One Million Points of Light: Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar: The Ethics of the Image.

We live in a world of images. Social media defines the new ecosystem through which we move, a media landscape influential throughout the world. Producing images today using our smartphones is easy, like breathing. In a certain way, we live in an osmotic world made by images that mediate our representation and understanding of reality. The world is globally connected and represented by images, which produce a rhetoric of our actions. This rhetoric represents the new reality we inhabit and is embedded in our communications. The actions represented form an echo, propagating beyond the context in which they are generated, in a feeble representation, accommodating the blunt aesthetic of social media.

In this situation, contemporary artists have swiftly reacted to a world losing ethical values by choosing image-based communication, adopting a strategy to convey human and social values.

Alfredo Jaar is one of the champions of this strategy.

In past centuries, artists were the producers of images for society, but today, through social media everyone can produce them. Jaar's work focuses on the politics of the image. Throughout his entire body of work, he unveils how images reveal the internal and underground correlations within a culture, expressing attitudes, ethics, and society’s values. He makes us aware of the power of images.

For his first solo gallery exhibition in Lisbon, Jaar presents two of his key works at Galeria Francisco Fino, both of which constitute a declaration of his poetics and their introduction to the Lisbon audience.

The exhibition’s title originates from one of the three works in the exhibition. One Million Points of Light (2005) is an image that portrays the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Luanda, Angola. Water represents life as it is the most important element on our planet, supporting every human necessity from the most basic to the most complex. It allows nourishment, trade, and the exchange between civilizations; it is a symbol of regeneration. For Portugal and Lisbon, the ocean has historically been a source of inspiration throughout its history. The image of the ocean with reflections of sunlight photographed by the artist is very beautiful; the sun’s reflection offers us a perfect image of life on Earth.

However, this image is one of shame, reminding us of 14 million African slaves sent to Brazil by the Portuguese between the 17th and 19th centuries, in an unspeakable practice, which characterized Western civilization in the past centuries as part of an ideology of progress, giving this beautiful picture another disturbing meaning. This simple image displays, in an instant, millions of lost lives as flickers on the surface of the water, revealing the dark side of the so-called Western civilization. This picture denounces a practice as direct communication with the spectator, without indulgence and in a sober manner. And this communicates us the core of Alfredo Jaar's work. It is the opposite of the eloquence of the picture. It disconnects it from the circus of our communication system. It frees it from any amplification the system offers, letting it pose a mute interrogation to the spectator, which uncovers its real meaning, born of an appeal to humanity.

The other major work in the exhibition is The Sound of Silence (2006), an iconic work in which the artist presents a short film about a photograph by Kevin Carter, photojournalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, of a famine-stricken boy watched by a threatening vulture. The installation is contained inside a large volume, a theater built for a single image, whose access is controlled by a green and red light.

The extraordinary precision and sensitivity with which the artist treats this image gives it a depth that is not social or communicative, but a set of values, respect, equality, and ultimately, humanity. It considers human life the highest of the values of our condition as human beings on this planet. Jaar does not represent something, but gives us an immediate perception of the most important value: life.

In another work, he makes a simple statement attributed to Ansel Adams: “You Do Not Take a Photograph. You Make It”. To observe the artist’s ability to immediately convey a value is the key to entering his works. Jaar’s process is to choose a single image, charge it with all the expectations and interrogations for which it is the vehicle, and let the image powerfully speak for itself. In some ways, we could say that the image burns in the spectator’s eyes, and what remains are the ashes of the value that it transmits.

At the same time, the work is a powerful critique of an entire vision of society. A society that allows famine and slavery to still exist in our current society, in a world drowned in conflicts and violence.

In this process, Alfredo Jaar’s work strips bare (or demolishes) the aesthetic as the rhetoric of the image, reaching its ethical essence; for him, the ethic is the aesthetic of the image.

Jaar reminds us that politics is not a separate human activity in society, reserved for politicians, but a fundamental aspect of any person living in a community, and we cannot renounce it in our daily lives.

This exhibition, which recalls the dark past of Portugal and the present of European and Western neo-colonialism, makes a positive appeal to the new generation, who grew up in democracy and respect for human rights, which Alfredo Jaar's art claims as an integral part of social and human activities.

Maurizio Bortolotti