Alfredo Jaar Lecture 11/18/09

Alfredo was born in 1956, the same year as my mother, and has been making art for the last 30 years. He divided his art work into three main areas and only 1/3 of the work fit into the mainstream gallery work seen at the time. The other 2/3 of his works are called public interventions. In his public interventions he considers himself an architect making art. He feels for the essence of each location he works at and in turn makes art to interpret what he feels and observes.
First started work in Chile and used trash can lids and flags to show his opinion of the disappearances of people in Chile who were rebelling politically. He then did the piece in Manhattan were he showed text and symbols of the U.S. and America. He stated that people would assume if you say America that means the United States only and Jaar wanted to put it out there that there is more to America than the United States.
After that contract Alfredo went to Sweden for the paper mill project. He designed the first museum for this small city and it was made out of paper. On the grand opening he had students display art with direct correlation to paper. A popular display was the origami table for children. In the plan the Alfredo created the museum was to be burnt down in a short amount of time and town members came to him and wanted Jaar to changed his mind and not set fire to it but Alfredo was against it. Even though there are now plans for him to build a permanent museum there which will be open around 2012.
Another piece done in Europe was Finland where they have very strict immigration rules so Alfredo was able to get one million passports printed off and set them up in a gallery space to show the significance of blending and melting cultures together. They would have that many more people who would be artists, geniuses, and millionaires.
My favorite piece was the museum made from handing out 1,000 disposable cameras to the public and then around 740 camera were turned in so he had to go in and decide how to display the images. The ones he thought had some real artistic value got blown up but every single photo was shown in the museum and every single person was given credit. I enjoyed this piece so much because no one in the community wanted this museum, they would have preferred a sports complex but in the end they all loved it because they were the artists. Also I enjoyed this because it made the area look better for this community considering there was a dangerous prison located adjacent to a park where small children would play.
Alfredo Jaar then accepted to go back to South America where he worked in Venezuela on a piece of art for former President of Chile Salvador Gossens. In a park he set up multiple canvases in a park beside a school. You could go to the school ask for paint and then go create anything and share it with the world. It enabled so many to be creative when they did not have the funds to paint.
He then did a piece about the killing of people trying to cross the American border. It consisted of a stringed band playing music, people reading poems, biodegradable balloons set off into the air from the “cloud,” and then the lonely musician playing a stringed instrument on the other side of the border. It was as if the two sides were communicating by music. This piece was very sad for me and I felt a small amount of what the families were having to go through.
In former East Germany this Art Council bought a broken down church and wanted Alfredo Jaar to come there and make a piece of art to reflect on the disintegration of that area economically. He cleaned up the building some what like the stained glass, chairs and chandelier. He first drew attention to the center by turning on the chandelier and moving it up and down which was effective to get people in the building. But he then decided to make it a town meeting location and this plan failed completely. No one even talked when they came much less about saving the community.
Finally he showed us a public intervention he did in Montreal making a statement about the amount of homeless people in this area. He first talks about how this one building was burnt down 5 times before the people decided to more this government building. So they had Alfredo come in and for a long time he couldn’t figure out what to do with the place. One day he was walking and saw this trucking delivering food to a homeless shelter and thats where the idea originated. His plan was to fill the location with red lights and buttons at two homeless shelters and every time someone walked in to stay for the night they would push the button and the dome building would light up bright red. This piece got lots of attention from the TV, newspapers, and magazines.