Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900 by Margareta Ingrid Christian

Reviewed by: Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900 by Margareta Ingrid Christian Susan Funkenstein Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900. By Margareta Ingrid Christian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. 304. Cloth $45.00. ISBN 9780226764771. A book on the concept of air feels especially salient during a pandemic. Since 2020, we humans have become hyperaware that what surrounds us might be invisible but not empty; that our relationship with air shifts as we move through spaces and distance ourselves from others; and that our bodies are porous as we breathe air in and out. These pandemic experiences parallel Margareta Ingrid Christian's analysis of theories of material space around art. In her book Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900, Christian explores the ecstasis for an artwork, which she defines as the artwork's "ability to 'stand outside' of itself and affect us" (1). In her turn-of-the-last century examples of writings by Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Rudolph Laban, seemingly empty air space is filled with meaning and possibilities, both for a formalist understanding of artworks themselves and for how artworks resonate in their exhibition spaces and historical moments. The nuance of this material space is explored through careful analyses of notions of Milieu (milieu), Luftraum (air space), Umgebung (surroundings), Umraum (environing space), and Umwelt (environment), among other concepts. One reason these four writers engaged with the material space was its currency in science. Late nineteenth-century discoveries of radioactivity, electrons, and electromagnetic fields brought realizations that objects may emit matter and voids may be filled with moving particles. These discoveries, coupled with broader cultural interests in ether and the occult, meant that ideas were in the air, so to speak, encouraging some writers to consider the porosity of artworks' surfaces, and others the curative benefits of dancing outdoors. Christian's core argument is that air is both the artwork's "space of reception" [End Page 581] as a "vehicle of propagation for aesthetic effects" and a "space of production" where "the artwork's singularity does not come to an end at its material boundaries" (17). The space around the artwork—its externalism—is complex, for air may function as "both a physical medium and a biological-sociological milieu" (17). Christian's approach is distinct from empathy studies or other psychologically based studies of spectatorship because she prioritizes the "extensive artwork" and how it "troubles the distinction between its own boundary and the world environing it" (24). In addition, the book's approach is "a literary study of art-historical texts" (1), and as such, contributes a nuanced analysis of connections between concepts, word choices, and turns of phrases, an approach less common in art historical scholarship. Certainly, Christian's methodologies and analyses are relevant for her case studies around the year 1900, and as she implies in her linkages to Walter Benjamin's notions of a photograph's aura and Rosalind Krauss' exploration of installation art's expanded field (18–23), Objects in Air is likewise pertinent for understanding art and theory well into the twentieth century—and beyond. Objects in Air includes four body chapters plus a coda, and with each chapter the scope of air and material space expands from what is inside the painting, to the material space surrounding the artwork, to moving bodies in space. In this trajectory, Christian takes us from static to dynamic artworks and from a focus on two-dimensional painting to three-dimensional sculpture to four-dimensional dancing. Chapter One analyzes Warburg's interest in Milieu and related terms of Einfluss (influence), Inspirator (inspirer), and Stimmung (mood, atmosphere). In Warburg's dissertation, breezes animate billows of drapery in Italian Renaissance painting and ancient Roman sculpture. Such depicted physical embodiments of air relate semantically and contextually to a cultural atmosphere or milieu in Renaissance Florence—to a time and place influenced by antiquity. Here, air flows across centuries, connects cultural histories, and inspires art. Chapter Two explores Riegl's book Late Roman Art Industry and the related concepts of Umgebung and Luftraum. Riegl's is a "theory of space as a theory of aesthetic environment" in...