Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper examines the aestheticization of death in David Orr’s “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air,” described by the artist as a “series of photographs of the skies above locations of violent deaths” (Orr). In addition to the apparent Marxist intimation of the title, I also explore Orr’s series as an analogue to Marx’s framework of commodity fetishism: Orr’s photographs obscure the social relations which produced them, and reduce death to a visually broad relationship between spatiotemporal objects. The serenity of the sky obscures the violence of the photographs, and Orr’s use of generic “cause of death” language depoliticizes the power dynamics behind these deaths; thus, the picture becomes “dead” in and of itself, “evidence” of only “the general human condition…it accuses nobody and everybody” (Berger). Furthermore, by relying on the (uncredited) L.A. Times “Homicide Report” as his primary source of “death data,” Orr renders invisible the critical labor of mapping, and abstracts death into an airy landscape that is generic, decontextualized, and unknowable—a map of nowhere and no one. This paper interrogates the front-facing statements behind Orr’s series on his official website, explores the evolution of death photography and images of violence in the United States as a move towards the abstract, non-objective, and disembodied object, and engages critically with the apophenia inherent in cloud-gazing and cloud photography as a means of manufacturing signification. This paper also explores alternative methods of death-mapping and memorialization which prioritize the individual being over the spatial object.