Artist, Nina Katchadourian: Many artists have made use of dust in their work—perhaps most famously Marcel Duchamp, who invited it into his piece known as The Large Glass. This case holds some of Duchamp’s elaborate notes and sketches, intended as a complement to The Large Glass. The Large Glass is about six by nine feet, and it was meant to be displayed vertically, but Duchamp decided to let it lie horizontally by an open window in his studio so that dust could settle on it over time.
Here’s curator Kim Conaty.
Kim Conaty: It becomes this, like, topographic surface. But it’s kind of an amazing moment of thinking of this, of this flat, turning what will be, what is a vertical piece flat, to really be like a receptor surface, and to allow the— allow the whole environment, the city, the inside and the outside, to come together as dust and to take over that space.
In 1920, after a year’s worth of dust accumulation, photographer Man Ray took a picture of the surface of The Large Glass. It’s a black and white photograph that has always reminded me of an aerial view of some very dusty airport runways, and the image is called Dust Breeding.
Nina Katchadourian: Dust does take over, and dust does breed—like bunnies, as the expression goes. And that brings me to a dust bunny story, one that exemplifies both an embrace of dust and an another way of using it as a sculptural material. This story comes from MoMA conservator Ellen Moody.
Ellen Moody: I enlisted some of my colleagues. Uh, we collected dust for about a month. And actually, at our Christmas party, I made a little sculpture out of them, in the shape of a rabbit, and called it a dust bunny, and gave it to another conservator. It was about rabbit size. It was a life-size dust bunny.
Nina Katchadourian: If you look at your device, you’ll see a picture of the dust bunny. The conservator who got it as a present still has it, although apparently it smells a bit funny.