The Politics of Breath: Reanimating the Air Art of Hans Haacke and Lygia Clark as Models of Social Critique

Abstract

As part of their distinct, and manifestly influential bodies of work, artists Hans Haacke (b. 1936) and Lygia Clark (1920–1988), produced indelible artworks that engendered a fragile balance between air, the inorganic materials used to suspend or generate it, and the human bodies that impacted it. These works modeled the precarious relationship humans have with their environments: natural, technological, biological and social. Haacke’s and Clarke’s early investment in aligning kinetic processes alongside organic/biological and human/social ones presents an integrated system of transference – what can be thought of as a reciprocity between bodies of knowledge production and bodies breathing in real time and in real space. Installed in their retrospective exhibitions in New York – Clark’s The Abandonment of Art at the Museum of Modern Art (2014) and Haacke’s All Connected at the New Museum (2019) – these air art works first produced in the 1960s were re-staged against a more contemporary socio-political backdrop marked by the continued struggle for social justice reform stemming from the civil rights movements that defined the period of their initial making. Examined together here, selected works by Haacke and Clark pivot on notions of reflexivity and complicity – reanimating our understanding of the interconnectedness of visual art and cultural life in a manner that draws our attention to the politics of breath within contemporary art.