The Stuff In Between

In this digital residency in collaboration with Art Volt, Stephanie Weber examines the different meanings of the notion of “atmosphere” and attempts a definition of the word as it is invoked in art and art writing, drawing out the threads that link the different uses made of it by the authors of Esse.


In the vein of classic arguments that consider material as synecdoche for era, Patrick Poulin, in his essay “Plasticity and Fragility” published in Esse 65: Fragile, makes the case that the most suitable physical analogue for the contemporary age is plastic. Poulin calls upon two critical precedents to structure this claim: Walter Benjamin’s treatise on glass in “Experience and Poverty” (1933) and Peter Sloterdijk’s diagnosis of the advent of the contemporary condition as congruent with the deployment of chemical weapons in the First World War. Crucially, both touchpoints revolve around characterizations of these transparent materials—glass and gas—in terms of a thing that we might call their “atmosphere.” 

In “Experience and Poverty,” Benjamin famously suggested that objects made of glass have no “aura,” which he defined as a quality contained by art and missing from mechanically reproduced objects; for him, a thing’s aura is drawn from its particularity: its unique position in time, space, and cultural context. Benjamin’s conception of aura also has a phenomenological quality; to experience nature, he wrote, is “to breathe the aura”¹ 1 - Walter Benjamin in Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. Jean-Paul Thibaud (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), 45. of a mountain or branch. Because of this characterization, philosopher Gernot Böhme takes up Benjamin’s “aura” in his pioneering theoretical classification of “atmosphere.” Noting that atmosphere, though not fully theorized, is often used in aesthetic discourse, Böhme suggests that “its substitute representative in theory” is Benjamin’s “aura” and concludes that “to perceive aura is to absorb it into one’s bodily state of being. What is perceived is an indeterminate spatially extended quality of feeling.”² 2 - Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. Jean-Paul Thibaud (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), 47.