This is air
Air flow reactive kinetic sculpture, 2020
Aluminium, High Performance LED-Matrix, Black 3.0, String Curtains
85 x 199 x 6 cm and 85 x 285 x 6 cm
On Default Settings and the Potential of Wonder
With the term default setting, the American writer David Foster Wallace described the standard configurations of our everyday existence — all those seemingly banal elements that surround us daily without our conscious notice.¹ A default setting of this kind, along with the epistemological questions it entails, becomes visible in This is Air. The installation renders air sensually perceptible. Gently, a black-dyed curtain of threads moves in the air currents before a white, glowing LED display measuring three meters in length and eighty-five centimeters in height. The movement draws attention to air as an element with which we exist in constant interaction. The invisible thus becomes not only visible, but—through the tangible presence of the swaying threads—experientially graspable.
This is Air proves to be a programmatic title in every sense. Just as the fish in Foster’s parable—used to illustrate his notion of the default setting—are unaware of the water surrounding them, so too is our perception shaped by apparent self-evidences. Shedding the blinders that accompany these self-evidences requires us to approach the world with unprejudiced curiosity and an open gaze. As the ancient Greeks already noted, “wonder is the beginning of all knowledge; when we cease to wonder, we risk losing what we know.”²
In this sense, sensory experience is an essential aspect of wonder and of the insights it enables. “Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses,” Aristotle observed.³ Perception, as art critic Hanno Rauterberg reminds us, has little to do with rational cognition: “It is not about clear thinking, but about soft and indistinct feeling.”⁴ It is precisely this that Nadja Adelmann’s installation addresses. The sensuality of thousands of gently moving threads allows a tactile experience of an element otherwise difficult to apprehend.
A second layer of meaning emerges from the black color of the curtain. The material used is BLACK 3.0—a pigment that not only absorbs light but also evokes a cultural and ethical debate. Stuart Semple developed it in response to Anish Kapoor’s Vantablack, after Kapoor had secured exclusive artistic rights to its use. Outraged by what he saw as a commercial appropriation of a shared artistic value, Semple offered his black for sale to everyone—except Kapoor.⁵
Beyond this meta-level, the black pigment also stands out in terms of perception. Because of its light-absorbing properties, it resists habitual modes of seeing; the motion of the curtain, though entirely analog, appears like a digital shimmer. The question of how—and whether—we truly perceive the digital world, and which default settings we might continually need to question anew in an age of increasing digitization, remains open. But perhaps, as the saying goes, such a question would simply be up in the air...
Anne Simone Krüger
¹ See David Foster Wallace: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, Boston, Massachusetts, 2009. The essay is based on a commencement speech Wallace gave to the students of Kenyon College in 2005.
² Ernst H. Gombrich: Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 2nd ed., Stuttgart/Zurich 1986, p. 24.
³ Aristotle, paraphrased.
⁴ Hanno Rauterberg: Und das ist Kunst?! Eine Qualitätsprüfung, Frankfurt 2008 (2007), p. 117.
⁵ See, among others: Spiegel Online article on Stuart Semple and Anish Kapoor.