Dust Gathering

As part of a two-year collaboration through MoMA’s program Artists Experiment, I made Dust Gathering, an audio tour that explored The Museum of Modern Art by examining its dust.

On one of my many research trips to MoMA, as I was thinking about what I wanted to make for this project, I noticed an extremely dusty ledge on the exterior side of a window, high up above the atrium floor and inaccessible from the inside. With every subsequent visit, I went to check on this ledge and watched it get more and more spectacularly dusty. Small dust heaps clustered in the corners; dust balls began to leave trails on the surface, the way snowballs do when you roll them on a snowy ground. I spent a lot of time looking at that ledge, often ignoring the Picassos and other famous works of art behind me.

This project was the first to reveal to me the value of a working method I’ve adopted many times since: when getting to know an institution and its collection, it is very helpful to ask not just “What’s here?” but also “Who’s here?” I had no clear idea what to make at MoMA, but as a way of exploring what might be possible, I booked meetings with staff in many different parts of the museum’s areas as I could: visitor services, facilities and maintenance, conservation, art handing and installation, for example. Eventually, a throughline emerged: all of these people, in some way, had a connection to dust.

Dust consists of material from both inside and outside, from Earth and the cosmos, from places very high and very low—and at the Museum, it’s literally an intermingling of different people from around the world. The museum has to keep it off the artworks and filter it out of the air. Some artists have worked with dust as a material, too.

It was finally clear to me that this was going to be my subject. In the MoMA sound studio where the museum produces their audio guides, I interviewed the same staff members about dust, this ever-present, mundane but also highly symbolic substance that remains mostly out of sight. While taking the Dust Gathering tour, visitors learn what it takes to dust the suspended helicopter in the atrium, they learn about the building’s complex air-filtration systems, and get to know some of the particularly troublesome, dust‐attracting modernist sculptures. All of this is told through voices from within the Museum that the public rarely hears from, describing their expertise and labor that the public rarely sees.

You can listen to the audio guide program here.