Book Launch for Michael Schmelling’s The Plan

Michael Schmelling The Plan 1

According to the official statement on the book, The Plan, by Michael Schmelling:
“Between 2003 and 2005, Michael Schmelling photographed 12 private residences in the company of Disaster Masters, a New York-based company specializing in cleaning up homes and counseling compulsive hoarders. Featuring 490 photographs printed in black-and-white on 576 newsprint pages, this volume devotes one chapter to each home — producing an arresting art object and a fantastic document of urban archaeology and psychology.”

I attended the reading and presentation of this book last night at Family (book store) in Los Angeles.

Michael Schmelling’s latest project deals with something inherent to the human condition: the desire to tell stories as a way of expressing the fact of our existence. What is interesting about this project, namely the photographic study of Obsessive Compulsive Hoarding Disorder in his book The Plan, is that the subject matter and subjects being studied have warped over into story overload: their stories branch out in a hundred thousand different never-ending directions, all at once. There is a white noise effect in visual terms in The Plan: it’s as if there is a ten thousand page novel that consists only of first sentences….

With the accompanying slide show, Schmelling read an essay (by Richard Maxwell) included in the book, which was intriguing mostly because of the dis-location of the narrative voice, something that seemed to shift around between first and third person. The book itself, as an object, has a strangely accessible quality to it: it’s as if the images have been printed on a rustic newsprint, the kind that artists might buy a pad of, when they are intending to make throw-away drawings in service of a later project that needs many many initial drafts. As a photographer (and a professional artistic person it seems), Schmelling is forthright and deeply invested in the curious nature of his subjects. There is nothing that appears to be about the glorification of something potentially disturbing here. It’s about exposure of something that has heretofore been kept as private as a thing can be kept.

Michael Schmelling The Plan 2

Michael Schmelling The Plan 3

Obsessive Compulsive Hoarding Disorder and Organization

How can one thing be considered an “odd” or an “end” when all that one’s universe consists of is essentially clutter? The organizational systems by which we live are in an unusually hyper display in these cases, wherein people have privately held on to literally everything they have ever come across. Magazines are filed away in cereal boxes; junk mail is stacked in piles in a room; bags of unused groceries are strewn about the kitchen floor. It’s as if the power of discernment has been entirely erased: everything is necessary; everything has a use, but the use is never actualized.

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Schmelling’s Surprises From The Plan Experiences

I asked Schmelling at the reading if, given the visual overload and the potential for all things to just wash out, anything ended up distinctly surprising him after several trips out to hoarders’ houses with Disaster Masters. The first thing that came to his mind was an image of a dresser that had been pulled away from the wall to reveal a perfectly kept skeleton of a pigeon. The bird had seemingly flown in through the open window of the apartment, landed behind the dresser and then died and rotted there. The feathers were assembled in a circular halo around the skeleton. An entire ecosystem on pause, an infinite loop of the action of collecting.

Michael Schmelling The Plan Book Cover

Anyone who has read my fiction (many stories are about the ritual and analytical uncovering of odd behavior in Don’t Smell the Floss), can just sense that the histories behind what creates this condition is ideal fodder for a new short story. I will be working on a draft after I’ve researched the condition of OCHD enough. Stay tuned….

Click to Buy The Plan by Michael Schmelling NOW

436 N. Fairfax Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90036 USA_323.782.9221_Open Noon to 9pm Daily
Michael Schmelling’s Reading for The Plan is From Sunday, May 10 @ 7:30pm

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