Air

9 James Turrell, quoted in James Turrell , <jamesturrell.com/work/type/ >, viewed June 2022. 10 Invoking the German concept of dasein , or ‘being there’, Serres writes: ‘We are the dasein in the sky, not in the land . . . This is not a new state of things. It is a very ancient state of things’. Quoted in Connor, p.34. 11 Albano, p.x. 12 Fujiko Nakaya, quoted in Lucina Ward, ‘Where earth meets sky, find Fujiko Nakaya’, National Gallery of Australia , 1 March 2019, <medium.com/national-gallery-of-australia/ where-earth-meets-sky-find-fujiko-nakaya-786fbca2c18a>, viewed June 2022. James Turrell / The Color Inside (Skyspace) 2013 / Commission, Landmarks, The University of Texas at Austin 2013 Earthrise offered a hitherto unseen perspective on the immersive totality of air. Yet in the instant of gaining an appreciation of its finitude, we were also struck by the indefinable plurality of air — its ever-changing geography, and its ability to express itself in a prismatic and seemingly irreducible array of different forms, as vapour, light, space and, of course, breath. Since the 1960s, American artist James Turrell has sought to amplify our perception of the kaleidoscopic properties of air through his deeply absorbing works that encourage a state of reflexive vision, which he terms ‘seeing yourself see’. 9 His celebrated, site-specific Skyspaces , begun in the 1970s, offer portals to unobstructed views of the sky. Viewers are encouraged to gaze upwards, and through Turrell’s careful orchestration of both natural light, outside, and our light, inside, immerse themselves in the luminous and subtly shifting modulations of light and colour passing across and through the aerial cloudscape created by the artist’s deliberate framing. It is a dynamic experience of pure perceptual sensation, which develops from the idea of air as a medium of interaction, with our senses providing the canvas for its expression. With our absolute immersion in various forms of air, we have embraced our complicated state of inseparability from it — the notion that we are essentially more of the air than of the Earth, as French philosopher Michel Serres has remarked. 10 The idea that air is vitally expressive of the human condition has inspired a number of experiential and participatory artistic practices of the latter half of the twentieth century. Pioneering Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya’s fog installations take shape around this dissolution of traditional distinctions between bodies and their environment, the physical expression of cultural theorist Caterina Albano’s remark that ‘we share the air in which we are immersed, exhaling our own internal atmospheres’. 11 Since the 1970s, Nakaya has animated different sites through fog installations premised on the contingent and indeterminate behaviour of air as a medium. Rather than ‘sculpting’ the fog, she approaches it as a kind of transducer, which reacts with the local meteorological and topographical conditions of a site. In the National Gallery of Australia’s Foggy wake in a desert: An ecosphere 1982, some 900 nozzles pump a delicate rolling mist over the pond and through the casuarinas of the Gallery’s sculpture garden around lunchtime each day, creating a transient work that is ‘moulded by the atmosphere and sculpted by wind from moment to moment’. 12 Sustained by the whim of the air, Nakaya’s fog works make visible the contemporary condition of our interdependence with air, a reminder that we are, ourselves, aeriform, and in a near-constant state of becoming. 59 58 Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art