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Asbestos as part of an artist's self-definition online
It's important to keep up to date with your subject matter wherever you're working. Because of this, I spent a big part of this week exploring various asbestos-related issues - asbestosis, mesothelioma, lung cancer, pleural plaques and thickening, etc. All of which is completely serious and important both to us and to our clients, but can cast a dark cloud across a writer's mood.
We know that cloud's nothing when compared to a sufferer's problems, but there's still something of a sense of relief that crosses all of us when something that is not so serious crops up in Google. And this week I found that through following a piece of news in which an art gallery had been found to contain the potentially lethal substance.
It turns out that there's a street artist who goes by the name Asbestos, whose website www.theartofasbestos.com shows someone keen to intervene in public life with unexpected artworks. These include small stencil prints, in the manner of Banksy, and some screenprints of doll faces, some using gold leaf, that are placed in busy areas of cities including Paris, London and Dublin.
He's also created some more traditional paintings, although his portraits include hands as much as faces, and his site opens with an image of a face - presumably his own - wrapped in hazardous material tape.
He's not the only one to take a name from the hazardous substance; an American self-taught artist uses the URL www.asbestossister.com. These are more traditional in their presentation - flat works in marker and acrylic, with gallery displays and shows. While not entirely realist, it is work that draws its power from a representational urge, rather than the interventionist methods of the artist above.
When I mentioned this to a colleague, he reminded me of the episode of Antiques Roadshow where someone turned up with a set of paintings and sketches, including some signed by Kurt Schwitters, from a Second World War internment camp on the Isle of Man. One of these was on an asbestos tile, showing incredibly clearly how limited artistic material was, yet how powerful the urge to create even in such surroundings could be.
The clip seems to be one of the rare things that is not on the internet; I'd have linked to it otherwise. I'd have also loved to have seen what happened to the evaluator's face when he realised what he was holding, and what the advice for hanging a slightly dangerous piece of art (one, indeed, that could cause a compensation claim) is.
Today's easily-accessible web 2.0 world throws up further artists who embrace the emotional power that the word "asbestos" carries; there's more than one artist on deviantart.com that uses the word as part of their username, and more than a dozen on Flickr.
Is this a good thing? On the one hand, it shows an awareness of the material, and probably suggests that the people using these handles are aware of the significance of it. On the other, there may be a hint of the tendency of children to be aware of the power of swear words without being aware of the meaning of the word itself.
Even if the latter is true, however, it is easier to expand that awareness to include the industrial diseases related to the substance than it is to build awareness from scratch. So even a qualified cheer for the presence of asbestos in online artistry is still a cheer.
