Exhibition
Air is an essential element for sustaining life on our planet.
The Air We Share is an exhibition that delves into the often overlooked environmental effects of human activities on air quality, an increasingly urgent issue in global conversations which is vital for public health. With the World Health Organization revealing that 99% of the global population lives in areas with unhealthy air, the need to address this challenge is now.
As an avid hiker who suffers from asthma, I deeply appreciate clean air. This body of work explores the visible and invisible nature of polluted air through photographs manipulated with abstract overlays, techniques that juxtapose the dichotomy of toxic air versus clean air. My work seeks to subvert conventional representational imagery, provoking viewers to look beyond the tangible and critically reconsider the impact of anthropogenic activity on our ecosystems. This collection invites deep reflection on our relationship to the air we breathe.
Article
The accursed share to which we are heir
Exhibition insights by Jayson Althofer, Independent researcher, Toowoomba
‘Deloitte’ appears atop a Brisbane skyscraper in Monica den Hertog’s suite of collaged landscapes. This begrimed sign is a cipher for mechanised anthropogenic air toxicity – leitmotif of the artist’s debut solo exhibition, The Air We Share – and the catastrophic globalisation of what Karl Marx gothically called, in the 1840s, ‘the pestilential breath of civilisation.’ In England during that decade, William Deloitte became accountant to a major polluter, Great Western Railway, and Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels led a double life as a Manchester-based German capitalist and a revolutionary critic of capitalism and its industrial contaminants. Engels’s study of England’s cities showed that ecocidal externalities, including ‘the total pollution of the air,’ can’t be credibly accounted by capitalist financial services.
The paint flung by James Whistler and John Ruskin’s declamatory blows still sting our senses. The former’s smoggy Thames pictures and the latter’s Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), remarkable forerunners of the recent atmospheric turn within the arts and criticism, enliven awareness of how the ghosts of toxic air materialise into forms of live burial. Past, present and emergent particulates conspire (etymologically, breath together); we asphyxiate ourselves and extinguish breathing space for all earthly life.
Inspired by Whistler, among others, Den Hertog has made Gothic surfaces. In contrast with sanitisable surfaces, ‘bearing no trace of the past,’ Gothic ones seethe with ‘unhealthy history’ (Williams). Den Hertog variously sprays paint and ink, splays plastic and tracing paper, and slings silk over parts of her photographs. These material covers uncover: they visibilise unhealthy histories and grim prognoses of human harm to air.
‘I’m a respirateur – a breather,’ Marcel Duchamp said with mock airiness (quoted in Sloterdijk). Having created a germinal installation that anticipated our daily airpocalypse, namely, 1,200 Sacks of Coal (Paris 1938), Duchamp recognised that the banality of breathing isn’t a given in a society that produces and profits from the unrespirable. For Den Hertog, artist, outdoors adventurer and asthmatic, art can’t be lived and breathed if art doesn’t defend the right to breathe and live.
References:
Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845.
Marx, Karl, Paris Manuscripts, 1844.
Sloterdijk, Peter, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran, 2009.
Williams, Gilda, “Defining a Gothic Aesthetic in Modern and Contemporary Visual Art,” The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 2014.