Yes, but, is it photography??

[Oren Grad]

Thanks for a thoughtful response, Chris, and apologies for my earlier post, which was unreasonably snippy.

Although I obviously had a strong reaction to the concept myself, my question this time was not intended to be rhetorical - I don't think I know the answer. To the extent that you're just following your muse, and this is where you need to be right now to "scratch the itch", it doesn't matter. But to the extent that you have instrumental purposes in mind, it would help to understand a bit more.

No doubt serious market research would be way beyond your budget. But I wonder whether some sort of impromptu focus group cobbled together with friends of friends might not be enlightening. It wouldn't have to be elaborate - if you have a friend who has any understanding of how this sort of research is done and is willing to donate a couple of hours pro bono, and with whom you could talk through the issues in advance, I suspect you could get all sorts of insight from even a quite informal exercise. Rent a focus group facility for an hour so that you can sit behind the one-way glass and not contaminate the proceedings. Then sit back and see how a group of people respond to and interact around the stimulus of this work.

If you were local for me I'd be happy to moderate such a group for you. But surely there is someone in Seattle who can help.

[Bill L.]

Chris,

Sorry for the late entry - These work for me. I've been interested in communicating these types of issues in the health field (although not photographically) - i.e. "One death is a tragedy; 10,000 deaths is a statistic." These certainly get across the idea of the enormity of some statistics that just can't seem to be grasped as numbers. The down side, alas, is that none of these would fit in my living room.

Cheers!
Bill

[julian]

and I try to stay away from hoity-toity academic art theories.

to be honest Chris I think some rigerous critical thinking is what this series misses.
There is absolutely no reason to produce these mosaics in the forms of an ansel pic for example. There is no artistic reason to do so, no value added if you like. The whole thing lacks a structural integrity.
to say 'consumption is bad' is not new, you have no new message here, and the artistic form of the message is so closed that it doesn't allow the viewer to come away with a new take on the problem. there is no way, for example, someone like Frank is going to rethink his cultural values that place 'economic sense' above other forms of sense or responsability.
As an ex-sociologist, I'm also in a kind of despair at this kind of message from the left. It has no depth, no suggestion of an answer. It is on the same level as GW recently suggesting people 'buy more' (or was it 'shop more'?) to help the economy. In one respect he was right, shopping and consumption stimulates industry which makes jobs, but it is not an answer!
Consumption is a multifaceted problem, which has at its heart the belief in personal right over wider responsability. You are basically asking people to question a belief system. It isn't as if people don't know the problem exists.
This interpretation and personal questioning of a personal paradigm is exactly what great art can do - it forces the viewer inwards and outwards at the same time, it can make connections between elements that the viewer has not thought of, it can be 'universal' - in the same way that the Guernica has become a universal image that people STILL are affected by when they see it. By allowing viewers to 'play' with the elements of an image and its meaning, you permit the opportunity for wider connections to be made than you originally thought of - the scope of the work becomes greater with each viewing, if you like.
I've been thinking a lot recently about the Guernica and your series. You are depicting huge numbers. The Guernica is about an atrocity where only 100 people died - only 100. Yet the scope and intent of the artwork go far beyond that. You look at it and think Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Bosnia etc etc it can touch you. Now I believe that your exquisite pictures will not touch people. You will get a hand clap from the left, a 'right on brother', and a derisive 'who cares' from the right. I also doubt you'll move children any more than a pie chart in a text book. Children are sophisticated viewers of art, but are essentially ego-centric, so you have to engage the ego. And by having the 'meaning' of the work so closed, there is little room for a child's imagination to play.
You are going a long way beyond just (just!) 'making pictures about something.' You are trying to tie a political message into a concept and a constructed work. This doesn't just happen. There has to be some theoretical thinking - rigerous critical thinking, some delving into art theories, hoity toity or otherwise - to achieve this.
I'd strongly suggest a theoretical rethink. This kind of concept art needs to have a well thought integrity between the concept, its link with ALL elements of the image, and the role of the viewer.

[kmgibbs]

Getting away from what any of us individually thinks about the art, the science or the politics, how effectively will this mode of expression realize Chris' larger consciousness-raising objective? Is it likely to "connect" with an audience that is uninterested in conceptual art for its own sake? Why or why not?

While excess waste is a concern, I think there is a grave danger to keeping these sorts of things 'too much' in peoples faces. That danger is called overload.

For example, I spent part of my childhood living a chain link fence away from a major freeway in Sacramento. When we first moved there the noise from the freeway was constant and unavoidable. However, after a few weeks we were barely aware of it anymore and months later only something unusual happening on the freeway even got our attention.

Similarly, smelling an odor, developer for instance, when first encountered is very strong. But stay near it and a few minutes later you cannot smell it anymore.

This is sensory overload. The brain tunes it out until something changes. The same thing can and does happen when issues are beat into the ground. Eventually people quit listening.

The problem I have with most environmental groups and those who scream about how man is an evil polluter, is that having failed to properly motivate change in people, they then resort to judicial or legislative lobbying to force change. So you have the few dictating to the many creating an elitist society.

As I said, while the technique used to create the images is interesting, the idea is neither original or creative. These kinds of images (images of waste) have been pushed down societies throat for 30+ years at least. Attempting to motivate people through guilt only causes negative reactions and no lasting results.

Kent

[chris jordan]

Julian, I wonder if you maybe missed the point of the Denali piece because you don't know some of the background about what Denali means in American culture. Denali is a 21,000-foot mountain in Alaska, considered by the Alaskan native culture to be the sacred place where the Great Spirit lives. It is the highest mountain in our hemisphere, and it occupies a sacred place in contemporary American culture, maybe in a tie for first place with the Grand Canyon as our most wild and beautiful primal natural wonder. The mountain’s native name was Denali for a few thousand years, but a few decades ago some white guys renamed it "Mt. McKinley" after one of our Presidents. Mt. McKinley National Park in which it resides has recently been named back to Denali National Park.

At the other end of the continuum of sacredness, the GMC "Denali" is a giant sport utility vehicle made by General Motors Corporation in Detroit. It is one of the largest and most ostentatious luxury SUV's made. It is 17 feet long and weighs almost 6000 pounds. It is so high off the ground that it has a step built in between the driver’s door and the ground so that normally-sized people can reach the door. Despite its enormous size and weight, dangerous handling characteristics, and low gas mileage, hundreds of thousands of Americans drive it as their primary “car.”

For me there is an interesting juxtaposition between this example of crass and thoughtless consumerism, and the sacred natural place for which it is named. For someone like me who is interested in provoking reflection on the issue of consumerism and what is sacred in our culture anymore, it is hard to think of two things that go together better.

So I thought that putting images of the GMC Denali logo up against an image of Mt. McKinley would be an interesting and provocative thing to do. Ansel's famous image of Denali (which is sacred in itself in the world of photography) seemed the appropriate image because it shows Denali in the beautiful and sacred light for which the mountain is known.

I also find it ironic that the words Denali and Denial are so close together linguistically—all the same letters, just moved around a bit. The concept of denial is part of our national dialog right now in connection with many aspects of our consumer culture, especially in the luxury SUV market. So I changed some of the "Denali" logos in the picture to "Denial" as a visual pun designed to raise the issue of denial in an ironic way. My hope is that it might prompt a self-reflective viewer to stop and wonder into the things we are in denial about. The whole SUV movement, for example; what are we doing driving such huge wasteful cars, and why are they getting bigger and bigger despite everything we know about the consumption of oil? How can we drive GMC Denalis and expect sacred places like Denali National Park to survive? And so on.

It also turns out that Mt. McKinley National Park is experiencing some of the most environmentally damaging effects of global warming, which has been in the news here lately thanks to a photographer named Subhankar Banerjee. The tundra in the arctic, which has been frozen solid for more than 3000 years, is melting, and the resulting effects on that ecosystem are disastrous in lots of different ways that are having effects that reach far out into the rest of the world (a huge percentage of all of the world’s birds go there to nest, for example). So Mt. McKinley also serves as a direct cultural symbol of the global warming issue in the US, as does the GMC Denali for those who are willing to consider it.

On top of all of that, there is a specific number of Denali logos shown in this piece, in keeping with my new statistical theme. I don't expect everyone to get all of that looking at the piece, but anyway there's the cultural background for it.

[Kirk Keyes]

Kirk, Kraftwerk doesn't have enough edge.

I don't know - people seem to get on edge when I play Kraftwerk records...

I haven't listened to much Philip Glass other than a few albums from around the 1000 Airplanes era, so I'm not an expert on him (unlike I am with Kraftwerk).

But I see Glass as more art-school, obsessive, repetitious, finely tuned music, while I find Kraftwerk more popular, obsessive, repetitions, finely tuned music.

I do see Chris' work here being something that will immediately be enjoyed by the public - they are like giant puzzles.

But the associations being made are not all that obvious; Denali - the mountain, Denali - the truck, Denail - the public's behaviour. If Chris had not told us that 24,000 trucks were being sold in 6 weeks, we would have no way to make the association between the mountain, the truck, and the word. Mt. McKinley (isn't this what most of the public calls this mountain still?) made out of thousands of little words, all of them "Denial". Is it a statement on Native American affairs or some other obscure connection? Perhaps Alaska and our use of oil? I don't know and I can't figure it out fomr the image alone.

I think I would have rather seen 24,000 little GMC trucks covering the landscape instead of the word "Denial". At least then I might have wondered why there are so many trucks there? Maybe I'd make the association that all those trucks take up space and consume resources and are helping to blot out some of our remaining pristine natural spaces. Simply putting the word "Denial" in the graphic is a bit heavy-handed and doesn't really make me think about it at all. It preaches to the viewer, instead of making them think.

So maybe you're right, Kirk, Philip Glass is a better association - it's more like a lot of stuff I've seen from art schools...

Chris, I think I would have liked to see a landscape that you took for this graphic, instead of usurping Ansels photo for this concept. I think the Franklin and the office paper images work much better.

[Kirk Keyes]

I don't expect everyone to get all of that looking at the piece, but anyway there's the cultural background for it.

Chris - looks like you were doing a lot of typing while I was doing some typing.

I think your long explaination of the piece to Julian exactly reinforces why it is not a very strong concept. That was a lot of 'splaining to do...

[Kirk Keyes]

How can we drive GMC Denalis and expect sacred places like Denali National Park to survive?

Don't worrry about that - no one ever takes those things off-road, let alone all the way to Alaska!

(Sorry for the cheap quip.)

[Brian Vuillemenot]

I thought that Chris's "Denali Denial" was the best piece in the series. To me, the meaning was quite clear, and it required no explanation. I also liked the verbal pun, and have often pondered how some of the most destructive vehicles are named after pristine places, such as the "Durango", "Santa Fe", and "Yukon". Is this to ease one's guilt over the purchase of such a gas guzzling behemouth, only used to commute 30 miles each way on the freeway to work every day? Sure, art with an anti-consumer message may not be new or the only way to solve our environmental mess, but this series really makes you think. I wonder how many people would think twice about buying a Denali after viewing the work.

[Kirk Gittings]

I thought that Chris's "Denali Denial" was the best piece in the series. To me, the meaning was quite clear, and it required no explanation.

I agree.