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Informationen zum Autor Edward Vazquez Klappentext 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. Zusammenfassung 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 and fearful population living under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. It also spoke to a country in transition, as a newly adopted constitution remade Chile through privatisation and other neoliberal reforms. In its varied interventions and direct mode of address, Studies on Happiness functioned as a feedback device meant to catalyse a critical awareness with its blunt questioning. Edward A. Vazquez contextualises Studies on Happiness within Jaar’s early production and situates his practice within a Chilean art world haunted by the residues of political violence. This study foregrounds the project’s historical embeddedness and the deep political stakes of its apparent sociality, recognising the crucial role that context has always played in Jaar’s practice. By turning to the Santiago of Studies on Happiness , Vazquez explores the work’s political and art historical environment and provides a wedge to realign current interpretations of Chilean art and hemispheric conceptualism with the openness central to Jaar’s project. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgments 9-10 The Matter of Memories 13-17 Phases of Happiness 18-50 Open Works 51-66 A Retrophysics of the Stereotype 67-78 Voices Against Silence 79-93 Word Weapons 94-114 Organic Intellectuals 115-120 Toward the Sky 121-129 Notes 131-143...
