ART REVIEW : Alfredo Jaar Sermonizes at Bloom Gallery

Charred corpses, smiling refugee children, toxic waste dumps and throngs of museum visitors are some of the many images in Alfredo Jaar’s exhibition at Ruth Bloom Gallery. The Chilean-born artist’s installation begins with good intentions, moves into confusion, and ends by exploiting the misery of its subjects. Along the way it preaches to its viewers with more self-righteous condescension that can be found in fanatical sermons by small-town televangelists.

Jaar’s exhibition consists of eight light-tables that illuminate images of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong, toxic waste in Nigeria, border traffic between the U.S. and Mexico, casualties of the Gulf War in Iraq, and visitors to a Van Gogh retrospective in Rome. Connections are suggested--but never spelled out--between the privileges of the museum visitors and the suffering of the subjects of contemporary news stories.

But Jaar is less interested in the specifics of any of these issues than in reinvesting photographs with the power he believes they have lost in our media-saturated society. His idea is that we’ve been numbed to the horrors of international capitalism and that if we can be shocked into awareness we’ll work for social change.

An unsigned quote by French literary critic Roland Barthes hangs above the light-tables and testifies to Jaar’s naive, academic approach to art, politics and life. Barthes’ interest in photography lies in its capacity to give its viewer a moment of ecstatic escape in self-entered fantasies. This sort of effete aestheticism could not share less with Jaar’s desire to use photographs as simple tools of political change. Either more schooling--or much less--would serve to clear up the deep confusion that turns his well-intentioned project into an ineffective, moralistic exercise.

Alfredo Jaar at Ruth Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-7454, through April 10, closed Sundays and Mondays .