18. Mai |  19:00   |  Linda Henderson (Austin, TX)

»Repositioning the Ether in Early 20th-Century Art and Culture«

It is remarkable that an entity as ubiquitous as the ether of space in the late 19th and early 20th centuries could be lost in histories of the cultural production of this period.

Contrary to standard narratives, it was only in 1919 that the popularization of Einstein and the theory of relativity began to challange the public´s belief in the impalpable ether, which was understood to fill a space and to serve as the necessary medium for the various newly identified ranges of invisible wave vibrations. From X-rays to the Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy - and their occult extensions in the telegraphy-telepathy-model -, modern artists found inspiration in these new modes of seeing and communicating based on vibrations and frequencies. At the same time, with the ether posited as the possible source of matter itself and radioactivity suggesting the continous dematerialization of matter, artists faced a fluid new paradigm of interpenetrating space and matter in continous cohesion and dissolution. It is little wonder that they responded so creatively - from the dematerialized forms of Cubism and Futurism, including Boccioni´s focus on the ether as »the unique form of continuity in space« to Duchamp´s decision to »make a painting of frequency« in his Large Class project and Kandinsky´s attempts to evoke the vibrating realm of ether itself in his abstract paintings.

Extending Albert Kümmel´s suggestion in the title of his 2008 anthology »Äther: Ein Medium der Moderne«, it seems increasingly feasible to argue that the ether was the cental medium of early 20th-century modernism.