A very short History of Dust in Art
Art
seems to employ a myriad of textures and materials – and even no
materials at all – in order to express itself. Yet there is something
which has been used from the very start of this thing called art, when
our cave-dwelling ancestors began leaving their spiritual mark on this
world. I am talking about dust, about dirt, earth, humus. The Neolithic
"artist" imprinted his thought firstly and foremost by using charcoal
and various types of dust, preferably of the reddish variety. The
results are stunning even nowadays, after millennia and millennia. And
they are born out of one of the most elemental materials available to
humankind, something that just lies around in every corner and, indeed,
everywhere one cares to look.
Dust in itself is not
very versatile, and surely our ancestors noted this. The results of this
observation is that they mixed it with animal fat to make stick around
for longer. I should say that ten thousand years is a pretty long period
of time, and I wish many other art pieces would last even hundred times
less. But you see, they don't build things this durable these days,
isn't it?
But we are not here to talk about how long
things last, but about how things are made, and what are they made of.
Making art by using dust is, as we all know, nothing new. Apart from
cave paintings, dust (or rather special pigments from special soils) has
been used in paints from the ancient Egyptians onwards, by peoples from
all the corners of the world. We are going to jump over millennia,
then, and look at the use of proper dust while creating works of
contemporary art. We are not speaking of tempera, oil colours or
gouaches made with ground-based pigments, but dust-dust, the kind that
gets on your clothing when you take a fall outside, that sticks to your
shoes, and is swept by street sweepers with their big brooms and
mechanised aspirators and other cleaning implements.
There
are several contemporary artists who have left their mark in dust in
recent times: I will only mention Vik Muniz, Allison Cortson, Mona
Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Zhang Huan. We could also add to the count
the great Antoni Tapies and several exponents of Arte Povera, but that
would bring another dimension to this discussion. The art with dust I
would like to talk about is the sort of art that is really connected to
people. We can add to this small but nevertheless illustrious gallery
our own Nicolae Comanescu, the painter of Romanian disconnected
realities.
What brings together such different artists
such as Muniz, Cortson, Floe/Vatamanu, Zhang and Comanescu? It is the
materials they used, which have the particularity of being the people's
own dust and ashes. And dust, whether we like it or not, is personal and
it represents us. Let me explain...
No matter if we
talk of buildings or people, the dust that surrounds them is made, to a
lesser or greater extent, by tiny particles that were born out of their
own bodies. In the case of buildings, dust can be made of bits that
come, through fiction or impact, from bricks or cement, but also brought
from the outside world, carried inside by the people who pass their
thresholds.
In the case of people, the dust that
surrounds them – in their houses or workplaces – comes from bricks and
cement too, but also from tiny pieces that come from books, shoes,
clothing and so on. And, lest we forget, from dead skin and fallen
hairs. So the dust from my house fully represents me bodily. And if
anyone would be curious enough to analyse things under the microscope,
they could say what sort of objects I have in the house, whether I like
to wear cotton or silk, or whether my carpets are old, or that I have
many old books and so on.
This was the general idea
used by Vik Muniz in his great show from the Whitney Museum in the US
(2001), and also the concept behind Allison Cortson's portraits.
Muniz,
for his exhibition "The Things Themselves: Pictures of Dust" thought to
use the dust gathered by Whitney Museum's cleaners for several months.
Sifting through it, he then used it as some artists use paints and inks,
to render shapes and forms and colours. Naturally, the effect was that
of black and white photographs: regular dust is not too coloured.
Muniz,
a Brazillian artists living in the US, is also known for his paintings
made with jelly, jams and other unusual substances. But of this dusty
experience he said: "There was dust from the first floor, which was dark
and greasy. On the top floor, there was some lighter dust. It was the
hardest substance I've ever worked with, because it's disgusting. Dust
is pieces of hair and skin. I think people scratch their heads a lot in
museums; that gets mixed with the residue from the artworks themselves.
That's the ultimate bind between the museum visitor and the artwork".
(from New York Times Magazine, 11 February 2001).
So there you have it: Muniz's works were a "portrait" of the museum, but also of its visitors. Read more on Vik Muniz at
www.vikmuniz.net
Allison
Cortson, an American artist, has a somewhat different view. Cortson,
for a change, looked not for the dust of public institutions, but from
that of people's personal spaces, in their flats and houses. Her
naturalistic portraits of friends and acquaintances come complete with
the depiction of the space they use everyday, painted with the dust of
those living quarters. Such perfect portraits indeed! One can see the
people, and one can search for their spirit in these depiction. But also
present are the particles and molecules from those people's lives,
which are derived (in part) directly from them. See some Allison Cortson
works here:
www.thehappylion.com/index.php?artist=cortson&view=list
To
give a further, spiritual, dimension to this short history of dust and
contemporary art, we mentioned Zhang Huan. He does not work with dust
per se, he works with ashes, but I do believe we must include him in
this short history of artistic dust. His materials are the ashes of
prayer incense sticks from the temples of Shanghai. They don't represent
people as well as the dust from apartments and museums does, but coming
from temples, these ashes represent people's hopes and prayers. If we
would go for pompous phrases, we could even say this is a metaphor for
humankind's hopes and prayers – but we won't say it, because we happen
to hate metaphorical speeches. Zhang's most recent exhibition took place
during October-November 2007, in London, at Haunch of Venison Gallery.
Here he exhibited paintings (made with ash-paints, naturally) and
sculptures made of compacted ash. The exhibition was transferred to
Haunch of Venison Berlin, where the novelty is a 4-metre tall Buddha
made of compacted ash. (details here:
www.haunchofvenison.com/en/#page=berlin.current.zhang_huan)
This
spiritual dimension of art reminds me of a
work/intervention/performance by Romanian artists Mona Vatamanu and
Florin Tudor, incidentally former colleagues of Nicolae in the
Rostopasca art group that made the Romanian art headlines in the
1998-2000 period.
The Schitul Maicilor church in
Bucharest is a building which, in 1982, was put on tracks and literally
moved some 200 metres further down the road to make room for blocks of
flats. In 2006, Mona and Florin went to the present-day location of the
church, picked up pocketfuls of dust and transported them back to the
original location of the church. Thus, symbolically but also physically,
the old church found its old place. We could say that the artists have
made, through this intervention, a historical reparation for the
demolition of a large chunk of old Bucharest that made room for
Ceausescu's People's House, the present-day Palace of Parliament. More
on Mona and Florin at
www.monavatamanuflorintudor.ro
And now we can start speaking about our friend Nicolae Comanescu, the painter whose brand new project you are about to see.
Ever
since I met him, Nicolae was up for a laugh, and always ready to give a
kick in the Establishment's behind. Working together with his mates
from Rostopasca, Nicolae did exactly these: he had fun, he poked fun at
the pretensions of the Romanian contemporary art scene, and – very
importantly – he provoked into action the dozy young artists of the day.
Or maybe those were the times when young artists didn't do much,
anyway.
Gone are the days when Nicolae would kill,
together with his fellow Rostopascians, the category of "nice", and
would play tapes with long rants about all and sundry (which were
probably fuelled by alcohol). Mr Comanescu has grown up to be a painter,
and a pretty good one, too. A painter with an eye for the quirks of
Bucharest's urban life (and God knows there are so many of them!), and
with a healthy sense of humour. His new works from "Dust 2.0" series
continue the line of reasoning observed in the "Wrong Paintings", "Grand
Prix Remix, and "Beach Culture in Bercsenyi".
In those
series, the world is seen from the perspective of a big bag of candies
(different tastes, different colours, all mixed-up), or of a generator
of randomness: limousines, sexy girls in skimpy outfits, sea-battles,
trucks, dogs, blocks of flats... This all might seem unconnected, but
they all belong to the same reality of media hyperactivity that results
in a deluge of visual information hitting us square on our heads.
Underneath
the anarchic facade of wild colours and cars and bodies, the attentive
viewer can see that our friend Nicolae is preoccupied by serious
problems, such as the strange alienation which many dwellers of urban
conglomerates suffer from. Or at least that's what I read in those
paintings. You may read what you want, I won't stop you.
The
"Dust 2.0" series goes one step further in showing us the darker, even
more serious side of Nicolae Comanescu, and this is more than likely
aided by restricting the chromatics to various shades of dust. But we
have to observe another preoccupation in the artist's mid. These new
works depicting the neighbourhood of Berceni literally convey the life
of the artist, and I would make so bold as to compare them to Utrillo's
Montmartre paintings. What we see is the artist's immediate environment,
the places where he spends a great deal of his time, and where some of
inspiration comes from.
And they are true portraits of
Berceni, too, due to the fact that these works are painted with the
native dust of this dusty neighbourhood of Romania's dusty capital. If
there ever was a thing that lasted well longer than anything else, then
that thing would be Bucharest's dust. And well after all of Bucharest
will have fallen into ruin (God willing in a very distant future), there
will still be the dust to testify for this great city, just as the dust
of a carted-off church went to cry over its former earthly location, as
a witness of its former self.
Nicolae Comanescu's
Berceni is the very real Berceni you can reach by taking the Magistrala 2
Metro line to Piata Sudului, or the famous tram 34 from Gara de Nord (I
would not advise this route because it would take ages to get there).
The blocks of flats might look just the same as countless other
buildings raised by the former leaders of Romania's recent communist
past, but their images set in dust by Nicolae are different.
They
are different because the dust they are painted with their own dust,
coming from their bricks and mortar and peeling paint, and from
adjoining dust-laden streets, alleyways and lawns. The metaphysical
sadness of the mostly unloved block of flats comes through its image
more than it would show in a photograph. While the photo preserves the
(semi)perfect likeness of the building, the image is made by the
impression of light on photo-sensible material. And light is always
clean. Comanescu's dust paintings are made from primordial matter, from
what can be turned to sludge and mud with as little as a light shower.
The
paintings in the "Dust 2.0" series have left a mark on my consciousness
as indelible as the spots left on my light-grey jeans after hurrying
through Bucharest's streets on foot, on a Spring/Autumn/Winter day. If
you haven't had this experience, you will not understand me completely. I
suggest you go for yourselves on a little walk on any given pavement in
Bucharest, in rainy weather. For best results, try a neighbourhood
street (although the fully central Piata Rosseti might do just as well),
and make it late-Autumn/Winter.
But enough about dust
on shoes and trousers. What I would really love to do is to talk more
about dust on paintings, or better still, about paintings with dust. I
think that Nicolae is the first Romanian artist to treat this underrated
medium with the respect it deserves. One of the basest things in life,
dirt, has been elevated to the rank of artistic endeavour. The
metaphor-lover would go on to say that by this act, the artist has
emphasised the transitoriness of life, and that all we are is dust in
the wind and from dust we come and to dust we shall return, or even that
life is dirt.
But I say no, this time the artist does
not propose metaphors, or other meta-meanings. My opinion is that
Nicolae has decided to give a voice to his environment, to make his part
of Bucharest talk for itself, loud and clear. What can be more direct
than the voice of stones and bricks and dust and dirt, if you want to
hear the story of a place? (And no, this is not a metaphor).
Let's
leave metaphors aside for the time being, and trust what we see,
because what we now see is what we get if we go to Berceni tonight (and
what we get on our trousers if we walk there in wet weather).
You
probably got tired of me by now. I should end it here, but not before I
will heap some more praise upon Nicolae Comanescu: the man, the artist,
the thinker of genius, the embodiment of the best qualities of the
Romanian people, one of the brightest stars in the constellation of
leading men and women to have come from the city of Ploiesti.
Enjoy
these images, and please try to think about them in the light of my
little text. You will then see that this project truly represents
Comanescu as a mature artist, as an artist whose humour and insight into
life, translated into the language of art, do not need to employ the
great array of artifice available to contemporary artists.
Nicolae
does not want to con us into believing some well rehearsed theory of
art, I am sure of it. He wants us to witness life as it is in his corner
of world called Berceni, Sector 4, Bucuresti, Romania.
Mihai Risnoveanu
