This book is a literary study of art writings around 1900. It traces evocations of air within and without an artwork, evocations between artwork as image and as material object. As such, it is about artworks that continue beyond their material confines and about air as the embodiment of their continuity. The book focuses on air as the material space surrounding an artwork, its milieu, surroundings, and environment or Umwelt. By looking closely at the linguistic efforts of the art historians Aby Warburg and Alois Riegl, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the dance theorist and choreographer Rudol ... More

This book is a literary study of art writings around 1900. It traces evocations of air within and without an artwork, evocations between artwork as image and as material object. As such, it is about artworks that continue beyond their material confines and about air as the embodiment of their continuity. The book focuses on air as the material space surrounding an artwork, its milieu, surroundings, and environment or Umwelt. By looking closely at the linguistic efforts of the art historians Aby Warburg and Alois Riegl, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the dance theorist and choreographer Rudolf Laban, the book investigates the artwork’s external space as an aesthetic category in its own right. What is the medium of the artwork’s externalism? It contends that air, the medium of continuity par excellence – air is the site of aesthetic ecologies; it is where artworks enact the permeable boundaries between art and life. The book rethinks entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and recuperates alternative ones: self-transcending art objects complicate the discourse of empathy aesthetics and its attention to self-projecting subjects; furthermore, works of art that stray outside their limits challenge the notion of the enclosed aesthetic form and, in particular, that of the modernist self-contained artwork. In its concern with the continuity between form and space, the book also invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and environments of Minimalism from the 1960s onward, and to consider their origins in aesthetics around 1900.