Jul 31 2008
The Statistical Sublime
Constitution, 2008
8 x 25 feet in five panels
Depicts 83,000 Abu Ghraib prisoner photographs, equal to the number of people who have been arrested and held at US-run detention facilities with no trial or other due process of law, during the Bush Administration’s war on terror.
This is Seattle artist Chris Jordan’s latest project, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait.
Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.
This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
I found the whole series profoundly moving. See for example Barbie Dolls, which “depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006.” Also Prison Uniforms “depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005.” Then there’s Building Blocks, which “depicts nine million wooden ABC blocks, equal to the number of American children with no health insurance coverage in 2007.
On the surface, each piece employs the same stylistic elements. However, each piece provides its own narrative through the use of different rhetorical tools. For example, the Prison Uniforms are directly related to the number of prisoners, two directly related objects. The Building Blocks on the other hand represent feelings or memories of children and childhood but don’t relate directly to health care. The two mutually exclusive ideas tied together, an innocent childhood with lack of health care, create a sort of exclusive disjunction by which one concludes A is not possible without B. The blocks become hollow symbols with the knowledge of what they represent.
The Barbie Dolls are causal here. Unlike the benign building blocks, Barbie, as a tool for socializing girls into both young consumers and sexualized objects, directly plays a role in the numbers of elective cosmetic surgeries.
Each individual Abu Ghraib prisoner photograph is itself a highly provocative image. As a montage the images are all the more disturbing. Then of course there’s the staggering number. 83,000. What’s further, the brutality of this rouge American para-legal system which denies basic human dignity is so antithetical to the ideology of universal justice and liberty expressed in “We The People.”
When I first read these images, together with the context of the statistical data, often unfathomable or overwhelming numbers, I encountered a sense of statistical sublimity. But I’m seeing these online, through a 15′ inch computer screen. To actually experience these very large pieces must further add to the emotive response of these dizzying numbers of human suffering. If the statistics alone are anesthetizing, and I think isolated they mostly are, Jordan succeeds in re-humanizing the social meanings behind the numbers.
Thinking further about the statistical sublime I wonder to what extent seeing this exhibition, or any one of its pieces, might be similar to visiting say the Vietnam Memorial or the Arlington Cemetery. Similarly, with these works the viewer participates in a kind of public performance through the act of first standing in front of these overwhelming visual statistics and second through actively reading the individual images much like one would read the names on the Vietnam Memorial. Rather than say patriotic feelings or a sense of democratic solidarity with fallen soldiers the viewer here performs social criticism.
Jordan states that he hopes, “to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.” Here the viewer is not only an individual but also performs the role of the individual and is placed directly within these “enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming” statistics. Would this not provoke a deeply subliminal experience?
Jordan does raise many questions. The most relevant I think being, how does the individual, so atomized and isolated from an incomprehensibly enormous society (increasingly global in scale) experience solidarity in the face of these tragedies? Perhaps by re-humanizing these vast numbers of suffering the viewer can experience both the role of victim and perpetrator. After all, Jordan titled this collection “an American Self-Portrait.”