dust breeding

Small Slow Landscapes

Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp

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

Elévage de Poussière (Dust Breeding) is attributed to Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, 1920. Image found in Sophie Howarth, editor, Singular Images. London: Tate Publishing, 2005