Whitechapel Gallery, A Handful of Dust.

With a sudden burst of energy I was able to view the exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, ‘A Handful of Dust’. The exhibition is on the upper level and to get to it one has to go through another exhibition on the ground floor. The first photograph I saw in the A Handful of Dust exhibition was one by Man Ray taken in Marcel Duchamp’s studio in Manhattan where he took pictures of a large piece of glass covered in dust. Duchamp allowed dust to accumulate over his work called the ‘Large Glass’, also known as ‘Dust Breeding’ see pic. below. 

 Large Glass or Dust Breeding Man Ray, Duchamp, photo Whitechapel Gallery.

Duchamp asked Man Ray to record the progress. There is no specific subject matter or scale.  Man Ray wrote that the image through his camera lens: ‘appeared like some strange landscape seen from a bird’s eye view’ so it appears as an aerial shot, and is pervasive without a specific subject or an original sculpture. As with this photograph one can see photography’s ability to baffle the viewer’s sense of scale, which is one of the elements I am working on with my photographs. In the same period T.S. Eliot published the ‘Waste Land’ where he wrote: ‘I will show you something different from either/your shadow at morning striding behind you/or your shadow at evening rising to meet you’. Basically he is showing how dust can create fear as it pollutes our air. Man Ray describing his photograph said: ‘I would rather photograph an idea than an object, and a dream rather than an idea’. It operates on two levels both the particular and the abstract. The resulting photograph was made while they were out for lunch so with an exposure of about an hour. Between the 1920’s till 1940’s different avant-garde journals used the image in varying frameworks while making changes to the title and editing. In this way the image The Large Glass has became something else. While Man Ray’s photograph was seen as an original in his own right and was seen as a photograph in Duchamp’s case his work is a means to document the production process of The Large Glass, so his interest is in the process. There is a duality between the two. The work creates an open debate about its function and Duchamp’s intention. The Photograph raises more questions then answers for example: is it a photograph or a document? Is it about a concept or the process or both? Or is it just Duchamp’s interest in the mundane ‘dust’. Because of this I found this photograph fascinating; I kept going back and back relooking at it, I saw others doing the same.

  

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In the exhibition the juxtaposition of different works from different artists working with dust creates associations in the mind of the viewer. So dust as representing mortality, ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes’. Examples of this are original postcards showing dust storms in the Midwest in America, Mussolini’s car (see pic. below), covered in dust and the aftermath of the nuclear bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. 

                                           Photo Whitechapel Gallery

On one side of the exhibition the photographs show major events such as natural disasters, images of landscape scarred by conflict see pic. below, on another side dispossession within the context of dust as contrasted with the subject matter itself. 

                   Photo by Sophie Ristelhueber - Whitechapel Gallery

Contrasting with anonymous photos, for example the woman drawing with her finger in the dust, in this case dust is outside of context, it doesn’t have an association. Does the presence of dust detract from the underlined subject matter or does it make us think more deeply through our own associations?  The curation of the exhibition creates a narrative of disparate photographs from International works of art such as Man Ray’s photograph to anonymous abstract representations of dust to actual documentation of dust. This is why it is a very well curated and well worth seeing exhibition.