His work addresses the production, consumption, and proliferation of cultural objects, reflecting his interest in the possibility of an artwork to mediate information or meaning in a way that engages with the aesthetics of a specific time period.
He attended high school in Mill Valley and became involved in the Bay Area punk scene revolving around clubs such as the Mabuhay Gardens and the On Broadway in San Francisco in the early to mid 1980s.
[2] In 1992, Sietsema visited the first US solo exhibition of Jeff Koons, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which proved to be an influence on his early thinking and work.
He enrolled in UCLA's New Genres graduate program in 1996 and began studying with Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, and Charles Ray,[4] receiving his MFA in 1999.
[18] The artist's work also was included in the Carnegie International and the 5th Berlin Biennial in 2008,[19] and later that year, the De Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam mounted a survey exhibition, “Paul Sietsema: Three Films,” featuring Untitled (Beautiful Place), Empire, and Figure 3.
[22] That same year, Sietsema moved to Berlin on a DAAD residency, and in 2010 he had a solo show at the Schinkel Pavillon, which featured his 16mm film Anticultural Positions, in 2010.
[23] Upon returning to Los Angeles from Berlin in 2011, Sietsema began teaching in the graduate department at the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California as a visiting core faculty member.
[33] Empire (2002), his most well-known film, centers around an image of art critic Clement Greenberg's living room as pictured in a 1964 issue of Vogue magazine.
Greenberg's space, along with the books and artworks within it, formed the point of departure for a series of vignettes examining various avant-garde movements throughout history.
[35] Related to Sietsema's paintings and drawings, a black and white film from 2012 titled Encre chine depicts picture frames, paint brushes, a film camera, and other artists’ tools covered in black ink, an interference that explores the deterioration of objects through mediation and the intersection of the tools and products of art.
The film examines the presentation of unintentional marks from the artist's studio as possibly intentional artworks, as well as a confusion of aesthetics and philosophies from different eras being read as contemporary.
Images of real world equivalents of Photoshop's paintbrush, Microsoft Word's sheet of paper and email's envelope drowned in pools of enamel are rendered in that same material on the backs of found canvases, which he often sources from obscure online auction websites.