Event overview
GLITS (Goldsmiths Literature Seminar)
In advance of 'A Handful of Dust', an exhibition he curates for the Whitechapel Gallery next year, David Campany will discuss the genesis of the project. Let’s suppose the modern era begins in October of 1922.
A little French avant-garde journal publishes a photograph of a sheet of glass covered in dust. The photographer is Man Ray, the glass is by Marcel Duchamp.
At first they called it a view from an aeroplane. Then they called it Dust Breeding. It’s abstract, it’s realist. It’s an artwork, it’s a document. It’s revolting and compelling. Cameras must be kept away from dust but they find it highly photogenic.
Also in October 1922, a little English journal publishes TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” And what if dust is really the key to the intervening years? Why do we dislike it? Is it cosmic? We are stardust, after all. Is it domestic? Inevitable and unruly, dust is the enemy of the modern order, its repressed other, its nemesis. But it has a story to tell from the other side.
* David Campany is a writer, curator and artist, working mainly with photography. David’s books include a Handful of Dust (2015), The Open Road: photography and the American road trip (2014), Walker Evans: the magazine work (2014), Gasoline (2013), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (2010), Photography and Cinema (2008) and Art and Photography (2003).
He has written over two hundred essays for museums and monographic books, and contributes to Frieze, Aperture, Source and Tate magazine. For his writing, David has received the ICP Infinity Award, the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, the Alice Award, a Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, and the Royal Photographic Society’s award for writing.
Recent curatorial projects include The Open Road: photography and the American road trip (various venues, USA, 2016-) Dust (Le Bal, Paris, 2015/16) Walker Evans (various venues in Poland, France, Belgium, Italy, Australia and New Zealand), Lewis Baltz: Common Objects (Le Bal, Paris 2014), Victor Burgin: A Sense of Place (AmbikaP3 London, 2013), Mark Neville: Deeds Not Words (The Photographers’ Gallery London, 2013) and Anonymes: Unnamed America in Photography and Film (Le Bal Paris, 2010).
David Campany is a Reader in Media, Arts and Design at the University of Westminster, London
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 24 Nov 2016 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
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