This post leads me to questions I cannot answer.
Art Basel Miami Beach isn’t where you’d expect to find works made by a subtle and politically engaged artist. But, tucked away in a corner of the Kamel Mennour Gallery’s booth was Alfredo Jaar’s Mississippi Goddam.
Using the title of Nina Simone’s 1964 song, Jaar created a two-part work: a framed and wall-mounted white-on-black print and, in front of it, a pile of black-on-white prints on paper for visitors to take.
The works are simple and unphotogenic. In them, text is arranged in a five column grid of about fifty-five rows. Except for the top left position, there is a fill-in-the-blank space in each of the grid’s cells. The blank space is underlined, and followed by the word “GODDAM.”
At the top left, the blank space is filled in by “Mississippi.” As in Mississippi Goddam.
When I saw the piece in Miami, several place names quickly came to mind. Cleveland, Charleston, Baltimore, Chicago, and Ferguson could have filled some of the blanks. And then there were more places that I looked up later: Barstow, Opa-locka, Minneapolis, Oakland, San Diego, Richmond, North Miami, Memphis, Los Angeles, Houston, and on and on and on. I’m not sure that Jaar’s 255 blank spaces are enough.
Here are a few lines from Nina Simone’s song:
Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Nina Simone said that Mississippi Goddam ruined her career.
So, Alfredo Jaar.
I had taught his work in a few of my classes, and he’s the only artist I’ve ever written a fan letter to. What I love about Jaar’s work: his implication, “You know what to do.”
What has resulted from fifty years of going slow? Has it been fifty years of going backwards?
Alfredo Jaar, The Geometry of Conscience
This installation in Santiago, Chile commemorates the victims of the Pinochet regime, mixing their silhouettes with those of living Chileans. The work is experienced in a controlled sequence: one minute of complete darkness followed by 90 seconds of gradually illuminated silhouettes, then back to darkness, when afterimages of the silhouettes remain in the viewers’ brains. Brilliant!
photograph cristobal palma. © alfredo jaar