1 Live Weather, Systems, and Science

The Emergent Meteorology

Post–World War II meteorology and systems theory fueled the cultural atmosphere of early meteorological art. The recognition of the sensitivity to minute differences in conditions in meteorological systems and the emergence of process-based art forms occurred in parallel. The appearance of rain, wind, and clouds as live and tactile matter in artworks shared a conceptual basis with mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s study of nonlinear dynamics. In artworks of Haacke, Lye, Medalla, and De Maria, as we will see, disorder and random movement became productive of change, rather than an aberration in cultural forms. As a means of cultural politics, malleable art processes in response to chaotic factors—like a sudden gust of wind—aimed to perturb the stability of powerful institutional orders.

The shift in both the physical sciences and the social sciences from ontology (what things are) to ontogenesis (how things emerge) in systems far from equilibrium, exemplified by Prigogine and Stengers (1984), held creative potential for artists beyond the static art object as endpoint. By the 1970s, Stengers and Prigogine note, neither artists nor scientists could retreat from the potential and threat that we are living within a biosphere that is highly sensitive to small fluctuations (ibid.). Complex systems and the chaotic have been the subject of thought and scientific investigation since Lucretius or earlier, and certainly since the French mathematician-philosopher Henri Poincaré. By the mid-twentieth century, the connections forged between computers and weather during World War II enabled meteorologists to increase the accuracy of weather prediction. The study of complexity in meteorology intensified when systems theorist Norbert Wiener delivered his “Nonlinear Prediction and Dynamics” paper at Berkeley (1956). Wiener’s theory introduced a mathematical model in which the coordinates would constantly fluctuate. Several meteorologists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used Wiener’s nonlinear dynamics to reinforce their current statistical forecasting methods.

Further development of computers in the postwar period helped to prove that weather prediction was incompatible with any linear set of components from a fixed set of rules. Formulas emerged with the capacity to embrace a spectrum of changing factors such as humidity, wind speed, or the temperatures of a neighboring city. The meteorologist Lorenz built on Wiener’s theories by selecting a nonlinear, hypothetical set of weather-driven equations based on the various interactions of twelve variables (Lorenz 1993, 131). He charted how the weather changed in each scenario through these nonlinear differentials. At that point, the story goes, Lorenz was excited to find more unpredictability than he had bargained for. His numerical experiments revealed the “sensitive dependence of the initial conditions” (Lorenz 1993, 8), where the amplification of an initial discrepancy could produce a weather pattern that was quite different from an earlier weather forecast. This realization would radically shift the nature of weather prediction. Lorenz’s rethinking of linear statistical models in meteorology culminated in “Deterministic Periodic Flow” (1963). Mathematicians much later realized the importance of the “strange attractor” diagram in “Deterministic Periodic Flow” for many chaotic structures, from flu epidemics to commodity prices.

Artists’ experiments with chance events that could alter the shape of an artwork took hold at the same time as Lorenz’s notion that “certain fluctuations produce a higher order through complex relationships” (Lorenz 1993). In the cultural moment at which the principles of orderly disorder in science were recognized, music developed a nonvisual, nonverbal paradigm for “feeling chaos” as a bodily resonance. Interpretations of disorder, order, probability, randomness, freedom, and indeterminacy can be found in compositions by Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, and John Cage. Cage’s influential book of essays and lectures called Silence (1961) includes a chapter on indeterminacy, in which he discusses the time object, in close reference to science. Umberto Eco ([1962] 1989) was equally enthusiastic about artists’ translation of terms from physics, either literally or in spirit, as an elegiac expansion of science into the open work in the arts, literature, and information theory. The new paradigm of chaotics, a term coined by N. Katherine Hayles (1990), was later used to describe complex dynamics and unstable narrative forms in literature. The pursuit of a chaotics of weather as a form generator in avant-garde music, art, and literature attempted to break away from institutionalized stasis without resorting to a reductive dichotomy of order and disorder. Lye, as we see next, designed a sculptural language of wind-driven kineticism, offering freedom of movement to counter cultural inertia.

Live Weather in Len Lye’s Kinetic Art

I place New Zealander Len Lye at the beginning of this trajectory of meteorological art, with a series of artworks that concentrate on weather as a live, energetic force. In 1958, Lye began to transfer some of the moving motifs from his experimental films into kinetic sculpture. Lye made his first Wind Wand site installations in 1960 in New York. Eight poles made of hollow aluminum rods rose forty feet in the air from a metal base. Although much of Lye’s sculpture consisted of motorized stainless steel, the poles of the Wind Wands were activated by the forces of weather. In a strong wind, the poles spring or sway from side to side, exploiting the flexible quality of metal. In an iteration on the Taranaki coastline of Aotearoa New Zealand, opened in the year 2000, made to Lye’s original specifications, a red ball inside a clear plexiglass sphere is suspended on top of a 48 metre high pole. Lye intended the design of the wands to be “so finely balanced that if a bumblebee stood on the ball at the top it would dip a bit” (Horrocks 2001, 283). He termed his form of kinetic art tangible motion sculpture.

Lye’s sound and moving sculptures are a mix of engineering, meteorological systems, and the Indigenous cosmologies and forms he encountered in Samoa and in Australia. The word wand in the title suggests the ancient rites of magicians or artist-shamans. Lye’s sound sculptures and the soundtracks of many of his films are explicitly linked to a rich cultural history of weather music and weather noise. In Pacific culture, the artist may be a tohunga, or spiritual leader. The kinesthetic effects of drumming and instruments for calling rain in Te Moana nui a Kiwa (the Pacific diaspora), such as the Māori purerehua (a wood or bone blade whirled on a cord), make deep vibrations with air currents. These instruments produce physical sensations as they reverberate through the bodies of musician and listeners, as encountered by Lye as a young man. Lye’s vibrating sculpture Storm King (1968), made from a sheet of steel, connects to a rich global history of sound-producing meteorological instruments. The title refers to the thunderous voice of Shango, the Yoruba tribe of West Africa’s storm god. Noise has also been used in European culture since classical antiquity to drive storms away by banging on drums, crashing cymbals, blowing woodwind instruments, or ringing consecrated bells. As theatrical devices, thunder and lightning machines have made appearances in history from the pebbles in copper pots of Greek and Roman theater to Victorian phantasmagoria to continental son et lumière. Lye’s sculptures resonate with the power of these ancient forms.

Lye’s Wind Wands assembles the audience, the artist, a site, and the weather system in a new set of social relations. The first site chosen for the installation of the steel wands was a vacant lot on the corner of Horatio and Hudson Streets in 1960. A Village Voice journalist recorded one viewer’s comment: “They’re as graceful as dancers, it’s like making the motion of the wind visible.” The light afternoon breeze, which made the poles nod and sway rhythmically, was compared to “beings from another planet conversing with each other” (Horrocks 2001, 284). The journalist also noted that children ran between the poles, while Lye wandered around nervously with his wrenches, adjusting the sculptures as he went. Lye was a presence, if not a performer, in his installations, tending to the technology, rather than separating himself from the finished work. The wind itself was made tangible by the visible movement of the poles at the same time as it was felt on the skin. The Wind Wands were re-exhibited in 1961 as part of an exhibition organized by the Committee to Save West Village. Lye’s wife, Ann, was an active member of this civic project designed to draw attention to the demolition of an historic area in New York, where many artists had studios. The Village Voice framed the work with the headline “Swaying Mobile Is Art’s Ode to West Village Battle” when the works were exhibited in the playground of St. Luke’s school. The sculptural object materialized a heated political debate.

In 1960s’ sculptural language, industrial materials were often deployed for their specific or material qualities, rather than as signifiers of a higher meaning. Engineer Maurice Gross collaborated with Lye on the production of the smooth aluminum poles of the wands, yet in Wind Wands the weather becomes a medium for Lye as much as the metal poles. Lye’s central aesthetic concern was for movement and change rather than fixity. Reviewer Stewart Kranz (1974) wrote that an “observer-participant” engages with the Wind Wands artwork in a space of encounter, rather than as a passive viewer. Each of our perceptual encounters with the moving Wind Wands must be different as the wind is a randomizing element. Lye’s own concept of bodily empathy refers to energetic transfer between elemental energies, the metal forms, and the audience in the moment of perceiving the sculpture’s movement. Lye’s contemporary Jack Burnham praised Lye’s sculpture for generating “a feeling of barely harnessed physical power—half material and half pure energy” (1968a, 269). Although Lye resisted the prevailing scientific language that many kinetic artists exhibited at the time, his artwork became representative of Burnham’s discursive study of systems. Writing in response to Lye’s kinetic sculpture, Burnham described weather as a disruptive force that resets the system; “wind destroys the self-contained stability of the sculpture” because any system desires a return to equilibrium (1968a, 234). Burnham delighted in kinetic sculpture’s changeable aesthetics of free play, randomization, and instability.

In his own writing, Lye emphasizes the embodiment of sensations in his continuously moving forms. The search for patterns, or “figures of motion,” and the question of “how to get bodily senses into the act” are vital to Lye’s practice. Lye describes how, as a fifteen-year-old student, he became fascinated by movement in the natural world (Horrocks 2001, 12–13). He watched clouds rolling through the sky and was reminded of Constable’s oil paintings of cloud movement. Lye writes (narrating his life in the third person): “Then it hit him: why not make cloud shapes that actually moved instead of simulating their motion? But then he saw that cloud movements were fairly limited. Why not make his own shapes and compose his own motion? And that was it” (Lye 1984, 81). Lye’s intuitive practice of sensory self-experiment found a home in the growing kinetic art discourse in New York in the 1960s. He became familiar with the early twentieth-century kinetic sculpture in Naum Gabo’s rotating constructions and Alexander Calder’s gently floating mobiles, which were sometimes meteorologically themed, such as Snow Flurry I (1948). Lye reached New York in 1943, informed by his travels through the Pacific and the United Kingdom.

Of the kinetic mobiles of Calder, Eco writes: “Theoretically, work and viewer should never be able to confront each other twice in precisely the same way. Here there is no suggestion of movement: the movement is real, and the work of art is a field of open possibilities” ([1962] 1989, 86). Lye’s Wind Wands also operates as an open system, with endlessly variable movements possible in the bending poles. Although Lye’s practice makes physical forces tangible, unlike many postwar kineticists Lye was wary of progressivist science. Lye was aware of creative interpretations of cybernetics, but he generally avoided direct scientific terminology in relation to his own work. This differed from the attitudes of the Parisian kineticists, such as members of the GRAV (Groupe de recherche d’art visual) collective. Le Parc of GRAV, for instance, made a series of mobiles called Determinism and Indeterminism (1962) made of hanging plastic squares illuminated by light. Lye describes his work as a “homage to energy” yet he finds the discourse of cybernetics as distancing, commenting that cybernetic theory does not give much “emotional satisfaction.” He uses the term negative feedback in relation to his sculpture Rotating Harmonic (1959), while qualifying his usage by explaining that he is not particularly interested in the of a “brain machine” of nascent computing (Lye 1984).

Lye’s self-described “old brain” is the biological, deep-embodied knowledge that he contrasts with “learned” knowledge, the “new brain of the intellect” (Lye 1984, 90). The immediate sensations of the audience produced by his sculptures are, for Lye, both culturally learned and spontaneous. In philosophy, Lye’s contemporary Maurice Merleau-Ponty speculates on whether a “return to the immediate” is possible; distinguishing between “perception fashioned by culture” and “brute” or “wild” perception (Merleau-Ponty and Lefort 1968). How does one undo thinking to return to lived experience, the phenomenal (ibid., 212)? In Lye’s (1984) own account of childhood “sense games,” he would attempt to repeat movements in nature inside himself as a bodily “inner echo.” He writes: “I got so I could feel myself into the shoes of anything that moved, from a grasshopper to a hawk, a fish to a yacht, from a cloud to a shimmering rustle of ivy on a brick wall” (ibid., 82–83). He created his own language of the body through observing and imagining movement.

For Lye, empathy with the motion of the wind in kinetic art frees human beings from the anatomical limits of the body in a way that exceeds earlier art forms such as dance (1984, 81). Our ability to empathize with his sculptures depends on a bodily act of attunement with the elements. Empathetic tension increases with scale. In a radio interview, Lye describes empathy for the waves as follows: “The difference that you feel in empathy for this little furling wave—so minute that you hardly notice it—and the empathy that you feel when you are watching a huge comber—a 15 or 25 foot comber—is increased in ratio to the size of the thing, the energy involved in it” (Horrocks 2001, 284). However, Michael Fried—an art critic at the time—challenged the minimalist group of sculptors, including Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and Tony Smith, on the “theatrical” choice of an installation site that demands such empathetic participation. In his essay “Art and Objecthood,” Fried writes that in the theatrical situation, the “beholder” is necessarily included in the situation that the artist creates. The quality of the new sculpture that Clement Greenberg identified as “presence,” Fried considered to be a theatrical effect or mere “stage presence” ([1967] 1998, 155). Fried worried about the animate sensibility of site-specific art in relation to the human viewer: “ [the literalist sculpture] depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him, it has been waiting for him. And once he is in the room the work refuses, obstinately, to let him alone—which is to say, it refuses to stop confronting him, distancing him, isolating him” (ibid., 163–164).

From a contemporary perspective, Fried’s critique of the active role for the participant in the artwork reads as a positive trope. Lye’s choice of an abandoned lot as the location for the first Wind Wand assembles people in a built environment, rather than a gallery, in open air. Lye locates a feeling for wind as a common experience, creating space for the audience to feel the chaotic dynamics of a shared ecology. The new version of Lye’s Wind Wand, installed on the coastal walkway in New Plymouth, Taranaki, as the city’s turn of the millennium project by The Len Lye Foundation, followed Lye’s original instructions for an increase in scale of the wand. The wand uses yacht-mast materials to allow it to bend up to twenty meters in the strong prevailing wind coming from the Tasman sea. The red sphere on the top contains 1,296 light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that light up at night. The dynamic bends and arcs of the wand chart the movements of the wind. When I visit the Taranaki coast, I feel the same wind that moves the sculpture on my skin. When the gusts subside and the sculpture is becalmed, I wait impatiently for any motion at all to register. Lye wrote: “Just as silence emphasizes sound, motion enhances the perception of stillness after the interaction is over” (1961, 227). The wind wands at rest are full of latent potential.

Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field

If we compare Lye’s Wind Wands to Walter De Maria’s later and better-known artwork The Lightning Field (1971–1977), radically different approaches to site and participation become apparent. Both works used metal poles to conduct the weather to produce specific sensations, and both works engage energetic forces. Yet The Lightning Field is situated far from urban life in Quemado, New Mexico. No one gives a more detailed account of the formal arrangement of the poles, their construction, and the details of the site than Walter De Maria himself. De Maria’s formal statement (1980) about The Lightning Field, published in Artforum, is the key document and an extension of the work itself. The text is a mix of dry scientific facts and sudden statements about De Maria’s aesthetic concepts. The bureaucratic language of science and industry is explicit in De Maria’s statement, whereas the engagement with the physical sciences is immanent in Lye’s Wind Wands.

The title of De Maria’s statement about the work—“Some Facts, Notes, Data, Information, Statistics and Statements”—borrows from the language of scientific fieldwork. The desirable qualities of the desert location are its “flatness, high lightning activity, and isolation.” He tells us that The Lightning Field is located 7,200 feet above sea level and 11.5 miles east of the Continental Divide. The lightning field has four hundred highly polished stainless steel poles with solid, pointed tips, each an average height of twenty feet. The poles are arranged in a grid array (sixteen wide by 25 long) and are spaced 220 feet apart. A walk around the perimeter of the poles takes more than two hours. Each pole was “triple checked for accuracy” to make sure that the poles were all of equal height above the ground, based on a land survey that took points from four positions around each pole. Because of differences in ground level at different parts of the site, the height of the poles is subtly different, yet a continuous flat plane is formed by the level of the pole tips. An imaginary plane is created over the tips of the poles, which could “support a sheet of glass” (De Maria 1980). The factual nature of this statement could be a technical description from an engineer. Yet De Maria once wrote in his essay “On the Importance of Natural Disasters” more emotively: “I like natural disasters and I think they may be the highest form of art possible to experience” ([1960] 1995, 630). He describes tornadoes, floods, and sandstorms as rare forms of art that we should be thankful for.

In The Lightning Field, however, De Maria removed both his own physical body and the audience from the published images of the work, unlike Lye. De Maria provides a script for interaction with the work, and access to the site is highly controlled. The artwork has been infamously challenged due to its so-called authoritarian stance (Beardsley 1981). Visitors must apply individually to view the field in the remote Nevada desert by reservation, for only six people at once. The work is a contemporary homage to the “medium” of lightning, but the poles stand sentinel for a strictly limited audience and the rare visitations of lightning. The chance appearance of lightning is set against the precise numerical structuring arrangement of the poles, yet as Harris Dimítropouios (1985) suggests, this arrangement can be linked to the numerology of the Buddhist I Ching as much as to science.

The energetic and potentially destructive qualities of The Lightning Field and the role of the series of images De Maria released in Artforum in April 1980, are part of the narrative of the artwork. The photographs engaged a wider public and were integral to the circulation of lightning as art media. Art writer James Nisbet situates The Lightning Field as “a brief moment in the history of photo-energy,” to show how De Maria’s work internalizes a conflicted moment in ecology. Nisbet addresses what he considers the “persisting problem” of histories of land art that tend to focus on the land, rather than other atmospheres or energies. He writes: “By rendering energy flow itself as a series of constants—poles and sky, object and camera—the photographic Lightning Field maintains a sense of ecology that forecloses subjective presence or influence” (Nisbet 2013, 78). De Maria’s attention to the properties of lightning and his extension of “site” to a spread of photographs challenges the limited readings of the work as interventionist and highly controlled “land” art (Nisbet 2013, 84). With Nisbet, my focus on meteorological media suggests an expanded ecological vista beyond the land itself.

Natural phenomena are part of a social system in Lye’s Wind Wand in Taranaki, where it can be found on a coastal walkway. Walkers can interact freely with the swaying pole that amplifies and embodies the effects of weather. The restricted access to The Lightning Field in Quemado, on the other hand, limits the participation of human visitors. Yet De Maria’s (1980) expansion of the installation into a series of lightning-animated photographs in Artforum situates his work in the social realm. From a postanthropocentric perspective, The Lightning Field is open to the natural energies of lightning as media for contemporary art.

Hans Haacke’s Weather Systems

This statement was originally written by Hans Haacke to accompany an exhibition in Cologne in 1965 (Haacke and Alberro 2016, 5). They represent critical tropes in his practice: mutability, temporality, and audience experience. The imperative, “make,” consciously sets out a new paradigm for art, wherein the static nature of traditional painting and sculpture gives way to mutable “system artworks” (Burnham and Haacke 1967). Air currents, temperature, gravity, and environmental reactions over time are also the stuff of a quasi-meteorological enquiry.

Haacke’s institutional and political critique has occupied most of the scholarship on his practice. Recently, however, there has been a growing interest in the early phase of Haacke’s career, during which he manufactured systems as enquiries into physical processes. Haacke has been called a systems artist, a term that embraces his engagement with physical, biological, and social systems at once. Haacke’s plexiglass boxes from 1963 to 1965, often regarded as parodies of the minimalist cube, are given a more layered interpretation by Pamela Lee (2004). Grass Cube (1967), for example, a growing piece of grass sod on an acrylic box, is described as a “self-generating work about self-generation” that reflects a study of mutual causation in both the social and the biological realms (Lee 2004, 80–81). In addition, a reframing of Haacke’s practice in light of Jack Burnham’s “Systems Aesthetics” has been offered by Luke Skrebowski “as a productive methodological framework for considering post-formalist art as a whole” (2008, 58–59).

The physical system of meteorology that pervaded Haacke’s oeuvre from 1963–1968, however, has garnered less critical attention, though in the late 1960s art writer Jack Burnham devoted an entire book, with Haacke, entitled Hans Haacke: Wind and Water Sculpture (1967), to the meteorological aspect of his practice. Haacke himself writes, while reflecting on this series in 1971: “I was very excited about the subtle communication with a seemingly sealed off environment and the complexity of interrelated conditions determining a meteorological process” (2016, 48). Haacke’s Condensation Cube, also known as Weather Cube (1963–1965), engages experimentally with the physical transformation of water. According to Haacke, a meteorological process produces in the viewer’s mind a conceptual oscillation, in dialectical conflict with both traditional art and the hierarchical organization of physical relationships. In this new set of relations, the audience and the atmospheric conditions each play a part in making the artwork.

Systems Theory Meets Art

An enthusiasm for emergence, ontogenesis, and how randomness and chance might produce higher forms of order suffuse Burnham’s writing. Haacke credits Burnham with introducing systems theory to the New York art world (Skrebowski 2008). His lens on art acknowledged complexity theory and an emergent “systems consciousness” as opposed to the “cultural obsession with the art object” (Burnham 1968a, 369). Much of the language Burnham uses is developed from Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, author of General System Theory (1968), with whom he shared a publisher. Burnham locates both Lye and Haacke as “systems” artists. He draws on the interdisciplinary nature of systems theory to counteract the search for an irreducible essence in separate arts of his contemporaries, most notably art critic Clement Greenberg.

Lorenz’s discoveries in meteorology are closely aligned with the emergent systems theory that fascinated Haacke. One of the seductions of the complex science of meteorology for postformalist artists was the idea of the open system. Von Bertalanffy analyzed the dynamics of complex systems in response to the perceived fragmentation and technologically enhanced pace of social life. In the preface to General System Theory, he comments on the ubiquity of the word system as a fashionable catchword in science, sociology, and mass media in the 1960s. New jobs were emerging as a result, such as systems designer, systems analyst, and systems engineer (von Bertalanffy 1968, 3). He proposed that the complexity of social life means the modern subject is forced to deal with wholes, or the system overview, in all fields of knowledge. Stable modes of categorizing natural and biological phenomena began to give way to a discourse of nonlinearity and complexity.

Von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory (1968) refers to The Organismic Conception in Meteorology (1961) by J. W. Thompson to draw a detailed comparison of “modern meteorological concepts” and Thompson’s organic understanding in biology and open systems in the modern world. He notes that, in Thermodynamic Studies and Irreversible Phenomena (1947), Prigogine pinpointed meteorology as a field in which open systems theory could be applied. Open systems are characterized by a time-independent steady state, but they are not in equilibrium, or homeostasis. An open system may or may not reach a steady state; its development is independent of the initial conditions (von Bertalanffy 1968, 141–143). Architect Buckminster Fuller also wrote a chapter called “General Systems Theory” in his small book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969). He warns against the exhaustion of essential resources on our fragile planet as the “cushion for error” for humanity’s survival and growth diminishes. Von Bertalanffy, Fuller, and Burnham’s exchanges revitalized communications between science and cultural life after the media-hyped “two cultures” split (Snow 1959). An interdisciplinary and open model of relations seemed urgent in the years following the cataclysmic results of technological warfare.

Haccke’s Weather Systems

In the 1960s, Haacke simulated meteorological effects using water vapor, air currents with free-floating balloons, sails, and freezing constructions. His experiments with air currents and fine mists began prior to his arrival in New York from Germany. Particular works of Haacke’s are framed here as a meteorological interpretation of his oeuvre. These artworks are natureculture systems energized by processes of drift, flow, and transformation. I put forward links between Haacke’s weather-infused works and early meteorological instruments. In 1962, for instance, Haacke produced Rain Tower, a small, oblong-shaped tower of clear acrylic divided into ten floors. Water drips through the holes between the floors of the structure. The work has a formal relation to the metered measurements of the glass rain gauge instrument in meteorology. Haacke’s Rain Tower was designed to be flipped vertically to reverse the flow of water in either direction. The handling of the tower by the audience adds an unpredictable element to the system. According to museum administrators, when the work was exhibited later in 1962 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, museum staff “played with the artwork for days,” delighting at the tactile interaction invited by water and gravity (Burnham and Haacke 1967, 282).

Rain Tower was a precursor to Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963–1965), in which he developed his interest in the self-regulating system of atmosphere. The Condensation Cube (30 × 30 × 30 cm) is a single clear acrylic cube, placed on the floor. A small quantity of water is introduced to the cube’s floor, which slowly evaporates, forms droplets on the roof and sides of the cube, reaches a critical mass, then drops down like rain. There are various openings within the cube via which air can enter and leave to assist the condensation process. The rate of evaporation or condensation depends on the air temperature and sunlight conditions outside the cube. The climate of the gallery becomes an important condition of the work’s responsivity; a cold room that quickly warms with the sun creates greater condensing of droplets for instance. The mutable process of condensation never repeats itself, simulating the atmospheric cycle at micro scale. The relatively new material of plexiglass allows a visual flow from the outside to the experimental interior. Haacke describes the function of the cube, disclosing the length of time required for the work to be apprehended: “The drops grow hour by hour; small ones combine with larger ones. The speed of their growth depends on the intensity and the angle of the intruding light. After a day, a dense cover of clearly defined drops has developed and they all reflect light. With continuing condensation, some drops reach such a size that their weight overcomes the forces of adhesion and they run down along the walls, leaving a trail” (2003, 265).

The activity of Haacke’s Condensation Cube is reminiscent of early cloud chamber experiments. In 1894, Victorian meteorologist C. T. R. Wilson tried to simulate optical weather phenomena from the Scottish mountain Ben Nevis in glass vessels in his laboratory. The particles became visible as tracks in condensation. When Wilson expanded the air in the cloud chamber, he found that the vapor in the chamber was not forming drops on dust, as with clouds, but rather was forming on invisible, charged ions that he did not recognize. By 1912, Wilson introduced a radioactive source and found that he could photograph long lines of subatomic particles. This radical shift in method from imitating nature to taking it apart—or, as philosopher of science Peter Galison describes it, from “mimetic experimentation (simulating clouds) to analytic experimentation (detecting ‘real’ sub atomic particles)”—is played out within the narrative of the cloud chamber (1997, 75). Cloud chamber photography became widely known to artists in America through MIT professor Gyorgy Kepes’s exhibition and catalog The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956).

Haacke’s mimesis of physical systems of condensation, wind, or rain are cultural analogues for systems of control and release. For Haacke, the condensation is a free, animate agent. He writes, “The conditions are comparable to those of a living organism that reacts in a flexible manner to its surroundings. The image of condensation cannot be precisely predicted. It is changing freely, bound only by statistical limits. I like this freedom” (Haacke 2003, 265). The Condensation Cube has been positioned as a dialogue between the museum and architecture (Jarzombek 2005); I see the atmospheric conditions in the art gallery and the developing veil of condensation as co-performers. The activity of the water vapor even reflects the warmth of human bodies passing through the gallery. The cube is less a minimalist thing in itself than a functioning environmental and social ecology.

The Condensation Cube was understood by Burnham as a process of metabolic exchange between system and environment. Haacke’s weather work sometimes uses catalyzers, such as incubators, electric fans, and refrigeration units, to accelerate processes of change and amplify natural processes. Before Haacke met Burnham in 1965, cybernetic systems were part of Haacke’s creative milieu. Haacke exhibited with the German art collective Group Zero (1956–1968). He was also associated with the cyberneticist artmakers in GRAV. Later, von Bertalanffy’s open conception of a system would become of particular importance to Haacke. By 1967, Haacke explicitly describes his artworks as a self-regulating “open system,” in von Bertalanffy’s terms, rather than as sculpture. State changes in Haacke’s physical systems allude to the experimental materiality of meteorological science. In Water in Wind (1968), for instance, two purpose-built spray nozzles generated a fine mist on the rooftop of his studio at 95 East Houston Street in New York. The water vapor produced rainbow effects when the sun shone through the fine spray. This art event was as ephemeral as a naturally occurring rainbow, affecting the participant for only the briefest moment of time.

As well as the freezing and condensation of water vapor, Haacke also made use of the wind in several works, sometimes using outdoor air currents, and sometimes using electric fans blowing material sails in works such as Wind Room (1968–1969). Sky Line (1967) is the most visually spectacular of these, in which several hundred white balloons were used to visualize air currents in a public event in Central Park in New York. White helium-filled balloons drift according to the wind patterns to form a line in the sky, tethered together by fishing line. Haacke also made indoor works with electric fans to keep balloons and cloth buoyant in the air. Since the late nineteenth century, weather balloons (or sounding balloons) have been employed to monitor wind direction and later to carry instruments, such as the radiosonde, to send back atmospheric, temperature, and humidity data. The fluctuations of wind sensed by the park-goers on the ground also propelled the floating system of balloons in a transmission of subtle informational patterns. Burnham notes that in Haacke’s sail pieces and outdoor balloon lines, “the decision to allow natural entities to organise themselves began” (1969, 52). Haacke’s attention to the subtleties of currents suggests a sensory language beyond institutional constraints—the same freedom that he enjoyed in his statement about Condensation Cube. This project resonates with Phil Dadson’s wind-inflated Hoop Flags (1970) described in the introduction and anticipates Joyce Hinterding and David Haines Soundship (descender 1), in which a weather balloon and custom-made instruments reach the stratosphere.

Like Haacke’s Condensation Cube, Alan Sonfist’s artwork Crystal Enclosure (1965; figure 1.3) also suggests an early meteorological instrument. A glass sphere is filled with natural mineral crystals, which convert to a gas in reaction to atmospheric conditions. As the atmospheric heat and light fluctuates, the crystals make patterns on the surface of the glass. The functioning system of this sculpture recalls the Victorian storm glass, a type of barometer, once used by navigators such as Admiral Fitzroy on the Beagle (1834–1836). The growth of the crystals in the storm glass was used in marine weather forecasting; rapid advance of the crystals indicated a storm was brewing at sea. Sonfist, Haacke, and Philippine artist David Medalla mimetically engage with physical phenomena by creating isolated conditions for artificial reactions, just as scientists do. They playfully experimented with the materiality and formal language of the dominant “superscientific culture” (Burnham 1968a).

Figure 1.3 Alan Sonfist. *Crystal Enclosure*. 1965. Photograph courtesy of the artist. [See color plate 3]

The artificial enclosure of industrialized life is captured in the Hegelian term second nature. This term surfaces in the writing of Adorno and Marcuse in the late 1960s, while artists such as Sonfist also searched for metaphors for the earth’s delicate ecosystem. Adorno problematizes the vain attempt to try to know a thing through processes of mediation, or the “capture” of nature into “second nature” (Adorno 2006b, 121). By primary nature, Adorno means “no more than the elements, the objective elements that the experiencing consciousness encounters without his experiencing them as things he has himself mediated.” He characterizes the transformation of primary to secondary nature as follows: “Nothing that is outside appears to me to be outside—thanks to the total mediation that transforms even the elements of nature into elements of second nature” (Adorno 2006b, 121–122). In Marcuse’s view (1969), the work of art has no means of circumventing humankind’s repressive second nature so long as it still exists within it.

In the sealed containers of Haacke and Sonfist, there is a sense of an enclosed second nature that is offset by the free process of material transformation and dissipation inside. As Nisbet (2013) points out, in the 1960s and 1970s, artists’ understanding of ecological systems was tied to a critique of capitalist consumption. In An Essay on Liberation (1969), Marcuse connects the related capitalist desires of “possessing, consuming, handling, and constantly renewing” with a “second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form” (1969, 10). For Adorno, citing Marx, the law of capitalist accumulation has been metamorphosed by economists into “a pretended law of Nature.” In Adorno’s two lectures titled “The History of Nature (I)” (2006a) and “The History of Nature (II)” (2006b), he sketches a world where we have become so completely trapped by social and rational mechanisms that first and second nature cannot be distinguished between each other. Nature is suppressed by the global events of world history in Hegel, yet Adorno goes a step further to argue that second nature becomes the only reality. Capitalism becomes naturalized to the extent that, Adorno writes, “the organic nature of capitalist society is both an actuality and at the same time a socially necessary illusion” (Adorno 2006a, 118). To bring the commodity trap of second nature to light, condensation, melting, and freezing in artworks of this period politicized the shape-shifting qualities of environmental media.

Figure 1.4 David Medalla. *Cloud Canyons*. 1967. Installation view at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Plastic tubing, aquarium, pump, pipe, 400 × 300 cm.

Social Climates in the 1960s: Medalla and Haacke

In 1962, Medalla exhibited Ice Melting Sculpture at the Signals gallery in London, in which blocks of ice were literally allowed to melt in the gallery space at a speed determined by atmospheric conditions. When I first encountered a version of Medalla’s sculpture Cloud Canyons (1967) at Auckland Art Gallery at a crowded opening, I remember the bubbles frothing over the trough and seeping all over the gallery floor. I was struck by irreverence of this antimachine that joyously ignores the laws of the gallery situation. Cloud Canyons (1967) is made from plastic tubes, pumps, and pipes that froth bubbles like an out-of-control scientific experiment. Water is recycled through the lower half of the mechanical sculpture, which pushes the bubbles up in piles of cloud-like forms through the columns; they then slowly slide down into a rubber trough that can barely contain their exuberance. The lively, techno-organicist fusion of materials reflects Medalla’s observations of the gentle buildup and decay of cloud phenomena.

Medalla’s first bubble machine was exhibited in a solo show at the Signals gallery in London in 1964, cofounded by Paul Keeler and Medalla himself. Burnham describes Medalla’s artworks as producing “thermal walls with mutable mist and frost patterns” that would “sweat and perspire” (Burnham 1968a, 344–346). As an early artist-run space, there was freedom to experiment wildly without fear of a gallerist’s demand for pristine white walls and saleable work. According to Burnham, Medalla described his world view as hylozoist in the 1960s, comparing himself to the pre-Socratic philosopher who believes matter is animate. Philosopher of arts and sciences Michel Serres often cites a hylozoist text, La Mer, written by the natural historian Jules Michelet in the late nineteenth century, in which the sea and earth are constantly in “a labour of metamorphosis, transformation, production, generation” (Serres 1982a, 33); these phase changes of physical state are connected to a political state of unrest. For Serres, the abstract ideal of a steady state is unreachable and contrary to history.

Haacke and Medalla’s transformations of matter had political implications for the restless culture of the late 1960s. They were experiencing historically turbulent times; Burnham attests that Haacke was profoundly troubled by the continuing Vietnam war and the effects of May 1968 in Paris. Signals produced a gallery news bulletin edited by Medalla that acted as a conduit among art, politics, and the new sciences. Medalla published Lewis Mumford’s speech at the American Academy of Science condemning the US role in the Vietnam war; articles by the physicist Werner Heisenberg on indeterminacy; and writings of Professor J. D. Bernal, a crystallographer who was involved in the development of holograms. Medalla’s aleatory forms are vital, as Jun Terra argues, because they touch on “the most basic law that governs the individual, the world, and the universe; that is, that the only immutable and changeless law is the law of change” (1995, 98). Haacke also condemned the art object in “inert, static” conditions as a “politically dangerous” illusion of timeless stability (Bijvoet 1997, 84).

At a more personal level, Medalla’s autocreative machines reflect his own history and sensory memories from Manila, a city ravaged by war in his early childhood during the Japanese occupation and bloody recapture by American and Philippine troops. The bubbles recall his encounter with a dying soldier foaming from the mouth, memories of his mother’s bubbling cream of coconut soup, and later experiences of canyons of clouds in formation by airplane. Medalla now sees himself as a “citizen of the world”; like clouds in their unpredicatable movement, he is at home anywhere (Tate 2012). Haacke and Medalla’s artworks contributed to a cultural “dialectics of transformation” (Burnham and Haacke 1975, 131) in which art became integral to the political landscape.

Like Medalla, Haacke avoided the categorization of his practice into social, meteorological, biological, or behavioral systems. The foregrounding of systems theory is deployed here as a counterpoint to art historians, such as Benjamin Buchloch, who have had less interest in Haacke’s early, more scientific, work. Buchloch separates Haacke’s political work from his investigations of biological and physical systems, suggesting that only his explicitly political work is “mature” (Skrebowski 2008, 74). Yet Haacke’s Recording of Climate in an Art Exhibition (1970), for instance, engages on several intersecting registers. This work featured in the Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects exhibition curated by Joseph Kosuth at the New York Cultural Center (1970). Haacke displayed three functioning instruments—a barograph, a thermograph, and a hydrograph—while recording live shifts in humidity and temperature within the gallery. The unaltered display of meteorological instruments in Recording of Climate in an Art Exhibition suggest a Duchampian readymade, although there is no disjunctive jolt as these devices generally are to be found sitting unobtrusively in any major gallery.

The movement of the stylus on the barograph in Recording of Climate in an Art Exhibition charts the microclimate of institutional spaces and registers human presence. The work operates within the social system at play in the rarefied gallery environment and jabs at the institutional values that preserve artworks in climate-controlled environments as commodities. The instruments are presented as anonymous social mediators in a real-time system, as Haacke calls it, linking human and nonhuman, atmospheric and machinic. In computing, real time is a constraint, with operational deadlines from event to system response; for artists, real time suggests immediacy and accessibility. In Burnham’s 1969 article entitled “Real Time Systems” in Artforum, he quotes Haacke as follows: “The artist’s business requires his involvement in practically everything. … An artist is not an isolated system” (Burnham 1969, 52). The cultural impact of the so-called rediscovery of time in science, to include irreversibility, randomness, and fluctuation (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, xxvii), manifests physically in Haacke’s meteorological oeuvre. At the same time, Haacke’s real-time instruments connect the gallery’s physical atmosphere to the ideological climate of the art world.

The weather as a new medium for art catalyzed multidirectional flows between atmospheric science and systems theory within the cultural milieu of Lye, Haacke, De Maria, and Medalla. Artworks verged on the function of scientific instruments, such as weather balloons or cloud chambers, and reimagined the scientific language of openness. In the influential chapter in which von Bertalanffy describes a model of an open system, he writes, “An open system is defined as a system in exchange of matter with its environment, presenting import and export, building up and breaking down of its material components” (1968, 141). Live weather sources generate and decay, ebb and flow, as social systems do. Systems thinking, in art of the 1960s, evolved into an ecological perspective. Serres’s writing also draws on systems theory in his chaotic fusion of disciplines, proposing that “noise, chance, rain, a circumstance” may produce a small fluctuation, a contradiction, or an inversion that creates a new system that “could be entirely different from the one that was interrupted” (1982b, 18).

The open dynamics in 1960s autocreative art are precursors to open-source programming, open architecture, and participatory art. Environmental activism rose out of the counterculture, yet at the time, artists involved in these subcultures still depended on the infrastructure of the gallery and art world. Paradoxically, countercultural figure Stewart Brand’s early ecopolitical manual, The Whole Earth Catalogue (1968), later became an Internet-based bulletin board that facilitated the smooth integration of computing technology and associated work styles into American life (Lash 2010). The artists discussed in this chapter struggled against the workings of capitalism and the distance from real experience implied by second nature, by confounding gallery norms or finding sites outdoors, in free exchange with the elements.

Meteorological artworks may not always promote or reflect “ethico-aesthetic rupture” (Guattari 1995) simply by virtue of their choices of media, yet they convene vital forums for ecological debate and specific local resistance. Lye’s Wind Wands (1961), for instance, became a focal point for the civic unrest surrounding the demolition of parts of New York’s West Village. Haacke used the open system to counteract the hierarchical organization of physical relationships, which he believed operated within formalist art and systems of capital. The remote site of large-scale land art is often contrasted with the social engagement of contemporary ecological art, yet De Maria’s The Lightning Field pervaded the social environment through its circulation in Artforum. Medalla, Haacke, and Lye’s work called on audience-performers, attuned to atmospheric nuances in artwork that is relational, rather than sealed off from the physical world.

As barometers of feeling and catalysts for political action, 1960s meteorological art objects continue to engage audiences. With Latour, I see art objects as more than discrete “matters of fact”; rather, they are “matters of concern,” open entities that provoke perplexity and productive dialogue among those who gather around them (Latour 2004b, 66). As a symbolic matter of concern, Lye’s revived Wind Wand (opened in 2000), installed on the Taranaki foreshore, continues to play a part in social and meteorological narratives. Like Walter De Maria’s poles, the wand is sometimes struck by lightning. A story of the Te Atiawa iwi (tribe) of the region traces a drop of rain from the top of Mount Taranaki, the high mountain that overshadows the town, through rivers, to the seabed, where condensation rises again to the sky as clouds. The intergenerational retelling of the connective cycle of weather, land, and sea at Waitara marae (communal meeting house) is a politicized message to the New Zealand government as it moves slowly on Te Atiawa land claims to the seabed and foreshore to honor the Treaty of Waitangi (1840). Lye’s Wind Wand, positioned prominently among the elements on the shore, signifies the complexities of human-weather relations.