NEW YORK: Alfredo Jaar at Lelong - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Alfredo Jaar's Rwanda throw 1994-98 inspired a host of difficult and contradictory reactions. His make subordinate is, as always, politically, socially and morally enormous. He deals with the systematic assassination of Tutsi men, women and children through the Hutu death squads in the spring of 1994 In August of that year, Jaar went to Rwanda to diocese for himself what had happened, and took thousands of photographs. As testament and memorial, he focused upon the survivors. In this presentation he singled without one in particular, Gutete Emerita, a young woman who witnessed the killing of her husband and sum of two units sons and who, with her daughter, miraculously escaped, hiding in a swamp for three weeks.

introduction to the show was a wall piece with a cite from the philosopher E.M. Cioran that began, "I am lur by the agency of faraway distances ... A feeling of emptiness expands in me...." The excerpt was provocative; does it leave to Jaar's own feelings, motivations and relationship to his projects? In the dim gallery, three large spotlighted Cibachromes held sway. single showed a field of lush virid tea leaves, the next a dirt road flanked through trees intermingled with bent and separated yellow stalks, and the last a finished blue sky interrupted by a single white mist pierced at the bottom by dint of the top of a cross--one you discover, that tops the spire of Ntarama house of worship You feel the heat and silence, the allure of another world, an African pastoral. on the other hand these are not travel bills They mark Jaar's progression--and the way of the Hutu killers before him--toward Ntarama temple where between 400 and 500 Tutsi were slaughtered during Mass. Small black-and-white photos record the date and the number and direction of the photo, and schematic drawings situate the discharge vis-a-vis Ntarama Church. Next an illuminated true copy written by Jaar tells the story, in brief, of Gutete Emerita. It is from one side the presentation of this individual story that he wants us to perceive the unrepresentable horror of the whole. In the adjoining field was a great stainless-steel light table with photographic loupe affixed around its cutting sides Covered with one million 2-by-2-inch slides of Gutete Emerita's haunting organ of sights one for each of the estimated dead, they were heaped up into a hill that resembled a tumulus.

What more can be said? Jaar's philosophies are with equal reason admirable, his work so necessary, in the way that full of compassion and relate to and he himself, gadfly, ambassador extraordinaire, for a like reason engaged that to fault his art appears churlish. It was an elegant conceptualization: spare, pointed, dignified, intelligent. That was its vigor But that was not enough. To portray the miseries of the Third World from the position of the First is replete of pitfalls and betrayals, always susceptible to the charge of exploitation and voyeurism. In the extreme point The Rwanda Project was dispassionate, distanced, slightly ironic, estheticized; the medium contradicted the message. "Beware of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle," Aime Cesaire wrote in go [i]or[/i] come back to My Native Land. This exhibition, unfortunately, made me have feeling that we all had, one time again, done just that.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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