Sonia Pentz

Sonia Pentz

Cesare Pietroiusty , advisor

Comparative analysis

February 2013

1,262 words

Frida Kahlo and Alfredo Jaar:

 More In Common Than the Eyes Can See

We cannot separate art from its context the same way that artists are inseparable from the social rumble of the time they live in or lived in. Frida Kahlo and Alfredo Jaar are two artists joined by the hip by the political struggles they grew up in. Frida's life as a woman and later as an artist was marked by two main events: the revolution in her dear Mexico and her traumatic accident at a young age. Alfredo's life was marked by the struggles of his country, Chile, during Pinochet's brutal military regime and the pain of being aware of the indifference, for most of us, of the suffering around the world. Both of them channel personal and social pain the way that artists do best with creations. During this comparative analysis I will try to analyze works by these two contemporary artists based on the political and social context of their works and on their own ways of dealing with suffering.  

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacan, Mexico; the Mexican Revolution began when she was three years old. In her writings she recalled her mother helping the revolutionaries with food and later she proudly claimed that she was born in 1910 so people would directly associate her with the revolution. During the period that she was enrolled in Preparatoria (one of Mexico's prestigious school) she witnessed violent armed struggles in the streets of Mexico City as the Revolution continued.  Her life was marked by the physical pain of polio at age 6, the permanent scars of a terrible trolley accident that left her sterile and the mental anguish of a life with Diego Rivera (Frida Kahlo Biography).  

Alfredo Jaar was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956 and like Frida his formative life was forged by political struggle. He emigrated to US in 1981, at the height of Pinochet's cruel regime and after 25 years Jaar finally had his first exhibition in his native country (2006). (Selected Recent Press 2013-2012) "Growing up under a military dictatorship has made him wary of propaganda and he mistrusts art's (and especially photography's) ability to persuade uncritical eyes." (Selected Recent Press 2013-2012) His life, like many others under those circumstances, was molded in distrust and in the false sense of security dictators forcefully imposed on the public through the use and abuse of the media.

Analyzing the artist's works (Frida's Last Supper and Jaar's The Eyes of Gutete Emerita from The Rwanda Project) it is clear that both deal with pain in different ways and through the use of different materials and mediums. Frida used her paintings, specially her self-portraits to express and probably find sympathy from the viewer; Jaar is different in a way that the sympathy that he is looking for is not specifically for him but for the suffering around the world; he is a multi media conceptualist artist expressing his ideas with photography, video, installations and community-based projects.  

Frida Kahlo Last Supper

 

  In Frida's version of the Last Supper she combines many of her famous works presenting to the
viewer her many faces while her pain is very visible in each of the characters. Revealing a lifetime of suffering, physical and emotional she creates a special connection with the female audience.  The intimate autobiography of self-portraits is very different in form and function from the monumental scale or public themes of mural art dominant in her context and freely used by her husband Diego Rivera. The use of religious themes, symbolism and elements of her colorful Mexican folk tradition mixed with fantastic depictions of characters place her as a Surrealist; but she did not think of herself as a Surrealist until Andre Breton visited her in Mexico in 1938 and claimed Kahlo as a Surrealist (Social Protest and Personal Pain: Mexican Artists).

Author Maria A. Castro-Sethness said:

 "Through her persistent use of self-imagery, Kahlo meticulously examined her agony. Because of her long confinements and isolation, she entered into a spiritual realm that inevitably led, consciously and unconsciously, the incorporation of the Christian beliefs and iconography rooted in her cultural heritage and upbringing. (Castro-Sethness)

The cultural history in which the Mexican artist developed is unmistakably present in the colorful portrayal of this journal like painting of her life of sufferings.  

In comparison Alfredo Jaar's The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (shown below) even thought different aesthetically and in the language chosen by the artist to communicate his idea is very similar in one way, both have a common goal: communicate suffering. While Frida gives to the viewer her heart and soul in her self-portraits in a direct and honest way, Jaar uses a new language and an old tool , photography, to finally communicate what we often missed, the human distress. The way he presented his photography mattered more to him that the pictures themselves. "In our society of consumption and spectacle, where everything becomes decontextualised, images need help" he said (Selected Recent Press 2013-2012)

In The Rwanda Project that started in 1994 and concluded in 2000 Jaar helped the images, of one of the most ignored holocausts in history: Rwanda (in my own opinion), by inventing a new language to successfully get a response from the viewer. The project is a series of works about the genocide. The Eyes of Gutete Emerita ( two quad vision light boxes with six text transparencies and two color transparencies, 1996) my favorite of the group is the signature work of Jaar's series, part of The Rwanda Project.  This project leads viewers to question the efficacy of words over photographic images and to consider the ways in which they interact to create meaning outside the boundaries of either medium. When the artist visited Rwanda in 1994 right after the genocide he traveled to Kigali and he met a woman Gutete Emerita, who witnessed the killing of her husband and sons, he decided then not to show the images of bodies that still lay rotting but instead used text to describe it and the photograph of the survivor's eyes to convey his message. (Alfredo Jaar: The Eyes of Gutete Emerita. Press Release)

The text plays with the images and the images with the text and the result is a sense of awareness in the viewer which cannot ignore any longer the suffering.  Jaar does not want to worship the images so much as fight the sense of indifference. (Jaar)

Like Frida who wants us to be the witness of her imaginable suffering and in the process was looking for the human sympathy that brings unconscious relief from pain, Alfredo Jaar with his projects is trying to fight the indifference that desensitizes us.  Both artists found their own way of conveying their message each according to their own reality, Frida fought her demons Jaar is fighting the demons that bring suffering without sympathy.        

(The Eye of Gutete Emerita)

The Eyes of Gutete Emerita 1996

                                         Bibliography

Alfredo Jaar: The Eyes of Gutete Emerita. Press Release. n.d. 6 February 2013. <http://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu>.

Castro-Sethness, Maria A. "Frida Kahlo's Spiritual World: The Influence of Mexican Retablo and Ex-voto Paintings on Her Art." Woman's Art (2004-2005): 21-24.

Frida Kahlo Biography. 2013. 4 february 2013. <http://www.frida-kahlo-foundation.org>.

Jaar, Alfredo. Let There be Light: The Rwanda Project 1994-1998. ACCTAR, n.d. 6 February 2013.

Selected Recent Press 2013-2012. n.d. 5 February 2013. <http://alfredojaar.net>.

Selected Recent Press 2013-2012. n.d. 6 february 2013. <http://www.alfredojaar.net>.

"Social Protest and Personal Pain: Mexican Artists." Arnason, H. H. and Elizabeth C. Mansfield. History of Modern Art Sixt Edition. New York: Pearson, 2010. 392.

The Eye of Gutete Emerita. n.d. 7 February 2013. <http://students.cis.uab.edu>.