BY SUZI STEFFEN
Monumental Art
from Monumental Junk
Chris Jordan’s Running the Numbers opens at the J-Schnitz
A
rt from questions: How many commercial fl ights
go over the U.S. every 8 hours? How many plastic
beverage bottles get used in the U.S. every fi ve
minutes? How many artists go on The Colbert Report and
hang with Stephen Colbert?
Answers Chris Jordan started thinking about this kind of
thing — and other numbers, like the number of aluminum
cans used in the U.S. every 30 seconds ---
On The Colbert Report in 2007 (http://wkly.ws/10j),
Jordan noted that because the U.S. waste stream spreads out
across the country (and farther), it’s impossible for people to
fathom how much we throw away, or recycle. In his Cans
Seurat, for instance, he recreates the famous Seurat painting
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte with
digitally manipulated images of soda cans. According to the
2007 numbers, people in the U.S. recycled about half of the
aluminum cans they use, which per minute would be 212,000
cans. Half of that gave Jordan the Cans Seurat image.
Jordan’s “Running the Numbers,” an exhibit of 20
large images, opens at the UO’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum
of Art from 6 to 8 pm Friday, Jan. 14. The museum’s
executive director, Jill Hartz, says that the Seattle-based
Jordan and his work fi t well into the ethos of the UO.
“Sustainability and sustainable cities,” Hartz says, “is one
of the university’s Big Ideas.”
True, and the capitals are intentional: The UO set out
its “Big Ideas” in 2007, with two of them — visible here:
http://wkly.ws/10k — designated as Sustainable Cities and
Green Product Design. In Jordan’s exhibit, even seemingly
eco-friendly products like paper bags (recyclable, often
made of mostly recycled materials) look irredeemable, and
the statistic — “114 million brown paper supermarket bags
used in the U.S. every hour” — seems not only huge but
also ridiculous. Eugene, one hopes, doesn’t add very much
to that tally, but looking at Jordan’s Paper Bags might mean
considering holding a canvas bag close at hand at all times.
Some of his work’s funny or tongue-in-cheek, like using
a representation of enjoyment like a soda can to recreate a
7,000 Reasons to Move
New Asian art curator hits the (green) ground running
L
ooking at Anne Rose Kitagawa’s curriculum
vitae, one might be forgiven a startled question
or two about her move to Eugene. She grew up
in Chicago, the daughter of two extremely distinguished
professors at the University of Chicago. Then she went
to college at Oberlin and grad school at Princeton. She’s
been working in museums, ranging from the Museum
of Fine Arts in Boston to the Art Institute of Chicago
and most recently, and for 15 years, at the Harvard Art
Museum and was assistant curator of Japanese art there.
So … not to put our town down or anything, but
… Eugene? Well, to be honest, it’s all about the Asian
collection at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, which
has 7,000 items and thousands of square feet of gallery
space and is close both to other large Asian art collections
on the West Coast and much closer to Asia than is Boston.
Kitagawa began her position as chief curator of Asian
art and coordinator of academic programs at the JSMA in
June, and she says she’s been going full-out ever since.
“The collection’s so big, I’m just familiarizing myself
with it,” she says.
Museum executive director Jill Hartz doesn’t sound
too much like the cat that ate the canary when she
talks about Kitagawa, but it’s evident that the UO’s art
museum, in a Hartz-led change, has started pushing
harder and harder for a higher profi le in the world of
academic museums. “Anne Rose is a scholar, and she’s
very comfortable in academic museums — and there are
so few academic museums that have a focus on Asian
art, especially East Asian art,” Hartz says. Add the strong
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scholarship of the Giuseppe Vasi
exhibit of last term, and the
museum’s reputation may, and
should, begin to wax in other
parts of the country.
But within a museum, each
of the rooms and galleries needs
work, revamping, a fresh look so
that the galleries don’t grow stale
– and so that work in the galleries
isn’t harmed by exposure. So
Kitagawa’s been looking at each
of the (many) Asian galleries in
the museum, carefully altering
each gallery so that light-
sensitive textiles and works on paper, some of which have
been up for several years, take a rotation rest in the vault
while others come into view. She’s placed modern and
contemporary Japanese and Korean art alongside some
of the older work. “If you looked at the galleries, in some
of them it seemed like the art stopped around 1900,” she
says.
Though the carpets of the Japanese gallery still showed
the lines of old vitrines a few months after Kitagawa altered
the space, a delightfully smart, playful, rooted in art history
but fi rmly contemporary work, Magma Spirit Explodes,
Tsunami is Dreadful by Aoshima Chiho, hangs on the wall,
entrancing both the eye and the mind. It’s not that Kitagawa
wants to put away anything from before 1950, not at all; she
just wants to freshen up the galleries and get the older pieces
scene of the French working class on their day off, or the
Barbies and the Benjamins. The Barbies, 32,000 of them,
combine to form a white woman’s torso. That number’s the
total of elective breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S.
every month in 2006.
The Benjamins, which would be 125,000 $100 bills or
$12.5 million, or the amount the U.S. government spent
on the war in Iraq every hour from 2003 to 2008, form a
portrait of Ben himself.
Hartz says the show combines well with the upcoming
artist’s residency of Jen Van Winkle, an artist from Virginia
who works primarily with reused materials and kids or
others in workshops that culminate in public art projects.
“It’s an opportunity to link with new communities on
campus and off,” she says.
In addition, the Jordan show will be lit by LED bulbs in
an experiment that’s part of a larger study of museums and
LED lights. “They have no heat, and the energy savings is
amazing,” Hartz says. “But they haven’t been able [until
now] to cast the kind of light you can look at art with.”
“Running the Numbers” has traveled all over the place
since Jordan mounted it in 2007, mostly to galleries,
museums and university museums on the West Coast
(including a few stops in British Columbia). Jordan has
always hoped that with this show, viewers might change
their habits and consume less — perhaps not replace one
cellphone a year, not drink so much bottled water or soda,
not consume a Seurat’s worth of aluminum cans every
month, not leave their pets unfi xed, maybe not buy so many
SUVs.
That might be preaching to the choir in Eugene, and the
bluntly didactic message also might seem a little less artful
than the usual show at the museum. Hartz says, “Some
work better than others as amazing, beautiful photographs,
and if sometimes being blunt works better [for Jordan],
well, we’ll see what the audiences think!”
ew
“Running the Numbers: Portraits of Mass Consumption” opens Saturday, Jan.
15, and stays up through early April. An opening runs 6-8 pm Friday, Jan. 14,
and exhbit curator Chris Bunch, from Seattle, speaks at 2 pm Jan. 15. Artist
Chris Jordan gives two talks Wed. Jan. 26, one, about switching careers from
corporate lawyer to artist, at the Knight Law School at 12:30 pm; one an
exhibition talk at 5:30 pm in 177 Lawrence Hall, both on the UO campus.
in visual conversation with newer works.
And now, along with new fl atscreen monitors
that give information about the works in the
galleries, Kitagawa works on making sure that
info comes in several languages. Her dream is
to have Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish
and English (at least) available for all of the
galleries, but for now, at least, she and a team
of translators and helpers keep hard at work
on making sure the Korean art has Korean-
language information, the Japanese art Japanese-
language information and so forth. The museum
began adding bilingual labels, catalogs and
information with the fall 2008 “Cuban Avant-
Garde” exhibition, and as Kitagawa says, once a
museum opens that door, it’s not possible to start
limiting access again.
The new curator says that one of the great
things about living in Eugene instead of Boston/
Cambridge is what she calls, with air quotes,
“the commute.” In the crowded cities of the Northeast,
though the public transportation options covered most of
the ground, getting to work wasn’t exactly pleasant. “My
‘commute’ is seven minutes long through some of the most
beautiful landscape,” she says, laughing. But she’s been so
busy that she hasn’t had time to see much of the vaunted
Oregon natural beauty (that’s right, she’s been immersed
in the “great city for the arts” portion of the city motto),
and she longs to go horseback riding, see Crater Lake and
generally become more familiar with the landscape.
Hartz says that she’s enjoying working with Kitagawa
and seeing her work with the rest of the curatorial staff.
She adds, “We deserve her; we deserve this quality. We
want to be one of the fi nest university museums in the
world.” — Suzi Steffen
TRASK BEDORTHA
DEPICTS 32,000 BARBIES, EQUAL TO THE NUMBER OF ELECTIVE BREAST AUGMENTATION SURGERIES PERFORMED MONTHLY IN THE US IN 2006. (DETAIL ON RIGHT)
CHRIS JORDAN, BARBIE DOLLS, 2008, DIGITAL PRINT
visual arts
EUGENE WEEKLY JANUARY 13, 2011 25