Asbestos: A Matter of Time

Slought is pleased to present "Asbestos: A Matter of Time," a talk by Arthur Rose about the cultural and political history of asbestos and its exposures, on Tuesday, October 22, 2019 from 5:30-7:00pm. The event is free and open to the public, and will be moderated by Jean-Michel Rabaté and Aaron Levy of Slought.

In June 2018, a Russian asbestos company released a photograph of asbestos products on pallets and covered in plastic, with a stamp that featured Donald Trump's face. It emerged amidst troubling efforts by the Trump administration to reevaluate the EPA's recommendations on asbestos, a move only more troubling in light of Trump's repeated support for asbestos use. Asbestos remains an endemic problem for the built environment, since, without expensive abatement, it remains lodged in our buildings and homes, lurking.

Arthur Rose's cultural history of asbestos will highlight this intractable, timely problem. In 1959 the US Chamber of Mines released a film, called Asbestos... A Matter of Time. Made in collaboration with the largest US producer of asbestos products, Johns-Manville, the film propagates asbestos's truly impressive qualities as a fire retardant and an insulator. The original 'matter of time', meant to indicate the inevitable progress of industry and enlightenment supported by the miraculous properties of asbestos, has developed a disturbing historical irony. Death after asbestos exposure is presented as if it too were 'only a matter of time.'

Asbestos related diseases, pleural plaques, asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, are devastating. Their grim reality alienates us from the happy optimism of this propaganda work. Yet the film also demonstrates a heightened sensibility to the irony in its title; it is precisely asbestos's relative constancy, its immutability, after its formation that makes it a matter made by time, but also a matter out of time. Like some last laugh on historicism and historical revisionism, asbestos remains an interminable, unmediated Real. As the film follows the apparently hard rock turning into cobwebs that themselves seem to deconstruct into finer and finer fibers, it manages to demonstrate just how difficult it is to fix asbestos. In his presentation, Rose will consider how the cultural historian might catch hold of asbestos across its many iterations in objects, texts, and films, to understand asbestos' effects.