Air and the Visual
Amanda Sciampacone (University of Warwick)
‘The air is unique among the elements in having this affinity with nothingness, in signifying the being
of non-being, the matter of the immaterial.’ (Steven Connor, The Matter of Air, 31).
The materiality of the air has long been at the forefront of our cultural and visual imaginary. Air has
variously been associated with life and death, purity and pollution, circulation and stagnation. It is a thing
that moves and flows across space and time. It is also a site of transmission, a force that conveys both the
tangible and intangible. From vapours, microbes, and particulates to signals, sounds, and images, the air is
heavy with matter and meaning. Air is an element that can produce, elude, and be captured by the visual.
Following Connor, this session seeks to investigate the relationship between air and representation, and to
address issues of the visible in the invisible and the material in the immaterial. How has air, or its vacuum,
been visualised in art? How do images of the air, and their very dissemination, highlight particular
meanings and connections? How do new optical technologies, modes of visual reproduction, and methods
of investigation allow people to study and depict the air? The papers in this session will engage with visual,
material, and metaphorical forms of air. Papers will explore the theme through a cross-disciplinary
approach, linking art history to the history of science, environmental studies, musicology, and art theory
and practice.
Hyejin Lee (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Of Air and Men: Bodily-moral ambiguities of 18th-century luxury barometers
This paper examines the physical and moral ambiguities that barometers posed as decorative objects in
French elite domestic interiors during the 18th century. Measuring air’s weight, these instruments manifest
atmospheric changes with numerical and textual indices and the movement of their components. Encased
in lavishly ornamented frames, luxury barometers produced for non-professional, domestic clientele
signalled their owners’ participation in the scientific vogue and helped predict the weather. In addition,
these instruments were socially encoded objects that were thought to mirror the internal landscape of
human beings. With their needles and mercury columns responding to the vagaries of the weather,
barometers emphasised the benefits of the ‘temperate’ climate, which Jean-Baptiste du Bos, Montesquieu,
and other moral-political philosophers credited as one of the essential conditions of a superior civilisation.
By extension of their parallels with the human body and mind, these instruments also illustrated the merits
of moderation as a cardinal virtue of politesse. However, decoration of these objects, as well as the practice
of using them for their purported function of weather prediction, encouraged a lifestyle of excess and
artifice. Reform-minded philosophes criticised barometers as material signs of elite society’s increasing
dependence on artificial objects for observing and coping with nature. Exploring the contradictions in these
objects, I examine the relationships between decorative objects and discursive knowledge, as well as the
social significance of these objects at the intersection of social, medical, and scientific thought, aesthetic
ornaments, and everyday practices during the Enlightenment.
Richard Taws (University College London)
Lead Balloon: Drawing, atmosphere, and erasure in post-revolutionary France
This paper examines the critical potential of air in French art and science during the Revolution and Empire.
My focus is the work of Nicolas-Jacques Conté: an artist, chemist, engineer, and balloonist, probably best
known for his invention, in 1795, of the modern pencil, synthesising English ‘lead’ made unavailable by the
1
naval blockade. Following important experiments with hydrogen that developed Lavoisier’s innovations,
Conté, a former pupil of Greuze, became a key member of the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt. He
participated in the production of its most extensive visual document, the monumental Description de
l’Égypte (pub. 1809–29), devising an ‘engraving machine’ that facilitated the production of uniform
backgrounds for the Description’s plates. With this machine, the cloudless Egyptian skies that populated
the large sheets of the Description could be reproduced at speed, with minimal opportunity for artistic
error, reducing complex atmospheric effects to a simple mechanical process. While in Egypt, Conté also
participated in the ad hoc production of a bewildering variety of apparatuses, including a balloon-operated
telegraph that transmitted coded messages through the air. For Conté, then, air was not a neutral or
intangible space, but an active medium, responsive to novel scientific and artistic investigation, and
inseparable from the inscriptive practices he pioneered. My paper will consider how an aesthetics of
erasure and mark-making, weightlessness and mass, permeated Conté’s airy investigations, situating them
in relation to the failure of Napoleon’s imperial project.
Anne-Maria Pennonen (Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery; Helsinki University)
From Puffy Cumulus Clouds to the Lapping Waves of a Lake
This paper discusses the concept of air in connection with the artworks of the Finnish painters Werner
Holmberg and Fanny Churberg, who studied landscape painting in Düsseldorf in the 1850s and 1870s. The
troposphere, with its mixture of gases, surrounds planet Earth, forming a blue layer around it. It is the place
where all the phenomena related to weather happen, and these phenomena have fascinated artists for
centuries. In Dresden, artists became highly interested in drawing sketches and painting studies from
nature during the first decades of the 19th century. They found celestial phenomena especially fascinating.
One of the catalysts for their interests was the taxonomy created by the English amateur scientist Luke
Howard, whose ideas were conveyed to them by Goethe.
The same trend continued in Düsseldorf in the 1830s, where the observation of nature in the open air was
considered essential, and expressions like ‘naturalism’ and the ‘truth of nature’ were widely used. The
proponents of this movement considered the study of cloud formations and atmospheric phenomena to be
of great importance. When depicting immaterial phenomena such as air, these naturalists resorted to
different means, which were not restricted only to the celestial phenomena. Therefore, we can detect
other indications of air in the artworks, such as trees bending in the wind, dust arising from a dry sandy
road, or waves moving on the surface of a lake. In fact, these phenomena provided important tools for
creating a certain atmosphere in the artworks.
Emily Marsden (Durham University / National Media Museum, Bradford)
‘The violent dissolution of form’: Explosion images and abstraction in First World War visual culture.
For Steven Connor in The Matter of Air, the explosion ‘represents the most important form of our newly
unfolding involution with air.’ ‘From the First World War onwards’, Connor notes, ‘artists became
captivated by the task of representing the explosion’. Intimately connected with the development of
technological modernity, explosions became a significant motif in the works of Nevinson, Gaudier-Brzeska,
Paul Nash and others, and in the typographical experiments of Wyndham Lewis and Apollinaire. Drawing on
the collections of the National Media Museum, this paper seeks to situate such artistic representations of
explosions within a broader First World War visual economy. Although explosions were immediately
powerful as visual signifiers of war, especially of a war often experienced as beyond the visible, their
photographic representation — at the limits of contemporary technology — could be ambiguous or
uncertain. If explosions themselves were designed to obliterate (promising, in Connor’s words, ‘a death
without trace, memorial, or residue’) the explosion image acted to obliterate photographic space, tending
towards abstraction. While artists produced figurative images of explosions by adapting the language of
2
abstract painting, in popular media the abstracted quality of photographic explosions made them
susceptible to elaboration, via the vernacular arts of the retoucher and the colourist.
Corrinne Chong (University of Edinburgh)
Evoking Wagner’s ‘espace mystique’: Henri Fantin-Latour’s immersion in sound and space
In Henri Fantin-Latour’s first-hand accounts of the premiere performance of Wagner’s Der Ring des
Nibelungen at the 1876 Bayreuth festival, he repeatedly rhapsodises over the ‘espace mystique’ that
wondrously emanated from the invisible orchestra. From his vantage point, ‘le vide’ above the sunken
orchestra pit seemed to surge with sound – proving Pierre Schaeffer’s acousmatic thesis that when the
‘signal physique’ is concealed, the ‘objet sonore’ is amplified, becoming an entity in itself (Traité des objets
musicaux, 1966). This impression was further enhanced by the acoustical architecture of the Festspielhaus
whose surround-sound reverberation facilitated the audience’s psychic and physical immersion in the
music and, ultimately, in the illusory realm on stage. For Fantin, the peintre-mélomane, empty space or air
was imbued with both aural and pictorial properties due to Wagner’s exploitation of phantasmagorical
scenic effects to create a nebulous and mystical atmosphere. As Fantin eloquently described it, the
enveloping sound and pervasive presence of vaporous mists jointly produced an impression of the ‘sonore
et voilé’ amidst the darkened auditorium. Replete with both poetic suggestiveness and plastic possibilities,
‘sonore’ evokes the ineffable abstraction of music while ‘voilé’ carries inherent pictorial values that impart
a measure of materiality. This paper proposes that Fantin transcended iconographical means to evoke his
sense of corporeal absorption in an ‘espace mystique’ by developing a distinct facture for his musical genre
of artworks. The result was an aesthetic of vagueness, where form oscillated between transparency and
opacity, dissolution and resolution, to suggest a musically ambient and palpable space.
Gabriella Daris (University of London Alumna)
Breathing Space: Void and Corporeality of Air in the Work of Gustav Metzger
‘Air is of course the key element in life, but also a key element in my own work. […] At times I simply
stood there and turned the pressure up or down – when it was too high up it could knock down
human beings and even kill them, so it is extraordinary how much potential the pressure has in the
system. There is a range of possibilities some of which I have presented in Swansea, then in
Cambridge, and that’s when you come in.’ Gustav Metzger on his Dancing Tubes (interview with the
author)
Gustav Metzger’s fascination with the visualisation and vibration of air initially developed from an interest
in the movement of atoms. The result was a number of artworks with which he orchestrates a ballet of
objects marked by levity and deft movement, powered by the element of air. Exploring the possibilities of
air through artistic practice, his scientific experiments investigated the notion of movement and stillness,
breath and breathlessness, as a physical metaphor for the destruction of nature, air pollution, and
inevitable death. This paper will focus on his Mobille (1970/2005), Mica and Air Cube (1968/2005) and
Dancing Tubes (1968/2014), culminating in the collaborative work of Metzger and myself, the respiratory
kinetic installation, Dancing Tubes Interventions (2014–15).
Instrumental will be reference to Lucretius, Empedocles, Aristotle, Robert Boyle, Joseph Wright of Derby’s
An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768), Graham Steven’s inflatable structures (1960s), Hans
Haacke’s Sphere in Oblique Air-Jet (1967), and Olafur Eliasson’s Ventilator (1997).
3
Emma Cheatle (Newcastle University)
Un air embaumé: Air, pleasure and repression in the work of Marcel Duchamp
This paper examines the distinct role of air in Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, 1915–23, Fresh Widow, 1920,
Air de Paris, 1919, and Étant donnés, 1946–66. I analyse the way Duchamp establishes notions of air to
make allusions to sexuality, pleasure and identity through architectural constructions (glass, windows and
doors – all devices of fresh air), metaphors and wordplays. The Large Glass, for example, is the scale of a
large department store window of the late 19th century. Despite the fresh-air culture of the early 20th
century, it does not open, instead registering the stifling social restrictions of the time. Through its
Illuminating Gas (‘unequal spangles lighter than air (retail fog)’1) and Blossoming Bride (emerging as a
horizontal exhalation across the glass, a ‘flesh coloured’ cloud2), it suggests both sexual pleasure and
onanistic repression. Étant donnés, a construction of three rooms, with non-opening doors, spyholes and a
crude kind of ‘window’ through the brick wall, revisits the idea of Illuminating Gas, the nude holding up a
Bauer gas lamp in her left hand. Cool air is now pumped around to conserve the piece, surprising but fitting
for its air of death and erotic decay.
Incorporating ideas from Luce Irigaray on air and metaphysics, Duchamp’s homophones and the notion of
‘infrathin' as a waft or leftover state, and Hélène Cixous on pause, I demonstrate how air was, for
Duchamp, a material at once elusive, fragile and potentially suffocating; dry or repressive; a caress and a
cut.3
David Hopkins (University of Glasgow)
The Re-materialisation of Art: Back to the Presocratics
Air has a palpable presence in the art of the 20th century. This paper plots a trajectory between four
notable instances of its use as a material, looking closely at Marcel Duchamp’s Paris Air readymade (1919);
Piero Manzoni’s series of ‘Fiato d’artista’ gestures of 1960 (balloons inflated by the artist, and then deflated
and fixed to pedestals); Art & Language’s ‘Air Show’ proposition (1967), which envisaged a column of air
with a base of one square mile and unspecified vertical height, and Robert Barry’s Inert Gas Series (1969)
which involved inert gases being released into the atmosphere.
It might be argued that in the case of Duchamp and Manzoni air is made manifest as material, and linked to
embodiment (the artists’ pneuma in the case of Manzoni). With Art & Language, and to some extent with
Barry, air seems to provide a metaphor for the evacuation of traditional art content, although it is still
materially present. Art theory continues to address works such as these, shifting between the terminology
of conceptualism and dematerialisation, with Duchamp understood to be the progenitor of this attitude.
My model will be substantially different. Showing that Presocratic thought was actually a key stimulus for
dada, I will chart a tradition stemming from dada in which the invisible forces of the natural world are
materialised rather than dematerialised. Looking to the ideas of the Greek Presocratics – such as
Anaximenes’ conviction that air was the ‘arche’ or fundamental constituent of all things, or Democritus’s (
and later Lucretius’s ) atomism, I will aim to show that archaic conceptions of air circulate in some of the
most conceptually airtight examples of modernism.
1
Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp [1971], (trans.) Ron Padgett (New York: Viking Press, 1987), 48–9.
Marcel Duchamp, ‘The Green Box’ [1914], (trans.) George Heard Hamilton, in Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson
(eds.), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: De Capo, 1973), 49.
2 Duchamp, ‘The Green Box’ (1973), 36.
3 See Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, (trans.) Mary Beth Mader (London: Athlone, 1999); Marcel
Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, Notes, (trans.) Paul Matisse (Paris: Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou,
1980), (unpaginated); Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Hélène Cixous: Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing
(London: Routledge, 1997).
4