Chilean artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar challenges commonly held opinions
about the relationship between art and politics. He fuses the aesthetic and the ethical
to focus on injustices around the world – poverty, exploitation, genocide. Jaar’s works
show the tangled effects of international economic and political realities on the lives of
individuals.

Jaar conveived Gesamtkunstwerk (1988) after having read Guy Debord’s seminal
book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) where the radical critic of Capitalism and the
capitalistic ideology of consumption developed a theory of the spectacle: “The whole life
of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an
immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere
representation.” With Gesamtkunstwerk Jaar wanted to create an art object that is nothing
in itself but the pure abstract term. Wherever we place Jaar’s light box it will evoke in us
the whole notion of dissolving the boundries between aesthetic form and reality.