Goodman Galllery
06.04 - 15.05.2024
Writing on the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, in a review for The Guardian seven years ago, Adrian Searle spoke of a surface that “gives the world it reflects (and swallows) a kind of hard, filmic chill, draining things of their warmth.” He added; “As much as the mirror reflects, it projects an atmosphere.” I invoke the work of Gonzalez-Torres not only because of the direct connection to mirrors in his and Alfredo Jaar’s work (as surfaces that reflect and project) but also as a way to think about a specific kind of minimalist frame found in both practices — one that does not empty out meaning but rather sees content and form as being two sides of the same coin. On the occasion of the publication of Glenn Ligon’s ‘Encounters and Collisions’ Gonzalez-Torres spoke of this relationship, pointing to how forms gather meaning from their historical moment. He was adamant that “the minimalist exercise of the object being very pure and very clean is only one way to deal with the form.”
Alfredo Jaar’s recent solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery, ‘The Geometry of Solitude’, might at first glance seem very pure and very clean but underneath the surface lies tension and unease. In a recent interview, Jaar tells me he thinks of his work as “critical minimalism” that engages form. Why critical minimalism? “Because when minimalism started in the 60s and 70s, I was fascinated. But I was fascinated by the fact that this was the most turbulent decade of my generation. It was the student protests in 1968. It was the Vietnam War. It was the killing of Martin Luther King. It was the Civil Rights Movement. It was crazy. Minimalists were coming out with these beautiful cubes. And so, I thought it was extraordinary, but at the same time, I thought something was missing. As a young architect, I thought I would like to create some kind of critical minimalism where I put back the meaning into the very simple forms,” he explains.
Installation View | Alfredo Jaar, The Geometry of Solitude, 2024. Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
The language of architecture —tectonics, scale, proportion, symmetry and rhythm —is palpable within his practice. For him, the idea directs the form, often distilled to its simplest essence. The work is precise and clear and yet manages to hold complexity. In People without Names (Afghanistan), for instance, eleven square mirrors are arranged horizontally at about hip level. The mirrors cast back an image emerging from a lightbox facing towards the mirrors (and away from the viewer). This results in fragmentation as the viewer moves around the work, incapable of perceiving the image in its entirety. There is an intermingling of one’s own image against that of the people in the obstructed photograph. Part of a larger series, the work documents refugees and those impacted directly by war in various regions across the globe. For me, the mirrors gesture towards a kind of interruption – the image is constantly obscured and interrupted as one moves around it — which has the potential to be productive. Each time one is interrupted one can reframe, reconsider and shift perspectives. Perhaps, in a very loose way, this works against comfort and complacency.
Installation View | Alfredo Jaar, The Geometry of Solitude, 2024. Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
On the far end of the gallery space is a blue room exhibiting Jaar’s 1991 work, Fading, which documents Vietnamese exiles who sought refuge in Hong Kong and were kept in detention centres, following the Vietnam War. The installation comprises twenty-one anodised metal trays filled with colour Cibachrome photographs in water. A ribbon of blue neon light along the wall casts a cool and chilling glow. This work in particular, because it is both unsettling and alluring, brings to the fore questions on the link between ethics and aesthetics. Suppose aesthetics can be crudely thought of as primarily a matter of the senses and ethics as a matter of setting moral standards. In that case, there’s an argument to be made that Jaar’s work allows for a critical examination of both. He tells me; “Earlier in my career, people would criticize me because they thought that my art was aestheticizing suffering. That was the typical sentence.” He elaborates; “I’m not afraid of aesthetics. I’m not afraid of beauty.” In Jaar’s work, one must grapple with the disciplines of aesthetics and ethics as strategies for locating value judgements. One can judge the work as being ‘good’ in terms of how it affects the senses (when the eye lands on the blue light or the meticulously arranged trays for instance) but a lingering, much more complex question persists, and that is; ‘what good are images of war and suffering?’ That is to say; what good comes out of them? This is an old question. Virginia Woolf, whom I came to through Susan Sontag, reflected on it in 1938. Her book-length essay, ‘Three Guineas’, which began with the provocation; “How, in your opinion, are we to prevent war?” grappled with images of war and their effect. Sontag furthered this in her work ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, where she noted; “One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show.” This begs the question, when we see images that trace the suffering of refugees in different parts of the world, what do we actually see and what can we do with that seeing?
Detail | Alfredo Jaar, People without Names (Afghanistan), 1989. Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
It’s not lost on me that the exhibition is titled ‘The Geometry of Solitude’. In one sense, to think of geometry is also to think of the measurement of the earth, which is to say; divisions, lines, borders, and cartography (read colonial expedition and extraction). There’s a push and pull between hope and despair in Jaar’s work. He tells me; “Intellectually, when I look around at the world, I am terribly pessimistic. I don’t see any light, I don’t see any way out. But fortunately, I do not stay in that state of mind. I don’t know why or how, but my will is still optimistic. My will keeps me going.”
If we are to go back to the question; What are we to do with images of war? Jaar seems to be proposing that we are to remember — to think of memory and the act of remembering as an active resistance against subjugation.
‘The Geometry of Solitude‘ is on view at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town until 15th May 2024.
