While reading Swerve magazine on an early Friday morning I encountered a familiar image, Georges-Pierre Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte". Except, something seemed different about the painting, the pointilist dots had instead been replaced by 106,000 aluminum cans. The culprit? Seattle based artist Chris Jordan. The cans represent the amount consumed in the U.S. every 30 seconds. This is a provocative commentary of our mindless consumerist tendencies. While this is a stunning feat, I couldn't help but be reminded of Seurat's original vision for the piece.
While Seurat's painting was created between 1884-1886, it was a reflective piece of the social climate of the day. Seurat's painting depicts a community of individuals who all appear to be deceptively equal. However, the woman harnessed to the monkey symboliozes prostitution. She is deceiving in her attire as she plays the role of a respectable woman, and the monkey is a physical manifestation of her shameful profession. No one is given an individual persona in this painting, instead everyone has the same blank stare. These people are living in a world where the social divide is there, but not always evident. Jordan's work seems to me almost like he's trying to call attention to the people in the painting. Jordan wants them to look towards him and become engaged members of their world. However, they are transfixed in a state of laziness and apathy. By acknowledging that we are a worldwide community; regardless of sex, age or class, changing and acknowledging our consumer habits is necessary in order to alter our shameful consumer habits.
Jordan has used his creative ability whereby "not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange" (Fletcher)by taking Seurat's calming luminous hues and replacing them with the oversaturated colours found on aluminum cans. Individually, cans are marketed to grab our attention, while collectively they create a grainy hue reminiscent of a cloud of smog, suffocating the people inside the piece.
Jordan's work is compelling as he has taken what would otherwise be discarded cans and transformed them into a useful work of art. This idea reminded me of our 'Invisible Cities' project. For me, it was a conscious reminder that creating a message, whether of awareness or social commentary can be an inspired way to affect change, if not for a community, than for myself.
Source:http://hopeeternal.wordpress.com/2007/07/08/chris-jordan-cans-seurat-2007-georges-seurat-sunday-afternoon-at-the-grande-jatte.
Fletcher, Alan “The Art of Looking Sideways”. Phaidon.
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