Dust: perfect circularity

Sometimes we are not conscious of dust clinging to our bodies or of a sprinkling of chalk that settles on our limbs; we do not feel a mist at night, or the spider’s filmy threads in our path that ensnare us as we move, or the same creature’s withered vesture alighting on our heads, or birds’ feathers, or f1oating thistle down whose exceptional lightness often makes falling a heavy task; nor do we feel the tread of each and every creeping creature, nor each separate footstep that gnats and suchlike insects plant upon our bodies. It all goes to show that many particles must be stirred up within us before the seeds of spirit that interpenetrate every part of our bodies begin to feel that the elements have been disturbed, and before they can buffet their way across such great intervals, dash together, unite, and spring apart again. ¹

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about dust is the way it moves. Dust, as historian Caroline Steedman writes, ‘performs an action of perfect circularity’. ² By that, Steedman, as well as other scholars in sociology and architecture, ³ reorients our sensibilities of dust from the discarded to the fact that the smallest fragments of materiality and embodiment are never going away. In its circular movement, dust engulfs, settles and is airborne again. Dust is the traveller par excellence. It swirls, picking up our shed skin, worn-out fabrics and the minute particles comprising what we like to imagine and perceive as intact: bricks, cement, cities, our bodies, territories and the geo of geographies.

Always heterogeneous, dust picks up and leaves, shedding itself across the terrain it pervades. Dust covers glasses and lenses, clouds visions and inks the clear skies with hues of grey and yellow. Certainly, dust masks, but it also reveals. It is the sign, metaphor and visibility of ephemerality. It hovers and reflects, in-between your gaze and the striking beams of light coming from the night lamp, illuminating light itself into appearance. Dust is the fragment and the fragmented that remains after explosions of established orders ⁴ and that corrodes the materiality of determined grounds.

This short essay explores some of the themes of a recent exhibition on dust in London’s Whitechapel Gallery – A Handful of Dust, curated by the talented British photographer and writer David Campany. ⁵ This exhibition, we suggest, assembles together many critical affordances that dust offers to political and cultural geographers. Dust can guide us as we increasingly become more attuned to the indeterminacies and disorders of how we write an ever-fragmenting earth. In particular, Campany’s exhibition portrays dust as a trail that ‘traces a visual journey . . . from aerial reconnaissance, wartime destruction and natural disasters to domestic dirt and forensics’. ⁶ Dust here is narrated and mediated through the works of artists, magazine spreads, photojournalism, movie segments and an eBay collection of postcards of 1930s American Dust storms. ⁷ In the space of this essay, we follow the trail set by Campany, pausing at some of the exhibition displays while situating a number of its many themes in the emerging literature on dust. We start our exploration with an image of the legendary visual artist Man Ray (1890–1976). The title of the work is ‘Dust Breeding’, and it is also the exhibition’s opening piece.

In 1920, Ray took a picture of one of Duchamp’s artworks, ‘The Large Glass’ (also: La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même). Duchamp, a close friend to Man Ray, intentionally left the artwork for a year in his New York studio to gather dust. Duchamp’s studio was notorious for its dust in general, yet for this piece, as one art historian observes, Duchamp ‘made work of doing nothing: dust, typically the trace of neglect, was instead the product of purposeful inactivity’. ⁸ Beatrice Wood and Henri-Pierre Roche, the earliest proponents of American Dada, visited Duchamp to see the ‘The Large Glass’ and recounted the sign underneath the artwork: ‘Dust Breeding. To be respected’. ⁹

One year into this patient ‘breeding’ of dust, Man Ray photographically captured how it settled on Duchamp’s glass sheet, slowly landscaping its surface. His suspension of Duchamp’s ‘unapproachable monument’ ¹⁰ first appeared in print in 1922, with the telling caption, ‘A view from an aeroplane’. Ray remembered, ‘Looking down on the work as I focused the camera, it appeared like some strange landscape from a bird’s-eye view’. ¹¹ Later, it became more known as ‘Dust Breeding’ (Élevage de poussière), the image with which the exhibition opens (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Man Ray’s photograph in display in A Handful of Dust – Whitechapel Gallery (2017), taken by Aya Nassar.

To take the time to see dust, patiently letting it breed and looking at it, is to allow these small and invisible particles to question the place from which we grasp and capture space. Ray photographed dust on Duchamp’s artwork in the still-lingering aftermath of World War I and thus, unsurprisingly, announced it as a ‘view from an airplane’. Dust, displaying a continuous process of perfect circularity, has the ability to disorient the viewer by gesturing towards both the distance of the infinitely small and the nearness of the magnificently large. It invites geographic imagining, engulfing the spectator within a new but ‘vague terrain’. ¹²

Campany’s exhibition ends with a mirror picture that captures this ambivalence between a bird’s-eye view and a grounded close-up of the granularity of ground. This final piece is one of Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographs in Fait (‘Fact’, or ‘Done’), a photographic report of Kuwaiti deserts in the aftershock of Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion. The photograph references Man Ray’s picture of dust and equally problematises the position from which we are looking. A New York Times correspondent interviewed Ristelhueber in 2011:

The photos were taken straight on, some from the air, others from the ground, but the perspective is as indeterminate as that in the Duchamp-Ray work. ‘You don’t know if it’s a child’s game, running fingers through the sand; you don’t know where we are anymore’, Ms. Ristelhueber said. ¹³

We fear dust because it reminds us of death, of fragmentation, of neglect, but ultimately of (dis)order. Campany explains in an interview that the breeding of dust refers to its ephemeral quality and the ‘effect of some prior action – attrition, breaking, shedding’. ¹⁴ Dust, as architect Teresa Stoppani shows, is the witness after the fragmentation of the established spatial order(s). ¹⁵ It is for this reason that Campany’s exhibition was accompanied by T.S. Eliot’s landmark poem, The Waste Land:

There is shadow under this red rock

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust. ¹⁶

Duchamp’s celebration of dust, by inviting and exhibiting it as art, expressed an early critique of the clinical and conservationist space of the museum. Dust, in contrast to the museum, is drawn and moved by warmth and openness. Nina Katchadourian (2016), an Armenian-American artist, recently prepared a creative audio tour in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) entitled ‘Dust Gathering’. ¹⁷ For the project, she interviewed the MoMA’s oft-forgotten logistical manager whose sole responsibility, it seems, is to maintain the ‘enormous air handling units: roaring, breathing silver boxes each the size of a small room’. ¹⁸ Every museum fights a constant, but hidden, battle to prevent dust from breeding. The Director and Assistant Director of Building Operations are in charge of controlling the MoMA’s atmospheric link to the outside world:

Our air is pulled in from the outside, it’s treated, and when I say treated, sent through multiple layers of filtration before being sent into the galleries. No matter what the temperature is outside or the conditions, the air in the gallery needs to be maintained at seventy degrees with a relative humidity of fifty percent. ¹⁹

Despite the museum’s quests for order and control, dust still pervades. Halfway through Campany exhibition in London’s Whitechapel, we find another dust critique – this time, by the sometimes-forgotten French artist and philosopher Robert Filliou. He is featured posing in a photograph in the Louvre while, illicitly, collecting dust from famous paintings for his Fluxdust (1967) collection. Through this playful project, a part of Filliou’s ‘Dust to Dust’ (Poussière de Poussière, 1977) series, he expressed the wish that ‘the aura of original work could be presented as a relic’. ²⁰ Filliou collected dust from works of Magritte, da Correggio and other names from the canon and hid it away in an archival and labelled box. In doing so, he transformed an undesired element – dust – into a work of art itself. Playing with the ephemerality of materiality, his intervention challenges the authority of art and questions the value of stability.

Next to Filliou’s disorderly critique of the authority of art, we discovered what would become one of our favourite contributions in the exhibition. This was a modest collection of photographs taken by an unknown artist (or artists?). The anonymous photographs display and describe the affect and effects of the infamous Dust Bowl in ‘Dirty Thirties’ America. Carrying beautiful titles such as Trying to find the railroad track after a dust storm, the photos illuminate what happens when dust turns its ephemerality against modernity’s false sense of solidity and security. Even gravity has difficulties controlling it. ‘Dust goes where the wind lists. As if it were nothing at all’. ²¹ One of the largest anthropogenic environmental disasters in recorded history, the Dust Bowl is nationally remembered as having triggered the most intensive human (and animal) migration episode in US history. ²² Donald Worster, author of the classic chronicle of the event, observes,

‘Earth’ is the word we use when it is there in place, growing the food we eat, giving us a place to stand and build on. ‘Dust’ is what we say when it is loose and blowing on the wind. Nature encompasses both. ²³

What happens after the storm, the fragmentation, the explosion and the disorder? Dust is the choreographer of sedimentation and construction and of ruination and withering away. Dust is what we are left with when the solid urban concrete ground that secures our familiar bearings cracks and breaks. Halfway through the exhibition, we found a display of 33 pictures of fragmented and broken concrete ground. ‘Nomads’ (2008), by Xavier Ribas, also entitled Concrete Geographies, documents the fragments of concrete that were dug out from an eviction site in Barcelona in 2004. The concrete floor was lifted up and destroyed to empty the land and make it uninhabitable for the Roma families evicted from it. The glaring concrete slabs are all that remains, performing as remindful traces of the attempt to fix and instil emptiness. The exhibition shows black-and-white prints of the cracked concrete ground. These prints are followed by two pictures of cloud storms gathering over the site, alluding to the recurring dust storms that follow any eviction. In the exhibition, we watch, through a series of pictures, the stable ground of the everyday melting into dust – fragment to fragment.

In the space of the exhibition, dust enchants us, inviting us to see it as something more than an affective geography of loss. If we look at it long enough, allowing it to breed, it might teach us about its never-ending playfulness, the perpetual displacement of our material bodies and the positions from which we see and attempt to capture and write the earth – indeed, the very practice of geography. We might approach our geographies with fewer certainties about the stability of earth or air and the politics of vision, light and knowledge – stabilities and politics that we are schooled in, until we learn to crumble their cemented authorities and question their weighty gravities. Dust transgresses neat spaces, spaces we were told to keep separate in academic disciplines. It is at once magnificent – interstellar, and cosmic, belonging to (outer?) space – and mundane – inevitable and persistent like dusty corners salvaged from the vacuum cleaner.

Dust storms erupt and sweep over the face of the earth, carrying the granularity of the earth in the air. Dust storms engulf us, erasing the traces of the footsteps we dug deep, perhaps sometimes too deep, into the cemented roads of reassurance. Dust rises from the ground that we made and trusted to be stable, until it suddenly cracked! Dust storms bring that which we thought we had swept away as marginal back in full force and in perfect circularity.