Writing about air in the wake of 2020 is nothing if not overdetermined. The horrifying phrase “I can’t breathe” uttered by Black Americans murdered in police custody has galvanized global outrage against systemic racism. COVID-19 has exacerbated racialized injustice even as it has domesticated the aerosolized terror of contagion. Drone strikes; weaponized chemical clouds; carcinogenic miasmas and fossil-fuel smogs bringing death through the air to the world’s most vulnerable: all have haunted academic consciousness.COVID-19 and its rituals of masking, handwashing, and social distancing render airborne danger ubiquitous, material, endless.

Writing as art historians about the aerial image after 2020 is, thus, as impossible as it is passionately necessary. In The Marvelous Clouds (2015), John Durham Peters introduces a sprawling meditation on air, fire, and other elements by refreshing the familiar tag “in medias res.” We, too, write about air from within it, and do so at a moment of turbulent confusion. There is no distance—no recourse to that “aerial perspective” advanced by Leonardo da Vinci and his followers—from which to make air resolve into an orderly politico-intellectual agenda. What this issue attempts instead is an assembly of tools and provisional questions by which to pose the problem more clearly.

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