Tuesday 12 September 2017

A Handful of Dust

Kirsty Kerr is a visual artist and a curator at Spitalfields Studios. In this post she reflects on ‘A Handful of Dust’, an exhibition by David Campany, which recently finished at the nearby Whitechapel Gallery.

Emerging from the dizzying sensory journey that was Benedict Drew’s The Trickle-Down Syndrome (a series of large, loudly-coloured installations - possibly made all the more overwhelming by my hurried dash round before closing time), I found myself in a dim, unassuming room, with dark green walls dotted with photographs, and in the centre, a glass display box containing what seemed to be documents and artifacts more akin to a historical archive than a contemporary art exhibition.

This was A Handful of Dust, a show curated by David Campany, which took as its Muse a similarly unassuming image made almost a century ago. Presented alongside old press images and publications, and film and photography work from over 30 artists, the idea was to draw out the various resonances of this single photograph, inviting the viewer to trace a visual journey through major events of the 20th century.

The photograph in question was a kind of “unconscious collaboration” between Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp in 1920. The authorship of the work is debated, because the shot was taken by Man Ray, but the subject is the dusty surface of an artwork by Marcel Duchamp, a large glass piece (literally known as The Large Glass) that Duchamp had allowed to gather dust, intending to preserve it as “a sort of visual way of trapping time”.

My curiosity was instantly sparked by this notion of dust as subject and medium. It is something I’ve considered in my own work, previously collecting sheets of dust and preserving it in layers of resin for various projects (undoubtedly Duchamp and I would have gotten on). Man Ray’s photograph was later titled Dust Breeding, thought to have come from a sign Duchamp had hung in his studio alongside the words “Do not touch”. Of this strange process, Campany elaborates, “Dust, that inevitable intrusion is being harnessed, willed into existence and form” - as if the studio were a strange laboratory.



My previous experiments with dust.

Many artists have explored the idea of dust as metaphor, with its allusions to lofty themes as time and mortality. On the other hand, dust is about as ordinary as it gets, something we each have a relationship with in the everyday and the domestic. It embodies the “realness” of our lived experience in all its grit and imperfection. Perhaps it is the universality of dust that makes it both a profound and an ordinary substance, as Campany reflects, “we come from it, go to it, and create it daily with all the inevitability of breathing, and dying.

Eva Stenram’s work, Per pulverem ad astra (translated, “Through hardships to the stars”) explored both of these ideas. In 2007, the artist placed under her bed negatives of images that NASA sent back from the surface of Mars. She allowed clumps of dust to gather on them before making prints, besmeared with everyday dirt and grime. In the finished prints, the cosmic and domestic implications of dust become one.

Other works were rooted in a specific moment in world history, with the dust and ruin of Hiroshima, 9/11, and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius all explored to varying degrees. These sections were emotive, but also had a distance to them - the worst moments of historical suffering and brokenness so removed from my own experience that they felt otherworldly. Jeff Mermelstein’s photograph taken on the morning of September 11th felt eerie, depicting a public sculpture of man at rest near Wall Street, oblivious amongst the debris. Across the room, a large collection of commercial postcards sat with press images, both documenting the American dust storms of the 30s. The scenes looked apocalyptic, reminiscent of the dystopian American landscape visualised in sci-fi film, Interstellar.

Elsewhere, images of defiance and resilience revealed human responses to devastation. On one wall, a press photograph showed men at a library in Kensington after a 1940 air raid, browsing books among the wreckage as they would on any other day. On another, Shomei Tomatsu’s shot of a victim of Hiroshima came with the caption:

‘She had been irradiated as a young woman. I could tell she had once been beautiful. She walked and stood in front of my camera and said: “you came here to photograph me, right? So hurry up!”’

Though an indicator of decay and ruin, perhaps dust could also be a pointer towards renewal. The show’s title, A Handful of Dust, was taken from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, which Campany describes as a work “that pictures the world in fragments if not ruin, but sees the world’s possible redemption in those fragments too.” The idea of rebirth “out of the ashes” and glory from ruin has mythological and religious connotations, and is a concept I have been exploring in my current work about brokenness and restoration. In the first room, a screen playing an excerpt from Alain Resnais’ New Wave film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, showed the close-up embrace of two people becoming covered in a layer of nuclear dust. Though in black-and-white, the dust seemed to shimmer as gold, settling with a soft glow that was more aesthetically beautiful than thematically grave.


Tomatsu’s photograph of a Hiroshima victim


Man Ray’s Self Portrait

For me, this concept surfaced again in Man Ray’s Self Portrait, his handprint reproduced on the golden background of a book jacket. A print made from the body’s everyday sweat and dirt, impressed upon gold, amalgamates the ordinary with the glory that gold symbolises. This work was juxtaposed intriguingly with an image documenting early forensic fingerprinting procedures, and an anonymous press photograph of a mechanic with dusty hands, standing by Benito Mussolini’s car, which had been discovered ten years after the dictator was dragged from it and executed.

Other works carried an air of playfulness. In one section, Polaroid images were displayed with small open boxes, containing white cloths smeared with dust wiped from the surfaces of various Old Master paintings. In the 70s, artist Robert Filliou had photographed himself cleaning - without permission - one hundred artworks in the Louvre, claiming that these cloths now held the auras of the paintings themselves. Nearby, a video showed Bruce Nauman pushing a pile of flour on the floor into different configurations – a kind of “process sculpture”. The experimental film, called Flour Arrangements, also includes artists William Allan and Peter Saul observing and commentating on the activity in the style of a low-budget talk show.

Despite the various tangents and interpretations, the exhibition had a poetic cohesion to it. What could have potentially felt chaotic was actually a pleasing process of unearthing – a visual investigation allowing me to string together a sense of meaning across the walls, the unfolding of a kind of conceptual “map”. Sometimes the connections came immediately; Tereza Zelenkova’s photograph of Georges Bataille’s grave instantly recalled an earlier displayed excerpt of his text, Pouissiere (Dust):

‘The stotytellers have not realised that Sleeping Beauty would have awoken covered in a thick layer of dust […] One day or another… dust, supposing it persists, will probably begin to gain ground over domestics...’

At other times, the links were unexpected: the same photograph of Bataille’s grave, degraded and discolored from the printing process, also spoke of the inbuilt decay of analogue photography, foreshadowing Robert Burley’s 2007 shot of the demolition of two Kodak buildings, surrounded by a crowd documenting the spectacle with digital cameras.

The experience was one of surprise and discovery, of weaving threads between images that were seemingly worlds apart. Visual echoes bounced across the space, as if signifying repetitions in history. This idea was encapsulated in a cluster of three small photographs, depicting three prostrate bodies: a man taking a nap on a bench in Hiroshima, the plaster cast of a Pompeii victim, and a child’s grave, covered in a mound of dry soil in Alabama, and taken by Walker Evans during the Great Depression. For me, this profound triptych was a microcosm of the curation of the whole show.

Naturally, the ambiguity of images means that my associations are personal, and not necessarily universal. This notion of ambiguity was another starting point for Campany’s curation, on which he expounds:

‘I wanted a put together a show… that explored the many implications of Dust Breeding, and did so on a tight-rope […] Walking a deliberately precarious line, where one doesn’t know exactly what is being suggested by placing one image in proximity to another.’

And of course, Man Ray and Duchamp’s image has had a very ambiguous journey itself, originally being published under the misleading caption, ‘View from an aeroplane’. The exhibition begins by reflecting on this with a series of aerial photographs (including one processed on a broken glass plate, cracks visible) and comes full circle, ending with Sophie Ristelhueber’s 1991 shot of Kuwaiti deserts from the air, marked with the debris of war. Her image takes direct inspiration from Man Ray’s reversal of scale, and is even titled, Because of the Dust Breeding.


Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp’s Dust Breeding

A Handful of Dust was unlike any exhibition I have seen before. Not really a retrospective or merely a compilation of works on a theme, it would be better described as a kind of “passage” - a journey of how one image has shifted in meaning from context to context over the last century, a visual tracing of its “biography”, or what Sean O’Hagan calls its “long and curious afterlife” . Dust Breeding is now considered a disruptive moment in photography’s history, and has become a symbol of the mobility of images. In Campany’s own words, “the meaning of any image is in its destination” ; the interpretation of the viewer, and not just the intention of the maker, is significant. It’s refreshing to see his exhibition extend the same invitation to the viewer: to decipher meaning for themselves.

Posted by - Kirsty Kerr

1 comment:

  1. According to ghostwriting company In June 2017 Whitechapel Gallery displays A Handful of Dust. Uniting fine arts and archives, the display follows a visual excursion through the theme of residue from flying surveillance, wartime devastation and cataclysmic events to household earth and criminology. Brought about by caretaker and essayist David Campany as a theoretical history of the twentieth century, the presentation highlights works by more than 30 craftsmen and picture takers including Robert Filliou, Mona Kuhn, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Ristelhueber, Jeff Wall and Nick Waplington nearby magazine spreads, press photographs, postcards and film cuts.

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