Pictured is an old, flat-headed wooden broom that was photographed against a white background soon after it had been used to sweep a floor in a room in a house. Resting on the broom\u2019s bristles are a number of\u2006 \u2018dust bunnies\u2019, those small clumps of dust that accumulate under furniture and in corners, the places that a broom reaches less often than others.<\/p>\n
The dust in our homes is composed of many things: small amounts of plant pollen, human hairs, textile and paper fibres, minerals from the soil that we bring inside on the soles of our shoes and even burnt meteorite particles.<\/p>\n
The most significant particles are dead skin cells, which can make up to 50 per cent of its content. Do you remember being told this as a child? (We were also told as children that witches flew on broomsticks).<\/p>\n
Dust played an important role in an important artwork of the early 20th century \u2013 the Large Glass<\/i><\/span>, made (very slowly) by Marcel Duchamp in New York in sporadic periods between 1915 and 1923, when he declared the work \u2018definitively unfinished\u2019.<\/p>\n In 1920, using his newly acquired view camera, Duchamp\u2019s friend, the artist Man Ray (they hung out with each other every day during this period) made a photograph of the lower section of the artwork that had been resting on sawhorses, collecting dust for three months in Duchamp\u2019s apartment in the Lincoln Arcade Building on Broadway.<\/p>\n The resulting image resembled a desert or lunar landscape. Considered a joint work by the artists, it was given (by Duchamp) the new title Dust Breeding<\/i><\/span>. Soon afterwards, Duchamp would fix the dust with varnish on the sieves in the artwork, rubbing the rest away. This allowed the colours in the artwork to be made by chance, rather than something determined by human choice.<\/p>\n The (persistently polite) writer and raconteur Quentin Crisp was not one for sweeping or dusting the surfaces of the single rooms he lived in, both in London and New York. He declared on more than one occasion that \u2018after the first four years, the dirt doesn\u2019t get any worse\u2019. He would always follow this by stating: \u2018It\u2019s a question of not losing your nerve.\u2019<\/p>\n Crisp, like Duchamp, lived in a frugal manner, not quite Spartan, but certainly consuming less than most of us do in our contemporary situation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Again, like Marcel Duchamp, he looked at the human condition in a rather detached manner. At the end of the first paragraph of his wonderful book about his life in exile in New York, to which he gave the humorous title Resident Alien<\/i><\/span>, he wrote: \u2018I regard the earth as a courageous global experiment that failed.\u2019<\/p>\n Another type of dust is addressed in Ryszard Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski\u2019s final book, Travels with Herodotus<\/i><\/span>. Recalling his first visit to India, he observes a scene beside the Ganges where hundreds of corpses burn on wooden pyres. \u2018The gravediggers rake the still-glowing ashes and push them into the river. The gray dust floats atop the waves for a while but very soon, saturated with water, it sinks and vanishes.\u2019<\/p>\n Dust is all around us. Dust is what we all become.<\/p>\n David Grandorge is a photographer and senior lecturer in architecture at London Met. His fee for this column has been donated to support the publication of new and diverse voices in the AJ<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pictured is an old, flat-headed wooden broom that was photographed against a white background soon after it had been used to sweep a floor in a room in a house. Resting on the broom\u2019s bristles are a number of\u2006 \u2018dust bunnies\u2019, those small clumps of dust that accumulate under furniture and in corners, the places …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81397,"featured_media":774642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"ep_exclude_from_search":false},"categories":[702],"tags":[1324,76340,4930],"yoast_head":"\n