Dust

Author(s): Marijn Nieuwenhuis and Aya Nassar

Source: Cultural Geographies , July 2018, Vol. 25, No. 3, Special Issue: cultural geographies
of Precarity (July 2018), pp. 501-507
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

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747252
research-article2017
CGJ0010.1177/1474474017747252cultural geographiesNieuwenhuis and Nassar

cultural geographies in practice

cultural geographies

Dust: perfect circularity

2018, Vol. 25(3) 501­–507
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1474474017747252
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Marijn Nieuwenhuis
The University of Warwick, UK

Aya Nassar
The University of Warwick, UK

Abstract
This essay centres on a recent exhibition in Whitechapel Gallery, London – A Handful of Dust,
curated by David Campany. The exhibition focuses on the thing/concept/idea of dust and features
the work and thoughts of artists (e.g. Duchamp), photographers (e.g. Man Ray) and others. In
this essay, we walk through the exhibition, pausing at some of its displays while contextualising a
number of its many themes in the emerging literature on dust. Dust, we argue, teaches geographers
about the fragmentary, the indeterminate, and blurs the line between order and disorder. As we
attune to dust and appreciate its movements, we learn to cultivate a culture of geography with
fewer certainties about the stability of earth, air and light. Through it, with it, we question, and
embrace, the never-ending playfulness and displacement of our bodies and the positions from
which we see, write and dust the earth.

Keywords
art, dust, ground, museum, photography

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

Corresponding author:
Marijn Nieuwenhuis, The University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: [Link]@[Link]

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502 cultural geographies 25(3)

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 yel-
low. Certainly, dust masks, but it also reveals. It is the sign, metaphor and visibility of ephemeral-
ity. 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 orders4 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 particu-
lar, Campany’s exhibition portrays dust as a trail that ‘traces a visual journey . . . from aerial recon-
naissance, 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 situat-
ing 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 ‘unap-
proachable 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).
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 photo-
graphed dust on Duchamp’s artwork in the still-lingering aftermath of World War I and thus, unsur-
prisingly, 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

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Nieuwenhuis and Nassar 503

Figure 1. Man Ray’s photograph in display in A Handful of Dust – Whitechapel Gallery (2017), taken by
Aya Nassar.

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

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504 cultural geographies 25(3)

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 pho-
tograph 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 epi-
sode 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

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Nieuwenhuis and Nassar 505

concrete ground. ‘Nomads’ (2008), by Xavier Ribas, also entitled Concrete Geographies, docu-
ments 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 posi-
tions 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.

Author note
The two authors of this essay share fragmentary relationships to dust, as all dusty affinities are! Aya comes
from a very dusty city. This dustiness – a word which could mean many things, the ever-blowing of liveliness,
fragmentation, multiple temporalities and a colour scheme of shades of grey and yellow – haunts, yet para-
doxically, grounds her. With dust, she thinks, she can make claims against the neatness of politics, architec-
ture, space and time. With dust, perhaps she can walk through the melancholia that engulfs spaces of loss and
waste. Being-with-dust opens up endless possibilities like restless germinating pollen in a dancing dust storm.
Marijn does not like dust. He is allergic to it and finds it difficult to breathe when there is too much of it.
However, he knows (very well, indeed) that he was, is and will become that which annoyingly and allergically
enters his nose and obstructs him from breathing. How much he likes to breathe the air where also dust
resides. One more breath – in, then out in the great outdoors. He uncovers and covers himself with it.
The two authors contributed equally to the writing of this manuscript.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. by [Link] (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2001), p. 78.
2. [Link], Dust, Encounters: Cultural Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001),
p. 160.
3. In architecture, we build on the work of [Link], ‘Antigone’s Dissident Dustings: Coatings,
Revolutions and the Circularity of Dust’, in [Link] (ed.), Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence
(Critiques: Critical Studies in Architectural Humanities) (London and New York: Routledge, 2014),

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506 cultural geographies 25(3)

pp. 117–27; [Link], ‘Dust Projects: On Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk and Some Contemporary
Dusty Makings in Architecture’, The Journal of Architecture, 12(4), 2007, pp. 543–57; [Link],
‘Dust Revolutions. Dust, Informe, Architecture (Notes for a Reading of Dust in Bataille)’, The Journal
of Architecture, 12(4), 2007, pp. 437–47; [Link], ‘Dust, Vacuum Cleaners, (War) Machines and
the Disappearance of the Interior’, Idea Journal 2011: Interior Economics, 2012, pp. 50–9; as well as
[Link], ‘Dust (1)’, in [Link] and [Link] (eds), City A-Z (London and New York: Routledge, 2000),
pp. 62–3. For the importance of dust in sociology: [Link] and [Link], ‘Dust: A Study in Sociological
Miniaturism’, The Sociological Quarterly, 44(1), 2003, pp. 1–15, that is besides a collection of non-
disciplinary writings on dust, [Link], Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000); [Link], Dust, Object Lessons (New York and
London: Bloomsbury, 2016); [Link], ‘Dust in the Machine: Le Corbusier’s Gaffite À Cap Martin’,
Inventory, 1(2), 1996, pp. 10–29; [Link], ‘Egyptian Dust: The Social Life of Endangered Spaces’, in
[Link] (ed.), Dust: Egypt’s Forgotten Architecture (London: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2012).
4. Stoppani, ‘Antigone’s Dissident Dustings’, pp. 117–8.
5. For more information about the exhibition, see press release: <[Link]
press/a-handful-of-dust/>
6. <[Link]
7. ‘When the show opened in Paris, a very learned French art historian asked me which archive contained
all those popular postcards of 1930s American dust storms. When I told her they were from eBay, she
looked genuinely shocked’. ‘A Handful of Dust and The Futility of Glass: An Interview with David
Campany #ASX’, American Suburb X, 8 February 2016, <[Link]
[Link]>
8. [Link], ‘Something in the Air’, Cabinet, 35(Dust Fall), 2009, <[Link]
org/issues/35/[Link]>
9. [Link], Marcel Duchamp (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 116, original emphasis.
10. Cros, Marcel Duchamp, p. 116.
11. [Link], ‘“Dust to Dust” – David Campany discusses his exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London’,
Financial Times Weekend Magazine, 3–4 June [Link] at [Link]
12. In an interview, David Campany explains that the image is an unlikely counterpoint to military imaging,
forensics, documentary practices, photojournalism, and reportage. In it we see an exploration of time, an
embrace of chance, spatial uncertainty, ambiguities of origin and authorship, institutional instability, a
blurring of photography, sculpture and performance, a meditation on process, a stand-off between image
and text, and a scrambling of distinctions between document and artwork, the formal and the formless,
the cosmic and the domestic. D. Campany, aperture, 17 December 2015, < >
13. [Link], ‘Art/Architecture; A Specialist in Ravaged Leftovers of Humanity’, New York Times, 28
October 2010, <[Link]
[Link]>
14. [Link], ‘A Handful of Dust and The Futility of Glass: An Interview with David Campany’.
15. Stoppani, ‘Antigone’s Dissident Dustings, p. 123.
16. [Link] and [Link], The Annotated Waste Land: With Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2005), p. 58.
17. [Link], ‘Dust Gathering’, MoMA, 2016, <[Link]
18. Katchadourian, ‘Dust Gathering’.
19. Nelson Nieves in Katchadourian, ‘Dust Gathering’, <[Link]
20. [Link], Quests for the Lost and Found, <[Link]/amyfowler/Quests-for-the-Lost
-and-Found>
21. Amato, Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible, p. 4.
22. ‘Mass Exodus from the Plains’, Public Broadcasting Service, <[Link]
americanexperience/features/surviving-the-dust-bowl-mass-exodus-plains>
23. [Link], Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.
12, 13.

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Nieuwenhuis and Nassar 507

Author biographies
Marijn Nieuwenhuis lectures International Relations and Political Geography at the University of Warwick.
His research is at the intersection of geography, philosophy and politics. His current research focuses on the
‘politics of the air’ and political imaginations of sand. He studies these two themes broadly in relation to ques-
tions over the link between environmental materialities and political matters concerning technology, pollu-
tion, security, territory and governance.
Aya Nassar researches the politics of production of space in Cairo in the decades following independence
(1950s-1970s). She looks at ‘Fire’, ‘Mud’, ‘Cement’ and ‘Dust’ as key material/metaphoric elements of space
that have acted on the city. She is currently a doctoral student in the department of Politics and International
Studies, the University of Warwick, UK.

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