Kirjahaku

A richly illustrated survey of Alfredo Jaar's Studies on Happiness (1979-1981) and its deep political stakes in the historical context of Chile's neoliberal transition. Between 1979 and 1981, a young artist and architecture school dropout named Alfredo Jaar asked Chileans the deceptively simple question: "Are you happy?" Including private interviews, sidewalk polls, and video-recorded forums, among other interventions, Jaar's two-year and seven-phase project, Studies on Happiness, addressed a country in transition, as a newly adopted constitution remade Chile through privatization and other neoliberal reforms. Jaar's first major artwork has been imprecisely discussed in the monographic literature on the artist and rarely mentioned in studies of Chilean art after 1973. Edward Vazquez contextualizes Jaar's Studies on Happiness within his early production and places his practice within the Chilean art world, thus reinstating the project's historical embeddedness and the deep political stakes of its sociality. The work's marginality is a strength: its minor status in the period and in Jaar's oeuvre allow it an historical freedom in engaging Chilean culture under Augusto Pinochet and provides a wedge to realign current interpretations of Chilean art and hemispheric conceptualism with the openness central to Jaar's project.

Alfredo Jaar's immersive site-specific installation in the Chilean pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, "Venezia Venezia" is a call to examine how today's culture, composed of increasingly complex global networks, can be adequately represented on a world stage.This publication features essays by 18 prominent, international authors from different fields of work and thought, including political and philosophical thinkers, critics, theorists, art historians and curators. Their contributions consider Venezia Venezia in its critical context, as well d recent global developments and the volatile conditions of contemporary art practice.

This monograph follows the development of Alfredo Jaar's work (born1956 Santiago, Chile; lives and works in New York), from his early public interventions to his latest installations, via his works on the gold miners in the Amazon and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The publication also features previously unpublished works created in Santiago at a time when the artist was experiencing the repression of Pinochet's military dictatorship on a daily basis, as well as works made by collating and rethinking press cuttings.

The new Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla and Le*n, opened in Spain in 2005 with an exhibition of Alfredo Jaar's Emergency, a dark pool from which a fiberglass model of the African continent is constantly, slowly rising and resubmerging. This revised and expanded black book of essays--whose back cover leads to black endpapers and black title pages--extends Jaar's piece with reflections on the continent from such brilliant African writers as Ama Ata Aidoo (of Ghana, via Stanford University's creative writing program), Buchi Emecheta (of Nigeria and London), Nawal el Saadawi (Egypt's onetime Director of Public Health, the only woman ever to achieve such a position), and Nuruddin Farah (a novelist exiled from Somalia).