by Alexander Opper
This paper addresses two recent conceptually linked works by the author, employing dust as vehicle and metaphor for the challenging of established values and meanings attached to the museum archive. The horizontal cornice surfaces of the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s (JAG) exhibition halls bear testimony to the fact that dust – in its cumulative, undisturbed presence – physically and conceptually bridges and deconstructs the constructed divides between colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid space. Dust is unsettling in its main characteristic, its invariable tendency to settle. The settled state of dust is deceptive though, as it implies an ongoing, quiet and thick mobility of infinite settling. In its stubborn omnipresence it prefers the horizontal position of rest to the vertical surface of display. The non-linear and Dusty Realism, as I refer to it here, of this fugitive and permanent museum ‘resident’ overrides and overwrites the futile attempts of museum curators to neatly and chronologically categorise the contents of any museum archive. It embodies the Deriddean notions of margin and centre and reversal and doubling: in the two works discussed here, the ostensibly residual nature of dust is catapulted onto the museum’s centre stage. Here it operates simultaneously as a destabilising catalyst for new readings – and as an unsettling mirror – of the archive as we know it. Although museum dust remains relatively dry, due to the strict rules of control around temperature and humidity in such buildings, it retains an inherently sticky quality. Like glue, it clings to, binds, and is itself a constituent element of the synthetic archive it tenuously holds together.
