Making Art of Waste, or a Waste of Art?

Chris Jordan's exhibit “Running the Numbers” takes statistics that we as people read and cannot comprehend--the 1 million plastic cups used on US airline flights every 6 hours, or the one hundred million trees cut down each year to generate junk mail--and attempts to portray them in a way that the public can grasp. Jordan creates images which literally and metaphorically depict these overwhelming figures. He seems to be hoping that visually seeing the “images representing these statistics” will enable the public to understand the vast consumption all people contribute to daily.

Jordan is obviously fascinated with the wastefulness of Americans, something environmentalists often latch onto, and the public generally seems to ignore. Next to the image of the 2 million plastic bottles used in the US every 5 minutes, a quote from Jordan states, “The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me the consistent feature is staggering complexity.” Certain pieces in the exhibit may reflect this “darkly beautiful” aspect, particularly ‘Light Bulbs’ (wasted energy in US homes every minute) and ‘Toothpicks’ (representing the trees lost to junk mail), but after a few pieces the viewer begins to wonder if these disturbing facts are something we should celebrate as artwork.

By making our consumption aesthetically pleasing, Jordan is not presenting a social message to his viewers, or bringing about a desire for change. Other artists have succeeded in eliciting social change through artwork, like the Social Realists of the early 20th century who depicted factory workers or families forced to migrate because of the Dust Bowl. These artists did so by showing the austere reality of life, not by attempting to make an ugly truth into an “Intolerable Beauty” (Jordan's name for an earlier exhibit of the same concept). Jordan could easily have tweaked “Running the Numbers” to encourage viewers to adopt more environmental practices, such as recycling, turning off unnecessary household lights, or paying bills online, all practices that would perfectly align with the negative messages in his art pieces. Yet he does not.

Jordan’s exhibit almost obliterates the progress made by environmentalists in recent years in that “Running the Numbers” does not support the notion that one person can make a difference in the big picture of American consumption. The statistics themselves are staggering enough, but when a person can see the two or three plastic bottles they might contribute to the overall accumulation, how can they feel that not using those bottles will make any tangible difference? Add to this sense of desperation the fact that Jordan is presenting multiple areas of excess consumerism, and after a few pictures the audience is almost more desensitized from the statistics than they would be reading them in a book.

Jordan also fails in creating art that means something to its viewers outside of its immediate context. If a person does not read the title and understand the statistic, they just see a large, repetitious image which oftentimes looks like nothing at all. ‘Prison Uniforms’ is the best example of this: from far away the six ten-foot-tall boards just look like brownish-orange columns. Closely scrutinizing may lead a viewer to suppose Jordan has depicted stacks of pennies, or brown hats, but its purpose will be entirely lost. Only when reading that ‘Prison Uniforms’ contains 2.3 million orange prison uniforms, one for every American incarcerated in 2005, will the artwork attain a meaning. These pictures are computer generated, and therefore only estimates, but they are most effective when the viewer can understand what the image is representing without standing .5 inches away from the piece. 'Cell Phones' is not nearly as effective as 'Cell Phones # 2', which shows the phones so that they are recognizable from a distance. There may not be as many actual cell phones in the piece, but the immensity of the pile that is visible to the naked eye, without all the confusing miniscule graphics, strikes much deeper to home because of how realistic it appears. The farther removed from the original statistic the image is the less effective it becomes.

While viewing Jordan’s exhibit can be an interesting experience, it could just as easily be duplicated by visiting his website, http://www.chrisjordan.com/, where he has posted not only the artworks themselves, but zoomed in versions that are not accessible in the exhibit. The website is almost more effective than the exhibit because there the viewer can fully appreciate Jordan’s Photoshop-esque techniques. Jordan’s only tangible contribution to the art world is a half hour of interesting conversation, and possibly some pictures in future social studies books that demonstrate for students the American consumerism of the 21st century.