Yes, but, is it photography??

Greg,

When you say, 'they' want to control the common man, who do you mean? I doubt it is the scientists who are by and large ignored by society, and who don't have a power stake in any political or economic control. Do you think they are all in on some big conspiracy to misinform us? Why would 'they' want us to believe something that data didn't support? Was Jonas Salk lying when he said he found a vaccine for polio? Again, the only voices I hear within the scientific community in denial are these pseudo-scientist "experts" quoted in media articles who end up being oil and car industry stooges, who clearly do have an economic and political interest in their ideological viewpoint.

The only control I see is our current government encouraging us to consume as much oil as we can, waging a destructive foreign policy to keep that addiction going, touting mirage solutions like hydrogen cars (which under Carter already, were just 20 years away, if you remember), not investing in more plausible, efficient technologies and research.

As far as the data you quote, I am not a scientist, but many of the examples you offer are specious. Our biomass and ensuing temperature are not tipping the earth's atmosphere. Our consumption of resources is. That biomass has always existed; it used to be called biodiversity before we started replacing other species with our own fat arses. All I can tell you is every time I put one of these examples to my scientist friends, I patiently receive an explanation of why it's wrong.

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Originally Posted by claudiocambon

Greg,

When you say, 'they' want to control the common man, who do you mean? I doubt it is the scientists who are by and large ignored by society, and who don't have a power stake in any political or economic control. Do you think they are all in on some big conspiracy to misinform us? Why would 'they' want us to believe something that data didn't support? Was Jonas Salk lying when he said he found a vaccine for polio? Again, the only voices I hear within the scientific community in denial are these pseudo-scientist "experts" quoted in media articles who end up being oil and car industry stooges, who clearly do have an economic and political interest in their ideological viewpoint.

The only control I see is our current government encouraging us to consume as much oil as we can, waging a destructive foreign policy to keep that addiction going, touting mirage solutions like hydrogen cars (which under Carter already, were just 20 years away, if you remember), not investing in more plausible, efficient technologies and research.

As far as the data you quote, I am not a scientist, but many of the examples you offer are specious. Our biomass and ensuing temperature are not tipping the earth's atmosphere. Our consumption of resources is. That biomass has always existed; it used to be called biodiversity before we started replacing other species with our own fat arses. All I can tell you is every time I put one of these examples to my scientist friends, I patiently receive an explanation of why it's wrong.

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"They" is those that are in control of the government....it doesn't matter which political party they come from either. The scientists are just willing dupes that spout the "party line" in order to get their think tank funding.

Don't get me started on Carter. I was stationed in Chaleston, SC when the "Oil Crisis" was at it's highest. Tankers as far as the eye can see were trying to get into port only to be told that there was no room to drop their loads. The whole thing was a fabrication. As far as cheaper alternatives, if there is one, you'd be using it.

As for oil being renewable, there is a theory in the geophisics world that states the oil is constantly being manufactured by the internal actions of the earth itself. It is not a result of decaying animals. There are numerous "played out" wells in operation today. If this knowledge ever got "accepted" what would you think the price of oil will be then?

For a last little brain teaser to help in understanding of what "global" means: assume the earth circumfrence is 25,000 miles (40,000 km). There is a steel band wrapped tight on the circumfrence. Now add just 10 feet (3 m) to that steel band and move that band equidistant off the earth. Will you: A) Be able to walk under the band B) crawl under the band on your hands and knees C) barely slide a piece of paper under it? Have fun. :)

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Originally Posted by Greg Lockrey

"They" is those that are in control of the government....it doesn't matter which political party they come from either. The scientists are just willing dupes that spout the "party line" in order to get their think tank funding.

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And there are truck loads of money to made by scientists and environmental groups. See, no crisis=no funding. My brother is an astro-physicist working in Arizona on a government (taxpayer) funded project. The 'holy grail' of science today is not discovery, it's getting funding. Either from the taxpayer or some private source. So yes, 'voodoo' science does take place and more than many would believe. If a scientist does tow the popular line, he/she is not going to get funding for their research. This is fact not fiction.

By the way, I am not anti-science just anti 'voodoo' science and far too much that is merely theory is being stated as fact. That's not science, it's speculation.

Now this gravity thing. That's something I can get my head around.

As to the photos in question, I find them very well executed but trite, cliche' and condescending.


Kent

One thing I like about these photographs is the combination of near to far and of sequence. Both of these are time honored in photography; both are done in a different way. This approach also plays with the concept of pixel.

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Originally Posted by Greg Lockrey

For a last little brain teaser to help in understanding of what "global" means: assume the earth circumfrence is 25,000 miles (40,000 km). There is a steel band wrapped tight on the circumfrence. Now add just 10 feet (3 m) to that steel band and move that band equidistant off the earth. Will you: A) Be able to walk under the band B) crawl under the band on your hands and knees C) barely slide a piece of paper under it? Have fun. :)

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Answer is "B".

2*pi*r = circumference. Solve for "r", and the all you really need is the difference in the two circumferences to do the calculation. So:
3 meters/(2*pi)= 0.477 meters => 1.56 ft

So really more of an army crawl than hands and knees...

I personally suspect long term changes in solar flux (output) to be the driving force for planetary temperature. Stars are constantly changing in output, and it takes so little for it to change in the course of a a few hundred or thousand years to make a potentially big change in the temps here. And we only really have about 20 years of high resolution data (from satellites) and about 600 years of low resolution data (from sunspot counts) at this point that I think this theory cannot be discounted.

And I'm not a geotech scientist, just a chemist. But I took my thermodynamics classes in college.

As for Chris' art, they are not photographs, they are photoillustrations.

Chris - I'm curious as to how one makes images like this - you must start with the larger image that has been digitized so it's made of pixels. Then you must assign new images to each pixel based on the color content of the original pixel. Is there some software what does this in a semiautomated fashion or is a pretty hands on process?

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Originally Posted by Kirk Keyes

As for Chris' art, they are not photographs, they are photoillustrations.

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Define photograph. :p

Hi guys, I was wondering if someone would ask how I make these. Each one is a bit different; a couple of them were made with the help of photomosaic software (such as the Denali piece). For that one I took about fifteen photographs of the logos on the sides of variously colored GMC Denali cars, and processed them in Photoshop into a stepped series of small identically-sized images from black to white. Then I used the photomosaic software to create the final image of the Ansel Adams photo. The original Denali logos are all photographs, and the Ansel Adams image I used as the source image was a photograph, and the final print is a Type C photographic print. But whether the whole thing adds up to a photograph is another question (and I'm not sure if the answer really matters either).

I used a similar process for the aluminum cans piece. First I photographed about 40 aluminum cans in my studio, each from several different angles, and made 160 identically-sized small digital images that were the source images for the mosaic. The mosaic came out pretty rough looking even after many tries, so it took some cleaning up afterwards by adding cans manually. I then laid the Seurat painting image as a layer over the top and faded it in various different ways. I think it would be really cool to construct this image with actual cans some day. It would be 70x100 feet in size.

The others are made differently. For the prison uniforms, valve caps and office paper and some others I'm working on right now, I collect a bunch of that item in my studio and photograph it over and over. For Office Paper, I bought 8 reams of paper and stacked them on my studio table and photographed them with a digital SLR. Then I unstacked them and restacked them, and photographed them again. I did this about a hundred times, and then processed each image individually so I had 100 different photographs of paper that were all identically cropped and scaled.

Then I manually assembled all of the small images into the huge image, and cleaned up all the edges. It is pretty painstaking manual work; once I did all the photographic part, the digital assembly took something like 30,000 mouse clicks. Like the Denali piece, the Office Paper, Valve Caps, and Prison Uniforms all started with photographs that I took, and are printed as photographic prints, but I'm not at all sure that the final product can be called a photograph.

For the Ben Franklin piece I scanned a hundred-dollar bill (which is probably a crime but hopefully the Feds will get that it's for a non-criminal reason...), and compiled it into the huge prints pretty quickly. Then I made a very high-resolution scan of only Ben Franklin's portrait on a brand new hundred-dollar bill, and spent about a day cleaning up all the small errors that the engraver made (which are invisible on the bill because Ben's face is so small). Then I laid the portrait of Ben over the top of the three panels and faded it various ways until I got the fractal effect I wanted.

That one started with a scan and ended up as an inkjet print, so although it looks like a photograph, there isn't anything photographic about that particular piece. Same thing with the Suicide Mandala-- I made about 40 little watercolor paintings of the word "Life," and scanned them, and then spent about a week assembling them manually into the mandala shape, which I designed as I went. The only part of that piece that I could automate at all was filling in the black background, which I could do in sections of 10x10 tiles instead of one by one, but otherwise it was a purely manual process from beginning to end. I even got to use paints, which was fun; for a moment there I felt like a real artist!

Every one of these takes a lot of math in advance, to determine how many of that particular thing I can fit on a print, and how big each item needs to be to acheive the visual effect I am looking for. I make a bunch of test prints of valve caps, for example, at different sizes, until one looks right; then I calculate how big the final print has to be to portray the number I have in mind.

The resulting prints are as sharp and finely detailed as small prints made from 8x10 photographic originals, and yet the prints are enormous. It's a cool effect-- you can walk right up and put your nose on the 10-foot-wide print, and the closer you get, the more you see, like a contact print almost. For me it's an interesting metaphor for our consumerism-- it looks like one thing from a distance, and then when you start to zoom in (so to speak) it looks like something different. There is no place you can stand and see it all; you can stand back and see the whole picture, or you can walk up close and see the details, but you can never see both at once. Of course this effect is only visible when you see the prints in person. The little JPEG's look like they are giving away the essence of the pieces, but all they really do is show the underlying idea. The full-sized prints are quite shocking to see in person. I made the first one yesterday (Ben Franklin, for a show in Texas) and was quite amazed at how huge it looked sitting on my studio table.

Okay that's probably far more information than anyone wanted so I'll sign off...

~cj

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As for Chris' art, they are not photographs, they are photoillustrations.

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They are photographically based art, much like collage, as in Ulesmann's work, but with the obsessive qualities of a Philip Glass composition.

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Originally Posted by chris jordan

I used a similar process for the aluminum cans piece. First I photographed about 40 aluminum cans in my studio, each from several different angles, and made 160 identically-sized small digital images that were the source images for the mosaic. The mosaic came out pretty rough looking even after many tries, so it took some cleaning up afterwards by adding cans manually. I then laid the Seurat painting image as a layer over the top and faded it in various different ways. I think it would be really cool to construct this image with actual cans some day. It would be 70x100 feet in size.

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So this wasn't 100's of thousands of cans? 40 cans? So this is a contrived scene? Rather misrepresentative isn't it?

When I was in the USAF I remember building beer can mountains against the squadron barracks wall. But it took a couple of hundred people at a squadron party to accomplish. Wasn't near 70x100 either.

I do tend to agree with the solar output theory though as at least partially responsible. Even a very slight increase in output could very easily significantly increase surface temperatures of land and water on the earth.

Kent

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Originally Posted by kmgibbs

So this wasn't 100's of thousands of cans? 40 cans? So this is a contrived scene? Rather misrepresentative isn't it?.

Kent

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that's the nature of photography - it's a wickedly deceptive medium. It would be pretty boring if it wasn't

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Originally Posted by kmgibbs

So this wasn't 100's of thousands of cans? 40 cans? So this is a contrived scene? Rather misrepresentative isn't it?
Kent

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Surely you say this in jest? As I said before, I find there are serious conceptual problems with Chris' work but this aspect of it--reproducing the cans (or whatever) from a small set or originals seems to be right at the very essence of the work and one of its attractions.

It makes perfect sense to me and adds a little intellectual interest to the work that it was created with something akin to the production process--producing mass quanties of an item with a streamlined and directed process. In fact, hearing some of the details of the process as Chris describes them makes this aspect even more interesting as what he describes sounds to my ears like a real production process (not as simple as it might at first appear) rather than just some dude using photo-mosaic software.

The conceptual problems still remain:

1) The work (not the artist) seems unaware of the fact that it is a huge, wasteful print.

2) The connection between the micro image and the overall image (The Denali logo and the Ansel Photo; the cans and the painting, the dollar bills and Ben Franklin's portrait, the other objects which become geometric patterns of millions of themselves) do not seem to add much value to the overall work.

--Darin

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Originally Posted by Kirk Gittings

but with the obsessive qualities of a Philip Glass
composition.

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I guess I would have said Kraftwerk instead of Philip Glass...

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Originally Posted by Kirk Keyes

Answer is "B".

2*pi*r = circumference. Solve for "r", and the all you really need is the difference in the two circumferences to do the calculation. So:
3 meters/(2*pi)= 0.477 meters => 1.56 ft

So really more of an army crawl than hands and knees...

I personally suspect long term changes in solar flux (output) to be the driving force for planetary temperature. Stars are constantly changing in output, and it takes so little for it to change in the course of a a few hundred or thousand years to make a potentially big change in the temps here. And we only really have about 20 years of high resolution data (from satellites) and about 600 years of low resolution data (from sunspot counts) at this point that I think this theory cannot be discounted.

And I'm not a geotech scientist, just a chemist. But I took my thermodynamics classes in college.

As for Chris' art, they are not photographs, they are photoillustrations.

Chris - I'm curious as to how one makes images like this - you must start with the larger image that has been digitized so it's made of pixels. Then you must assign new images to each pixel based on the color content of the original pixel. Is there some software what does this in a semiautomated fashion or is a pretty hands on process?

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Thank you Kirk. I wonder how many"felt" that the answer was "C"? My final for Chemical Thermodynamics (My freshman year 3rd Quarter) was to answer this question: Accererate a 10 gram solid Gold sphere to 1000 m/sec. It travels 2000 meters during a 50 C atmosphere at STP. It hits a block of ice. What is the temperature after the 10th time constant? Now I do not recollect some of the other controlling factors but that is the jest of it.:) I'm with you on the sun also.

Kirk,

Kraftwerk doesn't have enough edge.

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Originally Posted by Kirk Gittings

They are photographically based art, much like collage, as in Ulesmann's work, but with the obsessive qualities of a Philip Glass composition.

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Thanks for bringing this back on topic, and at the same time stating so eloquently how I feel about these pictures. :)

Slightly off topic - did anyone else notice that some of the Denali logos are spelled "Denial"?

Even more off topic: Check out Milanković cycles. They're well described and documented, and a part of all climatological models. Sorry - solar output variations are not a valid excuse for the current warming trend.

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Originally Posted by kmgibbs

And there are truck loads of money to made by scientists and environmental groups. See, no crisis=no funding. My brother is an astro-physicist working in Arizona on a government (taxpayer) funded project. The 'holy grail' of science today is not discovery, it's getting funding. Either from the taxpayer or some private source. So yes, 'voodoo' science does take place and more than many would believe. If a scientist does tow the popular line, he/she is not going to get funding for their research. This is fact not fiction.

By the way, I am not anti-science just anti 'voodoo' science and far too much that is merely theory is being stated as fact. That's not science, it's speculation.

Now this gravity thing. That's something I can get my head around.

As to the photos in question, I find them very well executed but trite, cliche' and condescending.


Kent

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Thank you for giving us a real life example Kent.

The "Is it Photography" question seems moot. It's like asking if Rauchenberg's combines are paintings or sculptures. Maybe the better question is how well the work fits our understanding of Art.

To do this, I'll default to the only good defenition I know which is the Utilitartian rule.
(Anything created by people with no utility is art).

Doe this Art have more Utility than Esthetic? Is it more about the message? Are the political messages delivered from the work a utility of the work? If we remove the messages from the work, does the work hold up?

Pete

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?

I suspect the average viewer will get stuck on the "cool" and never mentally progress to the "why".

Oren, that's a toughy. One thing I try hard to do with my work is keep my feet on the ground. I run my pieces past my friends who have no interest in conceptual art, and listen carefully to their feedback, and I try to stay away from hoity-toity academic art theories. My hope with my new series is to keep going with an aspect of my previous work, which was that it was able to reach a wide public audience that weren't necessarily art afficionados. My Intolerable Beauty series appeared in all kinds of non art-related venues (stuff like yoga magazines, fashion magazines, blogs about random cool stuff, etc.) because its message was simple and clear. Unfortunately the new series will be difficult to reproduce in magazines and on websites, so the work won't reach as wide an audience that way. But my hope is that it will make it into museums and the original pieces will be seen by viewers there. The larger art museums have a couple of million people pass through in a few month period, and the majority of those people are not high-end art afficionados; they are tourists, school kids, and other members of the public who just go to art shows (just look at who is in the lobby of MoMA on a random day and you'll see what I mean). So hopefully if my new work gets into some museums that way, the full-size prints will reach a wide audience, and pass along the message that the little JPEG's can't do anyway. That's all just my hope though; what ends up happening will probably be something very different, because it always it...

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.

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

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Originally Posted by chris jordan

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Oren Grad

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?

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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

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.

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Originally Posted by Kirk Gittings

Kirk, Kraftwerk doesn't have enough edge.

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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.

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Originally Posted by chris jordan

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

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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...

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Originally Posted by chris jordan

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

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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.)

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.

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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.

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I agree.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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Hold on...you feel that the idea of Mt. McKinley as a sacred place for Alaskan Indians is represented clearly in the work? That the choice of the Ansel photo is clearly because it is "sacred" to photographers? (I've always found it to be one of his weaker works, myself...)?

From what I see, the vehicle was chosen because it is a huge, wasteful thing (an obviosu choice), the wordplay was chosen because it sort of jumps out at you when pondering environmental themes (an obviosu choice), and the Ansel photo was chosen because it was a picture of a mountain by the same name and was a picture that represented the opposite of what the Denali vehicle stands for, pure, un-ruined nature (another obvious choice). There's nothing about Indians in this work of any other of Chris' that I know of that would justify such a claim. There's nothing that I know of that would justify any claim for this photo to be sacred to photographers--the Ansel candidate in that regard is Moonrise, or go for Weston's Pepper No. 30.

So there are some very weak links here, maybe non-existent ones.

But don't get me wrong--the work (and new direction by Chris) has interesting potential--I wouldn't spend my time here otherwise!

By the way, now that I see the explanation for the Mt. McKinley photo I'm even more bewildered about the Sunday afternoon painting...what was the thinking behind the choice of that work--the only thing that strikes me is the so-called pointillism technique used for the work...unless there are French Indians that I am unaware of... :)

Hi guys, I must say that putting my work up against Picasso's "Guernica" is a pretty tall order. I think of Guernica as being one of the most emotionally powerful pieces in the history of visual art. If any of my work ever has one hundredth of the effect that Guernica has had, then I will consider myself a successful artist.

With that said, I did make my "Valve Caps" piece very close to the size of Guernica (the same width but not as tall), and using a similar tonal scale based on shades of charcoal and gray. It is intended as a quiet and obscure reference that few people will probably ever get. The estimated number of people who died in the bombing of Guernica is between 250 and 1600, far less than the number of Americans who die in single-vehicle SUV rollovers every year in the US. Is any of that portrayed directly in my Valve Caps piece? No. Is it something that my Valve Caps piece might cause a reflective person to wonder about? Maybe if I'm lucky.

The Seurat piece is a play on pointillism and the concept of pixels (where the "points" are brought up to date as being aluminum cans), as well as referencing a painting about people taking their leisure back when taking your leisure didn't involve quite as much consumption as it does now. If you think about people taking their leisure in a park today, it involves parking lots filled with SUV's, people with cameras, iPods, coolers filled with beers and pop, etc. So I was interested to reference a painting from a time when people were portrayed taking their leisure without so much "stuff." Is it deep and profound and moving? I don't now; for me it is cool and ironic and kind of funny.

Some people will get all this stuff by looking at the piece and reflecting on it; others might get it from reading commentary by a curator or critic; others might get it in some other way (like having it spoon-fed by me), and plenty of others will never get it at all. Self-reflection is not something that can be forced; that part of the process is the sole choice of the viewer. All I can do is put my own best effort out there, and then it's up to the viewer.

I will say that I am delighted by all this controversy. It is hard to hold it, especially the mean comments, which hurt (just put yourself in my shoes for a sec), but it is also great to receive so much honest and un-mediated feedback. My work is intended to provoke, and clearly that is happening, so in a strange and uncomfortable way this is all very affirming.

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Originally Posted by chris jordan

The estimated number of people who died in the bombing of Guernica is between 250 and 1600,

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there has been some new research published this week where someone has actually gone round the registers of deaths and thenumber is between 100 and 125. I'll dig out the reference...

Kirk, the reason I did the big 'splanation for Julian is that he's a Brit living in Spain, so he might not know a few of the things we Americans know about the meaning of the word "Denali." Hence I can understand why he missed the point of that piece. But maybe he still thinks the whole project needs a theoretical rethink despite my 'splanation...

Chris, the fact of your making this post suggests that you have some anxieties about your new work. This is probably true for us all but must be especially acute when your very living depends on your making good choices for building on your previous success. My comments are offered in the spirit of helping you sort through your conflicted feelings and thinking. My own take is that four of your new works, Prision Uniforms, Office Paper, Shipping Containers, and Tire Caps are worthy successors to your previous work. I think that Prision Uniforms is an absolutely stunning work both in its micro and macro effect! However, it lacks the conceptual link to your previous mass-consumption theme, and this may be a serious shortcoming in the contemporary art-photography world where consistent concerns play an important role in defining an artist's signature style. It is my favorite of all the new images, but it seems like it belongs to another portfolio yet to be fleshed out. The other three works are consistent with your previous concerns. All four images have a mosaic, minimalist quality that is also consistent with your previous style. With the added dimension of statistical meaningfulness in the agregation of basic units, I believe that these new images represent an appropriate growth in the depth of your artistic vision.

I'm afraid that I cannot say the same for the other images. Again, these are just my impressions, and they will be helpful only to the extent that they resonate with your existing concerns. To me, the photomosaics are a bit campy and, rather than being difficult to read, they are a bit too obvious. They overburden the viewer with the message. The subtle seductiveness is gone with these images where it is still present with the four I first identified. Another thought that strikes me is that the Denali and Seurat images seem calculated to capitalize on the current vogue of referencing historical art, e.g., Wall and Sherman. This may not have been your intention but others may also see it that way as well. I'm sure that it must be difficult to hear all these criticisms before the ink (not to mention your sweat) is hardly even dry, but I hope some of it will help you clarify your thoughts.

By the way, I think that one can get a pretty good idea of how they will look in person from the way you presented the successive image magnifications on your website.

All the best, Martin

One other thing - I would love to hear the story of your photographing those prision uniforms. :-)

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Originally Posted by chris jordan

. But maybe he still thinks the whole project needs a theoretical rethink despite my 'splanation...

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Got back too late last night to answer you Chris, I'll try now over the first coffee of the day! I hope you feel honoured because I think I'm writing and thinking about this more than I did in ALL of my posts last year!

I hope also you realise I'm not attacking you, but giving you a serious and considered response to a serious body of work you've put together. You are a serious, talented, dedicated artist who deserves having your work taken seriously, hence the length of my posts. I'm taking this series very seriously!

You are also trying to make a political point. You are trying to question something you see as a 'bad thing'. So I think it is fair to question how you are doing this. I also think, that, as you know me, I can dig a little deeper without causing undue offence. I'd much rather do this over a glass of something, as I think the internet is a bad vehicle for this kind of discussion. I'm quite convinced that this series is pivotal for you, that next series will benefit enormously from what you have undergone with this work. But by placing yourself in this series in a sector of the conceptual art camp, you are inviting people to look at and critique your theory here. So in that vein...

I used to use the guernica a lot when I was teaching as it is an example of a kind of art that is about a particular event, from a particular political standpoint, but the method it uses to get it's point across is totally different from that of the kind of conceptual art that you are now producing. As an opposite it is useful to make a comparison. I also know how much that piece moves you. I admit I have a problem with some types of conceptual art as I'm an old fashioned modernist in many ways.

My disquiet boils down to two main areas, 1. the role of the viewer and 2. the ability of the artwork to stand on it's own without reliance on text.

When someone sees your pics for the first time, how can they engage with it? I imagine they will think about the craftsmanship, the beauty or otherwise, awed at the scale, but how can they engage with, or create some sort of personal meaning, from the work itself? When you explain your work you have very specific references and meanings in mind. To understand these meanings I need a text. I need you to explain the significance of Mt McK (please don't tell me you are trying to do work only for a US audience!), I need you to tell me about US car makes, I need you to explain the realtionship between the mosaics. Once I have that I say 'Oh, now I get it' I stay a moment longer to see if I can make anything else out of it, decide I can't, and I move on. The work doesn't stand on its own. No matter how educated in aesthetics I am, now matter how much art I view, or how much effort or time I put into looking at the work, I can't get anything more out of it.

The same with the tyre caps. You need to explain to me their significance, I need a text. Without the text all I can get is a superficial response to their beauty.

My role as viewer is to read the text and evaluate whether you are succesful in transfering the text to the image. I am limited in my response and forced into a subservient role to the artist. The artist is Wise Leader and I agree and feel suitably chastened. Now the artist is treating the viewer in exactly the same way as those who you are criticisng. The artist instead of challenging the modus operandi of what it is trying to challenge, is using it's tactic in the artwork.

This is a closed loop. The viewer is inside a totalitarian system which it can't escape. Ok, I'm stretching this a bit, but I'm sure you get the point!

Now compare this with the Guernica (hah!). I don't need to know the title, I don't need to know the event. I am free to make my own meanings. All the clues to understanding are in the image. I can agree, or not with the artist. But I am being treated as an equal. I'm not being lectured, the artist is not Wise Leader, I'm being invited to go on a journey with the artist.

I once gave the guernica to a bunch of 11 year olds to describe as they saw fit. They came up with the most amazing list of meanings and stories. If I gave them your pics (or perhaps it is fairer to say, 'if I gave them works from this kind of conceptual theoretical base') would they be able to do the same?

I know my criticisms are more to do with some types of conceptual art in general rather than your pics in particular, but when you take on the responsability for using art as a vehicle for politics, you are doing something very serious and your methods and how you are treating the viewer deserve serious scrutiny. I also realise that I am also bringing my own aesthetic and political agenda to this discussion, but hey, I'm a viewer too.

Anyway, enough from me on this. I've beat you over the head way too much. But thanks for posting the pics. I haven't thought about this stuff in a looooong time, so it was nice to revisit.

And I guess this is the kind of discussion you aere hoping to achieve with the work anyway!

Hi Julian, yep, you're right: the titles of my new pieces, and the couple of sentences of accompanying explanation (as you see them on my website), are integral to the works, and will be included when the pieces are exhibited. I can't figure out any way around that. It doesn't bother me too much though, because many works of art require some degree of prior knowledge on the part of the viewer. I suppose every artist hopes their work will be universally accessible so that 11-year-old children will fully "get" it, but in this case I am willing to let that go in favor of trying to address some complex cultural issues.

But you are right-- if someone in Africa sees my Denali piece, they might have no idea what the word means, so that piece does have the limitation of requiring some prior knowledge of American culture on the part of the viewer.

Now in terms of this series being too didactic, hmmmmmmm. Some people are seeing it that way ("typical liberal propaganda," etc.), and others are seeing that all I'm doing is pointing out the quantities, which are factual only, and leaving the rest up to the viewer. The Denali and Hummer pieces contain some judgments, of course, and I suppose there are also implied judgments in my choice of subject matter that could be called didactic. For example, I'm not doing a piece on the amount of dollars contributed to charities by republicans millionaires (maybe I should-- I wonder what size it would be?). But other than that, I don't see that I'm wagging my finger in the Office Paper image, for example, or the Prison Uniforms one. Hopefully it's up to the viewer to form their own judgments about the size of our prison population, or the number of aluminum cans we use, and so on.

It's a difficult line to walk, though, and one that I think about a lot. On one hand I don't want to finger-wag (and I'm sure not in a position to do so anyway), but on the other hand I don't want to be a detached artist who stands back and observes the world from a distance with no apparent connection or point of view. That is one way that I part ways with Gursky; I do feel a need to advocate a position at least somewhat. Our culture is engaging in some insane unconscious behaviours and I'm not comfortable just observing them with detached irony; I want to do something about it. The challenge is to say what I have to say in a respectful and self-reflective way, honoring the complexity of these issues and giving my fellow man the benefit of the doubt. I try to build those concepts into my pieces, but of course it won't work for everyone.

In any event, thanks for your long and thoughtful reply. Too bad we can't sit in the plaza outside the Reina Sophia and share a pitcher of sangria over this subject, while "Guernica" filters down from its hallowed place next door. This subject deserves a good long Madrid afternoon's discussion.

Cheers,

~cj

talking of spain... here are some interesting photomontages by spain's no 1 joan foncuberta, click through to le last six. a nice reference.

http://www.lensculture.com/fontcuberta.html#

all the best chris

adrian

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Originally Posted by adrian tyler

talking of spain... here are some interesting photomontages by spain's no 1 joan foncuberta, click through to le last six. a nice reference.

http://www.cefvigo.com/imaxes/vilari%F1o_02.jpg

all the best chris

adrian

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hmmm - Fontcuberta:

http://www.lensculture.com/fontcuber...cuberta_33.jpg

or lego:

http://www.cefvigo.com/imaxes/vilari%F1o_02.jpg

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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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 ...

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Sure! How about all the hamburgers (let's say the King burgers!) eaten in one day in the US making a fractal mosaic of a crying African undernourished child?
Very clever and with tremendous visual impact! In this case not even the comment is necessary, everyone can imagine how many hamburgers are daily eaten by our obese kids... Heavens!!

I just posted a new one on my website, depicting 1.14 million paper supermarket bags (the quantity used in the US every hour). This is not a mosaic like a couple of the previous ones; this one I assembled manually in Photoshop from hundreds of photos I made in my studio of a small quantity of supermarket bags.

www.chrisjordan.com

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Originally Posted by chris jordan

I just posted a new one on my website, depicting 1.14 million paper supermarket bags (the quantity used in the US every hour). This is not a mosaic like a couple of the previous ones; this one I assembled manually in Photoshop from hundreds of photos I made in my studio of a small quantity of supermarket bags.

www.chrisjordan.com

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Chris,

I think you've done it, found a way past the earlier problems. Eerily beautiful work and the bag statistic aspect just adds to its appeal. Congratulations! More of this!

This is the first work of yours that I would really like to own--I wish I was a stock trader/lawyer/doctor and could afford it...

Very exciting to see this new work, which I see as a breakthrough. Very cool.

--Darin

Chris,

This new piece is your best. It removes all of my previous reservations. The subtle seductiveness is back, the focus is returned to the art with message in its proper proportion, the layers of meaning and reference are all there without being too obvious. Give your mosaic software to charity and sip some more of what got you to this one.

Martin

Chris, you might like to check this out for some more numbers!

I've followed this forum for a while and have always been impressed by the high level of content and intelligence of ideas. I've followed this thread with great interest (and to near exhaustion), and am inspired to comment. First- kudos to you, Chris, for opening a discussion like this and leaving yourself at the mercy of sometimes painful criticism. It must be hard enough to endure the judgements of professional critics; to invite the sometims harsh comments of peers (and wannabe peers) takes guts. I was looking at the new work on your website before seeing this thread and my initial impression was of a grand "work in progress". With the super market bag image, things seem to have gone to a new original level. The message is there, but there is also a serene beauty to this work that trancends the message. I think this work represents a welcome frontier where we are able to work as artists and imagemakers who use photography as a tool to reach a greater end. If nobody can figure out what to call it, all the better...

Richard Edic

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Originally Posted by QT Luong

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.

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That's been a problem with many different types of photography for some time. For instance, what is gleaned from Adams' Trailer Camp Children without accompanying text? By just looking at the photograph, a person may deduce that they are from a poor family, but that's about it. Both the text and the image must exist for the full impact.

Around 1995, there was a shooting in Miami, of an old man by the police. The police were serving a warrant, and broke the door down on the apartment. The old man had been watching TV, and held a remote in his hand. The police opened fire, thinking he held a gun. The photograph in the newspaper showed his weeping granddaughter next to a bullet-ridden wall. The image was extremely visually arresting, but it still took the accompanying text to bring home the full impact.