I've been away from the country for more than a month. One book that I read while spending too much time on planes (16 flight segments) was Bill Bryson's "I am a stranger here myself", that contains quite a few witty musings about numbers in America, including some of the very same numbers Chris presents, such as inmate population, so I was particularly interested in a project that tries to make visual art out of those numbers.
In executing this last project, I feel that Chris has moved from being a photographic artist to being a conceptual artist who uses photography, while at the same time maintaining an admirable continuity with the ideas and visual style that informed his previous work (this is most obvious with the containers and valves). The pieces are very clever, and I can only imagine that they must have a tremendous visual impact when seen in person thanks to the combination of enormous scale and minute detail (which can photographically be achieved only by large format photography or digital equivalents such as gigapixel composites), as well as multi-scale granularity.
Although as pieces of visual art, I have the same reservation as expressed by Julian about the need for the pieces to use an external commentary without which a lot of their meaning would be lost, I note that this is a common shortcoming of modern art, where most of the pieces are conceptual in nature, and in general require some commentary to fully illuminate them, giving an ever-increasing importance to critical discourse. Many do also make reference to former work, and in this sense become part of the critical discourse themselves. This trend is not specific to visual arts, but also present in litterature, as examined out several decades ago for instance by Gerard Genette.
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Originally Posted by QT Luong
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