Alfredo Jaar

ALFREDO JAAR
Name:
Class:
Date:
Alfredo Jaar
Introduction
Born in 1956 in Chile, Alfredo Jaar is an architect, artist and filmmaker living in New York City. Since his early years, while living in Martinique before he moved to Chile, he showed prospects and potentials of being an artist in the future even though people, including his parents, did not know or understand what field of artistry he would venture in. In essence, the field of artistry and architect Alfredo Jaar has ventured in is quite unique and different from the usual works that artists do and it is for this reason that his works have been the center of debate and controversy over the years of his career. He is widely recognized as an installation and fixation artist who regularly covers social and political wars as well as incorporating photographs in his works. The most famous and controversial artistry work of Jaar is conceivably the 6-year-running The Rwanda Project that covered the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed approximately one million in Rwanda. Aside from The Rwanda Project, Alfredo Jaar has had numerous publications and public intervention political works that have featured the most known and brutal wars in the world and the events that have been subject to the world attention. Through these photographs, installations and community-based projects, Jaar has, for a long time, explored the public’s unawareness to images and the restrictions of art to cover events such as epidemics, genocide and famines.

Describing himself as a project artist rather than a studio artist, Jaar’s works also bear witness to political corruption, military conflicts and the imbalances of power in the developing countries and industrialized countries. As stated by Alfredo Jaar, “I strongly believe in the power of a single idea, my imagination starts working based on a real life event, most of the time a tragedy that I am just starting to analyze, to reflect on…this real life event that I am trying to respond to.” In this regard, it is clear that his artistry works are motivated and inspired by real events that people relate to. This, therefore, means that Jaars artistry works are aimed at confronting and responding to the genocides, wars, corruption, famines as well as other epidemics that seems to be a challenge in the world. Through photography, Jaar incorporates all these images and pictures of the various unfortunate events to come up with videos and pictures that speak directly against the epidemics and the unfortunate events and people can easily and clearly relate to his works and publication. He has published several artistic works and most of these works have been the center of controversy, especially 2000 The Rwanda Project, and some have been highly appreciated by the people, especially the 1987 A Logo for America. As such, this paper seeks to analyze the works of Alfredo Jaar around the world by focusing on his publications. The paper shall basically focus on his five major publications and works that have received mixed reactions all over the world as well as the works that have been the trademark for his unique and politically motivated work; further, the paper shall explain what exactly motivated the works.
A Logo for America, 1987.
Alfredo Jaar’s billboard, referred to as A Logo for America, was initially publicized in New York’s Times Square in the year 1987 and was publicized again in 2004. When Jaar came up with this innovative billboard, there were cultural and political concerns that characterized the American society. In fact, there was a breakdown in the relationship between the Latin America and the United States. This billboard, funded and approved by the Public Art Funds, was part of the messages to the public that was aimed at restoring the unity among the Latin Americans and the United States itself. The 42-second series appeared together with programmed advertisements within the two weeks. Representations of the flag and the American map were succeeded by declarations that challenged the meaning of each of these logos. In this particular work, Jaar’s main aim was to confront the ethnocentrism of the United States, which customarily claimed the characteristics of the whole continent of American as its own.
Basically, this artistic work was motivated by the political and cultural uncertainties that existed in America during this time. Being a Chilean living in New York, the experiences he went through in trying to be part of the American community were the main motivations behind this work. In essence, this was an art aimed at expressing the disunity that was there in America despite the fact that the whole continent was described as the United States of America. With the many immigrants and foreigner looking for greener pastures in America, the call for national unity among the Latin Americans and the United States was deemed a public message and was approved and funded by the Public Arts Fund. In fact, the demonstration of characteristics and the particulars of the international relations were the major factors that inspired and influenced Jaar’s actions and thinking. Using his multidisciplinary artistic work, he decided to investigate and explore the imbalanced power relations as well as the social and political factors that were as a result of globalization. In fact, this work received a global attention and was even shown in the UK as part of the message to the public.
In the current dispensation, Jaar’s work still has effects, politically, in the modern society. For instance, in the just concluded elections, President Trump’s campaign was premised on the promises of making America great again by getting rid of the none-Americans, famously referred to as the illegal immigrants. According to Jaar’s message, America is a big munificent country with lots of accomplishments to be proud of. Also, hospitality is the greatest virtue in America. This reflects the number of Latinos or Hispanics that form almost 17% of the America’s population and have been part of the American history and success. Being a foreigner living in America, Jaar understood and still understands the importance of unity in America and the current calls by politicians is a reflection of what really motivated him into coming up with the art in the first place. In essence, America is known to the land of the free and has been widely praised for its unity and hospitality; that is the America that people know, not the America that is divided along ethnic lines as witnessed in the events before 1986. As such, A Logo for America was and is still a message for the people of America to embrace unity and stick to their core values and the virtues they are known for.
Image 1: Jaar’s work of A Logo of America

The Rwanda Project, 1994-2000.
According to Jaar, this project was the most difficult project to come up with considering the logistics that surrounded the subject of this project. Working on it, Jaar took six years to come up with the final piece of work and, narrating his experience while working on this project, Jaar admitted to taking much time in this particular work with the consideration of both intellectual and emotional aspects of the work. In essence, this work was initiated in 1994 and was finished in 2000. It is a sequence of photography-based fitting works that were derived from his experience in Rwanda. Essentially, this work was inspired by Jaar’s experiences when he visited Rwanda before the genocide came to an end which was devastatingly ignored by the international community. The genocide claimed the lives of approximately one million people which obviously caught the attention of the international community in trying to do what they could to save the situation in Rwanda during this time. In his work, he tried to act in response to a particular artistic problem of the previous century in attempting to manage mass murders. This work is a documentation of his encounter with some of the ugliest and most terrifying images in Rwanda and also the narration and experiences of a survivor of this particular genocide.
Compared to other works by Alfredo Jaar, this work was rather different in so many aspects. It tried to transform and counter the principles of photojournalism, which often objectified violent behavior through unmediated descriptions of victimization. Instead, Jaar managed to overturn the eye of the lens to put more focus on witnesses and the emotively attractive landscape in which these mass murders were carried out as a means of drawing an emotional reaction from those viewers that had access to his work. In essence, this work was well-thought out and directed by emotions derived from the first-hand experience Jaar had with regard to this particular massacre. To illicit a solution from the international world, this approach taken by Jaar was significantly different from the ones taken by other journalists who merely showed pictures of the massacre thereby objectifying the whole violence without really offering the solution. Instead, Jaar tried to play with the emotions of the viewers by documenting the beautiful landscape before the outbreak of the genocide and the landscape after the genocide. This was a way of emotionally connecting the international community and was the best way to compel and lead the international community to help in salvaging the situation in Rwanda to prevent more lives from being lost.
In essence, this work showed how artistry could influence the world. In as much as this particular work was the most controversial of Jaar’s artistry works, the influence it had internationally was amazing and it is one of the reasons the world started to look at the genocide in Rwanda in a different perspective contrary to what the main-stream media and other journalists were presenting the world with. In this regard, personal experience together with emotions and political factors directly influenced Jaar’s efforts on this particular artistic work. Most importantly, as opposed to most of his works, emotions played a major role in The Rwanda Project which came out in 2000 after a number of trials and errors since he wanted to get it right and influence the viewers using pictures and photography to intrigue emotions.
Gold in the Morning, 1986.
Gold in the Morning, publicized by the Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery, was Jaar’s first main individual show in Africa, South Africa. The series was initially shown, in 1986, in the Venice Biennale and then at museums globally, including the London’s Whitechapel and the French’s Center Pompidou. Essentially, this work was inspired by Jaar’s journey to Serra Pelada where he witnessed first-hand the hazardous conditions that more than 80,000 people worked in search of gold. In essence, Serra Pelada is a mine that is open cast and a phenomenal depression dug by the hands of the workers which was due to the huge invasion of self-employed miners in the rural northeastern Brazil. The assurance of gold enticed these over 80,000 people from their families and homes to the life of hard labor in this dangerous condition. After Jaar had traveled to this place, he documented the photographs he took and the experiences he had with the workers to come up with story Gold in the Morning.
Ideally, the images and representations that resulted are a harsh depiction of Promethean replication; the deceitful, daily decline of the people down the slick walls and the scrambling back up, loaded with packs of saturated earth. Away from the vivid depiction of their labor, the work exposes the culture and the suffering of the miners. Jaar presents a doorway into the unseen and unknown place, theatrical in its topography and scale. In making visible those that our society denies the good life, Jaar encourages us to look at the cultural, social and political motivations for the labor of these people. This enlightened installation offsets the great, anonymous demand of the developed countries with an abundance of faces: faces of those that are in the developing countries and those that supply the developed world with the materials they need for their industries. Jaar is recognized for his brusquely honest documentation as well as the open interventions. He refers to himself as a project artist that would rather spend longer times in the field, instead of being confiscated in a studio. He says “I do not create my work in the studio. I wouldn’t know what to do. I do not stare at a blank page of the paper and start inventing a world coming only from my imagination. Every work is a response to a real-life event and a real-life situation.”
In essence, Jaar’s works are not imaginations created by him but the personal experiences he encounters while traveling around the world. The real-life situation he encounters inspires him to come up with intervention by publishing them to the public to provide their opinion and be informed of the occurrences in some parts of the world. In this particular work, Jaar becomes a hero for the developing countries by highlighting the stresses and hard work the people that live in these countries go through to produce the materials treasured and used by the developed first world countries. These are stories and situations that no one knows and understand. In fact, the conditions these people work in are dehumanizing, and this is what Jaar focuses on when coming up with this particular intervention. Traveling to these places and experiencing these situations in person makes his work have a feel of originality and honesty which many people have referred to as “uncompromised work.” As such, this particular work is driven by social, political, cultural and economic factors that are witnessed in our society; the stresses and conditions other people have to work in to keep the world economy going.
Image 2: Gold Miners

The Skoghall Konsthall, 2000.
Skoghall is a town that is located on Hammarö’s island in Sweden. The paper mill in this town is the major employer in this particular area. In 2000, Jaar got an invitation by Skoghall to create public art for the local community. Being that Jaar is globally recognized for his socially and politically inspired work, he time and again presents the viewers with existing contentious conceptions to digest. When Jaar went to Skoghall, he was compelled the most by the lack of culture. They did not provide any structure with respect to the practice of artistry or even expression. As such, to contest this drought, he decided that he would become the focus of his art to this particular community.
As the major source of employment to the people around, Jaar requested the Skoghall Mill to sponsor the project by supplying the materials for production. He then erected an impermanent museum of paper to demonstrate to Skoghall the significance of educational provision within their community. He proposed that the moment the museum was finished, it was supposed to be scorched down to imitate the terrible nature of this cultural absence. This did not go down well with the town and the mill. However, as a result of his status internationally and experience, they allowed Jaar carry out his plan. In his speech to Skoghall, he said, “I think this piece of work is fascinating on many levels. The design of space, incorporated by the use of paper as a building material created a physical presence with what I imagine to be a disposable sensation. I find that also the determination to finish the work by burning it to the ground was completely appropriate because experiencing the town’s anguish with the event reinforced their cry for culture.” The work resulted in a unified local community made stronger by their anxiety to achieve and accept Jaar’s contentious proposal.
In essence, Jaar tried to show Skoghall what they lacked that caused the disunity among them. Since Jaar’s works are critically thought out and aims to intervene in these kinds of situations, the only way to help Skoghall with their situation was to have a demonstration of how culture and unity was an important part of such an organization and that its project was the only way the local people and the employees would come together. As such, Jaar’s work has been inspiring and his genius has been incredibly helpful to organizations and underprivileged people around the world. His art at Skoghall was a symbol of this inspiring talent and as a result, his main aim and objective were achieved and the management of Skoghall finally realized what Jaar was trying to achieve.
Image 3: Jaar work at Skoghall

Lights in the City, 1999.
In Canada, in 1999, Jaar completed a task known to as Lights in the City. Considering the fact that Canada is known to be having the largest population of homeless people and actually one of the wealthiest in North America, He created this public exposition in Montreal to bring previously homeless individuals and homelessness “into the light,” by installing buttons in shelters of homeless people so that they could use to brighten lights in the central downtown area in Cupola. This work, called “Lights in the City,” was aimed at connecting the less exciting and possibly less known residents of the town to ordinary individual’s every day experience of their area and thus, their everyday lives. By enlightening their perception of the society, this exposition aimed to arouse an equal consciousness of the result of such understanding.  It is a significant landmark which had been burnt roughly five times before Jaar’s completion of the project. There were around a hundred thousand red light watts installed in the Copula; in the event, a button has pressed the Copula produces a bright red light so that it is all around the city by the homeless of Montreal. Igniting devices are placed in some places and shelters of the homeless located within 500 yards of Cupola. Every time a homeless person comes in one of the areas, they have the freedom to press the buttons in these vicinities to light up the Cupola. The reason for this was to enable homeless people to be seen as people in the city with no humility.
The Lights in the City project can be perceived in some ways: first, each time a homeless individual presses the buttons, a photograph is to be. It means that the individual is, in fact, asking for recognition and help. By appreciating the homeless, the privacy and dignity of the homeless are preserved. In addition, when one is referring to the “photograph,” there is, in reality, no real photo taken but there are bright red lights in the Copula that are lit; in essence, a photograph is created to allow the homeless person to be appreciated and recognized with respect and dignity. The light makes the society understand and appreciate the need and importance of the homeless as actual human beings. Secondly, the light can be interpreted as a threat fire. This may symbolize the previous fires tragedies that occurred in the Copula. The symbol of fire being exhibited shows the harsh tragedy that has been destroying the Copula. However, the current portrayal of the light is another catastrophe of homelessness symbolizing that the society is threatened by this tragedy. Expectantly, Jaar hopes that there will come a time when the homeless will access these devices without having to go to the Copula.
Once again Jaar was at the service of the less fortunate in the society. Being that the homeless people were not considered human beings led Jaar into coming up with this kind of project to give them recognition in the society since they deserved to be recognized. He recognizes that homelessness is a catastrophe that is a challenge to the humanity and the society. Also, he believes that every human being should be able to have access to the services provided and should not be underprivileged when the society can provide those services. As such, the project is a gesture to the society to recognize that the homeless individuals are also human beings and deserve better lives.
Image 4: The Copula

Conclusion
Alfredo Jaar has made very remarkable accomplishments. Despite his unique style of expression, he has managed to leave a lasting impression in the society and has influenced so many people with his devotion and dedication to highlighting and uncovering the various tragedies, genocides and other vices in the society that are hidden to the rest of the population. In this regard, he has managed to change several things in the society and has been a very vital figure in the fight against unequal treatment of individuals in the society.
Bibliography
Birnbaum, Dara, Daniel Buren, Morgan Fisher, Marina Abramovic, Pawel Althamer, John Baldessari, Ricardo Basbaum et al. The next Documenta should be curated by an artist. Revolver Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, 2004.
Bourriaud, Kathleen MacQueen, and Emmanuel Levinas. “Artistic Intervention: Alfredo Jaar Rowynn Dumont.”
Camnitzer, Luis. Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation. University of Texas Press, 2007.
De Armendi, Nicole. “The map as political agent: destabilising the North-South model and redefining identity in twentieth-century Latin American art.” North Street Review: Arts and Visual Culture 13 2009.
Duganne, Erina. “Photography after the fact.” Beautiful suffering: Photography and the traffic in pain 2007.
Goldman, Shifra M. “How Latin American artists in the US view art, politics and ethnicity in a supposedly multicultural world.” Third Text 5, 1991.
Ireson, Brian. “Minions.” In Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia. ACM, 2004.
Jaar, Alfredo. Let there be light: the Rwanda project 1994-1998. Actar, 1998.
Jaar, Alfredo, and Dobrila Denegri. Alfredo Jaar. MACRO, 2005.
Jaar, Alfredo, and Adriana Valdés. Jaar Scl 2006. Actar, 2006.
Jaar, Alfredo. “Lights in the City.” Alfredo Jaar’s Online Portfolio. http://www. alfredojaar. net (Accessed August 1 2007).
Leval, Susana Torruella. “Recapturing History: The (Un) Official Story in Contemporary Latin American Art.” Art Journal 51, 1992.
Levi-Strauss, David. “A Sea of Griefs Is Not a Proscenium: On the Rwanda Projects of Alfredo Jaar.” Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 1998, 1998.
McLaughlin, MaryAnn. Homelessness in Canada. publisher not identified, 1986.
Phillips, Patricia C. “The aesthetics of witnessing: A conversation with Alfredo Jaar.” Art Journal 64, 2005.
Reejhsinghani, Anju. “Museums in Austin and San Antonio, Texas, of Interest to Ethnic Historians.” 2009.
Schwarz, Janien Nien. “Beyond Familiar Territory: Dissertation: De-centering the Centre (An analysis of visual strategies in the art of Robert Smithson, Alfredo Jaar and the Bark Petitions of Yirrkala); and Studio Report: A Sculptural Response to Mapping, Mining, and Consumption.” 2010.
Tervo, Juuso. “The Problem of Representation.” Studies in Art Education 54, 2012.
Vatsky, Sharon. “Identity: Three Global Perspectives.” Art Education 69, 2016.
Vattimo, Gianni, Santiago Zabala, and Luca D’Isanto. Art’s claim to truth. Columbia University Press, 2010.
Walker, Sydney R. “Artmaking and the sinthome.” Visual Arts Research 36, 2010.