One Number Too Many: A Review of Chris Jordan’s “Running the Numbers”

With his exhibit, “Running the Numbers,” Chris Jordan puts into pictures the staggering amount of material consumed by Americans on a regular basis. His technique of repetition, patterning, and photoshopping blends monumental numbers of everyday objects together while at the same time, keeping them separate—something Jordan calls the “one versus many” effect. While a simple written statistic or picture of wasted objects would generally be ignored, Jordan uses a combination of both in the hopes that his pieces will inspire a renewed awareness of overall social consumption to the individual viewer. This unique approach gives them a special significance in providing the viewer with an overall “in-your-face” illustrated statistic of their own wastefulness. However, looking more closely at Jordan’s works reveals a better perspective on the how effective his aesthetic approach and the portrayal of his social criticism really are.

Certainly, Jordan’s exhibit contained some noteworthy portions in regards to artistic ingenuity. Cans Seurat, for example, gives a creative modern twist to the famous French impressionist painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, by Georges Seurat. This well-known and highly regarded painting of a lakeside picnic is given a whole new meaning as one realizes its components are made up of not tiny paint dots, but of 106,000 tiny aluminum cans representing the number used in the U.S. every 30 seconds. By keeping the familiar image of the original painting but changing the fundamental components of the work, Jordan manages to create a small shock effect as the viewer processes the juxtaposition of the elements of the piece. The overall result is an effective portrayal of the statistic he is trying to convey, very much more so than if he had simply shown the number of cans in a mass amount.

Jordan’s Toothpicks also expertly blends his opinion with artistic technique, combining sheer volume with a landscape scene. The result is the illusion of a wheat field composed of 100 million toothpicks, an image that the viewer can easily recognize but is at the same time is contrasting to what they usually expect. Jordan skillfully fades the toothpicks into the horizon, hinting even more to the mass overuse of trees for something as unimportant as junk mail. Even the dark sky clouds ominously over the field of toothpicks, giving the viewer a sense of the looming consequences of their consumerist actions. Jordan combines these many elements to work towards a complex image of wastefulness.

However, despite its artistic merit, the exhibit ultimately gets to be too much by the end and it loses its effectiveness. While some pieces like Cans Seurat and Toothpicks do display a message of social criticism in an effective way, most of Jordan’s works simply contain too much patterning to give have continuing efficacy in piquing the viewers’ interest. The viewer will most likely get lost in the trance of repetition instead of taking in Jordan’s message, coming to expect the same overbearing statistic and repeated object in the next work that they saw in the last. This expectation can work opposite to Jordan’s intention, bringing increasingly less meaning to the works as the viewer’s senses get overwhelmed with large statistics.

Also contributing to the decreased efficacy of Jordan’s message in his works is the negative overall connotation attached to his exhibit. Jordan brings the viewers’ attention to the excessive consumption of America as a whole—in theory a helpful idea—but does not bolster his statistics with ideas on how to improve upon the consumption. Although Jordan’s message is given in an unembellished manner, the viewer is still left with a feeling of powerlessness, that they are simply one person who can do nothing against the millions of consumers in America.

Ultimately, despite good intention and artistic ability, Jordan’s exhibit falls short of its goal. For the most part, its message will suffer the same fate as his statistics, getting lost amongst the incomprehensible numbers that are just too much to process. But although most will walk out leaving the dreary significance of the exhibit on the walls, perhaps one or two conscientious souls will be inspired to cut back on their waste, and Jordan’s mission to raise awareness about America’s mass wastefulness will be justified.