Alfredo Jaar: The Dark Side of the Moon

Elevens*

In 1974, the number eleven seems to have haunted a young Alfredo Jaar. That year he wrote it repeatedly in even grids, with individual instances of the numeral reaching into the thousands, and in calendars, repeating the eleventh and arresting daily progress through linear time after September 11^th, 1973, the date of the military coup that deposed the democratically elected Salvador Allende and plunged Chile into a brutal seventeen-year military dictatorship. "Solo once despues del once," the artist wrote.

…6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11… 

Jaar's repetitions voice a chilling reality, unlike the (seemingly) arbitrary return of, say, November 18^th, the date that holds Tara Selter, the protagonist in Danish author Solvej Balle's seven-part novel On the Calculation of Volume, in a suspended temporal loop. In describing the impossibility of moving past the events of September 11^th, either by asserting the shadow of the coup over all that would follow or by being caught in a compulsive cycle of repetition, defining a present of anger, mourning or trauma, Jaar deployed elevens to mark the impossibility of simply moving on. His dates are "stupefied, paralyzed," in the Chilean critic-and important early supporter of Jaar's-Adriana Valdés's words.¹

In the most direct of these works-the grids of elevens on yellow, white, and blue notebook paper in September 11 (Yellow), September 11 (White) and September 11 (Blue) or across the even calendrical spacing of white and red Letraset Helvetica type on a black ground found in September 11, 1973 (Black)-the repetition appears compulsive, even hallucinatory, in its austerity. Rows and rows of elevens, as if trying to push through the number to make sense of it somehow, or, as a block in linear time, a repetition with the brutal simplicity of a recurring nightmare.

September 11, 1973 (Coke) frames its repetitions differently, deploying a march of elevens across a promotional calendar created by the Coca-Cola company adorned with cheery imagery of birds, flowers, and men, women, and children in verdant landscapes on its six double-month pages. Additionally, the calendar excerpts from the famous jingle, "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke," captioning the months of the year with its saccharine wistfulness. The included lyrics read:

I'd Like to Build the World a Home and Furnish it With Love

Grow Apple Trees and Honey Bees and Snow White Turtle Doves

I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing in Perfect Harmony

I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke And Keep It Company

I'd Like to See the World for Once all Standing Hand in Hand
And Hear Them Echo Through the Hills For Peace Through Out the Land

Two different couples in distinct-if equally green and cheery-landscapes preside unaware over Jaar's intervention, as the ad copy, figured in a softened, yellow typeface offers a wish for unity and peace alongside the familiar square, red logo urging viewers to "Enjoy Coca-Cola."

The language and imagery, all in the service of selling a Coke, are busy enough to render Jaar's alteration overlookable at first glance, which should not come as a surprise given that the original object operates as advert first, calendar second. Yet the elevens seep into the image, subtly overwhelming the stock imagery with disquiet, just as they implicitly raise the question-perhaps differently inflected in an English language calendar-of what might have happened to shift the dates: publishing error? Inconsequentially distant geopolitics? Cataclysmic reshaping of life for millions of Chileans?

The grammar of September 11, 1973 (Coke), its fusion of a produced, false happiness in text and imagery and a grim lived reality held in its dates, raises a question that would occupy the artist in his first major project, Studies on Happiness. In that work, which developed between 1979 and 1981, Jaar sought to use the simple, naïve-seeming category of happiness to pursue the deeper query of what ease, joy, and calm could even look like under dictatorship. It offers a study, in essence, of the tension between surface and depth. In this work, Jaar variously posed the questions "Are you happy?" and "What does happiness mean to you?" to people in Santiago and recorded their responses. This single project unfolded across seven-phases, attempting a portrait of Santiago and creating a space to broach-even if obliquely-the fatigue of political violence, censorship, and economic instability that characterized Chile at the time.

Studies on Happiness began with an initial phase of research, before progressing to sidewalk surveys in June of 1980 (phase two), private interviews (phase three), displays of the resulting documentation (phase four), the presentation of 'happy' and 'unhappy' people in a Santiago cultural center (phase five), a series of Public Interventions with "¿Es Usted Feliz?" ("Are You Happy?") printed on billboards around Santiago (phase six), finally culminating in an interactive video installation, An Open Work-a Non-Stop Record, at the National Museum of Fine Arts in December of 1981 (phase seven). For an artist whose architectural training has led him always to privilege context in his work and to see, understand, and synthesize via his art-developing a mode of making that has been aptly called "an aesthetics of witnessing"² — the first instances of this situatedness found form in Chile, and in his framing of these questions, and in the responses of others to them. Describing a wide-ranging, multi-hour conversation between an audience and his "happy" and "unhappy" subjects, in phase four of the project, Jaar saw "a freedom in art and the possibility to create new situations and environments"³ that arguably has occupied him since.

Shifting between active conversation and tersely constructed documentation, Jaar's project holds open a space for private opinion set against quantification and matter-of-fact representation. Studies on Happiness encouraged participants to talk-on the street, in private, in groups, or before a video monitor-and in so doing deployed itself as a vehicle for a type of witness and testimony that was particularly important at that moment in Chile, when revelations around political violence and the shadows of the country's detained and disappeared made speaking out imperative. Over its seven phases, the iterative nature of Jaar's project privileged a renewable openness, a clean slate that encouraged - or at least broached - some measure of honesty shared in public space and among strangers. In Studies on Happiness Jaar sought to particularize the default anonymity of the face with the honesty of the voice, inasmuch as his participants felt able to speak and were comfortable in doing so. If the work ended up a picture of that furtive interrelationship, it is portraiture and voicing all the same.

And yet, for all the implicit anonymity of Studies on Happiness-open street surveys, unguarded microphones and flickering video monitors, apparently looming billboards-much in Jaar's work in and on Chile remains individually rooted in its historical specificity: Buscando a Kissinger; Kissinger, Allende, Kissinger, Kissinger, Allende; Pablo [Picasso], Pablo [Neruda], Pablo [Casals], Pablo. Looking at these works now, as then, we find ourselves among these names, ensnared in the context, caught in time.

…11, 11, 11, 11,11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11…

Edward A. Vazquez⁴

July 2026