This led to Jordan’s Intolerable Beauty series shot between 2003 and 2005. Jordan specializes in giant prints, often measuring over 2m across, to draw attention to the vast amount of waste produced by the modern world.
In his Running the Numbers series, which is the focus of the exhibition, Jordan said he intentionally minimized the use of color and composition. “What happened with Intolerable Beauty was that all anybody ever talked about was how beautiful the pictures were. I was using color and beauty as a tool, but that was as far as people seemed to get ... . ”
Running the Numbers has a minimalist quality, each image composed of a single consumer item. Plastic Cups, 2008 depicts one million plastic cups stacked together, the number of cups supposedly used by airline flights in the US every six hours. Plastic Bottles, 2007 is composed of 2 million bottles arranged in a kind of impressionist seascape; the number of bottles represents the figure used in the US every five minutes.
For the numbers to matter, “for us to make the change that we all know we need to make, we have to feel something,” Jordan said. “If the only way that we can relate to these mass phenomena is through numbers, then we can’t feel anything about it. Our minds aren’t wired to be able to experience these statistics here. If it’s 20 million, or 200 million or 20 billion ... those are all just huge numbers that go in one ear and out the other.”
In trying to give expression to these numbers,” Jordan said. “I only used one plastic cup (to create Plastic Cups, 2008), the rest is digital manipulation.”
Disposable cups, cigarette packets, paper bags, are all part of his subject matter, and so effective has this visual representation of numbers proved that he has been approached to produce Running the Numbers, a sub-series on subjects such as Africa and the world’s oceans.
Despite producing work with a clear moral purpose, Jordan is wary of being labeled as an activist.
Speaking of his experience at the G8 Summit riots in Seattle in 1999, Jordan said: “There was this one group who really struck me. They had these signs and they were screaming ‘down with corporations.’ They where marching around saying this and they were wearing Nike, and Levis, and Gap. I don’t know if I’d call it hypocrisy, but there was a one-dimensionality about it, there was no self-reflection in that kind of activism, and I don’t want to be an activist like that.”
For your information:
Running the Numbers is on display at the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall (台灣民主紀念館) until April 27
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