Annotated bibliography Roxy Paine

Dempsey, Amy. Destination Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 2006

Destination Art examines sculptures which are site specific to the natural environment. Dempsey discusses how these must be ‘travelled’ to experience the true meaning and totality of each piece. This book only briefly mentions one of Paine’s dendroids and was no use to my presentation.


Heartney, Eleanor. Art & Today. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2008.

The chapter Art, Nature and Technology provides an overview and loose timeline of nature, technology and the body in Contemporary art. Heartney discusses numerous artists and their works in relation to this theme. Roxy Paine’s sculptures and paintings are only briefly touched on. Although this book was useful for a brief summary of the artist’s work, the chapter allowed to put contextualise his work.


Heartney, Eleanor. Roxy Paine, Munich, New York: Prestel, 2009

Roxy Paine by Eleanor Heartney is a comprehensive examination of the artist’s works, his themes and philosophies. She discusses his three oeuvres - automated art machines, replicants and dendroid, how his artworks relate to each other and how they fit within the theme of nature and technology. Heartney includes detailed illustrations of Paine’s works including his sketches and models. This book is a ‘bible’ for anyone who is interested in Roxy Paine or as a study tool.


Schimmel, Paul; Sutton, Gloria. Ecstasy : in and about altered states, edited by Lisa Mark, Los Angeles, Calif. : Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2005.

Ecstasy examines the connection between the human consciousness and Contemporary art. This book gives the reader a brief insight into his first major piece Drug Ziggurat, 1994, a nine-foot-tall tower consisting of addictive products and his realistic models of highly toxic mushrooms. It is just an overview of Paine’s work with real no benefit to my assignment.

SANTIAGO SIERRA

Spanish conceptualist sculptor and performance artist Santiago Sierra (b.1966) won’t talk about his background or have his portrait taken, yet for someone so seemingly shy his works are very contentious and often extremely confronting.

His performances focus on the inequality of the social and economic systems using the marginalised of society, such as the unemployed, dispossessed, illegal immigrants and prostitutes as his ‘performers’. These performer’s were ‘paid’ , however, their ‘payment’ could be seen as being ‘equivalent’ to their ‘life story’, for example,  ‘In 2000 he hired a tattooist to tattoo a continuous thin line across the backs of four drug-addicted prostitutes in return for the price of one hit of heroin.

 
160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo. Salamanca, Spain. December 2000 
Sierra’s events test individual and social boundaries to expose social and cultural inequalities1
 
In 2010 Santiago produced a piece for John Kaldor’s Project 22, titled

  

7 forms measuring 600 x 60 x 60 cm constructed to be held horizontal to a wall, in which he unifies ‘sculpture and performance to create a physical portrait of the labor economy. Hired for the minimum wage, the employees hold monolithic structures on their shoulders for the duration of a working day. They recall the caryatid or atlas figures whose sculpted forms stand as pillars to support the weight of classical architecture. Carrying casket-like forms on their shoulders, they represent what Sierra calls the ‘social burial’ of labor..... Sierra stipulated that they must be paid the minimum wage and be genuinely in need of work.’2  
Santiago Sierra’s performances are remarkably confronting and thought provoking due to reality of the ‘performers’ lives and the public nature of these works. 

1. http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/project-archive/santiago-sierra-2010
2. http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/project-archive/santiago-sierra-2010