Alfredo Jaar: Studies on Happiness

A richly illustrated survey of Alfredo Jaar’s Studies on Happiness (1979–1981) and its deep political stakes in the historical context of Chile’s neoliberal transition.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 residu