Air

The idealistic promise of an airborne existence that propelled the postwar US–Soviet Space Race found frequent expression throughout the art of the twentieth century, constituting an inspired, but at times futile, movement towards a habitation of the atmosphere. With air travel becoming one of the defining modes of modern life, the apparently infinite and largely unexplored blank canvas of the sky held seemingly endless potential for more fluid and free ways of being, an attractive proposition for artists seeking an escape from the all-too-material devastation of World War Two. Made in 1946 as he lay on a beach in Nice with friends, 19-year-old Yves Klein’s first artwork — a wholly imaginary signing of the sky — kindled a lifelong preoccupation with the ‘immaterial’ and the radical possibilities of an elemental architecture. 4 Klein’s iconic artistic action recorded in Leap into the Void 1960 famously captures his desire for a direct and unmediated communion with the air, born of the belief that it offered ‘a return to the legendary Eden’, a rebirth made possible by the dissolution of the body in space. 5 Klein pursued this concept of immateriality further in the Architecture of Air 1958–62 project, which employed air as a building material within a utopian architecture of elemental forces. Articulated through hundreds of designs, sketches, essays and filmed experiments made with architects Werner Ruhnau and Claude Parent, this revolutionary project imagined a city of the future in which sky-clad inhabitants reclined on air furniture and slept on contoured mattresses of pure air, shrouded in layers of thermal comfort provided by jets of air. Detractors may have dismissed Klein as building castles in the sky, yet some 60 years later, his earnest quest for an entirely aerial condition seems prescient when considered in the context of work by contemporary artists such as Tomás Saraceno. Klein’s forays undoubtedly influenced the members of the multidisciplinary American design collective Ant Farm, who, in the years following Klein’s death, developed a type of pneumatic, participatory architecture which extrapolated the radical impulse behind some of his unrealised experiments with air. Their Inflatables of the 1970s, a series of portable vinyl structures intended to shift the perception of the body in space, marked an important progression towards Klein’s ideal state of permanent levitation. 4 See Hannah Weitemeier, Yves Klein, 1928–1962: International Klein Blue , trans. Carmen Sánchez Rodríguez, Taschen, Cologne, Germany, 2001, p.8. Sharing Klein’s interest in air as a sculptural medium, conceptual Dutch artist Marinus Boezem would realise Klein’s imaginary appropriation of air with his 1969 work Signing the sky above the port of Amsterdam with an aeroplane , in which he used an aircraft’s condensation trails to spell out his surname in the cloudy sky above the Port of Amsterdam, a work which disappeared almost as soon as it was created. 5 Yves Klein, quoted in Peter Noever and François Perrin, Yves Klein: Air Architecture , Hatje Cantz, Berlin, 2004, p.87. Ant Farm / Inflatables 1971 (temporary installation, Freestone, California) (opposite) Yves Klein / Leap into the Void 1960 / Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 55 54 Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art