QAGOMA exhibition so good you could bottle it. Well, most of it.

Air is the focus of a new exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art.

Rosslynd Piggott’s Collection of Air for the Air exhibition at QAGOMA

Air is the most elusive and fugitive of the four elements, seemingly invisible, weightless and insubstantial. Earth and water, in contrast, are heavy and material; fire is living energy. Earthquakes, floods and bushfires are capable of overwhelming violence. And yet air too, in its animated manifestation as wind, can be as violent and destructive, and even more unpredictable. The very name of the wind god Aeolus implies his changeable, unstable and ever-shifting character. It is the winds, in ancient poetry, that whip up the sea, bring storms and make seafaring so perilous.

Light breezes, in contrast, are refreshing on hot days, restful after labour and, as Horace observes, invite sleep. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard associated air with dreams in the title of a famous work, L’Air et les songes (1943); and its gentle movements suggest the analogy of breath or spirit, as though the natural world were breathing. In Chinese classical painting, clouds are often thought of as the visible manifestation of the exhalation of mountains.

In landscape painting too, air is the most mysterious and difficult element to convey. In the most beautiful landscapes, whether Chinese or European, it sometimes feels as though the very heart of the work, its most intimate subject, is this almost invisible substance, as though all the more tangible elements of rocks and water and trees existed only to frame and evoke the ineffable emptiness that is also the presence of being itself.

But air is not entirely invisible, either in ordinary experience or in painting. What we call atmosphere is made up of a combination of gases with moisture and particles of dust, smoke and other materials. At different times and in different places the atmosphere can be clearer or more opaque. Landscape painters need to account for the interposition of the atmosphere, the phenomenon known as aerial perspective, which causes things in the distance to appear not only smaller, but less distinct in chroma as well as in tonal contrast.

It would have been interesting to start an exhibition devoted to the subject of air with examples of this sort – indeed with examples of classic aerial perspective in pictures painted in the studio and then a consideration of the changes that come about with the increasing practice of plein-air painting and especially the Impressionists’ ambition not only to start but substantially complete paintings outdoors. The traditional practice of oil paint with layers and translucent glazes was not suited to this approach, so the Impressionists worked mainly with opaque pigments, but in a higher key.

Unfortunately painting is not often included in “contemporary” art exhibitions, unless of course it is painting from some exotic tradition or by an Aboriginal artist. This is odd when we consider that painting is still the form most often practised by professional artists, the kind who put on exhibitions and sell their work to collectors, as distinct from those whose products are only shown by state-funded galleries or commissioned by corporations to enhance their brand identity. But the curators who design public exhibitions like this evidently don’t want anything to look like a traditional painting or to demand too much visual sophistication for its appreciation.

As we see again and again, galleries today seem to have three main priorities, which of course tell us much about the kind of visitor they imagine themselves to be addressing. The first of these priorities is variety: no two pieces can be alike, because the audience has to be kept interested by constantly changing media, materials and style. The second is for things to be striking at first sight, even if they don’t have much to say. And the third is for the effect to be as immersive as possible, so that no effort is required to experience it. All three of these priorities presuppose a passive audience with a diminished attention span, unwilling and unable to look closely or consistently and in need of constantly varied entertainment.

There are plenty of examples of this sort of thing in Air, QAGOMA’s current exhibition, but fortunately also some exceptions. There is, for example, a landscape by Albert Namatjira which would have been far more effective if presented in the context of the landscape tradition he was following instead of being hung alone and isolated. Most notably, and probably because he was born in Brisbane, there is a fine selection of early landscape drawings by Lloyd Rees.

The artist was barely out of his teens when he executed these studies of trees and other motifs, and they are juvenile works compared to the extraordinary drawings that he did around Sydney Harbour two decades later, and which were exhibited at the Museum of Sydney in 2016 under the title Painting with pencil (reviewed here on March 12, 2016). But for all their youthfulness, there is something of the prodigy both in the young man’s sensitivity to living form and his precisely accurate yet light and natural touch in rendering his motifs. What particularly evokes the element of air is the way that the individual studies float on the whiteness of the page in a way that fortuitously recalls the way trees and rocks can float, in a Chinese ink painting, on emptiness that suggests the air and atmosphere that surround them.

The other landscapes are to be found among the collections of seemingly disparate items that Patrick Pound has assembled, and all of which are meant to evoke air – some by direct representation, some by metonymy or association and some by narrative implication. This is one of the more interesting sections of the exhibition, and unlike some others, actually does invite the viewer to look closely and ponder why each image or object has been chosen for inclusion. Works included range from paintings to books to a statue of Hermes, about to fly into the air with his winged sandals.

Particularly interesting are several paintings and photographs which succeed in making air visible through effects of smoke and atmosphere, including Arthur Boyd’s Burning wheat stubble (1949-50), Pietro Fabris’ View of Mount Vesuvius from the sea – one of a set of works that the artist executed to be reproduced as illustrations to Sir William Hamilton’s important study of volcanology, Campi Phlegraei (1776) – and Max Dupain’s photograph Wind in the corn (1948).

Elsewhere in the exhibition there are photographs of the atmosphere heavy with sinister red smoke by Rachel Mounsey, evocative, almost mystical drawings of clouds by Ali Kazim, and most impressively an enormous drawing by Tacita Dean, Chalk Fall (2018) that does not directly represent air but alludes to it implicitly through representing the process of erosion that is increasingly affecting the famous chalk cliffs of Dover. Charles Page’s black and white photographs (1986) are among the best works in the exhibition, but only some refer to air or atmosphere.

Several other works seek to suggest the elusive element either literally, like the giant balloons full of air suspended in the main gallery space, or in the quasi-scientific manner adopted by some contemporary artists, as in Tomas Saraceno’s series entitled We do not all breathe the same air (2022). For this project the artist took samples of air in locations around Melbourne to determine their purity; the air was piped through a filter which ended up being lighter or darker according to the level of impurities in the air at different times of day, and it is the filter discs that are exhibited in rows. Dora Budor’s atmospheric terraria mimic the toxic gases of volcanic activity and remind us that earth’s breathable atmosphere is an almost miraculous exception.

One of the more engaging installations is mock-scientific, like something from a not quite serious wunderkammer: Rosslynd Pigott’s Collection of air (1992-93) takes the form of a row of little bottles presented in a wooden display cabinet, each with a hand-written label identifying the location at which the sample was taken: much of the poetry of the piece arises from the irresistible charm of names, combined with the poignancy of memory and time past: Air of the Rue de Rivoli, 10.1.1993; Air near Puvis de Chavannes’s Jeune filles au bord la mer 1879, Musee d’Orsay, 12.1.1993; Air of the Pantheon, Rome, 2.2.1993; Air of the Piazza della Rotonda, Rome, 4.2.1993.

Some of the larger installations are of variable success. A huge installation by Jonathan Jones suggests cosmic winds as well as the cycles of cultural tradition; but Yhonnie Scarce’s Cloud chamber (2020) does not inherently convey the many ideas that are claimed for it on the exhibition label. As so often in Biennale-type exhibitions, we are reminded that aesthetic meaning is not just a matter of assertion. What Ron Mueck’s enormous hyperreal sculpture In bed (2005) is doing in this room is a mystery; it has nothing to do with the theme of air. Mona Hatoum’s Hot spot (2006) is interesting but does not obviously speak of air; Jamie North’s Portal (2022), which suggests the poetry of ruins and the way that nature encroaches on the work of culture, has little relevance to the subject.

Carlos Amorales’s installation Black cloud (2007-08), with its 30,000 black paper butterflies, is striking for the vast space it occupies as well as for the surprising and sinister abolition of the colours that usually characterise these creatures. But like so many very large-scale and immersive installations, it registers for most visitors as little more than a moment of fleeting surprise.

The last installation in the exhibition is also immersive but is much more effective in provoking curiosity, engagement and wonder in the audience. Anthony McCall’s Crossing (2016) is an attempt to make air itself visible at the most minimal level of perception, approaching sensory deprivation. We enter a space so dark that at first we are compelled to advance very slowly; dark installations are not uncommon in contemporary art, but this is the darkest I can recall.

Even from the beginning, we can see very low-level light projections, making geometric patterns on the floor, but also forming what seem to be three-dimensional volumes in space. We approach what looks like a first thin, insubstantial wall of luminosity, yet it is hard not to believe it is actually solid; we extend a hand hesitantly to make sure that we can pass through it. As our eyes adjust to the gloom we begin to see more clearly that we are surrounded by walls and cones of luminous atmosphere; in fact, just as in landscape painting, it is humidity in the air that makes it capable of catching the light and producing the illusion of luminous solidity, and in this case the humidity is produced by a haze machine. But here, as so often in art, illusion serves to make invisible truth accessible to our senses, our imagination and our awareness.

.