2 Atmosphere as an aesthetic concept “Atmosphere” is a colloquial term, yet despite or perhaps because of the ambiguity of its usage, it is helpful to return to it again and again. We speak of the tense atmosphere of a meeting, the light-hearted atmosphere of a day, the gloomy atmosphere of a vault; we refer to the atmosphere of a city, a restaurant, a landscape. The notion of atmosphere always concerns a spatial sense of ambience, An extraordinarily rich vocabulary may be used to describe it: cheerful, sublime, melancholy, stufly, oppressive, tense, and uplifting. We also speak of the atmosphere of the 1920s, of a petit bourgeois atmosphere, of the atmosphere of power. The term itself, “atmosphere,” derives from meteorology and, as a designation for an ambient quality, has a number of synonyms that likewise connote the airy, cloudy, or indefinite: these include climate, nimbus, aura, fluid; and perhaps emanation should be counted among them as well. Between ‘As an aesthetic concept, atmosphere acquires definition through its relation to other concepts and through the constellations it creates in aesthetics. Atmosphere is the prototypical “between”-phenomenon. Accordingly, it is a difficult thing to grasp in words against the background of European ontology - Japanese philosophers have an easier time of it with expressions such as ki or aidagara. Atmosphere is something between the subject and the object; therefore, aesthetics of atmosphere must also mediate between the aesthetics of reception and the aesthetics of the product or of production. Such an aesthetics no longer maintains that artistic activity is consummated in the creation of a work and that this product is then available for reception, whether from a hermeneutical or a critical standpoint. An aesthetics of atmospheres pertains to artistic activity that consists in the production of particular receptions, or to the types of reception by viewers or consumers that play a role in the production of the “work” itself. Atmospheres fill spaces; they emanate from things, constellations of things, and persons. The individual as a recipient can happen upon them, be assailed by them; we experience them, in other words, as something quasi-objective, whose existence we can also communicate with others. Yet they cannot be defined26 Theory: aesthetics and aesthetical economy independently from the persons emotionally affected by them; they are subjective facts (H. Schmitz). Atmospheres can be produced consciously through objective arrangements, light, and music — here the art of the stage set is paradigmatic. But what they are, their character, must always be felt: by exposing oneself to them, one experiences the impression that they make. Atmospheres are in fact characteristic manifestations of the co-presence of subject and object Spatiality and presence The aesthetics of atmospheres shifts attention away from the “what” something represents, to the “how” something is present. In this way, sensory perception as opposed to judgment is rehabilitated in aesthetics and the term “aesthetic” is restored to its original meaning, namely the theory of perception. In order to perceive something, that something must be there, it must be present; the subject, too, must be present, physically extant, From the perspective of the object, therefore, the atmosphere is the sphere of its perceptible presence. Only from the perspective of the subject is atmosphere perceived as the emotional response to the presence of something or someone. Aesthetics thus becomes the study of the relations between ambient qualities and states of mind, and its particular object consists in spaces and spatiality, Accordingly, it liberates things and works of art from the form in which their own reception was embedded and considers them in their ecstasies, i.e. with respect to the way in which they alter spaces by their presence, Where time had previously been dominant, what this aesthetics rehabilitates or discovers is above all spatiality — as when evening or night are studied as spatial phenomena or music as atmosphere. In contrast to the ubiquity of telecommunication, therefore, it focuses attention on locality and physical presence. Performance and event The aesthetics of atmospheres corresponds to a primary direction in the devel- opment of modern art. If in the visual arts we are dealing with paintings that represent nothing, and in literature with texts that have no meaning, then semio- tics and hermeneutics cannot constitute the whole of aesthetics. Installation, per- formance, and happenings bring to light a dimension that always belonged to art, but was repressed in favor of form and meaning. The reproducibility of a work of art depends on the dissociation of its form from its specific concrete manifesta~ tion; it was here that Walter Benjamin identified the loss of aura. In ephemeral art, in the insistence on performance and event to the point of the denial of the work itself, artists attempt to reinvest their work with aura (D. Mersch). Staging The aesthetics of atmospheres is capable of addressing a broad spectrum of aesthetic work which, in traditional aesthetics, occupied marginal place or atAtmosphere as an aesthetic concept 27 most was labeled as “applied art,” ranging from architecture and stage design to design and advertising. This is the area in which the desired transformation of art into life was actually accomplished by the avant-garde. Today there is no area of life, no product, no installation or collection that is not the explicit object of design, What was still a revolutionary act in art — the departure from the object - is here a method. For all the talk of design, at stake are not the things and their form. Rather, the focus is on scenes, life spaces, charisma. Here, atmosphere is the explicit object and the goal of aesthetic action. The aesthetics of atmosphere directs attention to what had always taken place in these areas of aesthetic work, though an ontology oriented to the thing had distorted it; the object and goal of aesthetic work is literally nothing; ie. that which lies “between,” the space. The architect may share facades and views with the painter, but what belongs to the architect is the shaping of space with confinement and expanse, direction, with lightness and heaviness. To be sure, the designer also gives objects form. But what matters is its radiance, its impressions, the suggestions of motion. Naturally, in advertising, information and representation are important too - but much more so the staging of products and their presentation as ingredients of a lifestyle. Construction and criticism Atmospheres are experienced as an emotional effect. For this reason, the art of producing them — above all in music, but also throughout the entire spectrum, of aesthetic work, from the stage set to the orchestration of mass demonstrations, from the design of malls to the imposing architecture of court buildings — is at every moment also the exercise of power. In analyzing how atmospheres are produced, the aesthetics of atmospheres will hardly provide instruction for practitioners; rather the reverse — aesthetics must learn from practitioners. It will, however, afford a necessary critical potential, merely by saying that what one does has in most cases already happened. Today, aesthetics is no longer by any account the beautification of life or the appearance of reconciliation; rather, with the aestheticization of politics (Benjamin) and the staging of everyday life (Durth), it has itself become a political power and an economic factor.