When the Chilean conceptual artist Alfredo Jaar first unveiled A Logo for America in New York’s Times Square in 1987, it provoked outrage. Passersby saw the lit-up billboard as an affront to so-called America, but Jaar says describing the work as “anti-American” misses the point. “There’s nothing more American than claiming ‘America’ represents a whole continent,” he explains.
Fast-forward almost 30 years to the UK premiere of the work in London on 28 July and the work is more urgent than ever, Jaar says. “Each [presidential] candidate has a different idea about what the country is. It isn’t about language any more; it’s about the meaning of America. Millions of people are being expelled. Donald Trump is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Every six minutes between 6.30pm and 10pm from 29 to 31 July, A Logo for America is being screened among the giant LED adverts on Piccadilly Circus. The project is part of an exhibition at the South London Gallery called Under the Same Sun, which has been organised by Pablo León de la Barra in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum.
Jaar’s work consists of slogans such as “This is not America” superimposed over a map of the US and “This is not America’s flag” over the Stars and Stripes. The work’s meaning is amplified next to the blaring messages of US multinationals such as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, whose advert proclaims to be “lovin’ it”.
Jaar first created A Logo for America five years after he had left Chile for New York and following a particularly bloody period of US interventions in the Americas. “I would hear people say ‘Welcome to America’ or ‘God bless America’, and they were obviously referring to the US and not the entire continent,” Jaar says. “For us, the concept of America is very different, we are Americanos. I realised that the entire continent had been erased from the map with this language.”
Since then Jaar, who trained as an architect and film-maker, has forged a highly successful career as an artist, representing Chile at the Venice Biennale in 2013. His art often deals with immigration; at Art Basel this year he created a work called The Gift. Volunteers handed out “gift” boxes to visitors, which unfurled to reveal an image of the beach in Turkey where the drowned body of toddler Aylan Shenu (his surname was misreported as Kurdi) was found in September 2015. In return for the work, people were encouraged to donate to the Migrant Offshore Aid Station, a charity dedicated to saving lives at sea.
Today, immigration is at the top of Donald Trump’s agenda. One of the presidential candidate’s plans is to get Mexicans to pay for a wall to be built along the US border. “What’s happening in the US is terrifying,” Jaar says. “The system is rigged; politics have failed us tremendously. We all thought Britain wouldn’t leave the EU, but look what happened here. Trump is a very real threat.”