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9781478038788 Academic Inspection Copy

Alfredo Jaar

Decolonial Time and the Aesthetics of the Unfinished
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In Alfredo Jaar, Florencia San Martin analyzes the work of the prominent Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar, whose work challenges the linear and triumphalist temporality of Western modernity, which obscures the violence of colonization and globalization. Instead, San Martin argues that Jaar's work represents decolonial time, exposing the limits of the violent systems we oppose but inhabit. His art, she maintains, is informed by and responds to two interconnected historical events relevant to his own life: the US-backed military coup that established Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, and the implementation of its corollary neoliberal economic system around the world. San MartIn explores the key themes in Jaar's artistic practice-mourning, accountability, and failure-which situate the victims of the Chilean regime in a global context, directly confront the architects of atrocity, and question how ideas of diversity and inclusion have been co-opted by modern neoliberal discourses. Alfredo Jaar enables us to reimage art history, offering a fresh paradigm from where to think about global contemporary art today.
Florencia San Martin is Assistant Professor of Art History at Lehigh University. Wolfgang Kaleck is the founder as well as general secretary for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.
"It is rare that an artist whose work is deeply committed to socio-political issues receives detailed attention to that element rather than glancing references to alert the viewer. Alfredo Jaar is not only a globally important visual artist but a savvy and brilliant commentator/participant in the content at the heart of his work. In this book-as potentially ground-breaking as Jaar's art-Florencia San MartIn offers a dense, detailed, and intelligent analysis of the art and its crucial political contexts, opening up Jaar's visual oeuvre to its real significance in and beyond the world of art."-Lucy R. Lippard, writer, art critic, activist, and curator
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