The Power of an Idea: A Moment in Time with Alfredo Jaar and Luis Pérez-Oramas

A MOMENT IN TIME WITH

ALFREDO JAAR AND

LUIS PEREZORAMAS

THE POWER OF AN IDEA EDITED

BY YANINA VALDIVIESO

Copyright ©2022 Colección

Cover:

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, LLC

Alfredo Jaar in his

All rights reserved. No portion of

Open work and non-stop record

this publication may be reproduced

(E s t u d i o s s o b r e l a Fe l i c i d a d,

without the written permission of

1979 –81), 1981

the publishers.

CPPC Publications Editor:

All works ©Alfredo Jaar, unless

Ileen Kohn

otherwise credited.

Selection of artworks: Alfredo Jaar

We have made every effort to

Yanina Valdivieso

contact copyright holders for

Editor:

images.

Yanina Valdivieso

Please address any inquiries to the

Copyeditors:

publisher:

María Esther Pino [Spanish] Madeline Ruiz [English]

Colección Patricia Phelps de

Translator:

Cisneros, LLC

Kristina Cordero

info@coleccioncisneros.org

Volume Design:

ISBN: 978-0-9989724-3-5

Carolina Arnal

ABV Taller de Diseño,

Project support CPPC: The original interview was conducted

Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro

and published in Spanish. To read or

Alexa Halaby

download the Spanish language digital

Víctor Ortiz-Palau

or print-on-demand versions or, to see

Rafael Santana

a complete list of all Fundación Cisneros

Satoshi Tabuchi

/ Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros publications, visit: www.coleccioncisneros.org

Prologue

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Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

How to Be in the World

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Short Circuit in the City

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Who Has Taught Us to See?

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The Metaphorical Distance

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References

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Life and work of Alfredo Jaar in the conversation

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108 Luis Pérez-Oramas bibliographic references 109 English editions of the bibliographic references 110 Notes on the life and work of Alfredo Jaar and Chile 111 Alfredo Jaar bibliographic references

Image Captions

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About Luis Pérez-Oramas

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Pérez-Oramas has yielded a richer and more intimate perspective on the artist’s work. To Luis, who has been instrumental in realizing the Colección’s mission since the 1990s, beginning as a curator and later as an advisor, we are grateful for this new contribution to the scholarship of Latin American art. Luis’ poetic perspective invites us to see Jaar’s art and ideas in a deeper and more nuanced manner.

And of course, I must thank Yanina Valdivieso whose sensitivity and dedication to this project yielded a remarkable result in her skillful editing of years of recorded exchanges. I thank Carolina Arnal for her keen eye and impeccable design of the PDF and printable version of this project, Kristina Cordero for her expert translation, and María Esther Pino and Madeline Ruiz for their skillful copyediting of the Spanish and English versions respectively. On the CPPC team, I thank Executive Director Ileen Kohn for zealously ensuring this project came to fruition; and to Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Alexa Halaby, Víctor Ortiz-Palau, Rafael Santana and Satoshi Tabuchi for their invaluable contributions in shaping this project over the years.

The goal for the scholarship we publish has always been to reach the widest audience possible. With this in mind, The Power of an Idea is available in multiple formats. The book is published on our website in a serialized manner, and is also available as a downloadable PDF and as an annotatable e-book. For those who prefer a physical

copy of the publication, there is a print-on-demand option that can be ordered and delivered internationally. All of these options are accessible through www.coleccioncisneros.org.

As always, we are honored to continue building bridges of exchange between artists, scholars, and our readers.

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

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A lf r e d o Jaar in f r on t of La me nt o f the I mage s, 2002

Ve n e z i a , Ve n e z i a, 2013

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Ve n e z i a , Ve n e z i a, 2013

The digital dismantling of our individual privacy now threatens us with the specter of a society under absolute control, a universal voluntary servitude.

Global warming and carbon emissions, among other factors, are permanently altering the biodiversity of our planet, where one million animal and vegetable species are presently in danger of extinction. The world looks on impassively at the return of social-nationalist populist governments that continue to gain more and more power within the most influential countries of Europe and the Americas, while the experience of the twentieth century and its many traumas slowly ebbs from the collective consciousness of the generations born around the turn of the millennium. The first pandemic of the new century hits at different moments in time and in an unjust pattern of racial and geo-social distribution: flat curves here, infection spikes there, deserted urban centers in the countries of the Global North, and impossible quarantines in the semi-rural agglomerations of the cities of the Global South. The world—or what we call the world—has come to a halt.

The universal quarantine of the twenty-first century has exposed the absolute unreality of real time, and with it the fact that there is not one world, but rather a never-ending global, planetary fracture.

Our conversation went unfinished, and as a result, when I returned to New York from São Paulo, Alfredo Jaar invited me to Helsinki. The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art was preparing a significant retrospective of his work along with an international symposium. That was where I discovered D e a r M a rku s, 2011. Alfredo had been invited to Finland to create an art intervention in a remote archipelago of frozen islands. One day he discovered that the entire transport system connecting the islands —the extremely early morning departures, the late afternoon returns—had been established to accommodate a single inhabitant, the only adolescent that lived there. The boats would leave at 5:45 a.m. for the regional capital Turku to ensure that Markus would get to school on time at 9:45 a.m.

Along the navigation path of this archipelago, Jaar set up eleven billboards containing messages from a range of Finnish intellectuals and poets, each message directed especially, and with affection, to this young man.

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D e a r M a r ku s, 2011

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Dear Markus, Have you ever thought about where the center of the world is?

I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve come up with two answers.

First of all, there is no center. Paris, Moscow and New York are just names of places, and you can’t travel to the heart of the earth except in adventure books.

On the other hand, the center of the world is always there, wherever anyone senses and apprehends the world.

Every sentient human being or animal is at the center of their own world.

The Ostrobothnian poet Gosta Agren said the same thing when he once wrote that only mother tongue is spoken everywhere in the world.

I hear you were sleeping when that New York artist saw you on your way to school.

I think that, at the time, he also thought these impossibly simple thoughts. He probably believed he was far from the center of the world.

Antti Nylén, Writer

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D e a r M a r ku s, 2011

D e a r M a rku s, the title of the work, is one of Jaar’s most touching, and is proof that despite the darkness of the present moment, there are still fireflies among us that flicker and glow. This is a topic that the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman has recently explored by studying the early letters of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of Jaar’s intellectual beacons.

I pay a visit to Jaar’s studio one August afternoon. I know the building well because it is also home to a number of respected New York art galleries and other artists’ studios in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. A beautiful bronze elevator, which recalls another industrial age, grants access to the endless gray corridors, the linear labyrinth that leads to the Chilean artist’s studio. To enter Jaar’s space implies gaining access to the kind of environment where the main protagonist does not seem to be the art or the artist, but rather the collection of impeccably organized documents, newspapers, magazines, and catalogues, all arranged on shelves that occupy most of the studio. Large picture windows offer a view to the northeast part of the island of Manhattan, and white tables, equally impeccable, display the clinical, silent presence of cutting-edge computers.

The studio could be mistaken for a neurologist’s office, a computer science laboratory, or a meditation cell for secular twenty-first century monks.

LUIS PÉREZ-ORAMAS:

What does studio practice mean

for Alfredo Jaar?

ALFREDO JAAR:

Look, this is an architecture studio. As you know,

I never studied art. I’m an architect and I consider myself an architect who makes art. For my work, I use an architect’s methodology. In fact, I am quite grateful to the field of architecture because I always wanted to be an artist, but my father didn’t think it was a good idea, so I became an architect instead. That was the compromise we came to. It is thanks to architecture, to the vision that architecture gave me, that I am able to do what I do. And so,

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whenever people come here they are always impressed with the order, how neat and organized and systematized everything is.

But at the bottom of it all, the order you see here is the order that’s in my head. If this were chaotic, I couldn’t function. So my studio is a reflection, in some way, of how my mind works.

I consider myself a rational person, and this is a place for silence, for investigation, for thinking. The tools here are computers and a vast number of archives with images from the days of analog pictures. There are thousands and thousands of slides there, right behind you. Each work is in its proper place, in a file. The pieces I’m working on now are all on dozens of hard drives, in terabytes, because as time passes you need more and more storage capacity.

From seven to nine a.m. I am here reading the news. Then, I answer the most important emails that come in, get the studio organized, and distribute my lists among the assistants: what I give Jun to do, what I will I give Jordan to do, what I give David, who has to do this, what are the pressing things that have to get done today.

The moment of the day I most enjoy is when the team has gone home and normally I am alone from five to eight in the evening.

I usually disconnect the telephone so that nobody can bother me and I recapture the peace from the morning. You have to find the right balance between dealing with the administrative work that unfortunately has to get done, and doing the work of thinking, reflecting, and creating.

When you say that the space organized here is a mirror of your mind, one could propose that what you have here is the topology of that way of thinking. And in fact there are actually two spaces: an archival space that is larger, physical—where, I imagine, you keep your analog materials, correct? Then you have this computer space and also different kinds of flat file cabinets, shelves, and bookcases. Each one could be said to contain its own unique mental space: one for text, one for images, another one for sound, and another one for information from the world.

So then, how does Alfredo Jaar handle his relationship to the exterior world that nourishes him?

LPO:

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Be Afraid of t h e E n o r m i ty o f t h e Po s s i b l e, 2015 , at the artist’s studio

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AJ:

There was a point when I reached a record; I had subscriptions

to ninety-seven publications. I realized that this was absurd, almost obscene, that I was barely even looking at some of them, so I stopped. Now I must have subscriptions to about fifty. When they arrive, I treasure and truly enjoy the moment, because I am obsessed with information. I’m a very curious person and need to be informed. Ultimately, half of these publications end up in the trash, but the other half will pile up and I’ll archive them for two, maybe three years, and then I’ll ask an assistant to please get rid of everything, and then we start all over again.

Now, obviously, with the Internet there are other sources of information that are extremely important, and that’s how I spend the earliest part of the morning. Even before I check my email, I need to get informed. If I don’t do that, I can’t function. I need to see what’s going on in the world. I have about fifteen favorite websites where I compare the news and look at what’s happening here and there, what this paper says, what this other one says, and I look at a couple of print newspapers that I still buy. Here I have to acknowledge my father’s influence. My father could never start the day without reading the newspaper. It’s an image that’s etched in my mind. In fact, in one of my latest catalogues, I included this dedication to him: «L’artiste dédie cette publication à son père, Alfredo Jaar (1920-2002) en hommage a ce lecteur de presse assidu qui l’a initié à la lecture des mots et des images.»

Interestingly, Alfredo continues speaking in French and he shows me an image of his father as an old man.

The quote from the catalogue says: «The artist dedicates this publication to his father, Alfredo Jaar (1920–2002), in homage to that assiduous reader of newspapers who introduced him to the practice of reading words and images.»

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The artist’s father, 2002

AJ:

And this is my father who suffered from Alzheimer’s and

Parkinson’s and was no longer lucid at this point, but he continued to insist on reading the news. This is an image that almost makes me cry. Here he is not long before he died. He no longer made any sense when he talked, but he needed to start every day as he does right here in this image. Out of respect, I took the photograph from behind to avoid showing his face. And I used the image for this catalogue that was called La politique des images [Politics of the Image].

That zeal, that obsession with the news, comes from him.

Alfredo resumes speaking in Spanish.

I’ve been thinking about the way you changed register, linguistically speaking, just a moment ago when you recalled the figure of your father, this diligent reader of the morning papers.

Suddenly, without realizing it, we were speaking French. You lived in Martinique, didn’t you? What is your connection to French?

LPO:

AJ:

When I was five years old, my father had gone into faillite. . . .

Alfredo resumes speaking about his father and once again does so in French.

AJ:

What’s the word? Bankruptcy! My father went bankrupt.

He and a partner had started a small business together, the partner cheated him and he went into bankruptcy. He had a company that made glass, I think, or something like that. And my grandfather, who emigrated and lived in the French Antilles, in Martinique, said to him, «Why don’t you come and work with me? I’m working as an importer-exporter here.» And my father said, «All right, why not?»

LPO:

Your paternal grandfather? In other words,

your father’s father . . .

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AJ:

Yes, that’s right. So we went to Martinique. I was five years old.

There were five of us. My last sister, the fifth, had just been born, and we went. I think it was February when we arrived in Martinique.

We didn’t speak the language, and so for those first few months each of us went to class in our respective grades as observers and we just sat in the back of the classroom and listened. From February to June that was all we did, watching and listening, and then summer came. The school year there begins in September and that was when we entered class officially. That was all we needed to learn the language, you know at that age it’s quite easy. I was very lucky to go to the Lycée Schœlcher which was the lycée where Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant all studied. So it is a school with a lot of history.

My father had promised my mother that after ten years we would return to Chile. Even though things in Chile had become very complicated—this was 1972, and there was chaos in the country under Allende. Most of my family there, all of whom were very conservative, said things to my father like, «Stay there . . . you’re well-off there, the Communists are taking over the country, they’re going to expropriate everything we’ve got, etc., etc.» And my father answered, «No, I don’t believe any of that, we’re coming back.»

Ours must have been the only family to return to Chile that year [laughs]. Everyone wanted to get out because they were rightfully scared, and it was total chaos. People were selling off their houses for nothing. When we arrived, we had no money, but my father managed to buy a decent house in Santiago’s barrio alto, the «uptown» neighborhood area, thanks to the fact that prices had plummeted.

We arrived in 1972 and didn’t speak Spanish. We still heard it spoken at home somewhat, but my siblings and I had basically lost it. My parents still spoke it. So then we had to study at the Alliance Française, we all ended up there. I was there for two years and then I graduated, right around the time of the coup d’etat. So we lived through the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende one year after returning to Chile.

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All told, I lived in Martinique for over ten years. I would say that the experience had two important effects on me. One is the effect of the language, of that very Cartesian education, and of course I’ve kept up my French. I still receive the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, which I’ve subscribed to for many years. I’m very interested in French theory, philosophy. The second effect was the experience of being a white child in a primarily black school.

LPO:

I was just going to ask you about that .

AJ:

The first few years were very difficult; I suffered from reverse

racism. I was a very strange character with this mop of red hair, and the other kids would make fun of me. Since I was Chilean, and in French «Chilean» is chilien, the kids would have a laugh taking out the letter «L» and making me a chien—a dog. And to make things worse I had this red hair so I really was an oddball [laughs]. But in two or three years’ time I had won them all over and was one of them. By the end, in my innocence, I actually came to believe that I was fully integrated; I went through my childhood ignoring the subject of race, I suppose because of the need to adapt. At some point, I truly forgot about the color of my skin and just blended into speaking Creole like all the other kids. I still speak a little, in fact.

And so when people ask me what the hell I’m doing in Africa, why, why I work so much in Africa, when they question why 60% of my work deals with or is connected to Africa, I tell them there is a biological reason, so to speak, and a biographical one.

LPO:

Je suis africain . . .

AJ:

In some way, yes.

Clearly, that was your immersion, your existential, vital —and perhaps pre-intellectual—adherence to Négritude or its successors, who today are fighting for the rights of the Creole world—Glissant’s Tout-Monde—that finds the idea of cultures or civilizations that celebrate a deeply rooted single identity to be a simplistic atavism.

LPO:

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AJ:

Exactly.

What an incredible genealogy to belong to—Césaire, Fanon, Glissant—that’s huge.

LPO:

AJ:

A few years ago I was finally able to connect with Édouard

Glissant. He wrote a magnificent poetic text about my work: «Robben’s rocks have confined their site. The waves released it, and thus we notice it.»

Your period in the Caribbean is so interesting, coming from Chile. One has to picture that geography. . . . The Caribbean is one of those places in the Americas that is nourished by cultures from all over the world, no? It’s a place that holds remnants of everything that has passed through there. And when I say everything, I mean everything: Africa, Asia, Europe, America . . . all concentrated in that maritime and archipelagic body of water.

LPO:

AJ:

Yes, and on that note, I can tell you a little story. Two or three

years ago I was invited to Barbados to a conference on the diaspora of Caribbean intellectuals—and they considered me one of them, ha! And I was very proud to participate.

People were whispering things like: «Where’d this guy come from?», but then when I told my story and showed my work, we made some marvelous connections, and since then I’ve been invited again to Martinique and I’ve gone back. Now they’re asking me to propose, possibly, a monument to Aimé Césaire, which is a tremendous honor for me.

LPO:

How fantastic! That’s wonderful .

AJ:

And so I’ve reconnected with Martinique, and I’ve also

gone to the Bahamas, to Barbados. I’m reconnecting with that part of myself, my personal history.

What could the model for this be? I began to conceptualize it, and I said to myself, «All right, you’re going to have to involve the public somehow, you’re going to have to include images on the street, in the city, some kind of strategy for communication, for consultation, to allow people to express themselves.» But of course I had to do it in such a way that wouldn’t risk my life or the lives of the people who agreed—in an almost suicidal manner—to be a part of this craziness.

I came up with several possible approaches. I imagined different ideas, different topics around which I might articulate this whole process. Until finally I said to myself, «Alfredo, you’re wasting time. Let’s get to the point. Let’s pick the most essential, most philosophical issue, which is, in fact, inevitable: happiness.»

And then the title occurred to me right at the beginning, before I had fully laid out each phase. The reason it came to me was that, at the time, I had been reading Henri Bergson’s studies on laughter—during the dictatorship, let me tell you, it was a lot of fun to read this book. It was a very interesting escape valve. And so, as we say in Chile, muy patudamente [very cheekily] I steal the title from Bergson and decide to call my piece Estudios sobre la Felicidad [Studies on Happiness]. Of course, it sounded cocky and arrogant, but I told myself, «It doesn’t matter, this will give it a more serious, sober, and philosophical tone. As if this were a real investigation. Maybe that would help keep the military away, because they will think it was something of no importance, of no interest to them, something they’d be totally indifferent to.»

That’s how the title came about, and from there I went out to the street to ask my questions, with one friend who kept watch by the street corners in case any soldiers turned up, and another who took photographs of me doing the work. That’s how the project got started.

I would ask people if they were happy and to protect myself I had two questions prepared. The first one was, Are you happy? and the other one—because I really did need to protect myself—was something very general, something like, What percentage of

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the world’s population do you think is happy? So of course, with that kind of question what could the military really do to me, right?

Then, once I was feeling more secure, when I saw that everything would be okay, I would ask them the next question, which was definitely more compromising under those circumstances: What percentage of the population in Chile do you think is happy?

That was it, you see? I would throw those things out there and then I would give each person a little mint, a little mint so that they could deposit it, like a vote, in the box that corresponded to the percentage that they thought was happy.

This made the whole thing seem almost ridiculous and I would say to them, «Don’t worry if you don’t want to answer, just eat the mint.» Then I would give them another mint and I would say, «If you don’t want to, don’t answer, just vote.» The results showed that most people estimated that in the whole world only 20% —a bit more, 20% to 40%—were happy, and their results for Chile were quite similar. I was very interested in sociology, and so I invented all these stages to the survey as a way of getting to the main question. The idea was to give the project an air of scholarly research, but it was all a hoax. I was faking it, camouflaging what I was doing behind an academic disguise to lower the risk.

Of course. And did anyone catch on to the political dimension of the question?

LPO:

AJ:

LPO:

No, the soldiers left me alone, to them I was more or less . . .

. . . just another nut job on the street asking questions.

AJ:

Yes, I mean, don’t you see what I looked like then? I was a hippie,

my hair down to here, so I wasn’t a threat to them. And that was the beginning. That was the beginning . . .

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Series of surveys (E s t u d i o s s o b r e l a Fe l i c i d a d, 1979 –81), 1980

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Voting panels (E s t u d i o s s o b r e l a Fe l i c i d a d, 1979 –81), 1980

Alfredo, another thing that was implicit in this ópera prima and that happens to be a major theme in your work, is the production of a work of art that creates its own community. The work as an engine, a producer, a generator of community around it.

LPO:

AJ:

Of course, in Are you happy? a community was created by going

out onto the street with the images, the questions. Parallel to this, in these works, I wanted to give people a real chance to respond.

This is how it went: first I go out to the street and ask these questions; and then I decide to make portraits of happy and unhappy people. There is a physical portrait and a technical register of «happy person number 31,» with age, identity card, my remarks, and a questionnaire. That’s how these works were exhibited, in acrylic boxes with all these things inside. Finally, in the third phase, I invited some of the people whose portraits I took to appear in public following a precise schedule, «At this time and on this day, these two people.» They would show up at the art institute [Instituto Cultural de Las Condes], and people would sit down around to listen to them. The magic moment I dreamt of would happen when someone in the audience would ask one of the participants a question, and it led to a lovely conversation, a poetic, philosophical conversation in which they said everything without mentioning anything about the dictatorship.

On the monitors you could see videos of the interviews I had previously recorded with the participants, either happy or unhappy.

There, the people themselves were the art. Living beings partici­p ating in a performance in which the work was precisely that: a moment of real communication that went beyond what I had done with them. It was in the discussion part of what we call the «public presentation of happy and unhappy people» that this community you talk about emerged. I filmed everything. When someone asked something, a moment of reflection was generated in the middle of this atmosphere of fear. From the very beginning of my career, in a very programmatic sense, I defined art as commu­nication, and communication is not just about putting a message out there, but also that the message requires a response. If there is no response, there is no communication and therefore, no art.

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Public presentation of happy and unhappy people (E s t u d i o s s o b r e l a Fe l i c i d a d, 1979 –81), 1980

Public presentation of happy and unhappy people (E s t u d i o s s o b r e l a Fe l i c i d a d, 1979 –81), 1980

In the last phases of the project, at the Museo de Bellas Artes, I built a simple stage where I invited people to participate, to answer the question «Are you happy?» as the video camera was rolling. What happened then was that most people decided to talk, to say things, but they all preferred not to appear on camera.

Instead they would show photos of disappeared people, pages from newspapers, they would put their legs on top of the camera, or they would appear out of focus or with sunglasses, they would photograph themselves, some people even acted out segments of a television series. The truth is, they could do whatever they wanted. . . . I would stop by the museum with my Polaroid camera from time to time, to do some photo documentation of the participants and their image on the video monitor. I put them all together as a continuous record of the work so that something would be visible at every hour of the day, even when nobody was participating.

LPO: It’s fascinating how it is both an ópera prima and magna, for all the dimensions it took on. Recently I have been thinking a lot about E s tu d io s s o b re l a Fe l i c i d a d, 1979-81, because, as you know, over the past few years there has been a revival of interest in action-based art—happenings, performances—and a concern about how to acknowledge them and their history in traditional museums. Museums as institutions have asked themselves how to integrate these artistic forms into the body of a collection.

I can’t help but think that in 1979, you were already proposing the possible architecture of something that artists like Tino Sehgal have been transforming into a system recently, and that the museums don’t seem to have resolved yet.

You have repeatedly stated that you are an architect. You also said that you approached, that you handled that ópera prima on happiness as an architect, as something that occurs publicly in the public space, with others (or for others) who you may or may not know personally. What does this mean? There is a very clear architectural component to your work—the component of the b e l c om p o s to in the Baroque sense—a total work that people must travel through, physically. In the case of E s tu d io s s o b re l a Fe l i c i d a d, as you have described it, what does it mean that it —almost—suggests a «situationist» architecture?

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Open work and non-stop record (E s t u d i o s s o b r e l a Fe l i c i d a d, 1979 –81), 1981

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Video Documentation: Polaroids (E s t u d i o s s o b r e l a Fe l i c i d a d, 1979 –81), 1981

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AJ:

There are two ways I can answer that. First, you would have to

see the work from a programmatic point of view. In other words, you have to judge that architecture in its programmatic sense. This is because the architect designs according to a program, and so the work has its own structure (as mine clearly did). I started from the basic question and the work grew from there in intensity and depth, and it had certain objectives that I had posed from the outset. Its program was designed. For example, I wanted to create spaces for communication. That was already part of the program, that was already architecture, programmatically speaking, before we even look at how it was materialized. We are talking about another level of architecture, and at that level, in all of my works, I can talk about the program that frames them. That is how I am. It is a totally rational work in which I design the work, program it, define it: «This is my objective, this is the audience I want to reach, this is the time in which I’m going to do it,» etc. And so, programmatically, that piece is like all my work in which, specifically speaking, architecture is present.

However, architecture was also there on another level, when we observe the city, the anonymous city where people don’t even bother to look at each other, where people ignore each other. Chile during the dictatorship, I would say, was a lot like the way New York is on a regular basis: people are afraid to look each other in the eye.

What I mean is that you could read the effect of the military dictatorship through people’s behavior in the cities, observing how they moved, how they interacted with each other—and what was prohibited specifically was to interact. You have to understand that during the first few years of that dictatorship it was prohibited for more than three people to gather in one place, because that was already considered a political meeting. . . .

In theory, you could analyze the city, watch how people in the city moved, and from there guess that there was a dictatorship in place, because how could it be possible? Chile is part of Latin America and yet the people there didn’t look at each other. That’s unthinkable.

So when you got into it and started interacting with people, that already broke all the laws of the moment. The only interaction 46

permitted at that time was with military personnel or carabineros who were going to detain you for some reason because they suspected something. Otherwise, on a normal day, you didn’t interact with anyone. And there I was, this crazy person asking these questions, and so naturally a lot of people got scared, a lot of people said to me, «No, no, I don’t want to get involved.» And that was already the equivalent of a kind of short circuit in the city, you see? That’s an interference in the architecture of the city, in its evolution, in its movement, in the flow of people, in what was regarded as «normal» behavior at that time.

If we reduce the scale of this great question of happiness to one person who claims to be happy, and another who claims the opposite; that is to say, translating this giant thing into two people, you decrease the scale of a massive problem. This reduction in scale of an enormous problem down to a single, feasible action in space is also architecture. You reduce the scale of this great question to a person who either embodies—or doesn’t—happiness.

The creation of these small anonymous spaces, of totally anonymous and uninteresting architecture, is transformed into a space for resistance because it is a space of communication between people who don’t know each other and who decide to deal with an issue that affects everyone, but it is also a risky issue in times of dictatorship. Then these communities are created and we transform these anonymous spaces into spaces of resistance. Well, then that too is architecture.

An architecture in its «expanded fields» as conceptualized

by Rosalind Krauss. I find your use of the term «short circuit» fascinating. I would almost be tempted to develop it in the sense of the accident. Meaning, what ends up happening, what you don’t know is going to happen, which, in the case of the electric metaphor, is precisely a short circuit, right?

LPO:

AJ:

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A spark.

And the system is interrupted. . . . Your use of the term «short circuit» for architecture reminds me of something I once read in Aldo Rossi’s A Scientific Autobiography, a marvelous and forgotten book that I always carry with me. Rossi explains something similar to what you just mentioned: that architecture is, above all, a program, a plan, a project that will allow some­t hing—something we don’t know—to happen. Rossi uses a very specific, very beautiful image, «the silver ciborium before the High Mass.»

Architecture, in the sense that you describe, is about designing the conditions for an event, its conditions for possibility, without really knowing if it will ever actually happen.

LPO:

AJ:

Exactly.

There are some things that you direct more than others.

I’m talking about works in which you guide us because you want us to have the diegetic experience (like in a story in which we are also protagonists), that you want or program us to have. E s tu d io s s o b re l a Fe l i c i d a d is, for me, your base model for the diegetic work, but I am also especially thinking about works like Lament of the Images, 2002, The Gramsci Trilogy, 2005, The Sound of Silence, 2006, Venezia, Venezia, 2013, and more recently, Shadows, 2014 .

LPO:

On the other hand, there are works where you leave things looser, more open, more predisposed to act upon something that we thought we knew, but that in reality the work comes to reveal itself in a new light, and which manifests itself at the moment when you look at it. I’m thinking of the works that for me are seminal pieces like The Rwanda Project, 1994–2000, Untitled (Newsweek), 1994, The Eyes of Gutete Emerita, 1996, or Six Seconds, 2000.

And more recently, on another note, the astounding work about the image that captures the moment Osama bin Laden is executed, May 1 , 2011 , 2011.

AJ:

Absolutely. What you just said is key because people think

architecture is about building spaces, that architecture is space; architecture is not space. Architecture is the body that moves in space or what makes that movement in space possible, whether or not that movement actually occurs. The space itself is nothing

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Th e S o u n d o f S i l e n c e , 2006/2011

and its reason for existence only takes on meaning when a body enters and something happens precisely in that—let’s call it unsuspected—encounter. So architecture is that possibility. It’s not the concrete thing, but the possibility.

And in fact, you’re constantly dealing with the social, historical body in your work, and you talk about an architecture of the human body moving in space.

LPO:

AJ:

That’s where everything starts. Believing in precisely that is

what allows me to do what I do. Now, you talk about the social body, but I also talk about the physical body; the works are designed to seduce this body, to induce certain movements, so that that body will undertake a certain degree of physical effort. One designs that as an architect. People, when they think of the architect, they say, «Ah! He built those four walls,» when in reality the architect created the movement that you are going to make in order to penetrate those four walls, to cross these four walls. In the work, one—I mean the artist, at least the kind of artist I identify with— does the same thing.

The architecture in my piece The Sound of Silence, 2006 , is not architecture because the light box is square, or because there is a corridor three meters long. No! The work of art is you walking down that corridor drawn by the light at the end, you see? We’re always working with the human body, not with space. The space is designed only so that the human body may act or provoke or respond in a certain way to the ideas that we are trying to articulate with that space. In the end, we are trying to stimulate those human bodies, that choreography.

LPO:

Fascinating!

AJ:

That for me is one of the keys to what I do, and one of the keys to

contemporary art in general. Many artists aren’t fully conscious of this, or they do it intuitively, but in the end that’s where the clarity of the process lies . . . of what you have to do, of what you do.

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Th e S o u n d o f S i l e n c e , 2006/2011

It’s noteworthy that you, artists and architects, from the sixties to the eighties, generated a tremendous process of transition in which you broke free from the idea that, through an autonomous work, an artist could achieve the essence of their art form. I wonder if Modern art became a form of aesthetic fundamentalism as it became obsessed with the ongoing dream that it would be possible to reach the origin of its forms: the belief that it is possible, in a self-sufficient artwork, to reach the «foundations» to which that artwork belongs. A painter could arrive at the basic laws of painting, a sculptor could arrive at the basic laws of sculpture. The model of the open work that comes out of that transition, between modern fundamentalism and a more discursive and less essential art, implies abandoning the idea that we know what «man is» in order to let in those bodies that you talk about. Those people who are going to come, the person who is going to come even if we don’t know who it is quite yet. And the issue—the work, the open architecture—is left there for the person who is going to come.

LPO:

You artists pursued that transaction through which you surren­ dered that situation of responsibility to the viewers: allowing them to gain access to a certain «moral authorship» of the work, making us morally co-responsible for the work. In that sense, Modern art was still an irresponsible form of art. In the work whose issue is the political body, which makes us co-responsible for the darkness of the present moment, you have arranged those elements architecturally and it is no longer your responsibility alone.

Your responsibility was to do it well, to orchestrate it well, like an architect, so that whatever needs to happen either happens or doesn’t . . .

AJ:

That’s effectively what happens there. I suffer a lot because of

this, when I explain this to my students, for example. That no matter how hard we try, despite the precision of the construction designed for this articulation of ideas, in order to achieve this effect on the spectator, this communication with the viewer, in the end we lose control. In reality, what you are creating is a monster—and I mean monster in the sense that it’s out of control—with a life of its own.

In my works this aspect of communication is paramount. I don’t believe in the artist who says what he wants, does what he wants and doesn’t care that nobody understands him, who is totally 52

obscure. No. I care a lot about communicating with my audience and so I try to mark different entry points into the work at different intellectual levels. I want a child to be able to approach the work and communicate with it as a child can, because there is a point of entry for that child, do you see what I mean? And there is a point of entry for the adult, there is a point of entry for the intellectual, and there is always an entry point that you weren’t able to envision beforehand.

Nothing astounds me more than when I read something about my work, or I have a conversation with someone, and I realize that that mind entered through a place that I hadn’t imagined was possible, that I hadn’t designed. For me, it is a privilege to have someone like you to talk to, and you can discuss and discover precisely those things that I simply hadn’t calculated. I have to be honest, it’s happened before, there are viewers who have read things that I never saw. And so this monstrous thing unfolds on two levels. On one level you have the very real effects of behaviors, movements, reactions to the work that were not envisioned before.

And then sometimes you have readings, projections, that take you to a place where you never thought you’d go. It’s amazing!

What does it mean, from a retrospective point of view, to have begun your body of work with a piece entitled, perhaps unwittingly, but no less strategically, E s tu d io s s o b re l a Fe l i c i d a d ?

LPO:

AJ:

That work practically stalks me either consciously or uncons-

ciously. In the end, with all of my works, I am always asking people, «Are you happy?» Or I am revealing this question in some form or another, articulating that query in different ways. I’m also asking myself that question. In the end, the negative answer to that question is what pushes me to keep on working. When people ask me if I am happy, I say, «No, I’m not happy,» and obviously I think that is the main reason I continue working.

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Alfredo Jaar in his Open work and non-stop record (E s t u d i o s s o b r e l a Fe l i c i d a d, 1979 –81), 1981

digitize all the images and put them up for sale through Corbis, the agency that manages the author rights which, at that moment, became the largest stock photography agency in the world.

The article also reports that in order to preserve the photographs and the negatives, Gates plans to store them 200 feet underground somewhere to the northeast of Pittsburgh, in a kind of bunker that had once been a limestone mine. This article, which came out in 2001, criticized the deal, arguing that Gates was only going to digitize the most famous images—Marilyn Monroe with her dress flying up, Einstein sticking out his tongue, that kind of thing. And so I thought, «This is interesting, this guy is buying up all these images, and he’s going to sell them and store them in a mine 200 feet under the earth.» Perfect, I’ll file it.

A few years earlier, in 1997, I had been in South Africa working for the Johannesburg Biennial. I stayed on for a few days after it ended and went to visit Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned for twenty-seven years. A former political prisoner, about fifty years old, gave us the tour and he showed us around the facility, the place where they did their forced labor, that kind of thing. I was so stunned, so moved by it, that when the tour ended I said to the guard, «Listen, I want you to give me a private tour, please. Take me back there so we can talk.» «I’d be glad to,» he said, and so I hired him and he gave me another tour. He took me to this huge open field, a mine where Mandela and other prisoners had been put to work. Forced labor just to demoralize them; to blind them with light, they didn’t give them sunglasses. And when I ask my guide, «What kind of mine is this, what does it have?» he says to me, «Limestone.»

So, after reading the news about Gates that day in the Times, I say to myself, «Limestone! Of course.» I think this is interesting because it reminds me of the other limestone mine that caused Mandela and the other prisoners so much suffering, and I associate both events to each other. From that point on, I started to archive information on Gates and Corbis. Shortly thereafter, I managed to tie it all together when the United States invaded Afghanistan and the Pentagon 58

bought the rights to all the war images from that satellite Ikonos to prevent anyone from seeing the photographs of the invasion. That was when I connected the three elements and the piece [Lament of the Images] came into being. As you know, it consists of a dark hallway where I invite viewers to read these three stories about the control of images and blindness. Then I invite them to continue down a very long corridor that leads to a huge room where they are blinded by a white screen with no images, just a very powerful white light.

La m e n t o f t h e I ma g e s, 2002/2015

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La m e n t o f t h e I ma g e s, 2002

La m e n t o f t h e I ma g e s, 2002/2015

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The same thing happened with The Sound of Silence, 2006.

In 1993, the photographer Kevin Carter took a photograph of a very malnourished child, weakened by starvation, with this expectant vulture lurking behind, and I saved the issue of the New York Times where it first appeared. A year later, I read in the news that the photograph had won the Pulitzer Prize. I think, «Wow, that’s interesting, this guy won the Pulitzer!» So I archive it, and not long after that Carter commits suicide. «That’s it,» I said to myself.

«All right, this is unbelievable.» Years later I made the piece, which is one of my most popular. It’s been exhibited over thirty times, all over the world, in fifteen languages. The Sound of Silence is a theater built for this extraordinary image, a space for reflecting on what I call «the politics of images.»

I’ve been thinking a lot about your work and, among other issues, about how to confront the enunciability of contemporary art. I’m not thinking in terms of ethical authority, I’m talking about the fact that all discursive disciplines are based upon a reflection that has to do with their own limitations, with the question about what conditions them: what can be said through these instruments? What can you say, for example, through the instruments of mathematics or the instruments of poetry?

LPO:

On the other hand, there’s something that by now has become a myth, or maybe an ideology if we want to get Marxist about it, which is the illusion of this thing people call «real time.» They want to make us think that it’s possible to live in real time, to be informed in real time, to act in real time, that the experience of time is the same for everyone. This ideology overlooks a dark, exponential kind of time that no one sees, and that’s what I find so compelling about your work because you are reading the same news the rest of us are reading and yet what you are taking from it is the «anti-news.» What you read is the line of text that they aren’t writing in the body of the news piece. It’s an «anti-reading» of that current event, and because of that you are seeing a dimension of time there that the rest of us don’t see.

La m e n t o f t h e I ma g e s , 2002/2015

Detail from The New York Times Friday, March 26, 1993

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Th e S o u n d o f S i l e n c e , 2006/2011

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AJ:

This concept of «anti-reading» is really brilliant, I like it a lot.

Until now nobody had ever expressed it like that, and in fact, now I see that as time goes by, the thing that most interests me is reality, and precisely how that reality cannot be represented. We have this mediation through the press, which we all know is not an innocent mediation. It is perfectly directed and controlled, it’s always within a framework, an agenda, that is ethical, political, etc. And so it is a very complex mediation, but it’s all we’ve got if we want to learn about certain aspects of reality.

The trouble is that my entire body of work is based on real life.

That’s also a burden that I have borne for the past thirty years.

People find it incredible and it’s true. In thirty years I have never been capable of creating a work of art purely from my imagination —a little drawing, a little object, nothing. Show me anything from my work over the past thirty years, of the thousands of pieces I’ve done, something, anything, a John Cage kind of gesture, for example, something by chance, I don’t know. It doesn’t exist; I don’t know how to do that. Everything is based on reality.

I think this explains my passion for traveling, for going to the place, researching the place, seeing for myself, trying to eliminate that mediation that exists. Because until I do that, before I get involved at that depth, with that reality, what do I really have? Well, just the mediation of the press, whether it’s print, analog, or through the Internet. And as you say—I had never called it that, but I love the term—I do an «anti-reading.» You have to learn to read between the lines, precisely in order to create from there. And that’s my burden. I have no other choice but to work with that material because that’s all there is.

Now, how did I get here? For two reasons, I suppose. Partly because I am also a frustrated journalist; I’m very interested in the function of journalism. And on the other hand, because I didn’t know what art was, I never studied it. When I discovered Duchamp, who said «If you call it art, it’s art» . . . well, I wouldn’t be an artist if I hadn’t discovered Duchamp. And so at the bottom of it all there’s Duchamp’s shadow telling me, «If you call it that, that’s what it is; do what you know how to do.» And this is what I know how to do: I know how to read, 70

I learned «to read» and I also think I learned how to read images, which is something most people don’t know how to do. Nobody teaches us to read images. They teach us to read texts, words.

We receive the teachings of written language, but who has taught us how to see? Who has taught us to look, to understand images, and what they communicate? Those are the tools I work with.

This new concept of yours, of «anti-reading», makes me think that living in Chile during the dictatorship was also a lesson in «anti-reading.» Because the press was absolutely controlled by the military government and we lived under censorship, and they had shut down all the media outlets (at least all those that were opposed to or questioned the dominant ideology of the military dictatorship) we were just completely inundated by their version of reality. The only media landscape that existed in Chile for seventeen years was this press that was controlled by the dictatorship. For example, would you believe that I only learned about the US involvement in the coup d’etat in Chile when I arrived in New York in 1982? Before that, nothing. There were always rumors in Chile, but we really didn’t have the slightest idea. Can you imagine the ability of a dictatorship to control television, journalism, books, the books that are imported, the newspapers, everything? It’s total insanity . . .

I was very young at the time and hadn’t analyzed all this, but clearly, when you live in such a place where the press and the media landscape are under such strict control, you are forced to learn how to read between the lines. They can censor, they can omit certain things, they can even lie sometimes—although, in general, to avoid lying (because lies are easier to prove) they omit things.

This is a typical strategy of totalitarian regimes. They omit. Instead of lying, they leave things out. They didn’t say this, they didn’t say that. And so one begins to practice this concept you just introduced.

So, let’s just say that I had some very intense training—ha!— in «anti-reading.» But that’s probably a topic we should leave for another day. And because of those constraints, as you know, my works from that period in Chile, and even after that time, are very oblique, like Telecomunicación, 1981, for example, or Opus 1981 / Andante Desesperato, 1981. It was a survival strategy.

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There’s something here that I think can be seen throughout your body of work, from E s tu d io s s o b re l a Fe l i c i d a d, 1979–81, onward. It’s a very specific question that has two readings. One is a more transitory reading, for example, «Are you happy today?», and the other is a more lasting one, in the sense of, «Does happiness exist universally?» The dual dimension of one question recalls La me nt o f the I mage s, 2002 , as well. In that work, of course, you talk about (among other things) the end of apartheid, which on the one hand is a specific moment in time, but it is also an event with huge repercussions if we think of how the entire Western world is built upon racism, exclusion, and the exploitation of black people, among other exclusions and humiliations.

LPO:

AJ:

I’m very touched that you said that because I showed a piece in

Santiago at a group exhibition in a gallery that was a reflection on exactly that—racism. This piece, The Sound of Silence, from 2005, came out of a photograph that I took in 1997 of Mandela’s cell on Robben Island where he was jailed. The photo, taken from outside the cell, shows the interior of the cell through the bars on the door.

There are a couple of blankets, neatly folded, and on top of them a cup and a plate. That was Mandela’s cup. I took several photographs of that detail because it was such a heartbreaking image. On the back wall you can see the prison cell window and the view to the outside that Mandela had for twenty-seven years.

So I created a new piece with that material because South Africa was in the news during the summer on account of the World Cup and I was following it. I was very interested in watching it because I was very aware of what good this World Cup would do for Africa’s image in general, and South Africa’s image especially. For the first time, the entire world was witnessing on television a normal, happy event unfolding in Africa. An extraordinary event, without hunger or poverty, with athletic stadiums, television networks, advertising —with everything.

I couldn’t help but feel amazed when I noticed that journalists expressed a kind of incredulity when they did their segments on Johannesburg’s nightlife. They showed this magnificent city in all its magnificent normality, as if it were surprising to see that Johannesburg was a place with buildings, cars, and people instead of 72

Th e S o u n d o f S i l e n c e (Detail: Peter Blum Edition, NY ), 2006

murders! I think that the World Cup was a key moment in the representation of Africa, even when the international media engaged in the same old common preconceptions. At the same time, this coverage also served to reveal the latent racism that has not gone away, as well as another set of typical, well-known problems: that the ticket prices for the different events were all but inaccessible to most South Africans, particularly those of color. Anyone who visits South Africa today realizes that apartheid still exists, despite the fact that officially it doesn’t. Isn’t that right?

I extended that experience and formulated a new work because for me racism is really one of those things that governs geopolitical relationships in the world, not just between countries but inside of each country. I am sure this is also true in the country that you’re from, Venezuela. . . .

LPO:

Absolutely.

AJ:

Chile is an incredibly linear society. By the color of someone’s

skin you can see, you can immediately determine their social status.

Of course there are exceptions, but social status is based on . . .

LPO:

Race.

AJ:

. . . on race, yes, it’s unbelievable. So for The Sound of Silence

(M a n d e l a C e l l ), 2010, I made a video, 100 seconds long, where you see Mandela’s cell from the outside. With the camera I zoom in for a close-up of Mandela’s cup. Then, right there, after a few moments, you begin to see steam rising from the cup. It was a steam effect that we worked into the edit. A special effect, a very subtle but visible steam. It was my way of suggesting that the jail is still functioning, that Mandela is still imprisoned, and that racism continues to exist all over the world. It’s a sad piece, but also very simple, wouldn’t you say? It wants to talk about this fact, which is obvious to anyone who visits Latin America: the fact that racism is the cornerstone of the human relationship. It’s horrible, horrible, we haven’t progressed at all. . . .

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Th e S o u n d o f S i l e n c e (M a n d e l a C e l l ) , 2010 Video still

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Th e S o u n d o f S i l e n c e (Peter Blum Edition, NY ), 2006

It’s as if all the things we believe to be sublime in our human culture rest upon that dark hole. . . .

LPO:

AJ:

Yes.

Allow me to go back to how you tackle a specific event for which you can define its temporal and territorial limits, as well as the device that projects the work of art to a general level, until you arrive at the final question that is no longer tied to that space and that time.

LPO:

In the case of La me nt o f the I mage s, I clearly see that the piece has to do with its historical moment. A piece about a new system governing the image, that regulates the lawful possession, distribution and reproduction of images, and that then, as in many of your works, ends in an experience of blinding light, in a light effect that blinds us for a brief moment.

There are two ways to blind, of «blinding.» The first, is that of man in the political cave, in this case that of Mandela. Then, there is the more universal way of man in the metaphysical cave of the image, which you evoke through that experience of blinding light, and you exemplify it with the events of control over the distribution or the possession of images: the declaration of a new regime of control over the image. There we find a kind of amplification and it’s interesting to see how you manage to produce that shift.

AJ:

I can tell you that the work E s tu d io s s o b re l a Fe l i c i d a d ,

1979–81, set the tone. That first work, very prematurely and even

unconsciously, proposed the working model that I came to use later on. I expend a great deal of energy as an artist in the process of editing, in cleaning up, because I think that most of us artists have a tendency to try to express too many things at once. . . .

Perhaps because of my Cartesian mental structure, or because I try so hard to make sense of things, or because of my architecture background, I always try to arrive at an idea. I believe very strongly in the power of an idea, and most of my works are just that: a very simple idea, articulated sometimes in a very complex way, yes, but it is really just an idea. In the end, that’s the model for E s tu d io s s o b re l a Fe l i c i d a d . There I truly went straight to the 78

Th e S o u n d o f S i l e n c e (Detail: Peter Blum Edition, NY ), 2006

source, to the question of «Are you happy?» and of course it has projections, amplifications beyond the specific place and time of the dictatorship in Chile. It is also open to many possible interpretations, sediments, and layers of meaning, but ultimately, it was about condensing everything down to that one question that affects us all.

There is a key in La me nt o f the I mage s, Alfredo, that you revealed to me when we were working together on the Museum of Modern Art’s acquisition of the piece. You were explaining technically the «physicality,» the physical quality of the work, and you said to me: «The text is empty. I mean, there are no letters, what you have is light that passes through some openings. What you are seeing as a letter, precisely, is not a letter, it’s an incision, a slit in the wall.»

LPO:

AJ:

Exactly.

I think that what you are telling me has to do, specifically, with reading into the void between the letters, in the space between the letters. Because when you say «This is not America» in your 1987 piece A Logo fo r Ame ri c a, and you show us that cartographic icon that everyone recognizes (here, in the United States) as America, with that collection of letters, you are focusing on the void between the letters, on what is in the blank space between the letters, and that’s what allows us to say that America is much more than the map of the United States.

LPO:

This is akin to that extraordinary, textual moment etched into the work La me nt o f the I mage s that you just described, as well as when you say that you have been trained by the circumstances of the Chilean dictatorship to read between the lines.

I think we spoke about this once, something that I read in Umberto Eco years ago, a moment when he quotes Gershom Scholem saying that the expected reading of the Torah, that God will reveal at the moment the Messiah comes, requires reading not the letters but the spaces between them. And this came into my head when you were talking about your relationship to reality and the press; the reading of what is not said, of what is left out.

AJ:

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That’s marvelous! That’s poetry!

A Log o fo r Am e r i c a, 1987/2014

Public Interventions (E s t u d i o s s o b r e l a Fe l i c i d a d, 1979 –81) 1981

The Chilean miners are there trapped in this artificial cave and your work also has to do with the cave, with the absence of visibility, with the impossibility of seeing the visible, not as the result of an aesthetic or rhetorical effect, but because of an ideological plot that makes it impossible. Your work involves the disruption of light, the politics of labor, human misfortune, it is about spectacle and power, the spectacle of power.

And so it occurred to me that to start off our conversation I might say to you, «Alfredo, let’s talk about the miners.»

ALFREDO JAAR:

As it happens, I just returned from Chile, so

this topic of the miners is very much on my mind. I brought with me a couple of newspapers from the day they found them alive down in the mine. The visibility the press has given them is very interesting. One Chilean magazine is putting out a special issue to celebrate Chile’s bicentennial, because this is a bicentennial year: 1810–2010.

Indeed. Our conversation takes place exactly two hundred years after the majority of the Spanish-American republics declared their independence from Spain. It was a liberation that took place as a kind of «revolutionary spring» in 1810 after the Napoleonic invasion of Spain.

AJ:

They invited twenty, twenty-five Chilean figures to contribute

to the magazine. I was still in New York at the time, I hadn’t gone to Santiago yet, but I had begun to follow the drama of the miners and decided to write something about them. A short text dealing with the issue of the tragedy, the tragic temporality that is not the kind of tragedy in which you seek a guilty party. Right now it was essential to focus on saving these men, but I found that the distance between us and the miners was the perfect metaphorical distance between us and the Chile that we would hope to have on the occasion of the bicentennial. In that distance, the contours of the real Chile began to emerge. I wrote this brief text that perhaps I could read to you now: Today, 13 August 2010, my thoughts are with the San José mine, and the miners trapped there, 700 meters below the earth. All the 86

progress our country has achieved means nothing, compared to the impotence we feel as we confront this tragedy. In time, much will be said about the mistakes that allowed this to happen, but right now we may state, with confidence and sorrow, that the 700 meters separating us from them is the real distance that we must travel on this bicentennial in order to begin envisioning the Chile we dream of.

So, then I thought about my project in Brazil, Gol d i n the M o rn i ng, 1985 , where I tried to show the world the inhuman conditions

in which these miners work. The Chilean journalists have asked me a lot about this topic. My reaction has always been to say that we have done very little for the miners because the standard of living that Chilean society enjoys is at least partly explained by everything that these workers have contributed through the extraction of copper, our country’s raw material. These kinds of mistakes—such basic, totally avoidable mistakes related to workplace safety—are simply unacceptable. As I was saying, I recalled that experience in Brazil of how I had been drawn to a story that I found in a French magazine, in which they spoke about the extraction of precious minerals in Brazil, and described these men in an open-pit mine.

At that moment I said to myself, «How is it possible that this exists in the twentieth century?» That was the moment I decided to travel to Serra Pelada [in the south of the Brazilian state of Pará]. Over time, this project became the model that I would use for all my projects: traveling to see for myself and to be a witness, talking face-to-face with the protagonists, trying to understand the reality of others through my own experience.

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G o l d i n t h e M o r n i n g, 1985

88

I was returning from Caracas, which is where I began following the situation with the Chilean miners, and I started thinking about something very curious and paradoxical. . . . We are witnessing the unfolding emancipation of those men in that hole in the ground, that mine, that trap, and now you connect it to the bicentennial of the emancipation on a much greater collective, symbolic level. The piece you just read is fascinating: that precise distance in meters is metaphorically magnified to be the distance that separates us from our own national independence project, from individual countries’ projects or historical ideals. And so I ask myself, and I ask you, what does the idea of emancipation mean for us today, and what does art—the practice of visual art— have to do with all this?

LPO:

AJ:

The most extraordinary thing about this incident, this accident,

is when it occurs, and you have to look at it in connection to what has happened in Chile during this bicentennial year. There was the earthquake in February, which caused a great deal of damage, and it struck during the final months of the presidency of Michelle Bachelet, a socialist who was concluding twenty years of governance by what was called the Concertación—twenty years, let’s say, of the center-left after Pinochet.

And Bachelet, at the helm of the country during its fourth period under the Concertación, had done almost everything right up until then, but apparently she hesitated during some key moments of the earthquake. The Chilean right and the press turned on her, accusing her of having wasted precious time, saying that the government’s response had been inadequate and accusing her of not handling the crisis perfectly. The right tried to earn some points at her expense with this incident, and when the crisis with the miners happened, the right (which was now in power following Bachelet) reacted immediately. But the irony is that this [incident with the trapped miners] is an accident, not a natural catastrophe. An «accident,» so to speak, where a privately-held company was responsible. A mining company, like many that exist in Chile, a company like any other. It was not an «act of God» that called for the wholesale mobilization of the government, as tragic as it was.

And so normally, one would ask, what should happen here? And

94

G o l d i n t h e M o r n i n g, 1985

the obvious answer would be that the company should take the measures necessary to try and save those miners.

But the government took on the crisis, and some critics viewed this action to be almost a suicide mission, politically speaking, on the part of the government. The president said, «We’re going to solve this problem immediately.» And they dispatched the Minister of Mining who turned up the next day at three in the morning and announced, «We’re going to solve this problem.»

And for several days the government mobilized all its resources and the critics looked on and said, «Well if the miners are dead by the time they reach them, it’s going to be a disaster for this administration because they are gambling everything on this.»

The fact is that they were found alive, but before they were taken out of the mine, the collective imagination of the entire country was hijacked by the disaster. Nobody knew exactly how to project it into the future, wouldn’t you say? As it turned out, the miners are very organized: they have a leader, they have a schedule. They have even created some dominos, and with little scraps of paper they play dominos. They have distributed tasks all around: one man is in charge of keeping a written record of everything that happens on a daily basis in the mine, they split up all the work, etc. They have calculated exactly how long they could hang on, and so they eat one can of tuna—I think—every forty-eight hours. They are extremely organized and all the projections the country made were thrown out the window because they have discovered a model for survival in this kind of emergency. The incident has really helped this new government whose approval rating shot up from 40% to 60%.

It’s interesting to see how politics take over everything. Meaning, how everything is transformed into a political gain or loss, whether we like it or not. Everything is going to be read, translated, manipulated politically. They found the miners alive when they stuck that pipe measuring three inches—around ten centimeters— 700 meters through the rock. Now they just had to get them out. . . .

Do you know what 700 meters are? Seven city blocks, I mean . . .

95

LPO:

700 meters are almost a kilometer.

AJ:

They perforated the ground several times until they finally

reached the place they thought the miners might be. And right in the middle was the thing that caused the entire disaster in the first place: a rock that had shifted inside the mine, a rock 150 meters high, how crazy! Well, now they are widening the hole so that they can reach the point at which they would be able to bring the men up one by one. I am picturing the scene: they have to bring them up with their eyes covered because they had been in almost total darkness for two months. Can you imagine the image of these miners emerging into the light blindfolded?

Exactly. Just like an image of yours from the piece La me nt o f the I mage s : Nelson Mandela being released from the prison on Robben Island, from that limestone mine where the workers were blinded by the light during their forced labor to such a degree that they could no longer tolerate sunlight. It’s as if reality were insisting upon imitating art.

LPO:

AJ:

Well, I can tell you that I have received at least thirty emails

with an image that came out in the papers, because outside the mine they planted thirty-three Chilean flags as a tribute to the thirty-three miners down there. Of course many people connect that scene with the piece I did in 1981, when I planted Chilean flags across the Chilean territory—that was the piece I did right before I left Chile.

In 1981, the country was totally divided, polarized to the extreme: one half of the country wanted democracy restored, and the other half wanted Pinochet to remain in power. Dialogue between the two sides was impossible. Chile 1981, antes de partir [Chile 1981, Before Leaving], 1981, consisted of a thousand flags that divided the country in two, from the mountains to the ocean. The very last flags ended in the ocean, an image that wanted to suggest that the country was committing suicide; we were on the precipice of a civil war . . . the image is identical, identical.

96

C h i l e 19 81, a n te s d e p a r t i r (drawing), 1981

C h i l e 19 81, a n te s d e p a r t i r, 1981

100

The thing is, in this situation with the miners where so many unfinished issues came together, two key moments of your work also seem to come together. One, is the piece you created in 1981 when you left Chile, C h i l e 19 81, a nte s d e p a rti r, with these flags that pierce the body of the landscape, the geography of Chile. A work that evokes Michel de Certeau’s now-classic distinction between a space and a place, when he defines a space as a practiced (or traversed) place. And then, of course, there is La me nt o f the I mage s, 2002 , one of your most seminal works, that seemed to sum up the century that had just ended and also herald the challenges of the century that lay ahead. At least those challenges that manifest themselves in what we might call a «politics of the image.»

LPO:

It’s almost as if all those images from your oeuvre came together in this single event: Mandela coming out of prison, the problem of the nation as a body that has been trampled over, a body lost and found again, as a practiced or impracticable space . . . all the way to the more general issue—both for the philosophy and for the images—of the cave, blindness, the act of blinding. Roland Barthes’ traumatic image, the momentary blackout, the fact that perhaps we are all fated to be incapable of tolerating light when we emerge from all this.

AJ:

Blinded by the light, just like Mandela . . .

One of the things that I find most fascinating about La me nt o f the I mage s is how the work bites into a present historical moment, and at the same time, lucidly returns to a primitive moment in art history, to the function of the image in our philosophical culture—if you think of Plato’s cave—and what that means for the West: the power of seduction and the illusion of images, their value, the mistrust they generate, or the instability or uncertainty that characterize them.

LPO:

That dual temporality is very much at play in your work—one moment that is primitive (in the best sense of the term) and another that is absolutely red-hot, current. This is exactly what you were describing to me with regard to the miners. Let’s think about the 1810 emancipation and the history of modern Chile, and what has happened at the San José mine, and how, from there, a form of art emerged almost organically. Are we talking about a new work of art on your horizon?

102

AJ:

[Laughter] . . . To tell the truth, what I really see on the horizon

is Hollywood approaching. Without a doubt, through that pipe that connects us to the miners, they will receive contract offers from Hollywood. But yes, the image that makes me dream, would be to see these miners, one after the other, emerging from 700 feet underground with their eyes blindfolded. That would be an incredible image!

Camp Esperanza, Mina San José, 2010

C h i l e 19 81, a n te s d e p a r t i r, 1981

104

105

106

P 13–20

D e a r M a r ku s, 2011/ 2014 .

P 13

Alfredo Jaar: Tonight No Poetry

Will Serve, exhibition at Kiasma P 8–13

Ve n e z i a , Ve n e z i a, 2013 .

Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. April–September 2014 .

Alfredo Jaar bibliographic references [in order of appearance in the conversation] P 24 –26

La politique des images,

P 58

Campbell, Duncan. «US buys

Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts de

up all satellite war images, » The

Lausanne, (Éditions JRP/Ringier,

Guardian, World News, October 17,

Zurich, 2007). Bilingual French-

2001 , https://www.theguardian.com/

English edition of the catalog for this

world/ 2001/oct/17/physicalsciences.

Alfredo Jaar exhibition, with essays

Afghanistan.

by Georges Didi-Huberman, Duchamp, Marcel. Marcel quoted

Griselda Pollock, Jacques Rancière

P 70

and curator Nicole Schweizer.

in «Dada at MoMA , » Newsweek, New York, April 8, 1968, 132, second

P 28

Cahiers du Cinéma

column.

https://www.cahiersducinema.com P 86 P 29

Glissant, Édouard. «Robben’s

Chilean newspapers and other

publications collected by Alfredo

rocks have confined their site.

Jaar to document the visibility

The waves released it, and thus we

of the San José mining incident.

notice it,» in Th e S o u n d o f S i l e n c e,

The material is dated August 22, 2010,

(NewYork: Peter Blum Edition, 2006).

the day authorities confirmed that the miners trapped underground

P 32

Bergson, Henri. Laughter. An

El Mercurio, La Tercera, Las Últimas

trans. Fred Rothwell and Cloudesley

Noticias, La Cuarta, La Segunda, and

Brereton (Independent publication,

the bi-weekly paper The Clinic.

1911 ).

P 57

Boxer, Sarah. «A Century’s Photo

History Destined for Life in a Mine,» The New York Times, April 15, 2001, Section 1, Page 1, https://www. nytimes.com/ 2001/ 04/ 15/us/a-centurys-photo-history-destined-for-life-ina-mine.html.

108

were still alive. Newspapers included:

essay on the Meaning of the Comic,

Luis Pérez-Oramas bibliographic references [in order of appearance in the conversation] P9

Benjamin, Walter. «Sur le concept

P 28

Glissant, Édouard. Philosophie

d’histoire– V & VI (1940),» in Walter

de la relation (Paris: Gallimard,

Benjamin, Oeuvres III (Paris:

2009).

Gallimard, 2000).

P 41 P 13

Plumer, Brad. «Humans are

Careri, Giovanni. Bernini: Flights

of Love, the Art of Devotion trans.

Speeding Extinction and Altering the

Linda Lappin (Chicago: University

Natural World at an ‘Unpredecented

of Chicago Press, 2005).

Pace’,» The New York Times, Climate and Environment Section, May

P 47

Retracing the Expanded Field.

6 , 2019 , https://www.nytimes.

Encounters between Art and

com/ 2019/05/ 06/climate/biodiversity-

Architecture, ed. Spyros Papapetros

extinction-united-nations.html.

and Julian Rose (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014).

P 13

Rovelli, Carlo. The Order of Time

(New York: Riverhead Books, 2018).

P 47

Krauss, Rosalind. «Sculpture

in the Expanded Field,» October, 8 P 20

Didi-Huberman, Georges.

(Spring 1979): 31–44, MIT Press.

Survivance des lucioles (Paris: Minuit, 2009).

P 48

Rossi, Aldo. Autobiografía

científica (Paris: Parenthèse, 1988).

P 22

Essay by Georges Didi-

Huberman, «L’émotion ne dit pas

P 81

‘je’. Dix fragments sur la liberté

et philosophie du langage (Paris:

Eco, Umberto. Sémiotique

esthétique in: Alfredo Jaar»

PUF, 1988 ).

[«Emotion does not say «I ». Ten De Certeau, Michel. The Practice

Fragments on Aesthetic Liberty

P 102

in: Alfredo Jaar »] in the catalog,

of Everyday Life, trans. Steven

La politique des images, Musée

Rendall (Berkeley, CA: The University

Cantonal des Beaux Arts de

of California Press, 1984).

Lausanne (Éditions JRP/Ringier, Zurich, 2007).

P 102

Barthes, Roland. La chambre

claire. Note sur le photographie P 28

Glissant, Édouard. Introduction

à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).

P 28

Glissant, Édouard. Traité

du Tout-Monde. Poétique IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).

109

(Paris: Cahiers du Cinema/Gallimard, Éditions du Seuil, 1980).

English language editions of the bibliographic references P 22

The Politics of Images. Zurich:

Éditions JRP/Ringier, 2008.

P 28

Glissant, Édouard, Treatise on

the Whole-World. Translated by Celia Britton. Liverpool: The Glissant

P9

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations:

Essays and Reflections. Edited by

Translation Project, 3. Liverpool University Press. June 2, 2020.

Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.

P 28

Glissant, Édouard, Poetics of

Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing.

P 20

Didi-Huberman, Georges.

Survival of the Fireflies. Translated

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

by Lia Swope Mitchell. Minneapolis, Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific

MN: University of Minnesota Press,

P 48

2018 .

Autobiography. Translated by Lawrence Venuti. Cambridge:

P 26

Didi-Huberman, Georges.

MIT Press, 1984 .

« Emotion does not say ‘I’. » In The

Eco, Umberto. Semiotics and

Politics of Images. Zurich: Éditions

P 81

JRP/Ringier, 2008.

the Philosophy of Language.

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University

P 28

Glissant, Édouard, Introduction

Press, 1984.

to a Poetics of Diversity. Translated Barthes, Roland. Camera

by Celia Britton. Liverpool: Liverpool

P 102

University Press, 2020.

Lucida: Reflections on Photography.

Translated by Richard Howard.

New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

110

Notes on the life and work of Alfredo Jaar and Chile ▼

How to Be in the World

genealogy of Afro-Global intellectual activism, to which Jaar’s work

P9

On the image of the past in

Walter Benjamin: In his work

certainly belongs. This list begins with poet and politician Aimé Césaire

On the Concept of History/Theses

( 1913–2008), who in 1936 coined the

on the Philosophy of History, Walter

term négritude with the Senegalese

Benjamin writes: «The true picture

poet and politician Léopold Sédar

of the past flits by. The past can

Senghor ( 1906– 2001) who, in turn,

be seized only as an image which

developed the theory around the

flashes up at the instant when it can

concept. The list goes on to include

be recognized and is never seen

Frantz Fanon ( 1925–61) and Édouard

again.» The quote serves to illustrate

Glissant ( 1928–2011), two of the

and compare the mechanism behind

progenitors of the Afro-global

the operation of Alfredo Jaar’s

emancipation movement. The

installation titled Ve n e z i a , Ve n e z i a,

Négritude movement, championed

2013. See Walter Benjamin, Sur le

by the magazine Présence Africaine

concept d’histoire, V & VI (1940) in

in 1947, was a phenomenon

Walter Benjamin, Oeuvres III (Paris:

connected to the French decolo­

Gallimard, 2000).

nization and the interwar period.

This «negation of the negation

P 13

On time, according to

of the negro,» as Sartre described

contemporary physics: The world,

it, was a literary and identity-based

we are told, has finally reached

movement that was strongly

its global pléroma, in that illusion

influenced by figures like W.E.B.

known as «real time.» We all know

du Bois ( 1868–1963) in the United

that time—if it in fact exists as

States and, according to Césaire, by

one of the essential variables of

the movement known as the Harlem

the universe—is neither real nor

Renaissance. The work of Alfredo

unique. It is multiple, quantum,

Jaar connects with negritude not so

granular, regressive, syncopated,

much as an identity movement but

thermodynamic, and inextricably

in terms of its profound philosophi-

linked to our experiences and

cal and ethical consequences, as we

memories. For more on time from

see in Fanon’s radical works or in

the perspective of contemporary

Édouard Glissant’s notion of «cre-

physics, see Carlo Rovelli, The

olization,» that non-universalizing

Order of Time (New York: Riverhead

alternative to capitalist globalization,

Books, 2018).

with its defense of hybrid, heterogeneous, multifaceted civilizations.

P 28

Négritude: The list of figures

who preceded Jaar at the celebrated Lycée Schœlcher de Fort-de-France in Martinique is something of a

111

▼

Short Circuit in the City

is a recurrent concept in art history and relevant to the work of Alfredo

P 41

The baroque bel composto:

Jaar. For an overview and analysis

Alfredo Jaar’s work has a very strong

of the influence of Krauss’ concept

architectural component, which I

and the interactions between art and

personally connect to the concept of

architecture over the past several

bel composto, in the Baroque sense

decades, see Retracing the Expanded

of the term. Bel composto is a work

Field. Encounters between Art and

that manifests a convergence of

Architecture, ed. Spyros Papapetros

various media, images, texts, lights,

and Julian Rose (Cambridge: MIT

and spaces. In such a work, the

Press, 2014).

viewer must travel through each of Marcel Duchamp and a nomi-

these elements and experience them

P 70

physically. The origin of the concept

nalist artistic practice: Alfredo Jaar

can be traced to the work of Gian

makes a brief mention of Marcel

Lorenzo Bernini and the theoretical

Duchamp, specifically to address

critiques that it elicited during his

what some philosophical critics of his

lifetime in the seventeenth century.

work have termed a «nominalist» art

Many of Jaar’s most influential

practice. Jaar uses this reference to

pieces are special montages to which

Duchamp to remind us of the notion

the viewer gains access—much

that the artist needs only to call

as one accesses a small room, a

something art for the thing to actually

theater, or a building. The Baroque

become art. Certainly since antiquity

bel composto is a precursor to

the operation of transformation

the Romantic concept of the «total

(aesthetic? anthropological?) that is

work,» though regulated by more

implied by the artistic act must nec-

rational and tactical motivations

essarily go through a stage of nomi-

connected to the aesthetic of the

nalization, by the instantiating effect

Council of Trent. Different artistic

of the name. But when Duchamp

elements—today we would say «a

replaced the fundamental importance

combination of different media»—

of formal appearance with the strat-

come together in a spectacular finale

egies and tactics of apparition and

that translates into an effect that

exhibition, the instantiating effect

elicits the emotion of the viewer.

of the artwork’s name achieved its

For more on the bel composto see

maximum expression, historically

Giovanni Careri, Bernini: Flights

speaking. For more discussion on this

of Love, the Art of Devotion, trans.

topic, see Thierry de Duve, Pictorial

Linda Lappin (Chicago: University of

Nominalism. On Marcel Duchamp’s

Chicago Press, 2005).

Passage from Painting to Ready-Made (Minnesota: University of Minnesota

P 47

On the expanded field in artistic

practices: Ever since Rosalind Krauss published her academic article « Sculpture in the Expanded Field »

in Spring 1979, the «expanded field»

112

Press, 2005).

▼

Who Has Taught Us to See?

Diamela Eltit and Pablo Oyarzún, and emblematic artists such as

P 80

Umberto Eco and the reference

Eugenio Dittborn, Lotty Rosenfeld,

to cryptic reading: The need for

Carlos Leppe, Francisco Copello,

readings that probe beyond the

Juan Dávila, Gonzalo Díaz, and

literal presence of the letter is a

Carlos Altamirano, among others.

longstanding issue in the Western

In a conference that Valdés gave

hermeneutic tradition. Specifically,

on the context of the activities of

it has a Talmudic archaeology,

the curatorial think tank entitled

which has been explored by a great

Contemporary and Modern Art

many authors. Here, what Luis

Perspectives C-MAP (M o MA , New

Pérez-Oramas has in mind when he

York) in 2015, it became clear

questions Jaar about this dimension

that the group’s famously dense

of his negative reading, or «anti-

critical writing and wildly complex

reading» of the information he

theories were largely tactics for

comes across in newspapers, may

averting censorship by the military

be traced to Umberto Eco’s reference

government. In other words, they

to a comment by Gershom Scholem

wrote with almost incomprehensible

about the New Torah: the message

density in order to avoid being

between the lines, the white between

censored. This, in part, contributed

the letters that God will reveal at the

to their isolation within the larger

messianic moment. See Umberto

art scene in the Americas, but

Eco, Sémiotique et philosophie du

was strong evidence, as well, of

langage (Paris: PUF, 1988), 218–220.

the group’s powerful theoretical framework, unmatched elsewhere on the continent.

▼

The Metaphorical Distance P 96

P 71

113

The Chilean avant-garde art

Period of the Concertación and

democracy in Chile: After a popular

scene: By 1979, the Chilean avant-

referendum ended the dictatorship

garde scene had taken a turn

of Augusto Pinochet, Chile became

toward more radical forms of

a country governed by a pact of

contemporary art, during the dark

political forces that had historically

period of dictator Augusto Pinochet’s

occupied opposite ends of the

totalitarian control of the media

spectrum: the Christian Democrat

and public opinion. This art scene,

and the Socialist parties. The 1990–

to which Jaar belonged perhaps

2010 period thus came to be known

only tangentially because he left the

as the Period of the Concertación,

country early on, is known as the

and this alliance’s candidates

«Escena de Avanzada » or the Chilean

went on to win all the presidential

avant-garde. Critic Nelly Richard

elections through the first term

and philosopher Ronald Kay were

of Michelle Bachelet’s presidency,

the main theoretical anchors of the

from 2006 to 2010. When Sebastián

group, which included writers and

Piñera was elected president of Chile

critics such as Adriana Valdés, Justo

in 2010, he became the first post-

Pastor Mellado, Raúl Zurita,

dictatorship head of state whose

Roland Barthes’ traumatic

political support did not lie in the

P 102

Concertación alliance. Following his

image: The traumatic image

first presidency from 2010 to 2014,

is a notion within the realm

Michelle Bachelet was once again

of image criticism that Roland

elected president, and she was

Barthes developed in his book on

succeeded again, by Piñera, in 2018,

photography, La Chambre claire.

who is now completing his second

Note sur le photographie [Camera

term as president.

Lucida: Reflections on Photography].

Trauma resists inscription in the

P 85

The case of the San José Mine

image and as a result the image

and Operación San Lorenzo: In 2010,

of a trauma is a traumatic image:

from August 5 to October 14, the

decomposed, blurry, poorly framed,

eyes of Chile and the world were

out of focus, broken. For Barthes’

veritably glued to the unfolding fate

reflections on the image, see Camera

of the thirty-three miners trapped

Lucida: Reflections on Photography,

700 meters below the surface of the

trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill

earth in the San José Mine. Rescuing

and Wang, 1981).

these miners, who gave no sign P 103

a highly complex operation that was

Mine incident: Hollywood, or rather

successfully completed in October

the film industry, did not miss the

of that same year. The rescue of the

opportunity to produce movies

thirty-three miners, brought about

based on this historic event. One

by the government’s excellent crisis

was The 33 (2015), featuring Antonio

management and deft handling

Banderas and Juliette Binoche,

of the media, signaled a turning

among others; directed by Patricia

point in Chilean political history.

Riggen; produced by Dynamo

Sebastián Piñera, the country’s first

Productions; and distributed by

conservative head of state since

Warner Brothers in the United

the Pinochet dictatorship, who had

States and 20th Century Fox in Latin

been democratically elected to the

America. The Chilean documentary

presidency, took full advantage of

Campamento Esperanza [Camp

the after-effects of the successful

Hope], directed by Miguel Soffia and

mission, which was baptized

produced by Suroeste Films also

Operación San Lorenzo in honor

premiered that year and focused on

of the patron saint of miners. [The

the families’ efforts to get the miners

business of the San José Mine was

out alive.

the extraction of copper, of which

Links to the trailers may be found

Chile is the world’s number one

here:

producer. The rescue operation,

https://www.imdb.com/title/

which was the most widely-covered

tt 2006295/

and successful of its kind in the

http://cinechile.cl/pelicula/

history of mining, was carried out

campamento-esperanza/

at the cost of some twenty million dollars.]

114

Films based on the San José

of life until August 22, was

Image Captions

▼

Cover

P 14 –15

Turku Archipelago, Estudios sobre la Felicidad,

Finland, 2011

[Studies on Happiness], 1979–81

Contemporary Art Archipelago

Open work and non-stop

(CAA) exhibition, 18th June–30th

record, 1981

September, 2011.

Photograph by: Stefan Cramer / CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago

▼

Prologue P 16 –17

P7

Dear Markus, 2011

Lament of the Images

Public intervention, Turku

First version Documenta 11,

Archipelago.

Kassel, 2002

Photograph by: Stefan Cramer / CAA

Three illuminated texts, light screen,

Contemporary Art Archipelago

text by David Levi Strauss Overall dimensions variable

P 19

Dear Markus, 2011 Public intervention, Turku ▼

How to Be in the World

Archipelago.

Photograph: Courtesy of the artist

P 8, 10–12

Venezia, Venezia, 2013

P 22–23

Lightbox with b/w transparency

B e Af ra i d o f t h e E no r m i ty

Photograph: Milan, 1946: Lucio

o f t h e Po s s i b l e, 2015

Fontana visits his studio on his return

Neon

from Argentina

120. 7 x 182. 9 cm

©Archivi Farabola

Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Metal pool, 1: 60 resin model of the Giardini, hydraulic system

115

P 25

Wood structure, metal

The artist’s father, 2002

Photography: Agostino Osio

Personal archive Alfredo Jaar

▼

Short Circuit in the City

▼

Who Has Taught Us to See?

P 30, 34 –35

P 56, 60

Estudios sobre la Felicidad

Lament of the Images

[Studies on Happiness], 1979–81

First version Documenta 11,

Series of surveys 1980

Kassel, 2002 Three illuminated texts, light screen,

P 36 –37

text by David Levi Strauss

Estudios sobre la Felicidad,

Overall dimensions variable

1979– 81

Voting panels, 1980

P 59, 61–65

P 39– 40

M o MA, New York, 2015

Lament of the Images, 2002 Estudios sobre la Felicidad,

Three illuminated texts, light screen,

1979– 81

text by David Levi Strauss

Public presentation of happy

Each text panel 58. 4 x 50. 8 cm,

and unhappy people, 1980

light wall 182. 9 x 365. 8 cm The Museum of Modern Art,

P 42– 43

New York, Latin American and

Estudios sobre la Felicidad,

Caribbean Fund, 2010

1979– 81

Photography: John Rohrer

Open work and non-stop record, 1981

P 67

«Sudan is Described as Trying to P 44 – 45

Placate the West,» by Donatella Lorch

Estudios sobre la Felicidad,

Detail from The New York Times

1979– 81

Friday, March 26, 1993

Video Documentation:

Section A, Page 3

Polaroids, 1981

New York Times International Artist’s Archive

P 49, 51

Sound of Silence, 2006

P 68–69

École des Beaux Arts, Paris, 2011.

Th e Sound of Silence, 2006

Wood structure, aluminum,

École des Beaux Arts, Paris, 2011.

fluorescent tubes, LED lights,

Wood structure, aluminum,

flashlights, tripods, video projection

fluorescent tubes, LED lights,

( 8: 00 min loop)

flashlights, tripods, video projection

Software design: Ravi Rajan

( 8: 00 min loop)

Overall dimensions variable

Software design: Ravi Rajan

Photography: Charles Duprat

Overall dimensions variable Photography: Charles Duprat

P 54 –55

Estudios sobre la Felicidad,

P 73

1979 – 81

The Sound of Silence

Open work and non-stop

(Detail: Peter Blum Edition, NY), 2006

record, 1981

Pigment print Courtesy Peter Blum Edition, NY

116

P 75

▼

The Metaphorical Distance

The Sound of Silence (Mandela Cell), 2010

P 84, 98–101, 104 –105

Video (1:40 min). Still

C h i l e 19 81, a nte s d e p a r t i r [C hil e 19 81, B e fore Le aving], 1981

P 76 –77

Pigment Print

The Sound of Silence

139. 7 x 152. 4 cm

(Peter Blum Edition, NY), 2006 Portfolio box of fifteen pigment prints

P 88–89

Each portfolio includes a bound

Gold in the Morning (A) , 1985

poem by Edouard Glissant,

Edition of 3 + 2 AP

«Robben’s rocks have confined

Lightbox with color transparencies

their site, the waves released it,

121. 9 x 182. 9 x 12 . 7 cm

and thus we notice it.» In French with an English translation by

P 90–91

Françoise Le Brun.

Gold in the Morning (E) , 1985

Paper by Parrot Digigraphic, Ltd

Edition of 3 + 2 AP

Printed by Laumont Editions,

Lightbox with color transparency

New York

121. 9 x 182. 9 x 12 . 7 cm

Published by Peter Blum Edition, NY Courtesy Peter Blum Edition, NY

P 92–93

Gold in the Morning (K) P 79

(Black), 1985

The Sound of Silence

Edition of 6 + 3 AP

(Detail: Peter Blum Edition, NY), 2006

C-print mounted on Plexiglass

Pigment Print

127 x 228. 6 cm

Courtesy Peter Blum Edition, NY P 97 P 81

C h i l e 19 81, a nte s d e p a r t i r, 1981

A Logo for America, 1987

Drawing

Times Square, New York, 2014

Collage and graphite on paper

Public intervention Video (00: 38 min)

P 103

Original animation commissioned

Mina San José, Copiapó, Chile,

by The Public Art Fund for

October 14, 2010

Spectacolor sign, Times Square,

Flags of Hope—Chilean rescue effort

New York, April 1987

for trapped miners.

Andy Myatt/Alamy Stock Photo

P 82–83

Estudios sobre la Felicidad, 1979– 81

Public Interventions, 1981

117

▼

References

P 106

Shadows, 2014 Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom, 2017 Mixed media installation Overall dimensions variable Original photo by Koen Wessing (1942– 2011) Estelí, Nicaragua, September 1978 ©Koen Wessing/administered

by Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, The Netherlands