Images of inclusion - installation art by Alfredo Jaar

Art in America, July, 1993 by Richard Vine

Good taste is genuine taste and therefore is fostered by whatever makes people think truthfully.

-- Wittgenstein, as quoted by Bertrand Russell

Over the past 14 years, installation artist Alfredo Jaar has consistently addressed the single most difficult problem now besetting the postmodernist debate: how to engage highly controversial issues, and convey urgent moral convictions, without violating the disinterestedness essential to honesty. Is it possible, Jaar's oeuvre implicitly asks, for artists deeply impassioned about economic inequity and racial, gender or ethnic discrimination to produce powerful works without misrepresenting either the facts of the case or the motives of the antagonists--without, bluntly, making good use of lies?

At 37, Jaar, Chilean-born and since 1982 a resident of New York (though pointedly a citizen of the world), has confronted a variety of grim and often highly politicized topics. Gold in the Morning (1986), a large mixed-media installation, dealt with drudgery of nonmechanized gold mining in Brazil. The related Rushes (1986-87) brought oversized photos of the same workers to the Spring Street subway station in New York. Coyote! (1988) juxtaposes light-box images with a trough of water to evoke the professional smuggling of illegal Mexican immigrants into the U.S. The Fire Next Time (1989), disjointed and starkly black-and-white, commemorates the American civil rights movement of the '60s. Geography War (1989) humanizes the problem of toxic waste dumping in Nigeria by showing village children cavorting near ominously battered steel drums. MVSEVM (1991) enticed Hirshhorn viewers with reduced window views of Washington landmarks--the FBI headquarters, the Justice Department, etc.--only to confront them with reflected scenes from the Persian Gulf War.

In very instance, the artist's sympathy and sublimated anger were perfectly evident. Yet even in his most openly partisan pieces, Jaar has resisted the impulse to propagandize. In lieu of polemics, his work offers, perhaps as a necessary vision and a hope, the elements of elegant pictorial composition and restrained sculptural order--as though Jaar's strongest political impulse were to imagine a world in which decorum would be a genuine option for all.

But graciousness, like every other species of beauty, is highly suspect these days. Few viewers can enter a Jaar exhibition without experiencing a certain queasiness. How can such reprehensible images be so artistically pleasing? It is one thing to demonstrate that the destitute possess a beauty despite their impoverishment, but it is quite another to acknowledge that they sometimes induce esthetic pleasure because their circumstances are wretched. Jaar has even been accused of the cardinal sin of estheticization -- transforming human suffering into a pay-per-view commodity for a bourgeois audience whose "humanitarian" response serves as a substitute for corrective action. This misreading, though shortsighted, is understandable in today's climate off pervasive indignation. Can we ever again allow ourselves to enjoy the image of an old laborer's face wrinkled by years of overexposure and strain without at the same time endorsing the social crimes that produced it? This finely made work suggests that we can, but only if our art takes the world's actual moral complexity into account.

In Jaar's most recent solo museum show in the U.S., the prime strategy was self-reflexive. Organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn for the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and traveling in ever-changing versions for two years before its final stop at the New Museum in New York in the spring of |92, "1 1 1; Works by Alfredo Jaar" was structured on a series of counterpoints, the most immediately striking of which was thematic -- the Us and Them of the gaze that flows reciprocally between the First World and the Third. Jaar, who studied both documentary filmmaking and architecture in Santiago, designed an installation which--with its slant walls and cunning spatial intervals, its dramatic cropping and often cinematic scale established a host of visual echoes among the 10 multivalent pieces. The artist professes a distrust of rigid First World/Third World terminology and prefers to view development as variously distributed across the globe. Thus, playing against the "backwardness" of his images, he typically deploys "advanced" (and relatively impassive) devices of classic modernism like the grid, the cube and pictorial flatness in an effort to turn art-as-art nostalgia back on itself. The socially charged material comments on both the amorality of First World technology and the vacuity of pure formalism, while the stylishness of format (which arouses expectations for chic only to mockingly frustrate them) critiques the rude exploitation upon which our privilege, artistic and otherwise, shamefully rests.

Jaar's view of the affluent West and its counter-realm of impoverished secret sharers was made clear as soon as visitors passed the New Museum's initial inward-sloping wall and, literally cornered, turned to confront the first two works. The 8-by-8-foot mirrored surface of He Ram (1991)--its title meaning "Oh, God," the last words uttered by Mahatma Gandhi--was inscribed with Gandhi's formulations (seemingly by way of the Kruger-Holzer school of telegraphic prose) of the seven social sins, offered here as a veritable mantra against First World self-satisfaction: