The idea of an exhibition about dirt created by a trust dedicated to the advancement of scientific knowledge made me distinctly suspicious.Though it is hard to talk about dirt in a way that doesn’t carry some sense of disapproval, the moralism implied by the exhibition’s title, the Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, did nothing to allay my fears.This would be the opposite of the exhibition I wanted to see: rather than being a display of our hysterical modern relationship to dirt, it would be a paean to our triumph over filth on the road to spotless white kitchens and frequent showers. Such triumphalism is misplaced. Dirt isn’t some thing ; it’s a position.You can’t get rid of dirt. Sitting in the Wellcome Collection’s very clean café at the entrance to the exhibition, I read through my press pack, which quotes the anthropologist Mary Douglas approvingly:‘dirt is matter out of place’.That quote, so often used in discussions of rubbish, dirt, and detritus in the city, is itself a form of dirt, so often is it taken out of place, and out of context. In Purity and Danger , whence the quote emerges, Mary Douglas analyses the conventions and categories that provide the scaffolding of our lives. Things, as much as people, have places: dirt is the emergence of something in a place it should not be. Mud in the field is fine, on the kitchen counter, a horror. If you are going to follow this observation and construct an exhibition around it, as the Wellcome Collection claims it has done, then it should not be a history of the conquest of mud and bacteria, those enemies of mankind, but an inquiry into the conventions that create situations in which things come to be classified as dirt, and a display of the myriad ways humans and dirt find themselves bound up together.
For if dirt is a result of things moved from their proper places, often by human hand, people also spend a great deal of time inveighing against dirt, and ensuring that other people spend not inconsiderable amounts of time preventing its appearance. If people move dirt, dirt moves people.The need to be clean maintains the borders of the very categories through which dirt moves; the possibility of dirt creates the need for a constant watchfulness, and thus distributes roles and tasks to people. It is not so much kitchen surfaces that were scrubbed in American suburban houses in the 1950s, as it was a dream of security and comfort that was polished. Such logic is on magnificent display in the first room of the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition, which explores home-life in seventeenth century Delft. Upon entering, I immediately felt elated, and unclean – the exhibition is going to inquire into the categories that create dirt, it is going to uncover that history of the moral imperative to be clean, and here was I doubting the exhibition, merely because it is organised by the public relations arm of a pharmaceutical giant. In that first room, we are in the age of Calvinism, and purity is next to Godliness. On display are brooms and bibles, instruments for cleaning the house and the heart. Long before twentieth century anthropologists talked of purity and danger, the Calvinists understood that spirit rests in things, and that there is a correspondence between the purity of the house and the purity of the soul; dirt is an index of morality.
rel igion hygiene disapproval virtue moral ity
exhibitions | dirt , the filthy reality
of everyday life by joshua craze
MORAL CONQUEST
visiting the Wellcome Collection
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Bruce Nauman, video installation. Raw Material Washing Hands, Normal (A of A/B) Raw Material Washing Hands, Normal (B of A/B),1996
ARTIST ROOMS. Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund, 2008
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