Unexpectedly but punctually, dust has been found before at the historical junctures of the most important artistic eras and issues, and it reappears abundantly in the work of many artists today.
The exhibition is based on an idea and book by Elio Grazioli (La polvere nell’arte, Bruno Mondadori, Milan 2004) and presents a selection of contemporary artists invited to confront this theme. The invited artists have created new works created for the occasion, different in techniques and media, proving the centrality of a theme that is nevertheless so particular.
The metaphorical values of dust cover a vast and central constellation: life/death, instant/time, atom/matter, visibility/invisibility, ephemeral/durable, wear/eternity, knowledge/vanity… all the way to the modern concepts of entropy, complexity, anti-aesthetic, post…
Ever since the dust represented on musical instruments, books, objects, sometimes emphasized by fingerprints, dust has a special status: visual and tactile deception, it is a sign of absence and at the same time of the passage of something-someone: trace, imprint, cast.
When Marcel Duchamp enters the scene, dust comes out of representation: on the one hand he enters the work as substance-matter-color, on the other hand, with Elevage de poussière (made together with Man Ray) he binds himself to photography and highlights two of its unprecedented characters, that of “impossible” ready-made (because it is volatile and therefore needs to be “fixed”) and that of “inframince” (ultra-thin difference between image and real), which in fact will mark the main problems or with which many of the most important artists will come to terms in the postwar period.
Informal and material, developments in photography, the confrontation with the ready-made in so many ways, up to a refounding of painting and the image, are areas in which dust will return punctually and significantly. On the other hand, an artist like Alberto Giacometti re-proposes in terms of granularity what we can call the “minimal,” the being and the figure on the edge of disappearance. A whole other strand of the confrontation with dust follows, passing through Francis Bacon and others.
Dust often means dirt and dirt in turn means negative, unbecoming, socially repressed or removed: in art from Dadaism and fluxus to Gilbert and George to Mike Kelly. The opposite of dust is cleanliness: the presence of the tools of cleaning are equally significant in the path of dust in art: from brooms to mops to vacuum cleaners, we go from Robert Filliou dusting masterpieces in museums to Jeff Koons displaying vacuum cleaners as post-ready-made.
A particular strand is that of the link with photography: dust has much in common with photography, both in terms of its so-called semiotic status as an “index” (a direct trace left materially by the referent), and in terms of its quite particular relationship with time (present already past forever but preserved in image for a future always “delayed”).
A particular theme is that of absence: dust leaves a halo of what is no longer there, what has been taken away, what has been (Claudio Parmiggiani and Erwin Wurm are at the center of this issue). There is dust in the world of “concept” and multimedia as well: Lawrence Weiner, Luca Maria Patella. Then there is special dust in quantity: stardust, living dust, ecological dust, drug dust, dust of special places, post-dust… And so dust and “formlessness,” dust and “simulacrum,” dust and post-history… dust and music, dust and play…
