Aesthetic Ecologies: Air and the Space of Art around 1900

This talk explores air as the material space surrounding an artwork – its “Milieu,” “Umgebung” and “Umwelt.” It takes as its starting point evocations of air within and without an artwork, thus, evocations that cut across the separate realms of reference between artwork as image and as material object. The talk examines artworks that “overspill their form” and become continuous with the space environing them, in order to ask: What would an intellectual history of the environment look like when told from the perspective of the literature of art history?

Margareta Ingrid Christian is an Assistant Professor in Germanic Studies and the College at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2012. Her work is situated at the intersection of literature, art history, and the history of science.