Project 3- Performance Piece

For my performance art piece, I chose to recreate a screenshot from Santiago Sierra's performance,‘160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People.’ This performance was created in 2000 and intended to address social responsibility and political ideology. Sierra challenged the system by looking beyond the current status of the subjects he tattooed. He is a Spanish artist that emphasized the pointlessness of menial labor jobs throughout many of his pieces. In this performance, Sierra paid four prostitutes the price of one shot of heroin in exchange for tattooing a single line on their backs. The tattoo machine mimicked the needle through which the amount of heroin will be administered and spans the entire width of the prostitutes' backs. The piece also touches on the permanency of the tattoo versus the short-lived impact of heroin. Sierra also comments on how problematic society has become that people actually became so desperate that they allowed the artist to exploit them. In the performance, four women are seen sitting topless facing a blank wall. You see two figures measuring their backs and setting up the tattoo machine. Sierra chooses not to show his face on camera. For this project I took a screenshot of two of the women getting their backs measured for the tattoos. I decided to use charcoal and keep the entire thing black and white because I wanted to emphasize the dark meaning behind the piece. Before starting this piece, I researched many of Sierra's other projects and they all seem to correlate around the same themes. Another performance that I found really interesting was one where he sprayed four Arab men with hardening foam, essentially so they were plastered to the ground. He challenged the way his audiences thought about different concepts and I really appreciate that he thought outside of the box to illustrate that. 

https://publicdelivery.org/santiago-serra-tattoos/#160_cm_Line_Tattooed_on_4_People_2000

https://delphiangallery.com/santiago-sierra/