By the Numbers

For my money, art is most vital when it’s picking up the
slack for the shortcomings of language, moving toward an expression of
the ineffable. So, perusing Chris Jordan’s five large-scale archival
ink-jet prints in the Portland Art Museum’s APEX gallery, I couldn’t
help but puzzle that his project is so narrowly obsessed with numbers
and statistics—the quantifiable phenomenon of the world.

Jordan’s 2007 series Running the Numbers: An American
Self-Portrait, from which all five works are drawn, visually
depicts various realities of American culture—from the number of
cell phones retired each day (426,000) to the annual ER visits caused
by prescription pain killer abuse (213,000)—in dense, digitally
composed tableaux. In the case of the latter, a whorl of concentric
circles—each made of thousands of tiny images of Vicodin
pills—suggests the pinpricked pupils of a user. Through the
repeated use of a single image or a handful of them, Jordan trades in
the visual lexicon of the infinite, cribbing conceptually from
Pointillism and Chuck Close’s “pixilated” portraits in a single pass.
Such art historical nods seem awkward fits, though, considering how
entrenched his subjects are in the finite.

There’s no denying that Jordan’s work is meticulously executed or
occasionally stunning: “Cell Phones” is so packed with visual
information, it dissolves into something like the smudged definition of
Formica. But this formal beauty is repeatedly undercut by ham-fisted
didacticism. After all, a work of art that implicitly chides Americans
for inefficient residential energy use—via a cosmos of
Photoshopped lightbulbs—seems like it ought to have bigger things
on its mind. “Skull with Cigarette,” a mosaic-like image of a skeleton
getting its nic fix, is the worst offender. Cobbled together from
200,000 tiny cigarette carton tops, the piece represents the number of
Americans who die every six months from smoking. It manages some
impressive tonal shifts from afar and makes like a miniature cemetery
up close (with each headstone bearing the familiar logos of Camel,
Kool, and more), but, in the end, telegraphs the moral complexity of a
“Just Say No” poster.

If such straightforward messaging makes for truly soporific
propaganda, I suppose it does have one perk: I guarantee you won’t
leave Jordan’s exhibition wondering what it all means.