Intolerable Beauty
"Sunday afternoon in the Grande Jatte" is an icon of modern painting. This enormous panel which measures about 3 meters in length by 2 meters in height was done in 1884 by Georges Seurat with the denominated technique "dotting" which consists in grouping small colorful dots in a certain order in a way that their fusion in the retina produces an intelligible image. This way a piece of these dimensions bears a dozen million stokes, making everyone of them a pixel. But what does all this have to do with consumerism? Chris Jordan explains.
As the American and consumer Chris Jordan is, he pretends to call the attention of an enormous quantity of waste produced by his fellow countrymen. The process he found to do is hardly not as efficient as surprisingly beautiful. He called it in a very appropriate way, images of intolerable beauty.
His "pieces" are enormous and repetitive sets of consumed objects arranged in a way that they form patterns or images. Later they are photographed. The result seen in camera at a certain distance reminds us sometimes of abstract paintings; however a closer look reveals the materials they were made of. He also announces the time it takes for those objects to be consumed: when we refer to the Grande Jatte the 106 000 cans of soda which compose it are produced every 30 seconds in the USA! Dotting de Seurat taken by hand...
But there’s more here: cellular phones, cigarettes or ammunition cartridges forming spots which vaguely resemble Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism.
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