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Beyond Inchoate Debris

This paper looks at the ways in which the matter of dust has been dealt with recently in British, US and European cultures, particularly in contemporary art. In their rehabilitation of the minimal, refuse and dust – by which I mainly intend here ordinary dust, in its multi-material mutable obsolescence – a number of aesthetic practices and theoretical discourses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including commodity studies, museum studies, anthropology, and epistemology, think about and make (things) matter, or matter otherwise. The article will draw attention to the cultural questions posed by dust: in its marking the unstable border between visibility and invisibility, between the past as cherished material memory and/or redundant useless excess, it functions as a powerful testimony to the ‘life of things’ and humans alike, as well as to the power of impurity.