Air

The twenty-first century marks a moment in which air, again, assumes new significance in our shared imaginary. While it continues to invoke the transcendent, air is increasingly explored by artists today as a congested space of growing conflict and crisis. What was once imagined as wholly fluid, borderless and available to us all is now understood as evermore territorialised, surveilled and toxic. As we contend with the pollution and politics of airspace, unequal access to air and breath, and the unpredictable currents of our warming climate, air’s traditional associations with infinitude are being dramatically commuted to something altogether less limitless and inexhaustible, leaving us in a state of ‘endemic breathlessness’ and facing a future impossible to forecast. 13 In our present, the matter of air continues to cloud as much as to clear our view. For the artists of past centuries, air seemed distant, ungraspable and unknowable; now it feels uncomfortably close, the site of so many of our shared anxieties. As Steven Connor remarks, ‘the thin air has become unignorably thick, for us, because it is thick with us’. 14 The constituents of our air — greenhouse gases, pollutants, radio waves, teargas, aircraft and their emissions, fast-spreading viruses, and even drones — serve as ephemeral artefacts of our own contemporary moment. To engage with air today is to practise an aerial archaeology that uncovers the political and social layers enfolded in the atmosphere. ‘I can breathe in my own way, but the air will never simply be mine,’ wrote the French philosopher Luce Irigaray, acknowledging that, as much as the atmosphere has become a site of human activity, we are still contained by, and utterly reliant upon, air. 15 Suspended somewhere between air’s openness and its limits — and alert to our increasingly complex entanglements with it — we gaze skywards for answers and draw our collective breath. Fujiko Nakaya / Foggy wake in a desert: An ecosphere 1982 / Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 13 Albano, p.x. 14 Connor, p.10. 15 Luce Irigaray, ‘From “The Forgetting of Air” to “To Be Two”’, in Nancy Holland and Patricia Huntington (eds), Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger , Penn State University Press, University Park, Pa., 2001, p.309. 60 Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art