Entry Wk 15.1

Plastic Bottles, 2007 by Chris Jordan using pigmented inkjet print (60”x120”) represents 2 million disposable bottles in a kind of endless sea with a gentle current.  The composition achieves balance and rhythm by the repetition of disposable bottles throughout the piece.  Once you are close enough to read the labels, Coke, Sprite, Vitamin Water, Dasani, Pepsi, Arrow Head, the bottles have natural lines, but from only a few feet away these merge into the aforementioned sea of blue-gray plastic and the lines are lost into oblivion with the exception of where they create the illusion of motion.  There is no area of interest to capture the eye, no direction of composition to follow, no story to decipher.  It is a statement, if not a lecture, and just as uninteresting.

It is my opinion that Plastic Bottles delivers less of an impact than Jumbo Veggie Dog because it is more abstract in representing its message, just one minute aspect of our waste is drowning our environment, and more acutely specific in its scope, disposable bottles, than the garbage painting; Plastic Bottles engages me on an intellectual level rather than an emotional one.  I know that America is the largest consuming nation in the world, and, thereby, also produces the most waste.  According to an article on the Stanford University recycling program site, the EPA estimates that Americans only recycle 30 percent of that waste and the Idaho Recycling and Waste Management Directory suggests that Idahoans recycles an even lesser amount because the pressure of land consumption is low. 

The message of Plastic Bottles is too big for me to feel effected by it on an individual level.  Jumbo Veggie Dog however is much more personal.  Rather than commenting on how wasteful 300,000,000 people are, it focuses on how wasteful the few hundred that frequent the artist’s favorite river are.  This idea is more “where I live,” it leaves me with a feeling that I can have a direct impact on the outcome of this issue and allows me to take a side.  Another reason Plastic Bottles is less meaningful to me is that I already limit my use of disposable bottles, were as Jumbo Veggie Dog uses a variety of discarded refuse which helps me see a bigger problem than the transporting of liquids.  The camping maxim: pack it in, pack it out, would make a good correlating message for this painting.