Jumpsuits & Teleporters

In Response to Alfredo Jaar’s “It Is Difficult” Lecture

Alfredo Jaar began his lecture at SCAD by claiming to have “one foot in the art world and one foot out.”¹ With over sixty community-based works worldwide, he strives to link the art world with the real world through, what he calls, public interventions. The world-renowned artist has a single mission: to engage communities in a dialogue. To do this, he combines conceptual art and performance art in the form of public interventions, which protest many terrible events happening around the globe. Each public intervention is the end-product of an investigative journey into a critical issue that the international community neglects to acknowledge including genocide, homelessness, famine, immigration and so on. Often times, these projects span over several years of research and include multiple trips. Such is the case of his most profound work from 1994 to 2000, The Rwanda Project, which resulted from witnessing the genocide in Rwanda firsthand.

Jaar describes his art as his sole response to a “lived experience.”² He explains, “There is no way to translate what I see into an artwork. It is absolutely impossible. The challenge is enormous and it forces me to come up with different strategies of representation.”³ A great deal of his process is problem solving how best to communicate a specific idea in each piece. Consequently, Alfredo Jaar has the responsibility of clarity and, in turn, he believes that because of this commitment, all of his projects fail.⁴

One specific failure is Requiem for Leipzig, a project in 2005 that took place in an abandoned church in what was once East Germany during the era of the Berlin Wall. Requiem for Leipzig is not an acclaimed piece of Alfredo Jaar’s. It is uniquely disconnected from his body of work due to the lack of visual language and imagery. Instead, Requiem for Leipzig relies on the language of music—to be precise, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, a native of Leipzig.

Fig. 1. Leipzig, a city in disrepair.

Fig. 2. The exterior of the abandoned church.

Fig. 3. St. Nicholas Cathedral on the other side of Leipzig.

Jaar was invited by the community to create a project on the poor conditions of Leipzig, a city in shambles (Fig. 1), which lacks funding from the state for its upkeep. After accepting the project and visiting the city, Jaar discovered an abandoned church (Fig 2.) and chose to use it in the project to reflect the immaculate St. Nicholas Cathedral (Fig. 3), a staple of beauty and significance on the other side of Leipzig. Rather than focus on the apparent demise of the city, Jaar centered the project on the massive chandelier within the abandoned church (Fig. 4). The public was then invited to sit in the church and witness the descending chandelier as it slowly illuminated the space while Bach’s music climaxed for a dramatic effect (Fig. 5). At its peak, the chandelier would reverse and return to the ceiling darkening the church once again as Bach’s music faded away. (This is a similar technique to his work with light where he gradually enhances the light in a space to blind and disorient the audience to submerge them in the experience of the subject matter.) Jaar had hoped that the audience would engage in a dialogue during the lowering of the chandelier, but the audience was instead silent. The dialogue only sparked after the participants left the core of the dilapidated church.

Fig. 4. A detail of the chandelier used in Requiem for Leipzig.

Fig. 5. The audience during one of the performances.

In 1995, Hal Foster criticized the artist that created work with the purpose of educating the viewer on different cultures and global problems. Foster questioned the role of the artist as ethnographer in contemporary art making a case that, “…despite the best intentions of the artist, only limited engagement of the sited other is effected. Almost naturally the focus wanders from collaborative investigation to “ethnographic self-fashioning,” in which the artist is not decentered so much as the other is fashioned in artistic guise.”⁵ In that capacity, the effect of Requiem for Leipzig is indeed an unintentional failure.

While Alfredo Jaar tirelessly researched the city’s history to develop a concept for the project, he responded mostly to the rundown church as a symbol of the differences between East and West Germany. Jaar’s work distinctly addresses both the community of the culture he is researching as well as the gallery audience in the United States. Typically, such a concept would fall short for the removed audience, or the spectators, because meaning is difficult to replicate when it is out of context. The situation is reversed with Requiem for Leipzig; the use of the church and Bach’s music prevents the clarity of the concept. The piece fails in the eyes and minds of the participants from the Leipzig community because they are focused on the experience evoked rather than the immediate issue at hand.

Requiem for Leipzig is meaningful, but the magnitude of the backstory is lost to the audience. While Alfredo Jaar intended to illuminate the death of the city, the audience’s experience conquers the significance because of the power of the music and the physical site of the church. Ironically, the only signifier is the title itself, as requiem is a song for the dead. Furthermore, meaning is hard to replicate in an auditorium far from the experience of the original location—especially in the Arnold Hall auditorium.

The most crucial element of his work is not merely the subject matter or the politically charged message of human rights issues and ethics, but the importance of critical thinking—for both the artist and the viewer. In essence, he is his own nonprofit organization providing a service and a voice for the people of each selected community. Therefore, Jaar’s work is more activist and advocacy art than it is a public intervention. So is the terminology of public intervention always appropriate for Alfredo Jaar’s work? The projects he undertakes are a more subtle form of protest than an open forum. Dialogue is definitely a spin-off resulting from his projects, but sometimes the meaning is more complex and hidden in straightforwardness and it takes time to truly analyze and respond appropriately. The experience of Alfredo Jaar’s work ultimately relies on reflection in the process of perceiving and understanding. Furthermore, what Alfredo Jaar believes is transparent and clear, the viewer might have difficulty finding a connection.

While Alfredo Jaar’s projects may fail in the sense of communicating an intended idea or experience, his projects must exist in today’s global society. Our visual culture is on overload and autopilot, so much that society no longer responds to photojournalism alone. The contemporary artist now carries the torch of communicating and responding to the world around us. Jaar has the unique ability to examine the world and ignite a chain reaction of empathy that compels an audience to think beyond borders, ethnicities, cultures and crises.

All images © Alfredo Jaar.

Endnotes:
1. Alfredo Jaar, “It Is Difficult: Recent Projects” (lecture, Georgia, Savannah, March 29, 2010).
2. Patricia C. Phillips, “The Aesthetics of Witnessing: A Conversation with Alfredo Jaar,” Art Journal 64, no. 3 (Fall 2005): pg. 14, http://www.janetzweig.com/RISDPDFPUBLICART/Jaar.pdf (accessed April 5, 2010).
3. Phillips, 14.
4. Ibid, 15.
5. Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?” in The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 306.