The Stranger recently did an article on the death care industry and Seattle artist Greg Lundgren, owner of Lundgren Monuments. Lundgren makes incredibly beautiful and unique translucent glass headstones. I really appreciate non-traditional funerals and funeral accouterments and Lundgren is absolutely providing a service to those who prefer something less funereal than sand blasted Barre gray monuments fabricated from Vermont granite. Boring.
Lundgren's monument business is also part art gallery which showcases the glass headstones and a wide array of atypical urns, caskets, action figures, portraits and other memorial art. From the article:One [piece], by Arne Pihl, is a polished piece of dark wood. Others, by Timothy Foss, look like Japanese ceramics glazed with modern, minimalist patterns. Stefan Gulassa made a small, white cupboard for mementos of the deceased—a watch, a fishing weight, some fly-tying scissors—like Joseph Cornell's evocative boxed assemblages, but with a discreet metal case in the back that holds the ashes.Lundgren's urns, made of small slabs of glass, look like tiny modernist houses. "An urn is a house, a little house," Lundgren had said a few days earlier, while giving me a tour of his studio. "This is style. This is fashion. When 50 Cent and P. Diddy die, I'm going to make them big bling diamonds out of glass."
The funeral-industry people are particularly taken with one object on Lundgren's shelves: a ceramic pipe wrench made of human bone china. "Human bone china?" they keep repeating to each other. "Human bone china!"
Its maker, Charles Krafft, stands inconspicuously—as inconspicuously as he can, being the tallest, baldest, most bearded man in the room—by the front door, drinking wine. Krafft makes hollow ceramics from pulverized cremated remains, then fills the object with the leftover ashes. He has made a ceramic military helmet for a veteran, a ceramic dog for a veterinarian, and a ceramic bottle of vodka for a friend of his ("an alcoholic gay man"). He also makes ceramic rifles, grenades, and "disasterware," including kitschy Dutch windmills with swastikas for blades. Krafft is one of the only artists in Lundgren's gallery—one of the only artists in America—who has been working in the funerary arts for years.
The gallery contains no ridiculous, gimmicky funeral shit: LifeGem, for instance, manufactures diamonds made from the liver, yes, you read it right, the partially cremated liver of your loved one. In order to make this diamond, the crematory operator is responsible for scooping some molten tissue from the flaming corpse of your cherished family member or friend. Then, the tissue is simply dropped in the mail to LifeGem and they take it from there. Who doesn't want to wear momma's liver around their neck? This gross, imprecise scooping, by the way, is illegal in New York State.
The article is really thorough and profound; it covers many aspects of the funeral industry and discusses the Goliath conglomerates (Service Corporate International, specifically, which also contains Batesville Caskets, Dignity Memorial, the National Cremation Society, Advantage Funeral and Cremation Services, Making Everlasting Memorials, Memorial Plan Cemeteries and Funeral Homes and Funeria del Angel) that are crippling and absorbing the small, privately-owned businesses in Seattle and the entire country. I really encourage you to read the article; I think its imperative to have as much knowledge about this topic as possible. It is impossible to know when you may be faced with making funeral arrangements and going into the process armed with at least some basic information will benefit you immensely in the end.
