A JAAR ACT
A marvelous instrument to use as a structural element.
Just looking at that.
Angola just came out of a civil war,
a fully-African production,
Road Africa.
Again it’s dark, it’s empty, there are no images.
Control: I didn’t want to show certain situations.
This is a way to go back to where I started.
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 12-14-05 (9:02 PM)
Written during the Chilean-born visual artist Alfredo Jaar’s talk
surrounding his presentation of his 2005 film “Muxima” at the Hirshhorn
Museum in Washington DC. This 36-minute film has an overtly poetic
structure of 10 cantos, each sounding a different version of the Angolan
song “Muxima”. My experience of Jaar’s previous work had been limited to
scattered accounts in art-world periodicals, but chance had brought him
into my store in 1982 shortly after he left Chile and just before he moved
to NYC. I had been rather impressed by him, though totally unprepared to
write on that occasion. Last Wednesday I wasn’t sure whether I could get a
piece of writing out of his in-person screening, but the personal resonance
and the process of re-identification pushed me to find language to
articulate through a favorite structural element.
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