dust breeding small slow landscapes
man ray and marcel duchamp
Elévage de Poussière (Dust Breeding) is attributed to Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, 1920. Image found in Sophie Howarth, editor, of Singular Images . London: Tate Publishing, 2005
from David Campany’s essay in Singular Images : Micro or macro Dust Breeding resembles, to borrow the French title of another Man Ray image, a terrain vague . It looks like a waste ground or disused area, perhaps the overlooked edge of a city. It is an indoor image alluding to the outside, particularly when titled View from an Aeroplane . Modern Europe saw the terrain vague as a site of anxiety: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ warned T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland . In North America there is more terrain vague than anything else. There, it appears more as a motif of boredom or entropy. Dust has a place in both schemes. It is abject, liminal, bodily stuff that threatens the modern and rational order. It is also a sign of dead time passing. https://davidcampany.com/dust-breeding-man-ray-1920/
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