• Santiago Sierra
  • Santiago Sierra is a performance artists that has caused waves in his exploration of capitalism: the exploitation of workers and immigrant poverty. One of his most controversial works was when he blockaded the entrance to the Spanish Pavilion in 2003, during the  Venice Biennale. He only allowed entry to Spanish passport-holders; a form of discrimination. He has also questioned the nature of employment in art institutions – he paid a museum watchman to live for 365 hours behind a wall at MoMA. In another installation, he filled the Kestner Gesellschaft museum with 400 tons of mud (a reflection on the creation of a Hanover lake using unemployed people as cheap labor).

• Maurizio Cattelan
  • Cattelan has done many controversial works commenting on the ‘readymade’, seemingly lackluster effort in many modern contemporary artists’ work. He has stolen an entire artist’s show from a gallery and tried to sell it as his own, titling it “Another Fucking Readymade.” However, his most controversial work was “All”, a Guggenheim retrospective.  He hung his work from the ceiling. However, what was hung was high-end, valuable internationally collected art suspended in the air from cables.

• Guillermo Vargas
  • Guillermo Varga’s work is controversial for his installation featuring an emaciated dog. He featured the words “You Are What You Read” behind the dog, the letters spelled out with dog food. The controversy behind this work is that the dog died after the exhibition from starvation, but Vargas argued that no one who saw intervened by feeding the dog.

What I have learned from all of these controversial artists, is that they make headlines and draw attention because they focus on work that is very of the ‘now’. What I mean by this is that within their given contexts, they exhibit and display work about things that they notice and observe about society today. Specific things that they want to comment on, the things that they believe are affecting society today. For example, Sierra’s work on immigrant discrimination and capitalism is something that has affected human behaviour and he creates a very glaring, obvious commentary through his performance art. What I have learned from my research is that they take aspects of life that surround people (e.g. contemporary ‘ready made’ art, capitalism) and bring it into the limelight. Such things make us (as the audience) uncomfortable because we choose to live amongst things that may be otherwise morally wrong, and to face it head-on through installations or performance art is forcing us to face it ourselves, that this is the society we live in.