"Walter Benjamin briefly refers to the role of dust in the nineteenth-century interior, a substance at once magical and mundane: “Plush as dust collector. Mystery of dustmotes playing in the sunlight. Dust and the ‘best room’.... Other arrangements to stir up dust: the trains of dresses.”4 In the decaying Paris arcades—the furred arteries of the modern city—dust both occludes and outlines the once-novel commodity and its slow desuetude."
This ecxellent piece by Brian Dillon, Editor of Cabinet Magazine can be read here.
I also liked this sentence a lot, ultimate expression of my innermost thoughts about London:" [...] the weary Traveller, at many Miles distance, sooner smells, than sees the City to which he repairs."
"Alternative" art first caught my attention a couple of years ago when I visited a small gallery in London that exhibited shit work - literally I mean: sculptures, a lot of them, made by what I recall being a Spanish or South American artist who employs faecis and turn them into art objects. Then there was a dog by the same artist, whom he let die of starvation while calling the process "modern art".
***
The Tate has just bought some William Blake hand-made pictures. The inscription for one of them, depicting a naked man clasping his head in pain as he is consumed by flames, reads: "I sought Pleasure & found Pain." My thought exactly every morning when I go to work; I wonder if I also look the same. The museum paid £441m for these pieces.
Monday 11 January 2010
Dust in London and Walter Benjamin (Brian Dillon)
Labels:
Arcades,
Brian Dillon,
Cabinet Magazine,
Dust,
London,
Paris,
Walter Benjamin
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