Mining the Third World’s Uncharted Regions : Alfredo Jaar’s Minimalism-influenced show at La Jolla attacks Western stereotypes

Some pictures can be traced to the eye and mind of an individual artist, but other powerful images are created by whole societies.

Imagine, for example, the Third World. The picture that forms in your mind is likely a composite that has been assembled, consciously or not, from bits and pieces generated by all manner of sources: newspaper stories, television documentaries, overheard conversations, personal experiences, books, Hollywood movies and more. Like a Picasso collage, the image is a potent fiction cobbled together from a diverse array of longstanding traditions, some newly crafted illusions and even a few assorted fragments of reality.

Yet, for all its multiplicity of sources, and for all the variations rightly claimed by individuals with differing conceptions of the same subject, pictures created by whole societies are still characterized by a singular perspective. The developing nations of the so-called Third World are “third” only from the perspective of the technologically complex First World, which drew the picture and coined the term. It’s an image “we” have painted to describe “them.”

Alfredo Jaar is an artist who, in his own work, tries to drive a wedge into whatever narrow cracks and fissures he can find in such stubborn and deceptive pictures. Beginning with a notable entry at the 1986 Venice Biennale, his installations featuring large, color transparencies mounted on fluorescent light-boxes have been the subject of steadily increasing attention. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956, and resident in New York City for most of the last decade, Jaar is surely in a position to have become keenly aware of assorted gruesome dissonances.

An exhibition of a dozen pieces dating from 1986 to 1990--Jaar’s first substantive presentation in Southern California--opened last week at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, where it will remain on view through April 1. The work is decidedly uneven. Yet Jaar is clearly wading through a largely uncharted territory that is of unusual significance to the present moment. Aspects of his endeavor suffer from a surfeit of earnestness that conflicts with an occasionally sleek, vaguely designerish manner of presentation; but other qualities possess the capacity to make fluid a variety of sluggish, congealed assumptions. Jaar’s is an art that compels notice through the sheer ambitiousness evident in his project.

The format of Jaar’s art reflects the twin poles of his academic background. After first studying documentary film making at Santiago’s Chilean-North American Institute of Culture, he pursued a degree in architecture at the city’s University of Chile. Today, his art is chiefly composed of documentary photographs--some made by Jaar, others found in published sources--which are displayed in relation to architecturally based sculptural forms that owe more than just a formal debt to the geometries of Minimalism.

As disciplines, architecture and documentary photography might seem to be wildly divergent; in substance and material, obviously they are. Conceptually, however, the two share something fundamental: a sharp awareness of the complexities of social relationships, which is the subject of Jaar’s art.

At the La Jolla Museum, curator Madeleine Grynsztejn has used the 1986 installation Jaar showed at the Venice Biennale as the touchstone for the exhibition, which is otherwise composed of more recent work. Now part of the museum’s permanent collection, and the single finest work in the show, “Gold in the Morning” is composed of several elements dispersed around a darkened gallery.

Jaar spent several months photographing among the 40,000 laborers in Serra Pelada (Naked Hill), a huge, open-pit gold mine in a remote corner of Brazil’s Amazon rain forest. Winnowing the thousands of pictures into a selection of just five, the artist skillfully chose images that show a surprisingly wide range of viewpoints: the enormity of the site and the resulting anonymity of the labor force; the human specificity of individual workers; the mythic and metaphoric power associated with the metal being mined; the brute, physical power required to do the work; the utterly mundane social interactions among miners; the fragmentary nature of every documentary enterprise, including this one; and more.

Any pretense that the photographer is a neutral and invisible eye is erased by a prominently placed picture of a group of miners playfully mugging for the camera. In an important way, what we are seeing is honestly declared to be a performance orchestrated by the artist. He inserts himself, however indirectly, into the picture.

These five color photographs have been made into large transparencies, several feet square, and each is mounted on a light-box that uses fluorescent bulbs to illuminate the image from behind. Four are paired with like-size metal boxes painted gold; the L-shaped displays that result have been installed at the junctures of the gallery’s walls, floor and ceiling--any where but flat on the wall at typical eye level.

The fifth light-box is a free-standing module, placed on the floor as a kind of headstone behind a large, ornate, gilded picture frame that lies atop a bed of nails. The nails inside the frame are painted gold, those outside are not.

In this and other installations, Jaar has sought to bridge the wide material gap between architecture and documentary photography through a knowing invocation of Minimalist form. The elegant, lacquered boxes of “Gold in the Morning” put you in mind of sculptures by Donald Judd, while the fluorescent lights recall the trademark material used by Dan Flavin. It’s a canny choice, because Minimalism shares with Jaar’s other interests an emphasis on the social dimension in which art is experienced.

Minimalist sculptors in the 1960s began to shift a viewer’s attention away from solitary interaction with discrete sculptural objects. Instead, they wanted to articulate the cultural context within which such interactions take place. Among the ways in which the feat was accomplished was the wholesale banishment of the pedestal--a primary device of Western culture by which sculpture had been elevated from the realm of the everyday and sent aloft into a hallowed space called High Art. Minimalism got sculpture down onto the floor, and sometimes even into and under it.

With strategies such as this, Minimalism harbored a profoundly political dimension. For all the abstract geometry of its forms, this was an art that insisted you be aware of the factors through which a society makes art a powerful and privileged activity. The passive viewer was subtly transformed into an active and inquiring spectator, who shared a real and distinctly social space with the work of art.

Jaar’s placement of his illuminated pictures anywhere but at typical eye level on the wall is an extrapolation of the pedestal-banishing formal device central to the achievement of Minimalist sculpture. He displaces his pictures from ordinary view, then seamlessly integrates them within the actual architecture of the room--a method that may also owe something to the elaborate decoration of Spanish Baroque churches in colonial Latin America.

Like a number of artists in recent years, Jaar has married this philosophical implication of Minimalist form to frankly political subject matter. “Gold in the Morning” invokes the long history of colonization, which counts among its most recent incarnations the very idea of a Third World. Today, debate centers on whether First World countries now colonize Third World countries not with explorers, invading armies or occupying settlers, but simply through long-distance control over international currency and trading. The precious gold at Serra Pelada, said to be the richest strike anywhere in the 20th Century, is aggressively being mined to pay off Brazil’s massive foreign debt.

The open-pit miners are simultaneously digging themselves out of a hole and into a hole. As in the fine 1989 work called “Coyote!,” in which a St. Christopher-like figure carries a veiled illegal alien across the Rio Grande, religious allusions to crucifixion, sainthood, life after death and other Catholic iconography abound. Set before a mound of nails topped by a gilded frame, Jaar’s funerary headstone suggests that digging is these peoples’ life, and they are digging their own collective grave.

“Gold in the Morning,” “Coyote!” and a triptych called “1+1+1” are resonant works, but there are decided weaknesses to Jaar’s approach. The transparencies are in color, but they are not colorful. Relying on a golden range of sepia tones, Jaar blessedly avoids the look of a travelogue or National Geographic layout, but at the expense of a certain blandness and redundancy. Dull didacticism, too, is a constant threat not always avoided.

More damagingly, the Minimalist-inspired fusion of architecture and documentary photography in his light-boxes bears an inescapable visual similarity to advertising displays at bus-stop shelters, airport lounges and shopping malls--situations in which cliche is king. Jaar frequently embraces the trite slogan, as in the groan-inducing relationship created between photographs of marginalized people and their placement in the out-of-the-way margins of the room.

At 33, however, the artist has established a solid and provocative base. Colonization is hardly new--the Phoenicians got the ball rolling in the ancient Mediterranean world, and it hasn’t stopped since--but European and North American colonialism are virtually inseparable from the modern world. Now that modernism has become the subject of cultural scrutiny, and as questions of the social relationships between so-called First and Third worlds are pressed, Alfredo Jaar is clearly mining volatile and important territory.

The native Chilean’s photographs document life in a Brazilian mine and other harsh realities of the poor.