Air

At the turn of the twentieth century, pictorialist photographers recognised the hazy potential of their medium. The grain of analogue photography is produced by particles of emulsion that absorb light, creating a surface of small spots that are then enlarged in the development process. An exaggerated grain conveys beauty and charm and, as Alfred Stieglitz demonstrated in his famous image The Flatiron 1903, it encapsulates something of the smoggy, modern industrial city, such as New York. Photographic grain was therefore in step with sooty, mechanical modernity, while also reminiscent of painting. Laura Gilpin’s Ghost Rock, Colorado Springs 1919, for instance, could easily be taken from a Weltlandschaft horizon. Rather than rescue this mountain from the day’s obscuring haze, Gilpin softens the focus of her lens, rendering a landscape that is paradoxically close and distant, ultimately feeling as out of reach as Altdorfer’s far-off North African ranges. (left to right) Jean Siméon Chardin / Soap Bubbles c.1733–34 / Wentworth Fund, 1949/ Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Marcel Duchamp / 50 cc of Paris Air 1919 / Collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art (left to right) Alfred Stieglitz / The Flatiron 1903 / Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Laura Gilpin / Ghost Rock, Colorado Springs 1919 / The Marvin Breckinridge Patterson Fund / Collection: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC The artistic preoccupation with haze in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected a growing curiosity with the materiality of air — the matter of which had previously been considered immaterial — and the radical alterations to its composition that were occurring due to industrialisation. Traditional conceptions of air as a single substance, even a vacuum, had to contend with a new appreciation for it as a mix of gases suffused with particulate matter: a compound that could become variously congested, contaminated and exhausted. If Gilpin’s hazy photograph embodied the confusion engendered by this emerging notion of the ‘atmospheric’, another work from the same year sought to distil, rather than diffuse, air’s ‘mongrel composition’. 2 Marcel Duchamp’s 50 cc of Paris Air 1919 is a dadaist readymade, an ampoule labelled as containing 50 cubic centimetres of Parisian ether — essentially, a vial with ‘nothing’ in it. The work delights in the absurdity of trying to separate air from itself, and the confounding impossibility of ever obtaining enough distance and objectivity from air to understand its true nature. The intimate material affinity shared by glass and air — with air being a constituent element of the glass vessel through the process of its own making (by blowing) — further compounds the paradox. As if the meaning of Duchamp’s 50 cc of Paris Air wasn’t unstable enough, in 1949, the ampoule was accidentally broken and required repair, inviting speculation as to whether the air, now adulterated, remained ‘from Paris’? 2 Connor, p.30. 50 51 Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art