In Alfredo Jaar, the first critical academic survey devoted to the prominent Chilean-born artist, Florencia San Martín shows how his work takes up mourning, accountability, and failure, offering a new model for how to think about global contemporary art today.In Alfredo Jaar, Florencia San Martín analyzes the work of the prominent Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar, whose work challenges the linear and triumphalist temporality of Western modernity t...

A richly illustrated survey of Alfredo Jaar’s Studies on Happiness (1979–1981) and its deep political stakes in the historical context of Chile’s neoliberal transition.Between 1979 and 1981, Alfredo Jaar asked Chileans a deceptively simple question: "Are you happy?" Through private interviews, sidewalk polls and video-recorded forums, among other interventions, Jaar’s three-year and seven-phase project, Studies on Happiness, addressed a furtive an...

Through a series of penetrating conversations originally published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard talk with a wide range of cutting edge thinkers--including Oliver Stone, Simon Critchley, and Elaine Scarry--to explore the problem of violence in everyday life, politics, culture, media, language, memory, and the environment. "To bring out the best of us," writes Evans, "we have to c...