Weaving a City's Passersby into a Wall: JR's The Chronicles of San Francisco at SFMOMA

On the Howard Street side of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), in the ground-floor lobby that costs nothing to enter, there is a curved screen 107 feet long — some 32.6 metres. Two vast LED planes, joined along a gentle concave curve, stand so as to half-enclose whoever comes in. What runs across them is not a product, not a logo, not a brand message. A swimmer, the men of a choir, a person living on the street, an obstetrician delivering a baby — ordinary citizens who happened to be walking through San Francisco, scrolling slowly sideways and sideways again. This is The Chronicles of San Francisco, which the French artist JR unveiled in 2019.

What this journal has usually followed is the few minutes of empty space that open on an advertising surface along a street, or a single image kindled on a façade. The moment when a street screen installed for the sake of commerce is surrendered, for a short while, to another logic — that is what we have called tenkei. JR's mural lights the same question from behind. Here an LED of roughly the same resolution as advertising has been installed, from the outset, in order to show portraits of citizens. To draw each individual passerby with the pixels of advertising — that is the kind of apparatus this is.

The Man Who Pastes — JR's Lineage

JR was born in France in 1983. His starting point was street graffiti: a teenager tagging the walls of the Métro and the Paris suburbs. Before long he began photographing the city and its people with a camera he had picked up, and arrived at a method — blowing the portraits he had taken up to enormous size and pasting them onto the walls and roofs of buildings. He is an artist whose site of publication is not the white wall of a museum or a gallery but the very surfaces of the streets where people live.

That method was extended into participatory projects on a global scale in Women Are Heroes, and in Inside Out, where anyone at all can submit their own portrait. In the latter, people around the world send in a photograph of their face and receive a poster-sized print in return, which participants then paste onto a wall in their own city. To raise the face of an anonymous citizen into public space at greater than life size — this has been JR's consistent subject. If advertising is a place reserved for products and for stars, JR has been cutting into it the face of a person with no name.

The Chronicles of San Francisco is placed on top of this lineage. According to SFMOMA, JR conceived the work out of the Diego Rivera murals that remain in San Francisco. The enormous murals Rivera painted in the first half of the twentieth century packed workers and ordinary people across the full breadth of the picture, compressing a cross-section of a society into a single plane. JR rebuilt that mural idea — the cross-sectional diagram of a society — not with a brush but with photography and LED, and with citizens themselves as the subjects. The SFMOMA showing was also JR's first large-scale installation in San Francisco.

Filming the Passersby — The Method of Making

Production was carried out over roughly two months in early 2018, ahead of the 2019 opening. JR set up mobile photographic studios at 22 locations across San Francisco, called out to the people who happened to pass by, filmed and recorded nearly 1,200 of them, and captured their voices. The subjects were not celebrities chosen in advance. Swimmers, members of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, people living on the street, an obstetrician re-enacting the birth of a baby — citizens from every community, who happened to be there.

What is decisive here is that the conditions of the shoot were made equal for everyone. In SFMOMA's account, the people who appear in the mural are those "who happened to pass that place at that moment," and every subject is captured at the same size, under the same light. The mayor and a person living on the street, a child and an elderly person, all stand at the same dimensions within the picture. Nobody is shown larger, nobody smaller. It is precisely this rule — that no hierarchy is made among the portraits — that turns The Chronicles of San Francisco from a mere accumulation of group photography into an image of a society.

Each person filmed is finally stitched into a single long horizontal mural. The backgrounds run continuously into streets and parks and waterfronts, and people photographed in separate places are arranged as though they had all been present in the same landscape on the same day. Citizens in fact encountered at scattered hours and scattered locations are re-edited, on the screen, into one cross-section of a city.

A Museum's LED as Apparatus

What supports this mural is a kind of LED technology that properly belongs to large outdoor vision boards and to the signage of commercial facilities. According to the design documentation, the display is by SNA Displays, with a pixel pitch of 2.5 mm and a total pixel count reaching some 26 million. At the time it opened it was reckoned among the highest-resolution LED screens in the United States. Physically it is 107 feet long (about 32.6 metres), with an area of roughly 1,748 square feet. The two LED planes are not set out flat side by side; they are joined along a gently concave curve. According to Sensory Interactive, which handled the technical integration, that curve was chosen to draw the viewer into the interior of the space and to maximise the sense of being enveloped by the moving image.

It is installed in SFMOMA's Roberts Family Gallery, the free public area on the ground floor. Without buying a ticket and going up to the museum's upper floors, anyone entering from Howard Street can stand before this mural. Which is to say that the museum's "exhibition" has been placed outside the admission gate, on ground continuous with the street.

The mural itself is image, but the voices of the citizens are stored in another layer. A soundscape plays in the gallery, and with a dedicated free app, "JR:murals," pointing a smartphone at someone inside the mural lets you hear the words that person spoke when they were recorded. Each of nearly 1,200 portraits recovers its voice, should the viewer wish it. Visually, everyone stands equal side by side; in the auditory layer, each person holds a story of their own — this double structure is what keeps the crowd from turning into anonymous wallpaper.

A Screen Without Hierarchy

On an LED of roughly the same resolution as advertising, neither a product nor a star but a citizen passing by. In this single point lies the critical core of The Chronicles of San Francisco.

The large screen of the street ordinarily works as an apparatus of explicit hierarchy. The advertiser who pays the most appears the largest and for the longest. The faces that appear are chosen faces — talent, models, the emblems of a brand. The resolution and the brightness of the screen are invested in delivering that "chosen image" as strongly and as far as it can go. What JR did was to hold that same technical standard while swapping out, wholesale, only what appears on it. Everyone at the same size, under the same light. Before a screen in which neither a fee nor a name intervenes, every face is equivalent.

Here the paired concepts of ma and tenkei give us a way in. In ink-wash painting, tenkei names the figure or the small boat set down as a single point within a vast landscape. It is not the protagonist of the landscape, but because that small presence is there, scale and atmosphere are born in the mountains and the water. Each of the citizens in The Chronicles of San Francisco is a tenkei in exactly this sense. Nobody is the protagonist of the city. And yet, as each one of them is kindled onto the screen, the size and the diversity of San Francisco rise up. With this mural, by gathering nearly 1,200 tenkei, JR drew an image of a city itself.

And the composition, scrolling sideways, is closer to the logic of the handscroll — in which the viewpoint travels and several times coexist — than to the single-point perspective of Western painting. The audience walks along in front of the mural, passing by the citizens who appear one after another. Rather than looking at a single fixed picture, they travel inside it. The citizens who were passing along the street at the time of filming are now themselves passed by, by the viewer — the positions of the one who films and the one who looks invert quietly, in front of the screen.

What It Means for a Museum to Edit a Large LED

Cases in which a public museum edits and operates an LED of architectural scale itself are appearing all over the world. In Hong Kong, M+ runs the exterior façade facing Victoria Harbour under the museum's own curation (When Architecture Becomes a Screen), and in Singapore the ArtScience Museum programmes the lobby screen of a commercial complex as an hourly exhibition apparatus (the essay on the ArtScience Museum). What these have in common is that large-display technology, developed for the sake of advertising, is being reread by a museum as "exhibition space."

What makes The Chronicles of San Francisco distinctive among them is that the object of editing was not the video work of a well-known artist but the citizens themselves. Where the M+ façade opens toward a whole city on the far side of the harbour, and the ArtScience Museum's lobby screen greets the people who visit the building, SFMOMA's mural filmed the people who live in that city and showed it to the people of that city. Subject and audience are residents of the same city, and can often enough be the same person — a citizen finds themselves, or the person next to them, upon the wall of a museum.

Rather than a street screen consuming citizens as "objects to be looked at," the citizens are edited into the screen and become the city's self-portrait. This mural, whose run ended after roughly a year, stands on the record as one lucid answer to the question of what a city's screens ought to show. The resolution of advertising can also be used to draw each individual passerby. A tenkei will not appear on a screen unless somebody kindles it.

Sources

1. fig.001The Chronicles of San Francisco — Teaser | JR (official)(2019)
2. fig.002Behind the Scenes of The Chronicles of San Francisco | JR (official)(2018)
3. fig.003JR on The Chronicles of San Francisco | SFMOMA(2019)
4. [4]JR: The Chronicles of San Francisco — Exhibition | SFMOMA
5. [5]THE CHRONICLES OF SAN FRANCISCO | JR-art.net
6. [6]San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) — The Chronicles of San Francisco | SEGD (technical case study)

Operations Record

OPERATOR

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) with JR Studio

LOCATION

San Francisco

MODEL

Museum commission — A commissioned installation for the museum’s free public lobby; production support from Lynne and Marc Benioff and other individual donors

ARTIST PAY

Museum commission backed by donors; the related book JR: The Chronicles of San Francisco was published by SFMOMA

CADENCE

On view for roughly a year from 23 May 2019; a single looping digital mural

SPEC

A 107-ft (c. 32.6 m) curved LED wall by SNA Displays; 2.5 mm pixel pitch, c. 26 million pixels, two planes joined by a concave curve. Nearly 1,200 subjects filmed at 22 locations across the city

SINCE

2019-05

STATUS

Ended

View on the registry