Join writer and curator David Campany as he discusses A Handful of Dust, which takes a photograph signed by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp as the starting point for a radical and ambitious history of the last century. In partnership with LE BAL and Ryerson Image Centre
Sunday 10 May 2020
17:00 BST, London
12:00 EDT, New York
Running time: approx 38 mins
About Handful of Dust
A Handful of Dust is David Campany’s speculative history of the last century, and a visual journey through some of its unlikeliest imagery. Let’s suppose the modern era begins in October of 1922. A little French avant-garde journal publishes a photograph of a sheet of glass covered in dust. The photographer is Man Ray, the glass is by Marcel Duchamp. At first they called it a view from an aeroplane. Then they called it Dust Breeding. It’s abstract, it’s realist. It’s an artwork, it’s a document. It’s revolting and compelling. Cameras must be kept away from dust but they find it highly photogenic. At the same time, a little English journal publishes TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
And what if dust is really the key to the intervening years? Why do we dislike it? Is it cosmic? We are stardust, after all. Is it domestic? Inevitable and unruly, dust is the enemy of the modern order, its repressed other, its nemesis. But it has a story to tell from the other side.
Campany’s connections range far and wide, from aerial reconnaissance and the American dustbowl to Mussolini’s final car journey and the wars in Iraq. a Handful of Dust will accompany Campany’s exhibition of the same name, first curated for Le Bal, Paris (16 October 2015 – 17 January 2016) and which has since toured to Whitechapel Gallery, London, Pratt Institute, New York, California Museum of Photography, Polygon Gallery, Vancouver, and Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto. The exhibition includes works by Man Ray, John Divola, Sophie Ristelhueber, Mona Kuhn, Gerhard Richter, Xavier Ribas, Nick Waplington, Jeff Wall and many others, alongside anonymous press photos, postcards, magazine spreads and movies.
To order copies of the book visit here
