Michel Hardy-Vallée
Membership Council
http://www.davidmaisel.com/works/picture.asp?cat=lod&tl=library of dust
It came out in book form not long ago, and just last week I had the opportunity to look at it in a bookstore. It's a large, almost folio-sized volume, and the printing quality is very good.
I found it haunting and fascinating, but not just because of the work per se, also because of what it represents as a product of the current artworld.
The whole project is a series of photos of cremation ashes urns that have developed some amazingly colourful mineral concretions as a product of the reactions between the ashes, the copper cans, and water. The people cremated were inmates at an Oregon mental asylum, whose ashes were never claimed by their families.
It must be perhaps the most remarkable confluence of accessible artworld tropes that I have seen so far; true, the photographs are amazing, but the conceptual and artworld ramifications are really what I think support the work:
* First of all it's in colour, and very wild ones on top of that (everything since Eggleston/Shore)
* The photos deal with the body, death, and transformation (academic literature in the Humanities since the last 20 years)
* It links the living with the natural: after all we are constituted by a bunch of minerals, we have bits of rocks inside our cells (Maisel is a landscape photographer of Burtynsky's ilk)
* It's a series (cf. the Bechers and everyone else)
* It engages with madness (Foucault), the archive (Derrida, Borgès), bureaucracy (Kafka, de Certeau, and the panopticon), and finally about people pushed aside: mental inmates whose ashes were never claimed (Foucault again, the lumpenproletariat, marginality) often because the inscriptions on the cans were undecipherable (Derrida again, Wittgenstein and the indicible).
* The Oregon hospital is where they shot One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (relationship with popular culture).
* Those are photographs of an aftermath: they show traces, not their subject directly (cf. for example Simon Norfolk's "aftermath" war photographs)
* They are a memento mori (a reminder of death) (cf. Susan Sontag who argued that every photo is a memento mori because its subject immediately disappears after the photo was taken). Here it's a double one: not only is the subject about dead people, but the ashcans themselves have been re-packaged after Maisel took his photographs, so it's not possible to observe them exactly as Maisel saw them.
* The prints are large (everyone)
I think Maisel's work will have a very interesting academic currency in the coming years.
It came out in book form not long ago, and just last week I had the opportunity to look at it in a bookstore. It's a large, almost folio-sized volume, and the printing quality is very good.
I found it haunting and fascinating, but not just because of the work per se, also because of what it represents as a product of the current artworld.
The whole project is a series of photos of cremation ashes urns that have developed some amazingly colourful mineral concretions as a product of the reactions between the ashes, the copper cans, and water. The people cremated were inmates at an Oregon mental asylum, whose ashes were never claimed by their families.
It must be perhaps the most remarkable confluence of accessible artworld tropes that I have seen so far; true, the photographs are amazing, but the conceptual and artworld ramifications are really what I think support the work:
* First of all it's in colour, and very wild ones on top of that (everything since Eggleston/Shore)
* The photos deal with the body, death, and transformation (academic literature in the Humanities since the last 20 years)
* It links the living with the natural: after all we are constituted by a bunch of minerals, we have bits of rocks inside our cells (Maisel is a landscape photographer of Burtynsky's ilk)
* It's a series (cf. the Bechers and everyone else)
* It engages with madness (Foucault), the archive (Derrida, Borgès), bureaucracy (Kafka, de Certeau, and the panopticon), and finally about people pushed aside: mental inmates whose ashes were never claimed (Foucault again, the lumpenproletariat, marginality) often because the inscriptions on the cans were undecipherable (Derrida again, Wittgenstein and the indicible).
* The Oregon hospital is where they shot One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (relationship with popular culture).
* Those are photographs of an aftermath: they show traces, not their subject directly (cf. for example Simon Norfolk's "aftermath" war photographs)
* They are a memento mori (a reminder of death) (cf. Susan Sontag who argued that every photo is a memento mori because its subject immediately disappears after the photo was taken). Here it's a double one: not only is the subject about dead people, but the ashcans themselves have been re-packaged after Maisel took his photographs, so it's not possible to observe them exactly as Maisel saw them.
* The prints are large (everyone)
I think Maisel's work will have a very interesting academic currency in the coming years.
