Air Art

I went through art historical archives to assemble a collection of 'air art' since the early 1960s, which then inspired some of my ongoing creative responses.

I propose four overarching themes for air art: clouds and skies, performance and flight, pneumatics, and mobilities and traces.

This project explores how ideas about process, kineticism, conceptualism, and spatiality that circulated in Western art circles throughout the late 1960s and 70s are equally thematically connected with ideas of flight, weather, atmosphere, and breath – perhaps in conjunction with the growth of mainstream air travel and concerns about nuclear at that time. Looking back at these works, I focus on how they make air palpable and how air became a medium for artistic processes. My method for the curatorial aspects of this research 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 as well as Lucy Lippard's theory of dematerialisation (the idea that art objects are replaced by processes and ideas).

I propose four throughlines for air art: clouds and skies, performance and flight, pneumatics, and mobilities and traces. While assembling these works and observing recurring themes and techniques, I also engaged with air art creatively through monochrome photography and creative writing. Overall, I found that the de-materialisation of art that Lippard diagnosed might also be perceived as a re-materialisation of air. And so in the 'concrete' prose below, I focus on the atmosphere of an art museum, rather than the art objects inside it. I do so by speculating about how a building 'breathes' from first-person perspective. This text was written specifically about Kunsthalle Zurich during a residential project on 'exhibition architecture' with the Architectural Association (AA) Visiting School in 2023. The kinetic photographs with plastic streamers were taken on the studio of my rooftop in Brighton.

The concrete prose below speculates about how a building 'breathes' and was performed at Kunsthalle Zurich in August 2023 with the Architectural Association Visiting School.