Description: 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.
Review Quotes: "It is rare that an artist whose work is deeply committed to sociopolitical 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 groundbreaking as Jaar's art--Florencia San Martín 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
"Florencia San Martín provides a compelling argument for Alfredo Jaar as a powerful guide through the practices of decolonial art made within today's repressive neoliberal regimes. Grounded in over a decade of interviews with one of the leading voices in contemporary art, this study envelopes the reader in Jaar's urgent questions about social justice and state violence, migration and exile, happiness and loss."--Esther Gabara, author of, Non-literary Fiction: Art of the Americas Under Neoliberalism "[An] excellent survey of the work of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar. . . . Based on 10 years of archival research, interviews with Jaar and his contemporaries, and the analysis of important but also lesser-known works, San Martín undertakes a comprehensive survey of an artist whose ideas seem more relevant today than ever."--Gavin O'Toole, Latin American Review of Books