"Commissioned for "Documenta 8", held in Kassel, Germany, in 1987, 1 + 1 +1 responds to the context of this major international exhibition, long dominated by a European perspective. (...) 1 + 1 + 1 equates the aestheticization of poverty with exploitation. The installation includes one of Jaar's first mature uses of the photographic light box - a glass and metal structure supporting a photographic transparency back-lit by fluorescent tubes - which has become his signature method of presentation. Here, three light boxes are mounted low on the wall; each contains a single black-and-white image of impoverished children standing in a dusty landscape. The photographs are cropped dramatically and presented upside down. (...) Three gilded "fine-art" frames - uniformly sized to fit the three light boxes - are positionend on the floor directly in front of the phtoographs. The left frame is empty, the center frame contains a series of four progressively smaller frames, and the right frame surrounds a mirror.
1 + 1 + 1 challenges the conventional politics of museum or gallery display. (...) The three arrangements of the gilded frame - used here as the iconic representation of an aesthetic experience - offer the art audience three possible ways of looking at "reality". (...) 1 +1 + 1 suggests, in its inconclusiveness, Jaar's ambivalence about art's ability to directly effect the world's most pressing economic and social problems." (James E. Rondeau)