Of Infographics, Illustration, and the Political in Art: Chris Jordan, APEX at PAM

The notion of the extended infographic is clearly in the air, Mr. Edward Tufte would be glad to know.

I recently gave an art director friend a copy of IDN magazine that was a showcase of exotic, expressive infographic design, some of it the deliciously oppositional combination of hard data with a subversively Raygun aesthetic.

Chris Jordan, in the handful of pieces from his Running the Numbers series on view in the current APEX show in the Portland Art Museum, employs a grandiose version of the infographic in large-scale prints that notably employ photo-collage (or specifically: Photoshop collage) rather than the common vector-graphic based illustration of the infographic. There is no summary of data here…no one icon representing 1,000 men, cigarettes, airplanes. Jordan’s M.O. is a one-for-one representation of data with photographed object. The objects are deployed as texture (426,000 cell phones filling a frame) or pixel/brushstroke in the service of image creation.

An example of the latter is “Skull with Cigarette,” a Seurat by way of Chuck Close image substituting 200,000 tiny tiles of cigarette box tops for brushstroke or gridpoint. It’s seductive in the way that Google Earth is, pulling you in closer and closer. Unlike Google Earth, here the viewer is pulled in away from the resolved image to its means, which of course is the artist’s “point.” And Running the Numbers is didactic work. The skull tells us via its wall tag that the 200,000 cigarette box tops represent “the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months.” The Numbers address easy targets like smoking, waste, prescription-drug abuse, together creating a portrait of late-capitalism America. And although we’re talking about death, the dying planet, and so forth here, the images are sanitized and in the case of “Lightbulbs” in particular,  extraordinarily beautiful.

“Lightbulbs” of the lot, is the most successful piece because it is more open ended in that in spite of its wall tag, it doesn’t need to be “about” wasting energy. It’s an image of thousands of milky, glowing lightbulbs repeated on a black ground, tiny and densely placed in the center, progressively larger and more widely spaced in front of and around the center. By calling to mind early images of the Milky Way, it can be read as addressing vastness, isolation, the consequences or inconsequence of individual action or (why not go all the way) existence.

The work needs this kind of open-endedness and complexity to distinguish it from illustrations in the better periodicals. “Lightbulbs” finds the escape from the trap much overtly political art finds itself in, hitting the nail too directly (ouch) on the head.

–Radon

POSTED: April 25th, 2009 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: apex, art, portland art museum | No Comments »

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