September 11 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile, in which the dictator overthrew a democratically elected president with the backing of the United States. Yet September 11, 1973, is not the September 11—that title belongs to the events of 2001. As Alfredo Jaar reminded the audience at the opening of his recent exhibition, “50 Years Later,” this is why the Pinochet coup is often referred to by historians as the “other 9/11.” It is precisely the sentiment bound up in this phrase that Jaar’s exhibition sought to investigate. The show, which coincided with a survey of the artist’s career at Goodman Gallery in Mayfair, extracted specific examples of Jaar’s early work that relate—directly and indirectly—to this other 9/11. In these pieces, as in all of Jaar’s art, a critical outlook toward the image-making process takes a central role. “Images are not innocent,” is Jaar’s oft-repeated line. Through investigations of mass media, he seeks to uncover the unspoken political and social forces that shape visual narratives, and to undermine the notion that photography is unbiased.
It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Jaar has been fascinated by the figure of Henry Kissinger, who features in eight of the twelve works in the exhibition. After all, it was Kissinger who supported the ouster of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, by Pinochet, even advising the dictator on how to effectively interact with President Jimmy Carter. Kissinger created an image for himself as a formidable figure in American politics, appearing in press-pool photographs alongside world leaders and in glowing magazine profiles touting his foreign-policy acumen. Jaar’s investigations into Kissinger take a variety of forms, including a falsified letter from Kissinger to the artist, produced in the decade after the coup (Dear Mr. Jaar, 1976), and a series of multilingual advertisements placed in a German newspaper that demanded the arrest of the former secretary of state (The Kissinger Project, 2012). At times, Jaar’s interest in Kissinger borders on obsession, and his approach to the notorious political figure fits into a typology familiar from the artist’s wider oeuvre: The Kissinger Project is part of an ongoing interest in visual activism centered on targeted messages implanted into mass media, while Dear Mr. Jaar emerges from appropriations of existing materials that are edited and therefore recontextualized by Jaar. A 2001 cover of the Village Voice on display declares Kissinger to be “Manhattan’s Milosevic”—part of Jaar’s ongoing practice of scanning and reproducing copies of magazine covers whose images he finds powerful.
Though Jaar does not allude to it directly, the shadow of the 9/11 hangs over the works in the exhibition. In September 11, 1973 (Black), 1974/2017, Jaar replicates a calendar for 1973 in which the 11th replaces every date for the rest of the year, as if time was frozen by catastrophe. Even this work is not immune to the effects of narrative domination—after the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, the date became loaded with the weight of this new trauma and subsequently functioned as a potent symbol of the United States’ endless war in Afghanistan. Placed above the vitrines holding Searching for K, 1984, the calendar piece is also a reminder of Kissinger’s past as chair of the 9/11 Commission—his role in the Pinochet coup was a source of controversy in the weeks following the attacks on the World Trade Center, ultimately leading to his resignation from the commission. Notably, Jaar never compares the two tragedies or examines Kissinger’s roles in them. He simply presents them as they appear in mass media, using gentle interventions to redirect our attention to hierarchies of distribution and cyclic presentations of power that so often go unquestioned.
