WE ARE EARTH: DUST IN THE HANDS OF THE ARTIST

Robin Wheelwright NessAMVC265012/7/2011

The Dust Collectors

"What I have kept is some W.T.C. dust I gathered from the windshield of a lonely car left abandoned on Fulton Street, near Nassau Street. I scooped up the dust on Saturday, Sept. 15, 2001, and brought it home in a small bag that I had found. When home, I transferred the dust to a jar, where it has been since."

- James Marturano

Symbolic and Totemic Dust

Jean-Marie Haessle, a French-born artist— had just discussed his will with a lawyer in Lower Manhattan — began hustling back uptown after the collapse of the first tower. But, in an action he can describe only as reflexive, he stopped long enough to scoop up dust with an envelope on Wall Street “I don’t know why, I don’t know why,” Mr. Haessle, now 71, said. “As an artist, I feel this gigantic, beautiful structure, reduced to this amazingly thin powder. To me, even today, it’s just. ...”

"We live in Greenwich Village. During the days after Sept. 11, soot and ashes rained down over our neighborhood and poured into our open window. A lot accumulated on the windowsill and it didn't seem right to throw it away. We gathered it in a jar, which we still keep until this day. -Joanne and Kevin Goodman

“I ran down to the World Trade Center after the attacks on Sept. 11, when I was still in school, and felt such a sense of loneliness after taking note of my surroundings, the air thick, and seemingly still, weighted down by the snowlike material covering every street. I filled my backpack with the debris, and completed this conceptual artwork out of acrylic/plexi in October 2001." - Eric Parnes

Fragmentation"Recovery workers gave these to me while I was volunteering at ground zero. I believe the pin is from a steel beam. There is a fragment of marble, and to me the most disturbing artifact, glass from one of

the towers. I do not display these at home. They have been in a drawer for over nine years." -Stephanie Zesssos

I was a New York City police officer and picked up a thin ribbon of metal from the site. I feel kind of dumb because it didn't occur to me that there were others doing this kind of thing. I didn't want a

'souvenir,' but I wanted something tactile just so I knew it really happened. – Dante Messina

“Mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls – such of them as are not yet gone where they have to go, and may be flitting hither and thither, doubting, themselves, of the fittest place for them”. – Ruskin’s 1870 diary

“WHERE DOES THE DUST ITSELF COLLECT?XU BING Manhattan

Memorialization

Xu Bing. Gallery of Wales, Cardiff, 2004

“PHANTOM TOWERS”

“They were still very present, to us they felt like phantom limbs.”

Having photographed the dust cloud the night before, they had the idea to “re-sculpt the dust cloud into towers”.

“UNREGISTERED CITY”Jiang Pengyi

“LIBRARY OF DUST”David Maisel

Inside the room, in a dim and dusty corner of one of many abandoned buildings on the decaying campus of the Oregon State Hospital here, are 3,489 copper urns, the shiny metal dull and

smeared with corrosion, the canisters turning green. The urns hold the ashes of mental patients who died here from the late 1880's to the mid-1970's. The remains were unclaimed by families who had long abandoned their sick relatives, when they

were alive and after they were dead.

Alchemy and The Victorian Dust Heap

London was built, in part, from it’s own rubbish. The brick making industry was born from the dust heap when the ash, cinders and rubbish were mixed with rich red clay mud from nearby fields.

The Great Dustheap, Kings's Cross, 1837

“Laid to Rest” SERENA KORDAKorda ‘takes on subject matters that are often overlooked and highlight’s them in new ways.”

For “Laid to Rest” Korda revived the 19th-century technique of creating bricks partly from the dust of the local heaps.”

Korda is fascinated with the commerce and industry that is embodied in waste and the fact that the waste we produce forms the basis of our civilization and can be transformed in to ‘gold’.

Reanimation/TransformationCOLLECTION – TECHNIQUE – CREATION – MARKING –

INSTALLATION – REANIMATION PERFORMANCE [DANCE/MUSIC/PROCESSION] – [RE]BURIAL – MODERN

ARCHAEOLOGY

The Great Clean-Up

Magical and Mundane:The Natural Dichotomy of Dust

“DUST SERIES”THOMAS EDWARDS & UJIN LEE

“House Series” FRANCESCA WOODMAN

“Dust consists of objects that have long since lost their identity. Things that have dried out, decomposed, powered, and shifted in a way that makes their true identities indiscernable.”