Air

Such embedded structures can be hard to change: we are now aware that the coming decade presents a critical challenge to halt global warming. The iconic film The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) 1987, by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, sets up a domino-like flow of connected cause-and-effect experiments where one movement, process or motion leads to another. Some stages seem inexorable and appear to obey the observed patterns we might understand as the ‘laws of nature’ — gravity causing a slowly filled bottle to tip over, and combustion to burn a fuel source after ignition. Other processes are amusingly fragile — a plastic cup rolls back and forth, working its way precariously to the bottom of a board, swinging side to side, and slowly downwards. We design complex systems on a global scale, but can we foresee their every eventuality? Fischli and Weiss’s work not only models how we got here but also the ingenuity required of us to engineer a brighter future. How do we energise change? Do creativity and humour have a role in engaging industry in service of our shared humanity? Something is happening off-camera to spark a warm smile on the face of a Queensland miner in Charles Page’s 1986 portrait Mount Isa mine , from the ‘Journeys north’ portfolio. Page depicts mining and industry as essentially human, even if their daunting scale and impact on the landscape can dehumanise. Max Dupain focuses on vapour funnelled into the atmosphere by an array of sugarcane processing towers in his photograph At Victoria Mill, North Queensland 1978. This sense of being caught between wonder and unease when faced by industrialisation is also present in Wolfgang Sievers’s construction-site image Escalator site at Parliament Station, Melbourne 1977, where the subterrain appears as a vast out-of-scale passage culminating in an elevated oculus-altar. If we zoom out, it becomes clear — in transforming the Earth, releasing carbon stored over millennia — that we have become a danger to each other and to the globe. Beirut‑born Palestinian–British artist Mona Hatoum sounds a compelling note of warning in her 2006 work Hot Spot . This large steel sculpture takes the shape of the Earth, the perimeter of each continent burns dangerously, orange-red neon sizzling against the raw metal. In an age of endless conflict and competition for resources, this work warns that even the most privileged of us can no longer think of war zones and ‘hot spots’ as being far away. Hatoum highlights our proximity to unrest, recasting our bodies and the space of the gallery in urgent red, as if predicting that the many systems we rely on are about to overheat or malfunction. Peter Fischli and David Weiss / The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) (still) 1987 (opposite) Mona Hatoum / Hot Spot III (detail) 2009 35 34 Do we all breathe the same air? Do we all breathe the same air?