10. Weather: The Fog of Ambient Aesthetics

Braddock, Alan C.

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10. Weather: The Fog of Ambient Aesthetics

Alan C. Braddock

Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History

Understanding the difference between weather and climate is crucial for comprehending the existential threat of global warming, not only to human beings but to other life-forms as well...

Author

Alan C. Braddock

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00341.11

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23308

Chapter subject tags:EcocriticismEcology in artWeather in artClimatic factorsImpressionism (Art)Monet, Claude, 1840-1926

10. Weather: The Fog of Ambient Aesthetics

weather, n.
1. a. (a) The condition of the atmosphere (at a given place and time) with respect to heat or cold, quantity of sunshine, presence or absence of rain, hail, snow, thunder, fog, etc., violence or gentleness of the winds. Also, the condition of the atmosphere regarded as subject to vicissitudes.
1. b. With descriptive adjective, e.g., good, bad; hot, cold, warm; bright, dull; fine, fair, foul; dry, wet, rainy; clear, thick; rough, windy, still, calm.
1. c. figurative and in figurative context; spec. (literary), applied to an intellectual climate, state of mind, etc.

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Understanding the difference between weather and climate is crucial for comprehending the existential threat of global warming, not only to human beings but to other life-forms as well. Whereas weather pertains to short-term, localized atmospheric conditions, climate has to do with long-term environmental patterns unfolding at regional and planetary scales with increasingly devastating and differentiated consequences. When attention to weather displaces or distorts knowledge about climate, a kind of epistemological fog sets in, shrouding an urgent problem in a haze of confusion and misinformation, as when politicians beholden to fossil fuel interests disingenuously point to extreme snowstorms and cold snaps in an effort to dismiss the science of climate change and the implication of human activity in it. Inadvertently compounding this fraught situation, artists have often exploited the immediate physical qualities of weather for aesthetic purposes, in some cases exacerbating the fog of misunderstanding with credulous spectacles of sensory experience and exaggerated claims of environmentalist engagement. Such art has a history that merits ecocritical inquiry.1 On the difference between weather and climate, see “What Is the Difference between Weather and Climate Change?,” USGS, https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-difference-between-weather-and-climate-change?. See also Brett Samuels, “Trump Cites Massive Winter Storm to Mock Global Warming,” Hill, January 20, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/426197-trump-cites-massive-winter-storm-to-mock-global-warming/; Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, “Trump Always Dismisses Climate Change When It’s Cold; Not so Fast, Experts Say,” Washington Post, January 29, 2019.

This chapter ponders two moments of aesthetic activity, a century apart, in which internationally prominent artists approached weather in the city of London as a creative source of sensory spectacle, dazzling the public and even impressing most art critics with atmospheric effects in their colorful works. Rather than offering cogent meditations on climate or other urgent environmental issues, the artists in question leveraged local foggy conditions to produce a generalized, abstract sensation of weather through ambient aesthetics. As I contend, ambient aesthetics of this sort involve immersive forms of perceptual experience under highly controlled scenarios that ultimately offer detachment and respite from thorny political ecologies, despite their apparent physical immediacy. In other words, they cultivate therapeutic and contradictory responses, consistent with the etymology of the word “ambient” as a term referring to a surrounding environment but also relating to “ambiguity.” As the literary scholar and ecophilosopher Timothy Morton has observed, ambient aesthetics exemplify “ecomimesis,” a form of environmental art that attempts to circumvent representation by being an environment. This art of mediated immediacy inevitably produces a paradox, for it promises an aesthetic perspective at once inside and outside nature, as well as ostensibly being free of culture and conflict. Such works bracket politics in deference to environmental experience as such—a palliative atmosphere for art’s sake that potentially implicates itself in the politics of denial noted above by obscuring ecological realities. The recent proliferation of immersive exhibitions inviting visitors to experience the work of famous past artists in new ways suggests the growing appeal—not to mention profitability—of such therapeutic spectacles. As an antidote, the chapter concludes with discussion of alternative artistic approaches that engage climate (as opposed to weather) in more critical and productive ways.2 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 152–53, 164–67. Anna Wiener, “The Rise of ‘Immersive’ Art,” New Yorker, February 10, 2022; Zachary Small, “Entrepreneurs Bet Big on Immersive Art Despite Covid-19,” New York Times, January 10, 2021.

PURPLE HAZE: LONDON FOG, 1903

In 1903, Claude Monet (1840–1926) signed and dated a painting titled Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Fog (fig. 1). This was one of about a hundred atmospheric pictures produced by the eminent founder of French impressionism based on three visits to London around the turn of the twentieth century. Staying at the luxurious Savoy Hotel, he observed and sketched views along the Thames River at sites noted for their modernity, including Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament. Then at the height of his financial success and professional renown, Monet particularly enjoyed seeing and depicting the city’s famous effects of fog: “I adore London, it’s a mass, a whole, and it’s so simple. But what I love more than anything in London is the fog. . . . Without the fog London wouldn’t be a beautiful city. . . . It’s the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth.”3 Christine L. Corton, London Fog: The Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015), 182–85, Monet quoted on 184, from René Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer, trans. John Rosenberg (London: Pimlico, 1992), 129.

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Description: Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Fog by Monet, Claude

Fig. 1. Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Fog, 1903. Oil on canvas, 25 5/8 × 39 3/4 in. (65.3 × 101 cm). Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

The phrase “effect of fog” and various permutations thereof appear regularly in the titles of his London pictures, including The Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog), underscoring the artist’s interpretation of the city’s atmosphere as a sensory, aesthetic experience (fig. 2). Another statement by Monet reiterated that perspective along with comments about the technical challenges and opportunities fog posed for him as a painter: “London is the more interesting that it is harder to paint. The fog in London assumes all sorts of colors; there are black, brown, yellow, green, purple fogs, and the interest in painting is to get the objects as seen through all these fogs. My practiced eye has found that objects change in appearance in a London fog more and quicker than in any other atmosphere, and the difficulty is to get every change down on canvas.”4 Monet quoted in Corton, London Fog, 185, from Emma Bullet, “Macmonnies the Sculptor, Working Hard as a Painter,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 8, 1901, 14.

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Description: The Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog) by Monet, Claude

Fig. 2. Claude Monet, The Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog), 1903–04. Oil on canvas, 32 × 36 3/8 in. (81.3 × 92.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

London’s foggy conditions were legendary, inspiring countless works of literary, artistic, and popular imagination during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, a picture in the Illustrated London News from 1849 shows horse-drawn carriages about to collide in midday on a city street befogged in darkness (fig. 3). As historian Christine Corton explains, London’s notorious fog was not simply a “natural,” or nonhuman, phenomenon. Rather, it resulted from a complex combination of atmospheric vectors, including smoke from modern industry and human energy consumption. A product of intertwined human and nonhuman agency, London fog thus exemplifies implication. As Corton writes, “A rapid increase in the quantity of pollutants, above all from coal fires . . . mixed with naturally occurring water vapour at times of temperature inversion to create a London fog, coloured yellow from the sulphurous emissions trapped beneath the cold air above the city.”5 Corton, London Fog, 14. See also John E. Thornes and Gemma Metherell, “Monet’s London Series and the Cultural Climate of London at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Weather, Climate, Culture, ed. Sarah Strauss and Ben Orlove (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 154–56.

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Fig. 3. “A London Fog,” from Illustrated London News, December 23, 1849

Monet understood the human element in such fog, as he acknowledged in 1900 in a letter written from London, expressing concern when it temporarily lifted, depriving him of his favorite atmospheric material: “When I got up, I was terrified to see that there was no fog, not even the least trace of mist; I was in despair, it seemed all my canvases were going for naught, but then little by little, as the fires were lit, the smoke and mist returned.”6 Monet, quoted in Corton, London Fog, 183.

Here it is important to highlight that Monet expressed “despair” not about “smoke” produced by human “fires” but rather its absence. Another London picture by the artist, Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect with Smoke (fig. 4), signed and dated 1903, acknowledged that desired element in its title (Waterloo Bridge, effet de soleil avec fumées). What mattered to Monet were the subtle atmospheric changes that occurred at a given site as well as how he perceived them and whether he could capture them in paint. In a letter to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922), Monet explained his primary interest: “For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life, the air and the light, which vary continually. . . . For me it is only the surrounding atmosphere that gives subjects their true value.”7 Monet to Paul Durand-Ruel, 1890s, quoted in Nancy Norwood, ed., Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process (Rochester, N.Y.: RIT Press in association with Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 2018), 6.

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Description: Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect with Smoke by Monet, Claude

Fig. 4. Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect with Smoke, 1903. Oil on canvas, 26 × 39 3/4 in. (66 × 101 cm). Baltimore Museum of Art

Atmospheric effects of various kinds had played a central role in defining impressionism as a modern, avant-garde artistic movement. From the beginning, impressionism asserted the importance of each artist’s subjective perceptual experience in registering ephemeral light and color outdoors, en plein air. Working in the open air, in front of their motif, the painters shared a fundamental commitment to direct observation, but their practice also relied on various modern amenities, including nineteenth-century technological innovations of mobility such as the railroad and the portable commercial paint tube patented by an American inventor named John Goffe Rand in 1841 (fig. 5). As Monet’s impressionist colleague Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) would later comment, “Without paints in tubes, there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro, nothing of what the journalists were later to call Impressionism.” In terms of atmosphere, access, and artistic materials, impressionism and the environments it depicted exemplified conditions of modernity and implication.8 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, quoted in Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, trans. Randolph and Dorothy Weaver (1958; repr. New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 69. On impressionism, mobility, and modern technology, see James H. Rubin, Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). See also David Bomford, John Leighton, Jo Kirby, and Ashok Roy, Impressionism: Art in the Making (London: National Gallery in association with Yale University Press, 1991).

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Description: Patent for Metal Rolls for Paint by Rand, John Goffe

Fig. 5. John Goffe Rand, Patent for Metal Rolls for Paint, September 11, 1841. Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Another defining trait uniting the impressionists was their artistic dematerialization of form and disregard of the narrative conventions favored by traditional academic painters. The impressionists sought direct observation with an innocent eye, focusing on their own optical perceptions rather than faithful representation of physical things. Monet clearly articulated this aspect of the impressionist approach in his advice to an American artist named Lilla Cabot Perry (1848–1933) in 1890: “When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naïve impression of the scene before you.”9 Lilla Cabot Perry, “Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1909,” Magazine of Art 18 (1927): 120.

As Perry also recalled, “He said he wished he had been born blind and then had suddenly gained his sight so that he could have begun to paint in this way without knowing what the objects were that he saw before him.” Thus, Monet’s impressionist philosophy emphasized the artist’s abstract interpretation of his surroundings, regardless of their specific physical nature or character. The point was to perceive those surroundings unfiltered and unmediated by cultural traditions and biases but also unaffected by ethical concerns or other value judgments. In light of this philosophy and Monet’s positive aesthetic perception of “smoke,” it would be unwarranted to regard even a seemingly realist picture like Monet’s The Coalmen as an indictment of environmental pollution or labor conditions (fig. 6). What might appear to some twenty-first-century viewers as a critique of such realities was simply another opportunity for subjective artistic expression to Monet. Of course, there was an implicit element of democratization in his undifferentiating approach since anything or anyone could potentially serve as worthy aesthetic material—a fact scorned by academic conservatives who preferred traditional elevated subject matter—but impressionism generally avoided obvious sociopolitical or environmentalist sentiments.10 On Monet’s The Coalmen, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” Public Culture 26, no. 2 (2014): 222–23.

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Description: The Coalmen by Monet, Claude

Fig. 6. Claude Monet, The Coalmen, ca. 1875. Oil on canvas, 21 1/4 × 26 in. (54 × 66 cm). Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Impressionism’s reorientation of priorities and practices went hand in hand with a deliberate effort to circumvent established institutions of artistic training and exhibition, namely the French Academy and its annual salon, through independent modes of education and display. During the impressionists’ first independent group show in 1874, held at the home of the photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910), Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (fig. 7) prompted a conservative critic, Louis Leroy (1812–1885), to write an influential negative review. Titled “The Exhibition of the Impressionists,” Leroy’s review thereby gave the new artistic movement a name. In condemning the entire gathering, the critic singled out Monet’s Impression, Sunrise for ridicule by satirizing its sketchy, unfinished style: “Impression—I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it . . . and what freedom, what ease of workmanship!” Leroy did not mention the sulfurous yellow atmosphere in which Monet captured the effects of industrial coal smoke at his home city of Le Havre, but he mockingly compared the painting to a popular form of commercial décor in domestic environments: “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.” Thus, impressionism evoked and interacted with various modern environments from the beginning.11 Louis Léroy, “L’Exposition des impressionistes,” Charivari, April 25, 1874. For discussion of Monet’s Impression, Sunrise and the first impressionist exhibition, see Rubin, Impressionism and the Modern Landscape, xi, xv–xvi, xx, 16, 27–37, 46, 94, 130–34. On Monet’s depiction of air pollution in Le Havre, see Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” 220–22.

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Description: Impression, Sunrise by Monet, Claude

Fig. 7. Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1873. Oil on canvas, 19 × 24 3/8 in. (48.3 × 61.9 cm). Musée Marmottan, Paris

These facts highlight a profound irony about Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Fog (see fig. 1) and the series of pictures to which it belonged at the cusp of the twentieth century. When he signed and dated this work in 1903, the artist was not in London’s environment anymore but rather at his studio in Giverny, fifty miles west of Paris. After his last painting trip to the British capital in 1901, Monet brought all the Thames pictures back to France and continued to work on them together as a group for two more years, far from London’s distinctive bridges and atmospheric conditions. By the 1890s, the artist had made a decisive shift away from painting exclusively en plein air. Instead, he increasingly produced ensembles of paintings with variations on a theme, laboriously working and reworking them en masse in his studio. The famous founder of impressionism was no longer an impressionist.12 Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the ’90s: The Series Paintings (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts in association with Yale University Press, 1990); Grace Seiberling, Monet’s Series (New York: Garland, 1981).

Monet’s London series constituted the largest such ensemble yet undertaken by him and one that involved considerable labor, delay, and frustration. As noted earlier, he mentioned how London’s atmosphere made the city “more interesting” but also “harder to paint.” Despite his love of fog, he struggled to complete the paintings to his liking. According to curator Nancy Norwood, technical analysis at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, has revealed “extensive reworking, both in the placement of forms and in color scheme.” Monet’s letters reveal his exasperation. Asked in 1903 by his dealer, Durand-Ruel, when some of the pictures might be available for exhibition and sale, the artist replied, “I cannot send you a single painting of the London series as it is absolutely necessary for the work I am doing to have them all in front of me, and, to be honest, not a single one is completed yet.”13 Claude Monet to Paul Durand-Ruel, March 23, 1903, quoted in Corton, London Fog, 183. On the London series, see Norwood, Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, 7; and Grace Seiberling, Monet in London (Atlanta, Ga.: High Museum of Art in association with University of Washington Press, 1988).

His urgent sense of necessity about having “the London series . . . all in front of me” suggests another important aspect of the ensemble approach. In this new phase of Monet’s artistic practice, the pervasive “atmosphere” of London had essentially migrated from the Thames to his studio environment in pictorial form. Working in tandem at dozens of canvases on easels and propped against walls from floor to ceiling, as seen in a contemporary photograph of his workspace, the artist had reinvented his London experience by surrounding himself with aestheticized fog (fig. 8). In describing Monet’s process during this time, the scholar John House proposed that the painter envisioned each picture with a distinctive tone and enveloppe, a French period term of art designating a “tangible, unifying atmosphere which surrounds objects.” At Giverny, the artist’s studio arguably functioned as such an environment, enveloping Monet himself.14 John House, Monet: Nature into Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 221.

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Description: Interior of Claude Monet's studio at Giverny

Fig. 8. Interior of Claude Monet’s studio at Giverny, ca. 1900. Archives Durand-Ruel, Paris

When Monet finally exhibited a selection of his London paintings at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris in 1904, critics received them very positively. One reviewer, writing under the pseudonym Le Masque Rouge, praised Monet for striving “to explore the inexplorable, to express the inexpressible, to build, as the popular expression has it, on the fogs of the Thames!” Another critic, named Arsène Alexandre, reported that the series “dazzled every observer with the subtlety of their effects, the richness of their colors, the astounding rendering of the sun through the mists, and the enchantment of the atmosphere.” Alexandre’s observation about “the sun through the mists” specifically recalls Waterloo Bridge: Effect of Sunlight in the Fog (fig. 9) and London, Houses of Parliament. The Sun Shining through the Fog (fig. 10), both of which bring to mind the solar haze of Monet’s foundational Impression, Sunrise (see fig. 7). In deserting his earlier commitment to plein air painting for studio-based series, Monet also recycled one of his most famous motifs.15 Arsène Alexandre, “News from Our Parisian Correspondents,” Courrier de l’Aisne, June 9, 1904; Le Masque Rouge, “Notes d’Art: L’exposition Claude Monet,” L’Action, May 12, 1904, quoted in Jennifer A. Thompson, “Between the Balcony and the Studio: Monet’s Struggle to Finish the Thames Series,” in Norwood, Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, 24.

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Description: Waterloo Bridge: Effect of Sunlight in the Fog by Monet, Claude

Fig. 9. Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge: Effect of Sunlight in the Fog, Oil on canvas, 28 3/4 × 39 3/8 in. (73.7 × 100.3 cm). National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

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Description: London, Houses of Parliament. The Sun Shining through the Fog by Monet, Claude

Fig. 10. Claude Monet, London, Houses of Parliament. The Sun Shining through the Fog, 1904. Oil on canvas, 31 7/8 × 35 3/4 in. (81 × 92 cm). Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The art historian Jennifer A. Thompson notes that reviewers admired Monet’s London pictures even though, as critic Desmond FitzGerald put it in 1905, “They are really more of a studio series than any of the other works of the master.” This critical acquiescence to studio production signals not only the artist’s abandonment of impressionist practice but also the institutionalization of “Impressionism” as a canonical modernist movement, in which its founder now enjoyed the reputation of an Old Master. It also confirms Monet’s success in helping to turn London’s fog into an aesthetic spectacle with a life of its own. Famous earlier artists to assay the theme included Joseph M. W. Turner (1775–1851) and James A. M. Whistler (1834–1903), whose works Monet knew well and admired (Whistler had even stayed at the Savoy himself). Monet took things to a new level, however, by creating an ensemble consisting of nearly a hundred paintings. A further sign of their spectacular appeal appears in another letter to Durand-Ruel, written after the successful series debut in Paris in 1904. In the letter, Monet informed his dealer that he intended to keep an unspecified Waterloo Bridge picture at his studio, “in order to make another one with smoke, as you requested.” Having established himself as a leader in painting atmospheric effects generated in part by modern industry, Monet developed his own quasi-industrial production process involving large ensembles of studio pictures, with thematic options created on demand.16 Desmond FitzGerald, “Claude Monet: Master of Impressionism,” Brush and Pencil 15, no. 3 (1905): 187, quoted in Thompson, “Between the Balcony and the Studio,” 24; Monet to Durand-Ruel, 1904, quoted in Thompson, 26. On the fog-related art of Turner, Whistler, and Gustave Doré, see Jonathan Ribner, “The Poetics of Pollution,” in Katharine Lochnan, Turner Whistler Monet: Impressionist Visions (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2004), 51–63.

In 1927, a year after Monet’s death, his once-impressionistic art of direct observation and ephemeral atmospheric phenomena acquired an even more public, institutional form in a colossal installation at the Musée de l’Orangerie in the Tuileries Garden of Paris (fig. 11). There, in honor of the master, the French government exhibited a monumental cycle of mural paintings from his last great series of Water Lilies (Nymphéas), based on studies made at his garden pond in Giverny. A quarter century before, in 1902, as he struggled to complete the London series, Monet had hired workers to expand the pond by excavating earth, constructing islands, building bridges, and diverting water from the River Ru, irking neighbors in the process with these environmental disruptions. That is, while dematerializing London bridges in paint, he built new bridges on his property in France as the infrastructure for his final project in ambient aesthetics. At the Orangerie, in an elliptical environment reminiscent of scenes from Stanley Kubrick films, Monet’s art may envelop visitors for eternity.17 For critical discussion of Monet’s diversion of water at Giverny and subsequent murals at the Orangerie, see Stephen F. Eisenman, ed., From Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism (Rome: Skira, 2011), 29–32. See also Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, ed., Monet’s Garden in Giverny: Inventing the Landscape (Giverny: Musée des Impressionistes, 2009); Thompson, “Between the Balcony and the Studio,” 19; and Michel Hoog, The Nymphéas of Claude Monet at the Musée de l’Orangerie (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990).

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Description: Water Lilies (Nymphéas) by Monet, Claude

Fig. 11. Claude Monet, Water Lilies (Nymphéas), 1927. Eight mural paintings; oil on canvas. Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris

SEEING YOURSELF SENSING: LONDON FOG, 2003

In 2003, almost exactly one century after Monet debuted his London fog pictures, the artist Olafur Eliasson created a large atmospheric installation called The Weather Project at Tate Modern, near the Thames River not far from Waterloo Bridge, as part of an exhibition series sponsored by Unilever Corporation (fig. 12). Prominently displayed in the museum’s cavernous Turbine Hall, Eliasson’s installation used monochromatic lamps, humidifiers, and reflective foil to immerse visitors in a massive, multisensory environment of mist illuminated by a giant, sunlike yellow disc. Two million people reportedly attended the installation during its six-month run. Visitors wandered through the foggy interior space and often lay down on the floor of the immense hall, observing their reflections in the mirror surface on the ceiling above. The Weather Project generated enormous attention from journalists, art critics, and academic scholars, with mostly positive reviews. During the installation, their writings conjured a variety of associations about social collectivity, global warming, deadly heat waves, solar power, the sublime, Turner paintings, and the famously foggy meteorological conditions of London, among other things. Indeed, the multiplicity of ideas evoked by the work indicates its lack of specificity about any of them—which probably helps explain its resounding popularity as a screen onto which visitors could essentially project whatever meanings they desired. If any artist had rivaled the grandeur and public success of Monet’s atmospheric London series, it was Eliasson. One critic, writing in the Guardian, unwittingly echoed an earlier review of the French artist’s work by describing The Weather Project as “absolutely dazzling.” In a subsequent publication, the artist cited the installation to describe effects he aspired to achieve in all of his work: “An exhibition has a texture, an atmosphere. . . . It’s like a small weather system: you enter it, are enveloped, live through the questions that particular atmosphere asks, and leave it again—retaining, I hope, some trace or feeling of what you passed through. I treasure the fact that you cannot quantify atmosphere—I feel more at ease in the non-quantifiable.”18 Olafur Eliasson, Experience, ed. Michelle Kuo (New York: Phaidon, 2018), https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2018/september/11/an-exhibition-is-like-a-small-weather-system-olafur-eliasson-on-art-audience-and-the-experience-of-putting-on-a-show/. For the “absolutely dazzling” reference, see Rachel Cooke, “The Brightest and the Best: The Latest Massive Installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall Is Absolutely Dazzling,” Guardian, October 18, 2003. On attendance at The Weather Project, see Adrian Hardwicke, “Secret Diary of an Art Gallery Attendant,” Guardian, October 9, 2003.

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Description: The Weather Project by Eliasson, Olafur

Fig. 12. Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003. Monofrequency lights, projection foil, haze machines, mirror foil, aluminum, and scaffolding. Installation in Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London

The Weather Project uncannily recalled Monet's London series in a number of ways, inadvertently marking a kind of centennial. The similarities suggest a historical pattern of ambient aesthetics.19 See also Susan May, Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project (London: Tate Publishing, 2003); and Tate Modern, “Olafur Eliasson The Weather Project: About the Installation,” https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/unilever-series/unilever-series-olafur-eliasson-weather-project.

Although Eliasson’s installation obviously differed from Monet’s London series in medium and physical scale, both projects produced “dazzling” atmospheric spectacles associated with London fog. “Who’d have thought fog was such a big thing?” Eliasson joked at the project opening, citing a long history of meteorological fascination going back to Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), who famously quipped that “Englishmen” were always “in haste to tell each other what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.” Eliasson’s sunlike disc of light penetrating the anthropogenic haze at Tate Modern even brings to mind specific paintings by Monet, such as Impression, Sunrise, Waterloo Bridge: Effect of Sunlight in the Fog, and London, Houses of Parliament. The Sun Shining through Fog (see figs. 7, 9, 10). Such resemblances point to their shared recognition of the aesthetic potential of fog, light, and color as artistic materials with multisensory appeal.20 Eliasson quoted in Rachel Cooke, “Brightest and the Best.” On antiwar protests during The Weather Project, see Caroline Gammell, “Tate Protesters Give Bush the Message,” Art for a Change / Indybay.org, November 18, 2003, https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2003/11/18/16602231.php.

More important, both Monet and Eliasson leveraged the evocative power of such atmospheric effects to create an experience that seemed modern and new while also being vague and politically unspecific. Consistent with the dynamics of ambient aesthetics noted at the beginning of this chapter, each artist in his own way abstracted weather to produce an immersive experience largely detached from thorny ecological realities, whether pervasive coal “smoke” circa 1900—which rivaled cholera as a cause of death, prompting a public smoke abatement reform movement—or corporate sponsorship by Unilever, British Petroleum, and other multinational businesses supporting Tate circa 2000—part of a calculated public relations strategy, prompting environmental protests. Some visitors to The Weather Project used their bodies to make antiwar statements as the U.S. and U.K. militaries prepared to invade oil-rich Iraq in 2003, but Eliasson and Tate remained circumspect about such protests, avoiding direct involvement or explicit expressions of solidarity. In keeping with Morton’s idea of ecomimesis, both Monet and Eliasson strived to create works that circumvented representation and politics by simply being environments rich with associative potential. The result in each case was a paradoxical art of mediated immediacy, seemingly inside and outside nature—palliative atmospheres for art’s sake.21 On the smoke abatement reform movement in London circa 1900, see Ribner, “Poetics of Pollution,” 52. In an exhibition catalog essay exploring the historical influence of weather on warfare and other events, Tate Modern curator Susan May buried the following statement in a footnote: “A more recent example of the weather’s influence on warfare is provided by the recent war in Iraq, where diplomatic efforts to secure a peaceful solution without resorting to war failed prematurely in the face of a determination to invade before the heat of summer intensified.” Susan May, “Meteorologica,” in May, Olafur Eliasson, 15n3.

At the time of the opening, Eliasson discussed The Weather Project in various places, using broad terms and big ideas with little specificity or urgency about either ecology or environmental politics. For example, in a Tate Modern book published to coincide with the installation, he said: “The weather has been so fundamental to shaping our society that one can argue that every aspect of life—economical, political, technical, cultural, emotional—is linked to or derived from it. Over the centuries, defending ourselves from the weather has proved even more important than protecting ourselves from each other in the form of war and violence. If you cannot withstand the weather, you cannot survive.”22 Eliasson, quoted May, Olafur Eliasson, 6.

Exemplifying the aforementioned displacement of climate by weather, such a statement even seems to confuse the two by discussing weather as a “fundamental” influence historically shaping “every aspect of life.” As in some corporate public relations language, Eliasson’s vague universalizing use of pronouns—“our” society, “ourselves,” and “you”—avoided naming particular communities that have needed protection from “war and violence” or groups that have faced disproportionate burdens as a result of “economical” or “political” inequities. Eliasson has articulated a general principle governing his work with the phrase “seeing yourself sensing,” referring to an intimate, personal experience of sensation and perception. According to that principle, weather functions simultaneously as a pervasive universal force of existential importance for all human beings and as a subjective, individual sensory experience.23 Eliasson used the phrase “Seeing Yourself Sensing” as the title of a installation in 2001 (https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK101202/seeing-yourself-sensing), but it also serves as a general idea pervading his work, as indicated on this Tate Modern web page: “How Eliasson Is Changing Our Perceptions,” https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/olafur-eliasson-5239/yes-but-why-olafur-eliasson. For critical analysis of corporate public relations discourse and the language of universals, see Michael Heller, “Foucault, Discourse, and the Birth of British Public Relations,” Enterprise & Society 17, no. 3 (September 2016): 651–77; Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

As archived on Eliasson’s website, The Weather Project features photographs and video of the installation interspersed with various words and phrases—“weather,” “fog,” “democracy,” “looking up, looking down,” “rethinking the institution,” “being with,” “constructed nature”—linked to other works by the artist relating to those themes. The artist thereby connects this particular project to his larger oeuvre exploring issues of space, environment, institutions, and social relationships. The Weather Project archive also displays the artist’s definitive description of the installation:

Created for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, this site-specific installation employed a semi-circular screen, a ceiling of mirrors, and artificial mist to create the illusion of a sun. Aluminium frames lined with mirror foil were suspended from the ceiling to create a giant mirror that visually doubled the volume of the hall—along with the semi-circular screen mounted on the far wall, its long edge abutting the mirror ceiling. Backlit by approximately 200 mono-frequency lights, the semi-circle and its reflection created the image of a massive, indoor sunset seen through the artificial mist emitted into the room. By walking to the far end of the hall, visitors could see how the sun was constructed, and the reverse of the mirror structure was visible from the top floor of the museum.

In preparation for the exhibition, Eliasson devised a questionnaire for the employees at Tate Modern that included questions such as: ‘Has a weather phenomenon ever changed the course of your life dramatically?’ ‘Do you think tolerance to other individuals is proportional to the weather?’ ‘To what extent are you aware of the weather outside your workplace?’ The results were published in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, which also included a roundtable discussion about the communication of art, meteorological reports of freak weather events, weather statistics, and a series of essays on the weather, time, and space.24 Olafur Eliasson, “The Weather Project, 2003,” https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK101003/the-weather-project.

In a rare critical analysis of The Weather Project and other works by the artist, literature scholar Louise Hornby argues, “Eliasson’s environments are fully orchestrated affairs that share the technologies and efforts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ militarization of climate control. Their phenomenological embrace, which has become a hallmark of much immersive art, relies on a stripe of self-centering that turns art into an occasion for feeling, foreclosing on critique.” I concur with the point about solipsistic feeling and “phenomenological embrace,” for these are indeed central to the appeal of Eliasson’s work and “much immersive art,” but I think Hornby misses the mark in also describing The Weather Project as “a series of apocalyptic hallucinations that summon the history of poison gas and polluted air in the twentieth century.” Such a reading ascribes too much criticality to the artist and fails to explain the work’s sensational popularity, not to mention its relation to the wider field of immersive art.25 Louise Hornby, “Appropriating the Weather: Olafur Eliasson and Climate Control,” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 1 (2017): 60, 76.

EMPIRE OF FOG: THE EXPANSION OF AMBIENT AESTHETICS

The Weather Project is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ambient aesthetics in recent art. Other examples include: Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s fog-shrouded Blur Building suspended above Lake Neuchâtel during the 2002 Swiss Expo; Random International’s motion-activated Rain Room of 2012–14 (sponsored by Volkswagen), where visitors were “simultaneously exposed to and protected from the water falling all around”; and Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Bridge of 2013 at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, which encouraged people to “lose yourself in a sudden, swirling mass of fog . . . enveloping all in its gauzy embrace.” Reprising its earlier popular success with Eliasson’s Weather Project, Tate Modern organized (with corporate sponsorship from BMW) an installation by Nakaya titled London Fog in 2017 (fig. 13), which the museum advertised on its website with an invocation to “Immerse Yourself in Fog.” All of these works involved the manipulation of water in various states to produce an immersive experience of atmospheric conditions as a tangible, yet ambiguous, material presence.26 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Blur Building, Yverdon-Les Bains, Switzerland, 2002, https://dsrny.com/project/blur-building; Random International, Rain Room, various venues, 2012, https://www.random-international.com/rain-room-2012, and “Rain Room,” Magazine–Momentum (Volkswagen Annual Report, 2014), https://annualreport2014.volkswagenag.com/magazine/rain-room.html; Fujiko Nakaya, Fog Bridge, Exploratorium, San Francisco, 2013, https://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/fog-bridge-72494; José da Silva, “Tate Modern Opens First ‘Live’ Show with Mist, Plants and a Rave,” Art Newspaper, March 24, 2017, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2017/03/24/tate-modern-opens-first-live-show-with-mist-plants-and-a-rave.

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Description: London Fog by Nakaya, Fujiko

Fig. 13. Fujiko Nakaya, London Fog, 2017. Immersive fog sculpture, animated by a light and soundscape. Tate Modern, London

By creating spectacles of sensory perception and bodily envelopment while avoiding pointed ecological or social critique, such art seems symptomatic of a historical moment when global warming and related climate disruptions make weather increasingly palpable and problematic. Contrary to disturbing reports of catastrophic environmental change contributing to massive property loss, dislocation, and accelerating global migration, the foggy “embrace” of these ambient installations offers something like a reassuring return to the prenatal womb. The artists and their host museums have invariably interpreted the installations in vaguely perceptual, not political, terms, ensuring an anodyne aesthetic experience. For example, Diller Scofidio + Renfro describe Blur Building as “an architecture of atmosphere—a fog mass resulting from natural and manmade forces” where “there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself.” According to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Random International’s Rain Room is an immersive environment of perpetually falling water that pauses wherever a human body is detected. The installation offers visitors an opportunity to experience what is seemingly impossible: the ability to control rain. Rain Room presents a respite from everyday life and an opportunity for sensory reflection within a responsive relationship.” For Nakaya, Fog Bridge evokes the “beautiful fog of San Francisco” and “is like talking to nature.”27 Abrahm Lustgarten, with photographs by Meridith Kohut, “The Great Climate Migration,” New York Times, July 23, 2020; David Wallace Wells, “Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming into View,” New York Times, October 26, 2022; Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Blur Building; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Rain Room,” https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/rain-room; Nakaya, Fog Bridge; Fujiko Nakaya, quoted in MeeFog Systems, “Sculpture Welcomes Visitors to New San Francisco Exploratorium,” in Special Effects (Irwindale, Calif.: Mee Industries, 2013).

It is hard not to associate mist with “mystification” here in the Marxian sense as a term describing the obfuscation of the commodity in its history and relations of production. This vogue for atmospheric art installations involves predictable “immersive” opportunities for direct “experience” in highly controlled scenarios of detached “reflection” and “respite” from “everyday life.” In other words, they are therapeutic and contradictory, in keeping with the now familiar parameters of ambient aesthetics. The proliferation of such installations in recent years suggests not only the aesthetic commodification of atmospheric sensory experience, but it also perhaps functions as a barometer of growing desire for therapeutic “respite” from “everyday life.”28 Guenter Lewy, False Consciousness: An Essay on Mystification (New York: Routledge, 2017).

An early example of ambient aesthetics in contemporary environmental art had occurred at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan, where Nakaya, Robert Rauschenberg, and other collaborators in the group Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., shrouded the Pepsi Cola Pavilion in a cloud of fog (fig. 14). With Pepsi’s permission and sponsorship, E.A.T. constructed a system of water pipes and spray nozzles to produce an enveloping vapor, engulfing architect Tadashi Doi’s geodesic structure in an atmosphere that Rauschenberg described as an “invisible environment.” Parallels between this project and Eliasson’s later installation at Tate become obvious when we consider E.A.T.’s treatment of the Pepsi Pavilion interior, with its reflective Mylar coating inverting images of visitors.29 Joseph D. Ketner II, Witness to Phenomenon: Group ZERO and the Development of New Media in Postwar European Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 254–59; Cristina Albu, “Between Expanded Consciousness and Expanded Bodies: Spectatorial Engagement with Invisible Architecture,” Athanor 28 (2020): 85–93; Rauschenberg quoted on page 87.

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Fig. 14. Experiments in Art and Technology, Pepsi Pavilion, Expo '70, 1970. Immersive environment consisting of mist created with pressured water pumping system and nozzle sprayers. Osaka, Japan. Photograph: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20)

An installation by Olafur Eliasson in 2015 complemented the ambient aesthetics of sensation with technical information to produce a somewhat more complex display. Titled Ice Watch Paris, the artwork consisted of twelve large chunks of glacial ice from Greenland, transported to the Place du Panthéon in Paris and arranged in a clocklike pattern alluding to the passage of time and the historic urgency of responding to climate change (fig. 15). The Panthéon, a secular shrine to heroes of the French Revolution and Enlightenment, provided an appropriate public setting for this installation coinciding with the U.N. COP21 Climate Conference, where international negotiators were debating a framework agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Many visitors cavorted playfully around the melting glacial ruins, taking selfies and striking humorous poses, but some engaged in more serious reflection and inquiry aided by the artist’s accompanying website, which provided exhortations about activism and data concerning the carbon footprint of the installation itself. Eliasson’s own statement once again emphasizes sensation—“I hope my works touch people,” he says—but he also hopes to make climate challenges “tangible” and thereby “inspire shared commitment to taking climate action.” Exactly what action remains unclear, suggesting a certain aesthetic continuity between this work and his earlier ambient installation at Tate Modern.30 Eliasson quoted by Angie Cook, “Artist Brings Fragments of Greenland Glaciers to Paris Climate Talks,” Architect, December 16, 2015. See also the artist’s archive website, Olafur Eliasson, Ice Watch, 2014, https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK109190/ice-watch.

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Description: Ice Watch Paris by Eliasson, Olafur; Rosing, Minik

Fig. 15. Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing, Ice Watch Paris, December 3–12, 2015. Twelve icebergs from a fjord outside Nuuk, Greenland. Installed at Place du Panthéon, Paris. Photograph by Alan C. Braddock

Although Eliasson’s public statements in recent years have expressed more urgency about climate change, the now recognizable atmospheric tone of circumspection still delimits his perspective on politically divisive issues and choices. For example, when Tate Modern organized a major retrospective of his work in 2019, Eliasson acknowledged, “We are living in a climate emergency.” This broad declaration coincided with his arrangement to have the museum serve vegetarian food catered by his sister, Victoria Eliasdóttir, evidently in recognition of the significant carbon footprint of meat. The artist has also founded programs to assist migrants and low-income people living without electrical utilities in obtaining services and solar-powered lighting. However, Eliasson carefully avoids criticizing specific people, entities, or policies that bear culpability for the emergency. Instead, he says, “We need to re-imagine and re-engineer the systems that brought us to where we are. . . . We need to take risks. We don’t have a choice. The future has to be different from the past.” As Hornby observes, this impulse to “re-imagine and re-engineer” mirrors other contemporary discourses about climate control and weather management, including those increasingly undertaken by military superpowers in a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape.31 Eliasson quoted in Javier Pes, “‘We Are Living in a Climate Emergency’: Olafur Eliasson on How He’s Using His Tate Modern Show to Combat Earth’s Greatest Crisis,” Artnet News, July 9, 2019. Hornby, “Appropriating the Weather.” On the 2019 retrospective, see Mark Godfrey, ed., Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life (London: Tate Publishing, 2019); Adrian Searle, “Olafur Eliasson Review—Art’t Weatherman Fogs up Tate Modern,” Guardian, July 9, 2019; and “Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life,” Tate Modern, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/olafur-eliasson.

When confronted about corporate sponsorship—for him and for museums such as Tate Modern—Eliasson responds in general terms by saying, “In the past ten years museums have had to operate on a higher moral high ground.” Instead of “suddenly scapegoating an institution,” he says, “What is more important is how we navigate the future with our newly acquired higher moral standards.” This raises a question about how those “newly acquired higher moral standards” materialized in the first place. Accordingly, this chapter concludes with discussion of an alternative artistic tradition that helped articulate them. The tradition in question—art of institutional critique—has much to offer ecocritical art history.32 Eliasson quoted in Pes, “‘We Are Living in a Climate Emergency.’”

ECOCRITICAL ALTERNATIVES

Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube of 1963–65 (fig. 16) directly addressed the problem of ambiguity at the heart of ambient aesthetics. In doing so, it revealed the inescapable political entanglement of even the most vague and seemingly self-enclosed objects or systems. In 1971, Haacke described Condensation Cube as his “first weather box,” consisting of

a rectangular container, made of clear plastic, in which I sealed some distilled water. Air currents, light entering the container, and changes in temperature made the internal temperature rise above the outside temperature and led to the condensation of the evaporating water on the inside walls of the box. If a condensation droplet gained a certain size, it would fall or run down the pane, erasing all other drops in its way. The trace left behind eventually would be covered again with a veil of droplets, although their size would differ from that of the older ones.33 Hans Haacke, “Provisional Remarks” [1971], in Working Conditions: The Writings of Hans Haacke, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016), 48.

Noting fluctuations in the dew point, Haacke highlighted what he called “a delicate constellation of ever-changing factors” and “the subtle communication with a seemingly sealed-off environment and the complexity of interrelated conditions determining the meteorological process.” “This was an open system,” he said, “responsive to changes in its environment. Ambient climatic changes were answered by a transfer of energy and material inside” the box.34 Haacke, 48.

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Description: Condensation Cube by Haacke, Hans

Fig. 16. Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube, 1963–65. Perspex, steel, and water, 12 × 12 × 12 in. (30.5 × 30.5 × 30.5 cm). Tate Modern, London. © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

In terms that foreshadow—but also critically illuminate—the recent ambient aesthetics of Eliasson et al, Haacke’s 1971 statement analyzed the ambiguity resulting from the placement of such a system into a cultural context. On the one hand, he recognized that the “dynamic system” inside the Condensation Cube “functioned independently of a viewer and thus carried meaning on its own terms,” relegating that viewer to “the role of witness to a process that would evolve without him,” regardless of whatever “cultural meaning . . . he was reading into it.” On the other hand, Haacke acknowledged that “the museum or any other cultural frame invests real-time systems with an additional program (meaning) . . . determined by the historical and cultural context in which the system receives attention.” In light of these competing meanings, Haacke concluded, “The witness and/or participant in a real-time system that evolves in a cultural context, recognized by him as such, therefore, responds in an ambiguous way; he is caught seeing something that proceeds according to its own terms, at the same time realizing that he is using it as a screen for his own culturally biased projections. This oscillatory state,” said Haacke, “can exist only with real-time systems.”35 Haacke, 48–49.

Haacke’s comments here, in an early articulation of what we now call the institutional critique, provide a valuable analytical perspective that seems to be lacking in recent artist statements and journalistic assessments of ambient aesthetics. More than simply “seeing yourself sensing,” as Eliasson would have it with The Weather Project and other works, Haacke insists that we critically confront the ambiguities arising from encounters between real-time systems and cultural institutions. For Haacke, there could be no isolated atmosphere per se in art, for even an apparently closed real-time system like the Condensation Cube, once inserted into a “cultural context,” inevitably brought other factors than those of a strictly aesthetic nature into play. Haacke knew that ecological and sociological vectors were inextricably entangled, or implicated, with one another. Moreover, as he observed in 1971, “Social phenomena are as real as physical or biological ones; we all participate in any number of social systems and are affected by them.” Haacke recognized the difference between ontology and metaphor, but he also understood the power of metaphor to inform actions. As he said, “Weather boxes seemingly have nothing to do with sociopolitical situations; however, even on the superficial level of figurative speech, there are many similarities. We speak of political currents, pressure, of a political climate and a political balance, political interdependence, a low in relations between two countries, political thaw, and the rest. Meteorological terms are abundant,” he said, and while they “might let unwanted symbolism in through the back door,” “on a conceptual level, physical and biological phenomena have their equivalents in the social and behavioral sphere.” For Haacke, “These are not correspondences due to an imaginary language, but are based on specifiable isomorphisms.”36 Haacke, 50.

When Haacke wrote these words in 1971, the political climate in the United States was tempestuous to say the least. His statement might as well have mentioned another isomorphism of the time: “fog of war.” This famous phrase had originated in the ideas of the nineteenth-century German military theorist Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), who referred in his influential treatise On War to the “uncertainty of all data in war” as “like the effect of a fog.” In 1896, shortly before Monet’s visits to London, a British colonel, Sir Lonsdale Augustus Hale, published a lecture titled “The Fog of War,” coining the saying in English. By the 1960s, “fog of war” was widely used to describe American “confusion on Vietnam,” notably surrounding the My Lai massacre of 1968 by U.S. troops—news of which only surfaced publicly in November 1969. This fraught atmosphere of military fog and political obfuscation circa 1970 led Haacke to insert a number of new “real-time systems” into the cultural context of art museum exhibitions, not to compound obscurity but rather to let facts speak publicly for themselves and to allow viewers to connect the dots.37 Karl von Clausewitz, On War [1832], trans. J. J. Graham (London: N. Trübner, 1873), 2.24, page 54; Colonel Lonsdale Augustus Hale, The Fog of War (London: Edward Stanford, 1896). “Confusion on Vietnam,” New York Times, November 7, 1966, 46; “Too Open Diplomacy,” New York Times, February 7, 1967: “Judgment on Mylai [sic],” New York Times, January 10, 1970.

Haacke’s MoMA Poll of 1970, for example, featured a pair of transparent plastic ballot boxes, like the one used in Condensation Cube, each attached to its own tabulating machine, enabling visitors at the Museum of Modern Art to cast “Yes” or “No” votes in response to the question, “Would the fact that [New York] Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?” In this real-time system, “Yes” votes carried by a two-to-one margin against Rockefeller, a MoMA board member and son of the museum’s founder. Haacke knew that such work would have minimal political impact. More important to him was that “the museum acted not only as the cultural backdrop but also as a vital ingredient of the social constellation of the work itself.” As a result, he said, “The Museum’s ties to the Rockefellers, Nixon, and, in turn, their involvement in the Indochina war, as much as its policy to present a serene image of itself to an unsuspecting public, were part of this real-time system.”38 Haacke, “Provisional Remarks,” 54. On Haacke’s MoMA Poll, see also Hans Haacke: All Connected, ed. Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni (New York: New Museum, 2019), 72–73.

Rockefeller and MoMA tolerated Haacke’s MoMA Poll, but the artist famously encountered censorship when preparing a new installation of real-time systems at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971. Among other works, Haacke planned to exhibit an elaborate display of photographs, maps, and data about certain Manhattan real estate properties and mortgages taken directly from public records. Titled Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, the installation “contained no evaluative content,” according to Haacke, and was therefore “legally unassailable,” but the Guggenheim’s director Thomas Messer canceled it anyway, citing concerns about a potential libel suit from the property owners. Legal concerns were not the only justification Messer cited in censoring the installation, however. According to the Guggenheim director, socially engaged art should operate by “indirection” and “generalized exemplary force,” not through “specific,” “topical,” or “verifiable information”; otherwise, it becomes, in Messer’s words, “an alien substance” entering “the art museum organism.” In response, Haacke noted the long history of specific, unambiguous information in past art. He also pointed to the museum’s contradictory approach in accepting certain fact-based works for exhibition while rejecting those “focusing on large-scale private property” and “current sociopolitical issues.”39 Grace Glueck, “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show,” New York Times, April 7, 1971; Haacke, “Provisional Remarks,” 59.

At issue here—between Haacke’s real-time systems circa 1970 and ambient aesthetics—is a difference of approach toward ambiguity. Reflecting on the Guggenheim’s censorship of his work, Haacke wrote that “preventing the free flow of information is the trademark of totalitarian regimes,” wherein “the accumulation of large capital . . . remain[s] shrouded under a veil of mystery so that it will not become subject to public scrutiny.” For Haacke, the introduction of real-time systems into the museum cultural context inevitably produced a certain ambiguity, but ambiguity was not an end in itself; rather, it demanded “free flow of information” and critical engagement with “current sociopolitical issues.” In contrast to Haacke’s approach, ambient works like Eliasson’s Weather Project have generally leveraged corporate sponsorship to cultivate an atmospheric sense of perceptual ambiguity for its own sake, “seeing yourself sensing,” with few specifics and even less politics.40 Haacke, “Provisional Remarks,” 59.

I conclude by noting the ongoing relevance of what Hans Haacke called “isomorphisms” that eerily relate meteorology to politics. In 2003, as Eliasson unveiled The Weather Project at Tate Modern, the filmmaker Errol Morris released his documentary The Fog of War, interviewing and examining Robert McNamara, the former U.S. secretary of defense, about various lessons learned from his role in leading the failed American war effort in Vietnam. In 2017, the conservative journalist Ross Douthat referred to “the fog of Trump” in a New York Times op-ed, noting the atmosphere of confusion, contradiction, deletion, and “alternative facts” surrounding the administration of President Donald J. Trump. In light of Trump’s big lie about the presidential election of 2020, which he lost but claims to have won, and his subsequent encouragement of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, it would be a fair question to ask, following Haacke, whether a truly totalitarian movement of misinformation and ambient aesthetics has emerged as a political principle in the United States.41 Ross Douthat, “Opinion: The Fog of Trump,” New York Times, January 28, 2017.

What kind of art can confront such politics? Intriguing possibilities appeared in the aftermath of The Weather Project, as activists in the Liberate Tate movement staged numerous performances at Tate Britain and Tate Modern protesting the institution’s long entanglement with the oil industry, specifically corporate sponsorship by BP. These interventions began in 2010 when the BP-owned Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and releasing an estimated 210 million U.S. gallons of crude oil. Although some Liberate Tate performances such as The Human Cost (fig. 17) projected an anthropocentric vision of their own, inadvertently reprising the recumbent figures of The Weather Project several years before, their approach diverged from the atmospheric solipsism of Eliasson’s installation by pointing vividly to problematic political realities within and beyond the walls of the museum. At Tate Modern, the performances also conjured much more directly the industrial history of Turbine Hall as a former carbon-based power-generating plant. In a particularly memorable intervention there, titled Crude / Sunflower (fig. 18), Liberate Tate activists stood in a circle and stepped on tubes of oily black paint, squirting it into a pattern of streaks that parodied the BP sunburst logo. These creative interventions forced Tate Modern—like the Guggenheim in 1971—to enter into a real-time system, fitfully trying yet ultimately failing to regulate the free flow of information. In 2016, BP announced that it was ending sponsorship of the Tate Museums after twenty-six years. Thus, the fog has begun to lift, but the appeal of ambient aesthetics persists.42 Liberate Tate, “Human Cost,” April 2011, https://liberatetate.wordpress.com/performances/human-cost-april-2011/; “Crude / Sunflower,” September 2010, https://liberatetate.wordpress.com/performances/sunflower-september-2010/. For more on Liberate Tate, see Mel Evans, Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts (London: Pluto, 2015). On the end of BP sponsorship, see “Liberate Tate’s Six-Year Campaign to End BP’s Art Gallery Sponsorship—in Pictures,” Guardian, March 19, 2016; and Stanley Reed, “BP to End Sponsorship of Tate Museums,” New York Times, March 11, 2016.

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Description: The Human Cost by Liberate Tate

Fig. 17. Liberate Tate, The Human Cost, 2011. Charcoal and sunflower oil. Performance protesting BP sponsorship, Duveen Gallery, Tate Britain, London

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Description: Crude / Sunflower by Liberate Tate

Fig. 18. Liberate Tate, Crude / Sunflower, 2010. Oil on concrete. Performance protesting BP sponsorship, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London

The recent commercial growth of “immersive” spectacles—often featuring historical art by famous artists such as Monet, Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890), and Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) as well as various forms of new imagery—suggests an almost irresistible public desire for aesthetic enclosure and therapeutic escapism. Studio Drift, teamLab, and Refik Anadol Studio are only a few of the artist-engineer collectives that have emerged since 2010, using what the journalist Anna Wiener calls “advanced technology” with an “entrepreneurial bent” at a time of growing corporate influence on museums and the art world in general. These developments, Wiener suggests, exemplify the broader millennial “experience economy” in which service industries provide temporary forms of engagement for consumers “predisposed to awe.” Perhaps the culmination of this trend will be the Metaverse, in which Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta imagines a “next generation” of “high-quality immersive experiences that transform the way we learn,” “from beneath the ocean to the vastness of space.” Yet none of these corporate ventures constitutes an open, real-time system of the sort envisioned by Haacke as ensuring the free flow of information and critical examination of issues. Instead, in various ways, they recycle a reassuring sense of physical and emotional enclosure promised by ambient aesthetics for more than a century—going back to Monet. From an ecocritical perspective, the tradition of institutional critique offers a more productive model for understanding and weathering our changing world.43 Wiener, “Rise of ‘Immersive’ Art”; Meta, https://about.meta.com/immersive-learning/.

Epigraph: “weather, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/226640.

1 On the difference between weather and climate, see “What Is the Difference between Weather and Climate Change?,” USGS, https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-difference-between-weather-and-climate-change?. See also Brett Samuels, “Trump Cites Massive Winter Storm to Mock Global Warming,” Hill, January 20, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/426197-trump-cites-massive-winter-storm-to-mock-global-warming/; Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, “Trump Always Dismisses Climate Change When It’s Cold; Not so Fast, Experts Say,” Washington Post, January 29, 2019. »

2 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 152–53, 164–67. Anna Wiener, “The Rise of ‘Immersive’ Art,” New Yorker, February 10, 2022; Zachary Small, “Entrepreneurs Bet Big on Immersive Art Despite Covid-19,” New York Times, January 10, 2021. »

3 Christine L. Corton, London Fog: The Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015), 182–85, Monet quoted on 184, from René Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer, trans. John Rosenberg (London: Pimlico, 1992), 129. »

4 Monet quoted in Corton, London Fog, 185, from Emma Bullet, “Macmonnies the Sculptor, Working Hard as a Painter,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 8, 1901, 14. »

5 Corton, London Fog, 14. See also John E. Thornes and Gemma Metherell, “Monet’s London Series and the Cultural Climate of London at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Weather, Climate, Culture, ed. Sarah Strauss and Ben Orlove (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 154–56. »

6 Monet, quoted in Corton, London Fog, 183. »

7 Monet to Paul Durand-Ruel, 1890s, quoted in Nancy Norwood, ed., Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process (Rochester, N.Y.: RIT Press in association with Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 2018), 6. »

8 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, quoted in Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, trans. Randolph and Dorothy Weaver (1958; repr. New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 69. On impressionism, mobility, and modern technology, see James H. Rubin, Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). See also David Bomford, John Leighton, Jo Kirby, and Ashok Roy, Impressionism: Art in the Making (London: National Gallery in association with Yale University Press, 1991). »

9 Lilla Cabot Perry, “Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1909,” Magazine of Art 18 (1927): 120. »

10 On Monet’s The Coalmen, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” Public Culture 26, no. 2 (2014): 222–23. »

11 Louis Léroy, “L’Exposition des impressionistes,” Charivari, April 25, 1874. For discussion of Monet’s Impression, Sunrise and the first impressionist exhibition, see Rubin, Impressionism and the Modern Landscape, xi, xv–xvi, xx, 16, 27–37, 46, 94, 130–34. On Monet’s depiction of air pollution in Le Havre, see Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” 220–22. »

12 Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the ’90s: The Series Paintings (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts in association with Yale University Press, 1990); Grace Seiberling, Monet’s Series (New York: Garland, 1981). »

13 Claude Monet to Paul Durand-Ruel, March 23, 1903, quoted in Corton, London Fog, 183. On the London series, see Norwood, Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, 7; and Grace Seiberling, Monet in London (Atlanta, Ga.: High Museum of Art in association with University of Washington Press, 1988). »

14 John House, Monet: Nature into Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 221. »

15 Arsène Alexandre, “News from Our Parisian Correspondents,” Courrier de l’Aisne, June 9, 1904; Le Masque Rouge, “Notes d’Art: L’exposition Claude Monet,” L’Action, May 12, 1904, quoted in Jennifer A. Thompson, “Between the Balcony and the Studio: Monet’s Struggle to Finish the Thames Series,” in Norwood, Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, 24. »

16 Desmond FitzGerald, “Claude Monet: Master of Impressionism,” Brush and Pencil 15, no. 3 (1905): 187, quoted in Thompson, “Between the Balcony and the Studio,” 24; Monet to Durand-Ruel, 1904, quoted in Thompson, 26. On the fog-related art of Turner, Whistler, and Gustave Doré, see Jonathan Ribner, “The Poetics of Pollution,” in Katharine Lochnan, Turner Whistler Monet: Impressionist Visions (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2004), 51–63. »

17 For critical discussion of Monet’s diversion of water at Giverny and subsequent murals at the Orangerie, see Stephen F. Eisenman, ed., From Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism (Rome: Skira, 2011), 29–32. See also Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, ed., Monet’s Garden in Giverny: Inventing the Landscape (Giverny: Musée des Impressionistes, 2009); Thompson, “Between the Balcony and the Studio,” 19; and Michel Hoog, The Nymphéas of Claude Monet at the Musée de l’Orangerie (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990). »

18 Olafur Eliasson, Experience, ed. Michelle Kuo (New York: Phaidon, 2018), https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2018/september/11/an-exhibition-is-like-a-small-weather-system-olafur-eliasson-on-art-audience-and-the-experience-of-putting-on-a-show/. For the “absolutely dazzling” reference, see Rachel Cooke, “The Brightest and the Best: The Latest Massive Installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall Is Absolutely Dazzling,” Guardian, October 18, 2003. On attendance at The Weather Project, see Adrian Hardwicke, “Secret Diary of an Art Gallery Attendant,” Guardian, October 9, 2003. »

19 See also Susan May, Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project (London: Tate Publishing, 2003); and Tate Modern, “Olafur Eliasson The Weather Project: About the Installation,” https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/unilever-series/unilever-series-olafur-eliasson-weather-project. »

20 Eliasson quoted in Rachel Cooke, “Brightest and the Best.” On antiwar protests during The Weather Project, see Caroline Gammell, “Tate Protesters Give Bush the Message,” Art for a Change / Indybay.org, November 18, 2003, https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2003/11/18/16602231.php. »

21 On the smoke abatement reform movement in London circa 1900, see Ribner, “Poetics of Pollution,” 52. In an exhibition catalog essay exploring the historical influence of weather on warfare and other events, Tate Modern curator Susan May buried the following statement in a footnote: “A more recent example of the weather’s influence on warfare is provided by the recent war in Iraq, where diplomatic efforts to secure a peaceful solution without resorting to war failed prematurely in the face of a determination to invade before the heat of summer intensified.” Susan May, “Meteorologica,” in May, Olafur Eliasson, 15n3. »

22 Eliasson, quoted May, Olafur Eliasson, 6. »

23 Eliasson used the phrase “Seeing Yourself Sensing” as the title of a installation in 2001 (https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK101202/seeing-yourself-sensing), but it also serves as a general idea pervading his work, as indicated on this Tate Modern web page: “How Eliasson Is Changing Our Perceptions,” https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/olafur-eliasson-5239/yes-but-why-olafur-eliasson. For critical analysis of corporate public relations discourse and the language of universals, see Michael Heller, “Foucault, Discourse, and the Birth of British Public Relations,” Enterprise & Society 17, no. 3 (September 2016): 651–77; Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). »

24 Olafur Eliasson, “The Weather Project, 2003,” https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK101003/the-weather-project. »

25 Louise Hornby, “Appropriating the Weather: Olafur Eliasson and Climate Control,” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 1 (2017): 60, 76. »

26 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Blur Building, Yverdon-Les Bains, Switzerland, 2002, https://dsrny.com/project/blur-building; Random International, Rain Room, various venues, 2012, https://www.random-international.com/rain-room-2012, and “Rain Room,” Magazine–Momentum (Volkswagen Annual Report, 2014), https://annualreport2014.volkswagenag.com/magazine/rain-room.html; Fujiko Nakaya, Fog Bridge, Exploratorium, San Francisco, 2013, https://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/fog-bridge-72494; José da Silva, “Tate Modern Opens First ‘Live’ Show with Mist, Plants and a Rave,” Art Newspaper, March 24, 2017, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2017/03/24/tate-modern-opens-first-live-show-with-mist-plants-and-a-rave. »

27 Abrahm Lustgarten, with photographs by Meridith Kohut, “The Great Climate Migration,” New York Times, July 23, 2020; David Wallace Wells, “Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming into View,” New York Times, October 26, 2022; Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Blur Building; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Rain Room,” https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/rain-room; Nakaya, Fog Bridge; Fujiko Nakaya, quoted in MeeFog Systems, “Sculpture Welcomes Visitors to New San Francisco Exploratorium,” in Special Effects (Irwindale, Calif.: Mee Industries, 2013). »

28 Guenter Lewy, False Consciousness: An Essay on Mystification (New York: Routledge, 2017). »

29 Joseph D. Ketner II, Witness to Phenomenon: Group ZERO and the Development of New Media in Postwar European Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 254–59; Cristina Albu, “Between Expanded Consciousness and Expanded Bodies: Spectatorial Engagement with Invisible Architecture,” Athanor 28 (2020): 85–93; Rauschenberg quoted on page 87. »

30 Eliasson quoted by Angie Cook, “Artist Brings Fragments of Greenland Glaciers to Paris Climate Talks,” Architect, December 16, 2015. See also the artist’s archive website, Olafur Eliasson, Ice Watch, 2014, https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK109190/ice-watch. »

31 Eliasson quoted in Javier Pes, “‘We Are Living in a Climate Emergency’: Olafur Eliasson on How He’s Using His Tate Modern Show to Combat Earth’s Greatest Crisis,” Artnet News, July 9, 2019. Hornby, “Appropriating the Weather.” On the 2019 retrospective, see Mark Godfrey, ed., Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life (London: Tate Publishing, 2019); Adrian Searle, “Olafur Eliasson Review—Art’t Weatherman Fogs up Tate Modern,” Guardian, July 9, 2019; and “Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life,” Tate Modern, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/olafur-eliasson. »

32 Eliasson quoted in Pes, “‘We Are Living in a Climate Emergency.’” »

33 Hans Haacke, “Provisional Remarks” [1971], in Working Conditions: The Writings of Hans Haacke, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016), 48. »

34 Haacke, 48. »

35 Haacke, 48–49. »

36 Haacke, 50. »

37 Karl von Clausewitz, On War [1832], trans. J. J. Graham (London: N. Trübner, 1873), 2.24, page 54; Colonel Lonsdale Augustus Hale, The Fog of War (London: Edward Stanford, 1896). “Confusion on Vietnam,” New York Times, November 7, 1966, 46; “Too Open Diplomacy,” New York Times, February 7, 1967: “Judgment on Mylai [sic],” New York Times, January 10, 1970. »

38 Haacke, “Provisional Remarks,” 54. On Haacke’s MoMA Poll, see also Hans Haacke: All Connected, ed. Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni (New York: New Museum, 2019), 72–73. »

39 Grace Glueck, “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show,” New York Times, April 7, 1971; Haacke, “Provisional Remarks,” 59. »

40 Haacke, “Provisional Remarks,” 59. »

41 Ross Douthat, “Opinion: The Fog of Trump,” New York Times, January 28, 2017. »

42 Liberate Tate, “Human Cost,” April 2011, https://liberatetate.wordpress.com/performances/human-cost-april-2011/; “Crude / Sunflower,” September 2010, https://liberatetate.wordpress.com/performances/sunflower-september-2010/. For more on Liberate Tate, see Mel Evans, Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts (London: Pluto, 2015). On the end of BP sponsorship, see “Liberate Tate’s Six-Year Campaign to End BP’s Art Gallery Sponsorship—in Pictures,” Guardian, March 19, 2016; and Stanley Reed, “BP to End Sponsorship of Tate Museums,” New York Times, March 11, 2016. »

43 Wiener, “Rise of ‘Immersive’ Art”; Meta, https://about.meta.com/immersive-learning/. »

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