Images of inclusion - installation art by Alfredo Jaar

Art in America, July, 1993 by Richard Vine

Politics without principles

Wealth without toil

Pleasure without conscience

Knowledge without virtue

Commerce without morality

Science without humanity

Adoration without sacrifice Odd, then, that this litany of Western vices (in effect scripted upon the viewer's live image) was juxtaposed with the 12-by-18-foot slide projection Opening New Doors (1991), in which the ironic titular phrase is sequentially superimposed in seven languages over a dramatic perspective-emphasizing image of a Hong Kong detention camp, its high walls forbiddingly topped with barbed-wire--just the kind of facility used to keep the Vietnamese boat people of the nearby Untitled (Water), 1990, from entering the British crown colony, that bastion of decidedly non-Gandhian commercial frenzy. No money-equals-evil pieties will explain away the ambivalence evoked by Jaar's assembling of his works into such dialectical groupings, where the abuses of the capitalist system are set against the self-evident failure of its alternatives, where the force of the desire to be admitted as full-fledged participants in the democratic enterprise is virtually palpable. For Jaar, immigration is the prime issue of the '90s. The walls of his installation, frozen stop-action-style in partially fallen positions, suggested not a revolutionary urge to annihilate but a plea for unrestricted access to the domains of liberality and wealth. His images unsparingly criticize vestigial colonialism without ever lapsing into paeans to a classless Nirvana--almost as though a subliminal economic pragmatism were keeping check upon his potentially radical allegiance to the world's marginalized Others.

Jaar shows his greatest strength when he addresses his signature motif: the flesh and the social determinants that condition it--a preoccupation well summed up in the Foucaultian title of nine Cibachrome prints, The Body Is the Map (1991). Arranged in a gridlike pattern around the central image of a man's sun-creased neck, eight identical close-ups of eloquent skin cracks are variously positioned within white fields in a mildly satiric exercise in minimalist distribution. Sun damage, poverty, age--by such coordinates is the corporeal self insistently located, even within a conceptual void (suggested by the pictures' blank surround and the museum's pristine space) that would otherwise ignore or negate human content. The odd placement of images throughout the exhibition--higher or lower than is customary, half hidden behind the bulk of light boxes, off center within their frames--as well as the literal refiguration of those stark volumes associated with Morris and Judd, is an exceptionally informed way of making modernism (and its former supporters) do penance for a once-unquestioned doctrine of impersonality. Viewers are no longer permitted just to grasp a work cerebrally and be on their way with a transcendental frisson. Instead, they must now stoop and stretch, peer behind and lean over to obtain glimpses of meaningfully freighted scenes--a physical engagement that reminds us to what extent our perceived reality depends upon our vantage point and the demands placed daily on our minds and carcasses.