Air

(left to right) Piero Manzoni inflating a Corpo d’aria (Body of air) using Fiato d’artista (Artist’s breath) at his studio on Via Fiori Oscuri, Milan, 1960 Corpo d’aria (Body of air) 1959–60 / MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation Piero Manzoni / Fiato d’artista (Artist’s breath) 1960 / Collection: Tate Of course, the desire to contain air — to capture and preserve something of its illusory, spectral quality, and make the invisible visible — pre-dates Duchamp. Jean Siméon Chardin’s Soap Bubbles c.1733–34 continues the tendency among genre painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to deploy the bubble as a symbol of the vanitas tradition, an intimation of the transience of human life. With the advent of air travel in the twentieth century, the use of bubbles, balloons and other inflatable structures by artists assumed new symbolic significance as a way of more faithfully conveying the modern condition of being in continuous osmotic exchange with the environment. While these pneumatic motifs carried our developing fascination with air’s elasticity, porosity and permeability, they also contained its corollary, an inherent fragility and potential for collapse. The Italian artist Piero Manzoni shared Duchamp’s preoccupation with air, as well as his predilection for calling into question the nature of the art object. Duchamp’s ampoule of Parisian air marked an important precedent for two multiples — Corpo d’aria ( Body of air ) and Fiato d’artista ( Artist’s breath ) — produced by Manzoni between 1959 and 1960, and for other larger-scaled inflatable projects that the artist never realised. Corpo d’aria comprises a wooden box containing a tripod base, a deflated white balloon and a mouthpiece — the artist made 45 copies, priced at 30 000 Italian lira each. Collectors could ask Manzoni to inflate the 80-centimetre balloon himself, but they would be charged an additional 200 lira for every litre of air exhaled by the artist, who declared: ‘When I blow up a balloon, I am breathing my soul into an object that becomes eternal’. 3 Fiato d’artista flipped this conceit, revealing that Manzoni’s breath was, in fact, far from eternal. Red, white or blue balloons inflated by the artist and secured to a wooden base have, over time, emptied of Manzoni’s breath, and today stand as objects of pathos — like a sorry, deflated aftermath of Chardin’s soap bubble. 3 Piero Manzoni, quoted in Suzanne Cotter, Piero Manzoni [exhibition catalogue], Serpentine Gallery, London, 1998, p.144. 53 52 Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art