Air

Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art Nina Miall and Sophie Rose Air hides in its ubiquity. It is at once familiar, our constant companion until death, and wholly elusive: a substance that cannot be easily seen or held and is seemingly impossible to isolate. As our native element, it is materially responsible for transforming this planet into a living world, and though integral to life, it is increasingly a threat to our existence. Over the course of the past five centuries, the systematic gaze of science has uncovered air’s chemical components and physical dynamics, its optical effects and evolution as a climatic system; yet such information is only part of the full story of air. The sustained attention given to air’s scientific properties has compelled a tandem development of what we might call the ‘atmospheric imaginary’ within Western artistic traditions. Early expressions of this intense observation of air may be found in the ‘deluge’ drawings of the great Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci. Thought to portray tempestuous wind currents, these exquisitely detailed sketches reveal a single line of intellectual and artistic inquiry within the artist’s broader obsession with air, flight and flying machines. Da Vinci’s swollen, cataclysmic skies anticipate the growing attention among subsequent artists to air’s mass, flows and processes, its disturbances, propagations and precipitations — how it mutates and inverts, is both inside and outside, simultaneously active and passive. These drawings from the early sixteenth century signal a persistent artistic desire across time and geography to capture something of air’s effervescent, mercurial and ungraspable nature, to make air, in all its physical and metaphysical complexity, perceptible. Marcel Duchamp / 50 cc of Paris Air 1949 / Collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art 45 Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art