Alfredo Jaar 

… In 1990, the Third Eye Centre kicked off with an installation by the Brazilian artist Tunga. Ikon Gallery followed up with the current Adrian Piper retrospective and now, following closely behind, is this Alfredo Jaar offering. The message is clear: look to supposedly ‘radical’ or ‘innovative’ artists for this season’s coloured… 

… As with downstairs, the upper galleries contained more lightboxes than you could shake a stick at. Lightboxes, lightboxes…everywhere you turn there were big, shiny lightboxes. This visibility and manifestation of expense was fore me the most unpalatable and distasteful aspects of the exhibition. The show amounted to not much more than a tacky and vulgar show of opulence. That Hong Kong photograph undoubtedly cost a large amount of money to take and reproduce. And because the photograph appears in isolation, the monied process which allowed for its creation becomes all the more obvious. But who pays for Jaar literally to fly off to disparate parts of the world and produce highly problematic single images which are then offered up in exhibitions such as these? Does he have a large income or a generous private gallery> Or does he just sell his work for lots and lots of money?...

… In many ways, the more profound question is this: where does the evasive Jaar position itself in relation to his subject matter? Certainly, any claim to be ‘of’ these communities is, at best, tenuous. Clearly, Jaar more readily occupies a position of privilege and condescension towards his subjects…

… If the Whitechapel was ever serious about using England’s Black artists as anything more than errand boys and message-carriers, it would surely give Bhimji, Piper, Raphael and a host of other Black artists one-person exhibitions. Their work easily made this Jaar exhibition look superficial. But then again, it looked superficial anyway.

The above extracts are from an exhibition review by Eddie Chambers of Alfredo Jaar at the Whitechapel. The review appeared in  Art Monthly, London, Number 155, April 1992: 19-20 [RTTJ]

This review solicited a hostile response from the Ikon Gallery. The sequence of correspondence was as follows:

May 1992: Elizabeth A. Macgregor, Ikon Gallery, responds. Extract as follows: "I was intrigued to read Eddie Chambers' review of Alfredo Jaar exhibition in which he criticises Ikon Gallery's motivation for showing Adrian Piper."

June 1992: my response. Extract as follows: I have never sought to comment on the exhibition programme developed by the present or previous director of the Ikon Gallery. (The Rasheed Araeen Retrosective was in fact the work of Antonia Payne.) So I was particularly confused when I read Elizabeth MacGregor's muddled letter in last month's Art Monthly."