Alfredo Jaar Quotes

United States, Artist
1956

Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean-born artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives in New York City. He was born in 1956 in Santiago de Chile. From age 5 to 16, he lived in Martinique before moving back to Chile. He is mostly known as an installation artist, often incorporating photography and covering socio-political issues and war - the best known perhaps being the 6-year-long The Rwanda Project about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He has also made numerous public intervention works, like The Skoghall Konsthall one-day paper museum in Sweden, an early electronic billboard intervention A Logo For America, and The Cloud, a performance project on both sides of the Mexico-USA border. He has been featured on Art:21.

Also known as Architect, Film Maker

As we all know, the objective and mission of the photojournalist is to show us the reality of the world. And in order to capture that reality, they go to dangerous and tragic places at the expense of their lives. I see them as the conscience of our humanity; they represent for me what is left of our humanity.

Alfredo Jaar
Nowadays I see my work being used, without my permission, as if it was an attack against the Trump regime. People want to say, "No! That's not my America, not the America I know." I'm honored - it's just not me. But as we were saying before, the artist loses control.

Alfredo Jaar
- Work
- Used
- Permission

Certainly when you do a work for a public space, you lose control.

Alfredo Jaar
- Work
- Control
- Public
Journalistic information and presentation actually discourage action... we think we know, and because we think we know, we think we care. But it stops there.

Alfredo Jaar
- Know
- Action
- Information
We are the result of the stimulus we receive.

Alfredo Jaar
- Result
- Receive
- Stimulus
America is our continent. You feel in the daily language that Americans use the word "America" to erase the rest of the continent from the map. And, of course, the language is clearly a reflection of the geopolitical reality: the domination of the United States over the rest of the continent.

Alfredo Jaar
My work is always based on reality. I'm not an artist that creates works of fiction. I'm not an artist who is in my studio inventing things out of my imagination - everything is based on reality, on real facts.

Alfredo Jaar
- Reality
- Works
- Creates
Our society is blind. We have lost our ability to be affected by imagery.

Alfredo Jaar
- Society
- Ability
- Blind

Images have an advanced religion; they bury history.

Alfredo Jaar
- History
- Religion
- Images
For me, what was important was to record everything I saw around me, and to do this as methodically as possible. In these circumstances a good photograph is a picture that comes as close as possible to reality. But the camera never manages to record what your eyes see, or what you feel at the moment. The camera always creates a new reality.

Alfredo Jaar