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C.W. Nicol . Born Wales, Citizen of Japan.
Became Japanese via the Martial Arts and spiritual discipline.
...and through environmental activism in Japan.
Afan Trust, a woodland in Nagano prefecture revived to its indigenous natural ecology by Nicol and co. (website in Japanese only).
On my walk to AIT this morning I stopped to take this image of a shop display window in Atre, Ebisu station.
'Primitive Air' somehow made me stop. As I walked the remaining way to AIT I pondered what this term could mean, mulling over various references. I began to wonder if there is a study of atmosphere within the fields of archaeology or paleontology, the study of what the air was like long ago. A quick Wikipedia search rooted out a field called Atmospheric Chemistry , a multidisciplinary field that studies the earth's atmosphere and its relations to human habitation etc. There was a useful diagram there:
The closest episode I could think of which veered towards what one could plausibly call an atmospheric archaeology was the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 by Howard Carter. Also known as the possible moment when the 'Curse of Tutankhamun' was liberated, it it noted how Carter and his team made a small hole in the outer wall of the Burial Chamber to peer inside, allowing an atmosphere which may have been essentially preserved for millenia to escape. What did it smell like?
On the art historical front Marcel Duchamp's 50cc glass vial of Parisian air made originally in 1919, but reproduced in 1939 for the image below, must be duly acknowledged.
Another work in a similar vein, though rather more immaterial, is perhaps Tom Friedman's cursed plinth where he asked a witch to curse the atmosphere above a single white plinth on which nothing is placed.
'Primitive Air' seems interesting because it allows us to ponder something intangible, but very self-evidently real and necessary to our survival. It couples the term Primitivism, which has largely been related to a powerfully material history of appropriation, colonialism and so on, with a term that moves into the domain of ambience and atmospheres. Perhaps the dance floor has been one of the more atmosphere-centric cultural spaces of the last 100 years, spaces essentially transcribed by bodies in motion, recorded sounds and the carefully programmed music of the host.
The final photograph below shows a dust storm about to engulf a little town in Texas in 1935. It reminded me of the images of the tidal wave of dust which swept across New York city after the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001.
Lafcadio Hearn - Koizumi Yakumo.
Hearn - an early Creole Studies Scholar?
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