Alfredo Jaar. Studies on Happiness

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.