’s galleries, trying to collect the money needed for the work – according to the police, a few million zlotys. This was another way of making art go beyond the confines of the galleries.
I suppose you had similar ideas in creating “Black Diamonds”?
In this case it was about including people who had survived a mine crisis in Silesia in the undertaking. I will be asking unemployed ex-miners working in the bootleg mines to dig coal and shape it into diamonds. In the holiday season these can be sold as gadgets – tourist souvenirs, Christmas presents – in the shopping centers.
You said earlier that you were interested in effective work. But when you work as an artist, your undertakings are seen as “artistic,” i.e. put aside and ignored. Wouldn’t it be easier to work as a volunteer at a non-governmental organization or a reporter? Why the equipage of art?
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