Atmosphere, writes Tonino Griffero, is “philosophically interesting not despite but precisely because of [its] vagueness”¹ — 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.

When it rapidly developed in the eighteenth century, the field of meteorology saw in the weather and more broadly, the atmosphere, a richness of information with which to forecast, or interpret what the future would hold. The premonitory power of atmosphere as a realm of predictive experience extends its rhetorical application toward describing tense social situations (an atmosphere of suspense or tension), tracking overwhelming, destabilizing social and political conditions by way of atmospheric effects (a “maelstrom,” a “hurricane,” a “tsunami”). In other words, the rhetorical function of atmosphere aligns the behavior of humans with the often predictable — yet rarely controllable — conditions of the weather; atmosphere is elemental, but it is also sociality. In recent years, and in decades past in other forms, advocates for social justice cry “I can’t breathe” to echo the suffocating machinations of antiblack culture and state power. Millions have called the names of Eric Garner and George Floyd, whose murders by asphyxiation have catalyzed widespread recognition of the stifling atmospheric conditions of American racism. The vagueness of atmosphere — its invisible operations — has also been invoked in the name of post-racialism: because one does not directly see racial violence in one’s immediate community, then it must not exist. The interdependence of visibility and existence makes it extremely difficult to recognize what occludes or enables recognition; reading cultural, political, and social phenomena atmospherically helps illuminate these conditions. As regards artistic practice, this essay understands the dematerialized and atmospheric strategies introduced by conceptual art in the late 1960s as a significant force that has shaped atmospheric approaches in contemporary art, for which the work of Lorna Simpson will serve as a case study.

Beyond invocations of ecology and atmosphere in discourses of climate change, the political valence of atmosphere, particularly its weaponization and totalizing capacity, remains underexplored. Peter Sloterdijk, in his book Terror from the Air, considers how, when poison gas was first used in WWI, the human condition could be conceived as “being-in-the-breathable.”² This concept implies that we are not contained entities, but interdependent with our environment — that our existence is conditioned by the composition of the atmosphere that surrounds us. Architect Léopold Lambert, for instance, invokes Sloterdijk’s ideas to describe toxic atmospheres, building on Christina Sharpe and Frantz Fanon’s observations about the atmospheric conditions of racism and colonialism as atmospheric forces of social death. Fanon consistently descried the colonial state as a breathing body, and colonialism as a totalizing environment of “atmospheric violence.”³ Likewise, Christina Sharpe, in her indispensable text In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, advances the term “the weather” as one of the ongoing locations of being “in the wake,” the spatial concept for existing within the legacies of slavery despite its denial of Black humanity. “The weather,” she writes, “is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack.”⁴ Slavery was, like the weather, totalizing — not a singular event but a recurring phenomenon that appeared under particular circumstances; as the climatological condition of antiblackness, it produces new ecologies.⁵ As Sharpe reminds us: that Black being persists despite its ontological negation, creating its own ecologies out of that weather, is a beautiful paradox.

The clearest art historical example of atmospheric practice is conceptual art and, by extension, conceptualism, which introduced experimental sensibilities that live on in contemporary art’s resistance to medium specificity and its wavering loyalties to form and feeling. The atmospheric experiments of John Baldessari (Cigar smoke to match clouds that are the same [by sight — side view], 1972-3), Robert Barry (Inert Gas Series, 1969), and Michael Asher (Vertical Column of Accelerated Air, 1966) seem to pursue a literal corollary for the theoretical premise of conceptual art, which Lucy Lippard and John Chandler characterized by way of the artwork’s dematerialization (into idea). Some artists saw, in the forces that exceeded the boundaries of the physical object such as entropy and infinite expansion, a counterforce to the cybernetic drive of technoculture and its reliance on closed systems and feedback loops. Pursuing environmental art and systems aesthetics, they utilized atmosphere as an open system whose conditions are subject to circulation and dissipation, and whose aesthetic thus cannot be fully controlled.

Critical conceptual artists addressed other environments: the institutional spaces in which art is defined and the invisible forces that shape its existence, such as economics and power dynamics. In Hans Haacke’s series of condensation cubes, for example, simple objects rendered the invisible visible: clear plexiglass cubes, each with a small volume of water placed inside, generated cycles of condensation in response to the temperature and humidity of their environments (most often the space of an art gallery) at any given time. These and other conceptual propositions by Haacke put atmospheric processes into metaphorical and metonymic dialogue with the increasing agitation over social and power relations in the late 1960s. Using interior environments as their mediums, some artists made space itself the subject of attention, short-circuiting the exhibition as a platform for the display of objects, as in Barry’s Closed Gallery Piece (1969-70) or Asher’s removal of the partition separating office from exhibition space at Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles (1974). At the same time, others utilized atmospheric blur (fog or clouds) to obscure the materiality of architecture with seemingly immaterial atmospheric effects. Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya, as a member of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), created a misty shell for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70, anticipating Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s 2002 pavilion for the Swiss Expo: Blur Building, an “architecture of atmosphere” occasionally shrouded in a cloud of mist pumped from the lake over which it was constructed, immaterializing architecture. Experiencing architecture thus, not as containment but rather as “white out” or “white noise,” obfuscates its physical status, leaving instead subject and atmosphere, qualities essential to architecture yet often not recognized as a part of it. In ways such as these, conceptual art offered a theoretical platform from which artists could advance ideas while holding the object in suspension.

Conceptual art’s embrace of the speculative — in the interest of restructuring the perceptual, and in the relationship between artistic process and artistic product — coincided with a broader atmospheric turn in philosophy, architecture, performance, music, and visual arts that embraced phenomenological concerns with the construction of meaning through embodied experience and space. German philosopher Gernot Böhme has advanced this development within aesthetic theory, challenging a model of aesthetics rooted in judgment about form — what constitutes the thing and differentiates it from another — and instead turning to the “ecstasies of things” as a way of discerning how things affect space (or, the activated zone between subject and object). “In classical thing-ontology,” he writes,

the form of a thing is conceived as something delimiting and enclosing, namely as that which encloses the thing’s volume to the inside and delimits it to the outside. But a thing’s form is also effective to the outside. It radiates into the surroundings, as it were, takes away the homogeneity of the surrounding space and fills it with tensions and movement suggestions.⁶

Atmospheres have an intermediate status: they exist between subject and object and, as mercurial phenomena, are spatially unbounded — “moving emotional powers, spatial carriers of moods.”⁷ If we understand race as an atmosphere — something not located within a body, but between bodies — it becomes clear that racism, a tool for categorizing individual difference, depends on race as a medium for transmitting feelings about what that difference means.

The elemental conditions in which conceptual art arose are broader than the information age, with which it has consistently been associated; the constellation of civil rights, women’s liberation, gay rights, and anti-war movements are less obviously connected to what conceptual art did in practice.⁸ Some conceptual artists stuck to philosophical (and at times solipsistic) modes of inquiry into art’s fundamental essence; others, like Adrian Piper, engaged the atmospheric conditions of their moment, many of which had long been considered to lie outside of art. For example, Piper, whose performative works in the 1970s used direct address to manifest xenophobia in the discursive space between artist and viewer, participated in the 1970 exhibition Information with the piece Context #7. It presented a three-ring binder full of blank pages in which visitors were requested to “write, draw, or otherwise indicate any response suggested by this situation (this statement, the blank notebook and pen, the museum context, your immediate state of mind, etc.).” Piper’s piece can be understood as a meteorological tool that measured the discursive, social, artistic, and political climate of the gallery in the form of the creative, participatory (at times confessional) inscription. As homage to the comment book — the analog vehicle of capturing visitor feedback — Context #7 became an atmospheric timestamp of the exhibition and its elemental conditions.

A more recent example stands in the work of Lorna Simpson, whose artistic practice has traversed various atmospheric registers — from the environmental, like fog, clouds, and ice, to the affective, like sound, texture, and absence — in an ongoing investigation of representation, history, desire, and the figure. Invoking buried histories of racial violence, sexual exploitation, and dehumanization of African slaves and their descendants, while simultaneously conveying the joy, mystery, and power of Black culture, Simpson mobilizes atmospheric effects like darkening, sublimation, and disappearance to make evident the paradoxical condition of what scholars have referred to as existing within the racial atmospheres that, more broadly, constitute “the weather.”

An African American photographer who emerged in the late 1980s, Simpson developed her lucid and critical perspective through graduate study at UCSD under the influence of conceptual artists Eleanor Antin and Allan Kaprow; filmmakers Chantal Akerman and Babette Mangolte; and classmate Carrie Mae Weems. Then as now, her use of photography, language, and the Black body melds the poetics of Blackness with clinical display and seriality informed by minimalism. She presented the Black female body, her most common motif, in a fragmented manner, only ever captured partially by the camera and thus never completely fulfilling the viewer’s scopic desire. Her early work in the late 1980s and early 1990s, installations of text plaques and framed photographs, posited the relationship between photography and language as an environmental condition. Picturing the figure (nearly always a Black woman) with their back turned away from the camera or their face cropped out of the frame, these phototexts asserted presence but not selfhood, frustrating a key claim of portraiture.

Extending her photographic practice into printmaking and film in the 1990s and early 2000s, Simpson in 2015 began painting large-scale canvases filled with deep blue hues of varying opacity, often combined with silkscreen archival photographs and appropriated images. She debuted these paintings in 2019 in the exhibition Darkening at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in New York City. The title referenced the aesthetic and temporal conditions of nightfall as a metaphor for the state of the world: “I… feel that living in America right now is like living in a darkening, a very dark period. So there was this way of thinking about color and thinking about night, but also about atmosphere and inhospitable conditions, and how to survive those conditions.”⁹ Darkening is an essential atmospheric operation, a signal of the passage of day into night or a premonition of bad weather. It represents transition, highlighting the horizon during sunset when, as the light of the sun recedes from its diffuse medium, the atmosphere becomes most coloristically visible. Darkening is a premonition for nighttime — its mysteries, its magic, its mythologies, as well as its metaphorical association with covering, veiling, and concealment. W.E.B. Du Bois described living as an African American as living “within the veil,” channeling the occlusive effect of racial perception: one’s Blackness is perceived at the expense of the true self; but one is also endowed with a unique mode of perception which Du Bois described as “second sight”: the ability to see through one’s Blackness to understand how one is perceived by others.¹⁰ The term “darkening” also refutes the assumed ideals of skin lightening, especially concerning the marketing to Black consumers of cosmetic products that promise to lighten complexion toward an ideal white beauty standard.

In one of these works, Three Figures, Simpson embedded a screen print of an existing photograph within an ink painting, suturing canvases together in an assemblage-like construction. The photograph shows three youths linked by their clasped hands; their silhouettes face away from us, backlit by an incoming deluge of sprayed water. Luminous and sublime, they stand on icy, white ground that drips with ink washes as if it were melting away, while whorls of black ink above their heads suggest a fiery sky.

The source photograph is by Bob Adelman, whose documentation of the May 1963 Birmingham civil rights campaign captured in poetic and graphic terms the violence withstood and resilience exhibited by young protestors. In these images, Adelman captured children marching peacefully, then instinctively resisting the physical force of high-pressure firehoses turned on them by Birmingham police, often by maintaining their connection to each other. In many of these photographs, the atmospheric haze of water — in the form of high-pressure streams, residual mist, drippings from bodies, or vapor steaming up from puddles on hot asphalt — appears as an omnipresent mediation of police and protestors which undergoes various phase shifts. Indeed, the channeling of elemental force — in this case water, a public utility most commonly used for firefighting — and its weaponization against specific bodies introduces water and fire as metonymic referents for control and resistance. “They Fight a Fire that Won’t Go Out,” read the famous photo essay published in the May 17, 1963 issue of Life magazine. Andy Warhol used those images, taken by Charles Moore, in his Race Riot paintings, initiated in 1964. The apocalyptic headline aligned firefighting, a high-stakes struggle between humans and nature, with the struggle to control a natural groundswell of hot emotions and impassioned energies in the interest of social justice, likening the inflammatory racial tensions in the city of Birmingham to an uncontrollable and destructive transformation on the level of natural disaster. Yet for many readers, the use of the firehose as a tool of suppression produced ambivalent feelings about the co-optation of an instrument of public safety to efficiently snuff out protestors’ control over their own bodies in public space. Moore and Adelman’s iconic images of protest were invaluable constructions of the feeling, tempo, and temperature of the Birmingham campaign, especially as historic documents for artistic interpretation.

The grid of canvases that comprises Three Figures begins to fall at its right edge, like a fault line or a cleaving iceberg. It breaks the unified front of the peaceful youth protestors as one figure, a boy, slips away from his two female companions. In 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, igniting nationwide protests calling for the protection of Black life. Just a few years earlier, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking home from the store when he was hunted down and fatally shot by a civilian who suspected him of criminality. In 2015, when Three Figures was shown at the Venice Biennale, young Black men were 5 times as likely to be killed as white men. The works in this series seem to weep and seep and melt — something that requires a more liquid medium than the photograph and its material basis in light. Interested in the magnitude of the ongoing environmental crisis, in which landmass-sized icebergs melt and cleave away, Simpson posits Black fortitude — the efforts to hold together against overwhelming environmental forces — as part of what’s at stake in the current state of ecological precarity. Whether slow or dramatic, the constellation of forces that will dismantle what we once thought was permanent is an apt metaphor for the steady erosion of Black life by the persistent condition of white supremacy.

While Simpson’s more recent paintings pursue the sublimity of climate change as a metaphor for mourning the persistence of violent histories in the present, earlier works also channel the conditions and language of weather. Five Day Forecast (1988), one of Simpson’s earliest works, is a wall installation of five large-format polaroids of a Black woman wearing a white shift, her bare arms crossed in front of her body in a gesture of closure. Her posture — perhaps guarded, perhaps defiant — varies ever so slightly in each frame, creating a filmic rhythm as one “reads” the work from left to right.

The frames cut the figure at the neck and pelvis, revealing incomplete cues about the subject’s identity, height, age, and expression. Above the photographs are plastic plaques with the names of the days of the work week, and below is a litany of words using the prefix “mis-.” The installation utilizes stereotype (an image perpetuated without change) as a photographic and conceptual device, repeating the image of the body — a Black woman’s body — atop a platform of words that describe errors and mistakes. Some, such as “misdescription” and “misdiagnose,” relate to medical racism and disparities in care. Others, like “misremember” and “misfunction,” are euphemisms for lies and failures. In writing about this work, curator Okwui Enwezor understood this strategy of repetition as essential to Simpson’s invocation of the “racial sublime,” whose methods of subjection and denial ground American culture in a particular epistemic violence that is atmospheric in nature: “Simpson deploys a staccato device, a kind of mechanistic action of repetition and differentiation. One feels as if doused with a shower of recriminations.”¹¹ Hemmed in by the standardized march of time (and the plodding rhythm of the workday) and a foundation of concepts that evoke errors in behavior, communication, and judgment, the Black woman’s body lives out the “changing same” of the monotonous weather pattern of everyday racism.

Atmosphere refers to a mood or a feeling that fundamentally exceeds an individual body, instead pertaining primarily to the overall situation in which bodies are entrenched.¹² Considered experientially, atmosphere slips in and out of perception: once inside a cloud, we cannot perceive its form. Mary Jacobus argues that “clouds puzzle us by representing, not so much the mind in a state of reflection, as the latency involved in all visible representation — not fullness versus flatness only, as [Hubert] Damisch argues, but absence itself; the ungraspable; what we can’t see as well as the visible.”¹³ But atmosphere at its most visible — in the horizon — offers a useful ontological allegory. Philosopher Linda Alcoff invokes the horizon in her theory of identification. Identity is not intrinsic to the self but rather encompasses “positioned or located lived experiences in which both individuals and groups work to construct meaning in relation to historical experience and historical narratives. … [W]hen I am identified, it is my horizon of agency that is identified.”¹⁴ One’s “horizon of agency” is circumscribed by their background assumptions, as well as by their position within the social structure or hierarchy.

Starting in the mid-1990s, Simpson turned away from racialized and gendered bodies in her work, privileging atmosphere and absence over bodies as content. Adopting the cloud as both motif and tool of abstraction, Simpson offers an atmospheric metaphor for the sublimating forces of racial violence in the video piece Cloudscape (2004). If the central paradox in Five Day Forecast was its anticipation of predictable inaccuracy, Cloudscape eschews any efforts to read the future and turns to the atmospheric in more formal terms, using the cloud as an ephemeral sign of a persistent voice whose figure oscillates between processes of coming into and out of view.

Cloudscape articulates the sublime semiotics of atmosphere through breath, voice, and the grammar of the body. It features a well-dressed African American man (the sculptor and musician Terry Adkins, 1953-2014) illuminated in an otherwise dark and empty room. Hands in pockets, he slowly whistles an unnamed, plaintive tune.¹⁵ Adkins is erased by the encroaching frame of the camera’s slow zoom while he is obscured by the gathering cloud, seemingly enveloped by the very breath with which he blows his tune. As he disappears, his whistle continues to pierce what obscures him, tethering the spectator with all that remains of his body — a breath, shaped into a melodic whistle by the mouth. At the halfway mark, the video reverses and Adkins’ whistle sounds uncannily as the screen of fog recedes to reveal his body again.

While the work’s title suggests that the “cloud” we see consists of vapor, the context of Simpson’s other references to racial violence suggests an atmosphere evocative of both lyrical fog and ominous smoke, lingering traces of the ritualized public spectacle of antiblack terror. The cloud conjures other associations as well: climate (a frigid chamber, the fog of one’s breath), science (the sublimation of water from liquid to vapor), superstition (spirits, oracles, genies, and ghosts), special effects (a fog machine), and finally, language (whether in author Ralph Ellison’s invocations of invisibility to describe the existential state of Blackness or in the verb “to cloud”: to obscure, to visually conceal, or to be psychologically confused). The affective and verbal associations explicitly reference Simpson’s consistent use of language in her work, now formed associatively in the mind of the viewer as Adkins’ lone whistle continues. The melody, intended to sound like something from the nineteenth-century, is derived from the negro spiritual “I couldn’t hear nobody pray,” which Adkins and Simpson had found on an early twentieth-century recording by the Fiske Jubilee Singers.

Destabilizing the African American figure through simple, cinematic means, Cloudscape brings Blackness into poetic suspension between spirit and flesh, subject to terrestrial gravity but creating a pull of its own that conjures the audible past. Scholars have associated its cloud with a liberatory potential that transmits, as Okwui Enwezor writes, “a song of departure from the charnel house of the racial sublime.”¹⁶ The concept of escape may also allude to the artist’s own feelings of entrapment as a spokesperson for Black women, and her desire to dislocate her autobiography from interpretations of the work, instead making known the structures which govern the appearance of Blackness in a specific time and place.¹⁷ Finally, the cloud offers a corollary for the process of losing oneself in music, in memory, in dreams; when the whistled melody is fully detached from the visible body, we understand that sound as breath, as atmosphere.

Simpson’s work advances different hypotheses of envelopment and mood: in large-scale paintings that spatially overwhelm the viewer, in a video of a man becoming enveloped in (or exhaling) a cloud, and in the photo-linguistic metaphor for everyday slights and microaggressions based on visible identity.¹⁸ Throughout her work, she acknowledges racism as an atmospheric condition that engenders disappearance, and imagines the resilient presence of Blackness within it, outside of the vicissitudes of time and place. Returning to Gernot Böhme’s theorization introduced earlier, an aesthetic of atmospheres addresses experiences that no longer relate to tangible artifacts, but instead to atmospheres, “tuned spaces” shaped by sound, mood, or what Walter Benjamin referred to as “aura.”¹⁹ 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.