Josef Stalin said that a single death was a tragedy, but a million deaths were a statistic. He was overly optimistic. Unfortunately—and unbelievably—a million deaths sometimes fail to achieve even statistical recognition.
In Alfredo Jaar’s self-titled exhibition, on display in the Zilkha gallery through Dec. 2, the artist portrays the suffering of millions with honesty and outrage. Comprised of three short films, the exhibition—“Muxima,” “The Sound of Silence” and “Untitled (Newsweek)”— is a testament to Jaar’s desire to methodically explore and reveal the overlooked.
Jaar is an artist first, an ideologue second, but the two are never far apart. “Untitled (Newsweek),” from 1994, is the exhibit’s simplest piece and but also the most straightforward. Seventeen Newsweek magazine covers, spanning the sixteen-week period in 1994 during which the U.S. refused to condemn the rising genocide in Rwanda, are placed above atrocity reports from the same span of time.
The contrast is downright embarrassing at times: beneath a sexy black and white shot of Kurt Cobain’s soulful gloom, post-suicide, we read that 25,000 Tutsi and Hutu moderates were slaughtered in the first five days of killing.
Other Newsweek covers featured the O.J. Simpson trial (twice), “Seven Great Lies about Twenty-Somethings,” and something called: “Is he as cute as his email?/ I bet she’ll love my war games: The High-Tech Gender Gap.” With a message as straightforward as its layout, “Untitled (Newsweek)” compels the viewer to question journalistic integrity and freedom of speech.
The other two pieces, “Muxima” and “The Sound of Silence,” demonstrate Jaar’s sense of aesthetics to a greater degree. “Muxima” is an elegant short film divided into ten Cantos, assembled from recordings Jaar took in Angola.
“Muxima” means “heart” in an Angolese language, but it’s also the title of a folk song. The film uses six such songs to create a soundtrack that dictates the content. Canto VI, for example, begins with a long close-up of boots padding carefully through a forest. Then we see hands, cutting brush with a scythe. At last, a protective mask comes into view, then a metal detector, and we realize this man isn’t farming or hiking—he’s searching for land mines.
This gradual unveiling characterizes the composition of each Canto of the film, and, frankly, separates Jaar from being just another photojournalist or activist turned would-be artist.
“The Sound of Silence” is a video installation dedicated to South African photojournalist Kevin Carter. It tells his story, pared down, in white text on a black screen, and shows Carter’s photograph of a vulture and starving child in Sudan, which won the 1994 Pulitzer prize.
The installation possesses incredible power, undermined only slightly by the confused ending, which seems to focus unduly on the fact that Carter’s photograph is owned by Corbis, a large corporation (Jaar does not attest to any problems pertaining to the company). The piece’s political message is more subtle than “Untitled (Newsweek)” and it doesn’t come down firmly—not even on the ethics of Carter’s decision not to help the child he photographed. Instead, Jaar reveals the situation as he does in “Muxima:” he is objective, and while he does not attempt to conceal his sensitivity to his subject, he does not exhort others to share it.
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