Introduction

Aether, one could say, is the unknown. But how can the unconceivable be conceived?

The answer is multifold: From Plato‘s fifth element to Descartes one can find a multitude of philosophical-theological and scientific theories of aether. Several natural philosophers, like Giordano Bruno, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton, whose works are fundamental for today‘s science, based their theories on the assumption that aether was a given.

Parallel to the rise of the enlightenment an abundance of esoteric theories of aethers appear. In pre-revolutionary Paris the healer Franz Anton Mesmer‘s posited an ethereal „ fluidum“ which supposedly served as the medium for his psycho-physical „Animal Magnetism“. Further, many scientific circles and literary salons had strong affinites with remote and alchemist aether-conceptions and speculations. The French artist and passionate 19th century astronomer, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot made stunning interpretative drawings of what powerful telescopes later revealed from outer space, before photography was developed enough to do the job.

Likewise, the romantic writers Edgar Allen Poe and Friedrich Hölderlin as well as the late Immanuel Kant were aetherists who wrote lengthy poems and treatises about it. 

Then of course there is the concept of the „luminiferous ether“, a concrete subtle matter, whose existence was heavily disputed throughout the 19th century yet defended by prominent scientists like James Clerk Maxwell, Henri Poincaré and Nicola Tesla until finally disproved by the experimentum crucis of Michelson and Morley in 1887.

Yet, however often banished and disproved, the aether kept reappearing and reemerging, as a concept of continuity or contingency, which binds together the microcosmic and the universal. Be it in Wilhelm Reich‘s Orgone physics, new age esotherism or - as some claim – even in today‘s dark-matter or unified field theory - albeit their careful avoidance of the term aether.

Last not least there is also the early anesthetic substance and cheap drug aether, consumed by members of the avant-garde to enhance perception and to escape reality, whose usage was popular when the battle for the aether was still at its height. Some notable artistic experiments which allude to altered states of consciousness, were done by Henri Michaux, Gisèle Freund and Brassaï, inasmuch as the experimental photograms and abstractions of Étienne-Jules Marey.

These explorations lead us, quasi-chronologically, to the contemporary works of Evariste Richer, Claude Leveque, Thomas Ruff, Ugo Rondinone and Wolfgang Tillmans. Or in a more loose note to a vast experimental field, consisting of contemporary art videos and films, which relate to the notion of the Aether, such as the works of John Smith, Mariana Castillo Deball, Joachim Koester, Adolf Wölfi/ Daniel Baumann, David Maljkovic, Cyprien Gaillard.

The Centre Pompidou is pleased to invite you to join this journey through an exhibition as a mise-en-scène, whose program thus articulates itself around the question of the Aether in a contemporary discourse, that is: where do we stand now in the beginning of the 21st century, having bypassed the modern condition yet with the fundamental questions of science, reality, transcendence and art still left open.

Christoph Keller, 2011