[An invited essay for the inaugural issue of Venti: Air, Atmosphere, Aesthetics, which features new work on the concepts of atmospheres. Understanding atmosphere as the social and affective mode of air, this issue focuses on atmosphere as a means of relational experience. My essay advances an idea of racial atmospherics and focuses on the work of Lorna Simpson.]
“It is perhaps only possible to identify the concept of race and the context of racism in visual art in terms of tuned spaces, elemental conditions, and atmospheric frameworks — evident not in the visible subject of the work, but in the air that surrounds it, whether as the space between the body and language, the mists of concealment and revelation, or the horizons of our perception.”
Atmosphere, writes Tonino Griffero, is “philosophically interesting not despite but precisely because of [its] vagueness” — the semantic plasticity of the term itself generates its own atmosphere of ambiguity, such that atmospheric description can designate a given situation in a vague way, or a vague entity in a precise way. And it’s true, too, that we conjure the atmospheric when no other verbiage will do, or when we don’t know how to make sense of an unfolding situation: “There is something in the air.” We connect by talking about the weather to cut through silence, because the temperature outside and the air we breathe may be our only known commonalities with strangers in our midst. Atmosphere is a totalizing paradox: it encompasses everything we know on this planet, but it is also something we are constantly seeking to measure and inhabit; it envelops our world without a surface of its own, and yet it makes possible our perception of the world’s edges — through the aesthetic experience of sunrise and sunset in radiant colors, through nothing but refracted light. This essay posits the paradoxical qualities of atmosphere as essential to a methodology of reading and representing the indeterminate, the invisible, the un-nameable, the in-becoming, and the totalizing forces that shape our perception. More specifically, it proposes these qualities of atmosphere as a rubric for understanding the idea of “race” in contemporary art practice: not as a subject of representation with any stable meaning, but rather as a dynamic process of distinguishing the human from the non-human, whose aesthetic lingers in the space between bodies rather than in or on their surfaces. In the hands of artists who have experienced racism’s dehumanizing consequences, atmospheric practice introduces important paradigm shifts between the body, the object, concepts, and space.
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Read in full here: https://www.venti-journal.com/ellen-tani
