Alfredo Jaar: Gramsci & Pasolini | Art21 "Exclusive"

Episode #026: Alfredo Jaar in his installation "Infinite Cell" (2004) in Santiago, Chile, and various works.

Through installations, photographs, and community-based projects, Alfredo Jaar explores the public's desensitization to images and the limitations of art to represent events such as genocides, epidemics, and famines. Jaar's work bears witness to military conflicts, political corruption, and imbalances of power between industrialized and developing nations, often taking the form of an extended meditation or elegy.

Alfredo Jaar is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Protest of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!

Learn more about Alfredo Jaar: http://www.art21.org/artists/alfredo-jaar

VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Lizzie Donahue. Artwork courtesy: Alfredo Jaar. Thanks: Fundación Telefónica, Santiago, Chile.

There are two thinkers, Italian thinkers, that I admire greatly - Antonio Gramsci, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

I was invited to series of exhibitions in Italy last year. And I wanted to make an homage to both men.

In the world of culture today, I miss Gramsci and I miss Pasolini.

I miss Gramsci because he was one of the first thinkers who really believed in power of culture to affect life,

To affect social life, to affect political life.

And Pasolini was an artist like no other.

He was a thinker, a filmmaker, a poet, a writer, a critic. He was writing and working in all directions.

And I miss today Gramsci and Pasolini.

What brought me to this piece in particular was, in one of Pasolini's writings,

He says that culture is a prison.

And we intellectuals have to get out of that prison.

Enough of me speaking to you and you speaking to me,

Me applauding to you and you applauding to me. Let's get out. Let's reach a larger audience.

And I realized that this could have been my motto for many, many years.

And for the last 25 years, I have always been looking for different ways of communication.

And each work employs a different strategy of communication, in order to reach a larger public.

In order to make sense.