Air Art

This project explores how ideas about process, kineticism, conceptualism, and spatiality that circulated in the late 1960s and 70s are equally connected with ideas of flight, weather, atmosphere, and breath – perhaps in conjunction with the growth of mainstream air travel and concerns about nuclear. My method involved reading between the lines of art history books, online archives, and exhibition catalogues to select examples of artworks that could be gathered into a collection marking the emergence of air art in the long 1960s, expanding on Willoughby Sharp's 1968-9 exhibition of the same name and Lucy Lippard's theory of dematerialisation.

I propose four throughlines for air art: clouds and skies, performance and flight, pneumatics, and mobilities and traces. While assembling these works, I also engaged with them creatively through monochrome photography and creative writing. The 'concrete' prose below describes how a building 'breathes' from first-person perspective and was written about Kunsthalle Zurich during an AA Summer School with the Architectural Association. Overall, I found that the de-materialisation of art, whereby art objects are replaced by processes and ideas, might also be perceived as a re-materialisation of air.