All About "Air" at the James Cohan Gallery

"The air of one's native country is the most healthy air," Chekov said during what probably turned out to be a warm Russian spring. In New York, battered by freezing January temperatures and arctic winds, the question of the air and its salutariness has recently inspired just a single, exclusionary thought: the cold. Yet it must be said that air, in its endangered ubiquity (think pollution and the ozone layer), is rarely ever seriously on our minds, even when the mercury climbs over 70. Among those elemental things we take for granted until they start running low, like light, water or our health, air consists not only of the stuff we pull into our lungs?it surrounds us, envelops the globe's peaks and valleys like a glove and occupies the human brain with metaphors the way helium (which is a part of air) fills a balloon.

In the past, poets and writers have waxed eloquent about air's many underappreciated properties. Yet for the last few gelid weeks in New York, the works of a select group of visual artists have provided meaningful, sometimes brilliant meditations on the one element that distinguishes the earth from all the other planets. Picking perceptual, conceptual and analogical notions from, as it were, the air itself, "Air" the exhibition examines and explores the one invisible, physical factor on which every living thing depends. The results are, in a word, inspired.

Organized by James Cohan, Elyse Goldberg and Arthur Solway, the three directors of Chelsea's James Cohan Gallery, "Air" is a hard-won victory of educated sensibility over orthodox curatorial pabulum in a battle the gallery's principals hardly knew they were fighting. Put together over a period of eleven months and involving newly commissioned works as well as complex loans from several museums and private collections, "Air" demonstrates a trend that reflects wonderfully on New York's galleries and terribly on the city's contemporary arts institutions. The city's best commercial spaces, smaller and sleeker than museums yet rich in resources, have long been responsible for debuting the work of the world's most important contemporary artists. Now that these galleries have begun to routinely turn out world-class thematic exhibitions, the question of whether or not curators and their beleaguered institutions are out of time or just out of steam takes on a new dimension if not new importance.

"Air" is much better, for example, than "Tempo," MOMA's monothematic inaugural exhibition, and asserts its independence from the late 20th-century tradition of theory-driven curatorial practice in two principal ways. Unburdened either by text (except, of course, that used by the art itself) or the programmatically therapeutic concerns that drive most contemporary museum exhibitions these days, "Air" unfolds inside the gallery space with nary a nod to the usual curatorial exegesis. The exhibition's second and most important characteristic is, like its subject, so fundamentally simple as to nearly escape notice: "Air," in its radical wisdom, takes as its subject the world. Or put another way, the works in the exhibition address a thousand ideas related to their theme, but they are never, ever about other art.

Featuring 29 artists whose works date from the 17th century to the present, "Air" runs through changing notions of the subject in question. The earliest works presented in the exhibition are two rare illustrated books that provide historical representations of what was once an indivisible earthly and spiritual concept. The Latin captions for Robert Fludd's Medicina Catholica seu Mysticum Artis Medicandi Sacrarium of 1629 include archangels inspiring the globe with breath and a proto-scientific description that explains the drawing as a "Demonstration of the winds blowing from the four cardinal points." More familiar representations of atmospheric conditions like cumulonimbus clouds, pea-soup fog and multiple colored skies fall to 19th-century naturalist painters like Gustave Courbet, John Constable, Thomas Cole, Arthur Parton, J.M.W. Turner and R.A. Blackelock. The Constable cloud study, a little parcel of gray and white air, is compact enough to fit into a child's lunchbox. Courbet's rugged channel seascape, is, like the Constable, also a minor work?but its rocky coastline and foamy waves invoke brininess the way a picture of a steak induces hunger.

Moving forward in the historical order the exhibition eschews, "Air" includes the 50-cc ampoule of Paris air Marcel Duchamp placed inside his Boite-en-valise, a suitcase-like construction the artist designed in 1938 to house miniature copies of his biggest artistic hits; Piero Manzoni's 1959 Corpo d'Aria (Air Body), a second conceptualist box containing a deflated balloon, a rubber hose, a tripod and a set of instructions for use; Man Ray's 1965 surrealist object What We All Lack, a pipe with a glass bubble attached to its bowl end; and Yves Klein's 1960 fictional Leap Into the Void, an ecstatic, manufactured photo of the artist jumping off a roof that got a considerable head start on both Photoshop trickery and a great deal of performance art.

At the performative and cathartic end of the exhibition, two videos push "Air" uncomfortably close to the "death impulse." The first of these, Bill Viola's Nine Attempts to Achieve Immortality, presents a gasping, tense view of the artist as he fights to hold in his breath nine consecutive times. The second video, Marina Abramovic's Breathing In, Breathing Out features Abramovic and her collaborator Ullay embraced in what at first appears to be a drawn-out, open-mouthed kiss. As it becomes clear that they have stopped their noses with cotton and are cannibalizing each other's air, the image of their struggling bodies is turned on its head, becoming quite literally so close as to become asphyxiating.

Other works, like Jeff Koons' bronze cast Aqualung and Robert Gober's elevated Prison Window, also touch on the notion of actual and spiritual death as the absence of air. But there are several other pieces, like Hans Haacke's Blue Sail and Janine Antoni's Sigh, whose lyrical optimism turns infectious. The first, an early work by an artist better known today for propagandist political art, consists of a simple blue sheet, fishing line, lead weights and a fan whose oscillations continually lift the fabric into sculpture. The second, one of five works the gallery commissioned for the exhibition (the others are by Howard Goldkrand, Erick Swenson, Jenny Holzer, Ann Hamilton and Olafur Eliasson), is equally simple in its elements (the gallery checklist includes "curtain, wind, fabric stiffener") and packs a powerful, melancholy but life-affirming punch. A curtain caught permanently in mid-billow, Antoni's work metaphorically casts the one essential thing one can never properly reach out and capture: the always changing, ever cycling air we breathe.

"Air," through Feb. 15 at the James Cohan Gallery, 533 W. 26th St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 212-714-9500.