Cover Design by Chris Fernald Photograph by Jessie Alperin AIR BUBBLES Volume One, Issue Two Fall 2020 Table of Contents Dedication (1) Some Fragmentary Reflections on Air Bubbles Jessie Alperin | preface | 10 (2) Fragments in a Modulated Time Sylvia Gorelick | poetry | 24 (3) What Might Not, Might Last Mary Ann Caws | essay | 28 (4) Seven Mixed Media Works Lee Miller | visual art | 36 (5) “If you think the world is a balloon in your head:” Rethinking Vignettes Andrei Pop | essay | 42 (6) Puddled Vignettes: A Photo-Poem Jessie Alperin | poetry & visual art | 56 (7) Machado’s Counselor of the Air Kenneth David Jackson | essay | 60 (8) Brief Interlude Em Schwager | poetry | 73 (9) Colors of Light: Newton’s Observations & Chardin’s Representations Anita Hosseini | essay | 74 (10) Musical Interlude Haast - Hāwea | audio | 86 (11) Bubbles in Northern European Self-Portraits: Homo bulla est Liana Cheney | essay | 88 (12) Tunnels Petra Kuppers | poetry | 108 (13) Death in the Air: Exploring Tension, Threat, and (In)visibility in Teresa Margolles’ En el Aire Julia Banwell | essay | 116 (14) Bubble Murals & Muralist Jokes: Asco’s Skyscraper Skin Mariana Fernández | essay | 120 (15) Three Poems & One Painting Wayne Koestenbaum | poetry & visual art | 126 (16) Bubble Planets Melanie King | visual art | 134 (17) Leavening Agents: Some Meditations on Baking Bread under Lockdown Charles Keiffer | essay | 142 (18) Sink Paintings Amanda Rothschild | visual art | 150 (19) “Like my dreams, they fade and die...” Esther Leslie | essay | 152 (20) Appendix The Editors | suggested reading | 160 EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Jessie Alperin SENIOR EDITORS Sarah Dailey Inês Forjaz de Lacerda Kate Moger MANAGING EDITOR Charles Keiffer HEAD COPY-EDITOR Troy Sherman CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Chris Fernald Mariana Fernández Sara Gabler Thomas Zach Metzger Yubai Shi Jenna Wendler CONSULTING EDITOR(S) Eli Llera FACULTY ADVISOR Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen BRAND IDENTITY & VISUAL DESIGN Chris Fernald EDITORIAL DESIGN & LAYOUT Jessie Alperin ADVISORY BOARD Anna Abramson (Amherst College); Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen (Williams College Graduate Program, History of Art); Ina Blom (University of Chicago); Marco Caracciolo (Ghent University); Mary Ann Caws (City University of New York); Mark Cheetham (University of Toronto); Margareta Ingrid Christian (University of Chicago); Kate Elkins (Kenyon College); Caroline Fowler (RAP, Clark Art Institute); Susan Stanford Friedman (University of Wisconsin, Madison); Mort Guiney (Kenyon College); Eva Horn (University of Vienna); Alison James (University of Chicago); John Lansdowne (The American School of Classical Studies); Jesse Matz (Kenyon College); Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art); Craig Santos Perez (University of Hawai’i, Manoa); Sugata Ray (University of California, Berkeley); John Paul Ricco (University of Toronto); Lytle Shaw (New York University); Ellen Tani (Independent Scholar); Orchid Tierney (Kenyon College); Jennifer Wild (University of Chicago); Dora Zhang (University of California, Berkeley) OVERVIEW Venti: Air, Experience, and Aesthetics invokes both the number ‘twenty’ and ‘the winds.’ Conceived in the year 2020, the journal is a forum for discussions centered on the year’s foregrounding of air, its related themes, and historical, interdisciplinary, and critical resonances. Venti asks: how do we become aware of something invisible and of things that are always in the air — such as the air itself? Investigating this query in a series of thematic issues, Venti explores the indexical qualities of air and our awareness of it through effects and affects. Venti’s inquiries into the field of the atmospheric humanities unfold through a series of multidisciplinary readings on a range of topics. Attempting to fulfill the impossible task of grounding air, Venti strives to do so through the unfolding of questions and answers within each particular issue and across all twenty. Containing interdisciplinary investigations and concluding each issue with a thematic definition allows Venti to become not only a collective but also a collection, acknowledging and preserving relevant approaches to understanding the world and its atmosphere today. VENTI journal AIR, AESTHETICS, EXPERIENCE venti-journal.com 8 Dedication 2020 has been host to multiple crises in the air. They are all too familiar by now: amidst global climate catastrophe, a virus that targets our lungs has affected lives, economies, and sharply refigured our social and political atmospheres. Simultaneously, the death of a Black man at the hands of the police has laid bare the conditions of austerity and violence that the United States’ racialized poor must endure. Though having inspired many who believe in a future where people might one day be allowed to breathe easy, these tragedies continue to stifle the air of thousands across the globe. We take this moment to thank medical workers for their tireless efforts to heal us from a devastating pandemic; we thank those who continue to do the work and speak out, holding us all in bated breath for the change we know is yet to come. We also take a moment of silence to recognize and remember all those who have lost their breath in 2020. It is to these people, and to those who love and continue to fight for them — for all of us — that Venti is humbly dedicated. We recognize these events could neither be fully spoken to nor accounted for by a dedication. At its best, intellectual dialogue supplements and informs action. Venti, in its simple bid to think about the air, might be just one tool among many for weathering this tragic, tempestuous, yet hopeful moment. As we continue to move through the topic of air, we believe it is our duty not only to mourn but to also derive inspiration. 9 Preface Preface SOME FRAGMENTARY REFLECTIONS ON AIR BUBBLES Jessie Alperin Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s sixty-first poetic fragment reads, “they become [ ] for not.”1 To think of bubbles, we might begin thinking with fragments, for air is traditionally understood through simile, metaphor, and other means. The bubble’s physical existence is its very non-existence. The fragment and the bubble share a life that depends on the ephemerality of the whole. The word “become” signifies a beginning, or to begin to be, yet before the line has commenced, the parenthetical space creates a gap, and with “for not” the beginning of becoming is quickly denied. The line is enchanting in its mode of creating and negating itself in a single breath, much like a bubble that also carries a space at its center and drifts through the air only to disappear. Like a fragment that speaks to us through remains, we might like to imagine that once a bubble disappears it evaporates and floats in the invisibility of air, waiting to be brought to visible form again. The visibility of bubbles derives from their liminality, suspended in a state of liquid and gas, substance and transparency, and appearance and disappearance. Just as a fragment may reveal our distanced intimacy with the past, the bubble is a means of realizing our distanced intimacy with the air. This fragment-like nature of the bubble is manifested in both Sylvia Gorelick’s piece, “Fragments in a Modulated Time” and in Mary Ann Caw’s essay, “What Might Not, Might Last.” Both string together a series of art objects and personal experiences that bubble up to elicit enchantment, wonder, and play — much like how the bubble and the fragment allow our imagination to fill the gap at their centers to create a new life, a new world. The life of a bubble fills us with awe and wonder: its creation and disappearance within a short time frame — the fragility of its expansion before it becomes suspended in the air, briefly refracting light like a distorted rainbow, transparent, only to pop. Friedrich Schlegel wrote that the fragment is “just like a small work of art, [and] must be completely separated off from the surrounding world.”2 Central to our inquiry of “air bubbles” are the questions at the heart of his claim: Are bubbles separated from the surrounding world? What worlds do bubbles create? ______ To blow a bubble is to create a world through breath. Like poetry, the bubble merges the animation of breath with visual play. Although most poets create dream-like worlds that appear floating on a page between sound and sense, the French symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé may indeed be the poetic blower of bubbles par excellence. In his poetry, Mallarmé draws attention to simple everyday events, yet elevates them with poetic language that suspends itself between transparency and reflective play, appearance and disappearance. Take for example the first line of his sonnet “Salut,” in which the bubble appears as froth at the top of a toasting glass, “nothing, this foam, virgin verse.”3 Mallarmé’s foam is both an accumulation of tiny bubbles and of the art of poetry. The foam exists within the sonnet’s main event of a celebratory toast, and within the creation of poetry, drawing attention to the quotidian and its marvelous transformation into poetry. The foam and the poem are simultaneously transparent and reflective, diaphanously exposing the page, while concurrently acting as an illusion of non-referentiality and something more — a contemplative play of sounds and meanings brought 11 Preface together to form the poetic whole. We find a similar bubble-like construction theorized in Kenneth David Jackson’s “Machado’s Counselor of the Air.” Jackson probes the bubbly play of Machado de Assis’s narrative structure and its means of ultimately reflecting the airiness of the text’s main character, Counselor Ayres. Mallarmé, too, conceives of his poetry as a reflective unit, in which breath is made visible by the words that “light up with reciprocal reflections.”4 The pairing of transparency and reflection allows poetic language to become self-referential. The bubble-like nature of Mallarmé’s writing is best expressed in his “Sonnet en -yx” in the line, “aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore,” in which the first half of the phrase reflects the sonorous inanity of the second half.