Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production

Mal Ahern

Discourse, Volume 45, Number 1-2, Winter/Spring 2023, pp. 3-32 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University Press

DOI: [Link]

For additional information about this article

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 Climate Control, Modernism, and
Mass Production

Mal Ahern

Air-conditioning (AC) made images modern. It enabled two of

modernity’s paradigmatic and seemingly opposite visual forms:
abstract painting and the mass-produced image. AC transformed
art conservation, securing the field’s scientific authority and adapt-
ing it to the demands of modernist painting. AC also played a crucial
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role in the development of industrial mass production, including

the production of “mass images” in newspapers and magazines and
on film. In both cases, AC transformed the labor of image mainte-
nance and production by de-emphasizing the roles of gesture and
manual inscription in favor of environmental management. Rather
than touch up a damaged canvas, the twentieth-century conserva-
tor preferred to prevent visible changes from happening in the first
place; rather than manually align color impressions, the twentieth-
century printer sought to control flows and atmospheres in the
pressroom. Of course, printing and preservation alike continued
to require manual touch-ups and corrections long after AC trans-
formed these practices. But expectations changed with the new
technology: manual intervention on the image surface became
more the exception than the rule, conceived as an act of repair or
quality control, rather than regular maintenance. Climate control
thus helped secure romantic and modernist ideals of the image’s
autonomy—the artist’s control over and ultimate responsibility for

Discourse, 45.1–2, Winter/Spring 2023, pp. 3–32.

Copyright © 2023 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.
4 Mal Ahern

the image—by restricting the hand of the craftsperson whose work

it was to preserve and transmit that image to others.
Every image has two realities: every image exists as both object
and appearance. W. J. T. Mitchell has proposed that we call “pic-
tures” those local manifestations of more fluid and intangible
“images.”1 While the image-as-appearance appeals to the eye, the
picture-as-object reacts to and interacts with its environment. Wood
and fabric swell and contract, wet ink seizes up or runs faster and
thinner, and pigments fade in sunlight or darken with oxidation.
In Nicole Starosielski’s recent work on the role of temperature
in media, she argues that all varieties of matter “have their own
thermo­sensitivities.”2 We can say the same for materials’ sensitivity
to light, humidity, and the surrounding air. Everything tangible will
react to the matter and conditions that surround it; every picture
will inevitably change over time. The “image,” in Mitchell’s terms,
transcends the specifics of the more tangible, contextually rooted
“picture.” An image can survive the destruction of the individual
pictures that host it; it can live on in reproductions or reinterpreta-
tions or even in verbal descriptions and memories.3
What counts as the “original” or “true” image—indeed, whether
and how we separate appearance and object at all—is historically
and culturally contingent. Consider, as do Alexander Nagel and
Christopher S. Wood in Anachronic Renaissance, the shock of a West-
ern visitor upon realizing that many ancient Chinese monuments
receive a fresh coat of paint once a year and have for centuries.4
This visitor has encountered a radically different paradigm of his-
toricity, one in which the artifact does not stand as the unaltered
trace of a moment past but instead obtains its historical authentic-
ity from the continuity of care it receives. Conservation practices
change over time and vary across space. So too do the conventions
for representing and reproducing artworks: the forms of reme-
diation (a handmade copy, an engraving, a photograph, a photo­
mechanical reproduction) that allow us to feel we have truly seen
a work of art.
The paradigms of conservation and reproduction I describe in
this essay are specific to the twentieth-century West and particularly
the United States. They constitute an “ideology of the image,” a
phrase I use to describe how individuals and institutions under-
stand the relationship between an image’s appearance and its
materiality. (It is worth noting that Louis Althusser’s classic defini-
tion of ideology—“the imaginary relationship of individuals to the
real conditions of their existence”—puts the imaginary, the image,
at its center.)5 Image ideologies determine a picture’s “truth,” that
is, what counts as a “good” copy in the production of multiples
Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 5

or as an “authentic” artwork in the practice of restoration. These

ideologies determine and are determined by technologies and
practices of image making, reproduction, and conservation. The
ideology I describe in this essay seeks to preserve the autonomy of
the image by carving out a second autonomous space around it,
one of environmental protection and control.
This essay proceeds in two parts. In the first, I argue that AC
strengthened the material conditions in which artwork could
appear as a bounded field of aesthetic experience and a singular
expression of painterly intent. I do this primarily by examining the
field of museum conservation, in which AC gave material support
to the notion that viewers ought to appreciate paintings apart from
their varied physical entanglements with their surrounding envi-
ronments. As minimalist and postminimalist artworks confronted
ideas about artwork’s physical autonomy, the modernist conserva-
tion paradigm encountered new challenges. The second part of
this essay examines the field of mass media. AC, as we will see, origi-
nated not as a technology of human comfort but instead as a tool
of mass production, one that proved useful to broader historical
processes of industrial deskilling and work discipline. Just as indus-
trial work discipline treated time as empty and homogenous, AC
emerged as the product of and support for a capitalist ideology
of homogenous, empty air. This was also the case in pressrooms
and film laboratories, where AC bolstered the view that photo­
mechanical technologies reproduce images transparently and
“automatically,” thus preserving the “true” image by limiting the
role of human hands and intentionality in its reproduction.
The unique art object and the mass-produced image are typ-
ically imagined as being at odds with one another. Yet, modern
conservation science and image reproduction both defined the
authentic image as that which is not just self-similar but also self-
identical, an identity that persists over time or across multiple itera-
tions. Maintaining such self-identity to fine degrees of precision
required eliminating atmospheric interference. In recent years Eva
Horn, John Durham Peters, Nicole Starosielski, Yuriko Furuhata,
and other media scholars have argued that we ought to approach
weather and air as media themselves, capable of communicating
information and meaning.6 In these accounts, the atmosphere
comes to mean through its sensible fluctuations and variations.
The movement of a cloud signals rain, and the humid intake of
breath lets us know we have arrived in the tropics. These are, as
information theory would put it, the atmospheric differences that
make a difference. In what follows, AC functions as a tool that flat-
tens out atmospheric variation so as to drive all meaning from the
6 Mal Ahern

air. As Starosielski has argued, “the manipulation of heat is critical

to the transformation of the earth’s raw materials into media.”7 Put
another way, climate control’s role in media culture has been to
erase the air’s mediatic and informational properties so that the
media within it can achieve more informational density. Preserved
in a perfectly controlled atmosphere, the modernist painting was
better able to capture and produce atmospheric effects through its
subtleties of texture, pattern, and tone; printed in air-conditioned
rooms, books and illustrated magazines could capture such nuances
more accurately. That modernist painting’s presence required era-
sure of the sensible world surrounding it perhaps explains how the
form of experience that Walter Benjamin called “aura” could wane
in modernity, even as art institutions embraced aura’s supposed
material bases (uniqueness, presence, endurance in time) all the
more passionately.
In their shared material basis, the modernist painting and the
mass image both provoked theorists to describe the effects of these
images as punctual and immediate. AC also provided a model of
the experience, theorized in some of the most passionate defenses
of painterly modernism, wherein forms of enclosure enable the
free action of modern subjects and the free play of perception.
That some forms of freedom have cost our world dearly is now well
known: “The mansion of modern freedom,” Dipesh Chakrabarty
aptly observed, “has been built on fossil fuels.”8 The belief that an
image can or ought to remain stable, down to its smallest detail
and over vast stretches of time and space, developed within that
very enclosure.

Painting: From Restoration to Preservation

In February 1958, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) issued a

press release announcing the four-day closure of its galleries to
update its AC system. Though in 1939 MoMA had been among
the first museums in the world to air-condition its galleries, it now
needed a new and expanded HVAC system. The update would
ensure the comfort of the museum’s patrons and, more crucially,
secure the museum’s valuable collection. Paintings, the press
release explains, are “less adaptable to changing conditions than
people, and complicated in physical structure.”9 Artworks thus
require “a constant temperature and relative humidity, as their
various parts respond unevenly to moisture.”10 With a new climate
control system, MoMA would be able to maintain “24-hour ideal
temperature” and an unvarying relative humidity in all parts of
Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 7

the building, including “the carpenters’ shops where pictures are

often framed, the receiving space where they are unpacked, the
storage tills where they are kept when not on view, and the restora-
tion laboratory.”11 Two ideas in this press release remain at odds
with one another: first, MoMA’s insistence that paintings, by their
very nature, require stable temperature and humidity, and second,
MoMA’s proud claim to being one of the earliest institutions to
adopt AC a mere nineteen years prior. Painting, the press release
implies, had waited centuries before it found itself in an environ-
ment that would properly meet its needs.
The installation of the massive Carrier Steam Absorption
Machine took four days. Construction of the system’s air ducts was
to continue over months so as “to interfere as little as possible with
the Museum’s normal schedule.”12 One month after this optimistic
prediction, a member of the team installing the ducts dropped a
lit cigarette on a paint-splattered drop cloth, igniting a fire that
killed one person and injured twenty-five. Museum employees, AC
contractors, and firefighters worked together to remove as many
artworks as possible from the danger. Several paintings were badly
damaged by smoke, including a panel of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies
and Jackson Pollock’s massive 1948 mural, Number 1. The incident
precipitated the founding of MoMA’s conservation department;
previously, the museum had only contracted art restorers on a
case-by-case basis.13 The museum’s first full-time conservator, Jean
Volkmer, had trained with Sheldon and Caroline Keck, a married
couple who sought to define a modern, scientific practice of art
conservation for the postwar United States.14
The Kecks made it their mission to train future conservators and
to educate the general public about the care of artworks. Together,
they curated public exhibitions on conservation at the Brooklyn
Museum, produced short films on the care of aging paintings, and
published several instructional books aimed at private collectors
and small-museum curators.15 Through these public-facing acts
of transparency, the Kecks sought to distinguish their work—and
the science of twentieth-century conservation generally—from the
more secretive arts it succeeded. “A few years ago,” Sheldon Keck
wrote in 1948, “a conservator was called a restorer. . . . Magic for-
mulas, magic hands, and magic eyes were among the nostrums of
his secret craft.”16 As late as 1967, Caroline Keck (the more prolific
author of the pair, whom I will refer to in what follows by her last
name only) complained that “less than a decade ago, one New York
museum employed a gentleman who insisted on treating its paint-
ings in a locked room, forbidden to any member of the staff.”17
For centuries, she continued, restoration had entailed “elaborate
 8 Mal Ahern

repainting,” changes to the “character and form of the original”

that served to subtly—or not so subtly—update aspects of the paint-
ing’s style or increase its resale value.18 By Keck’s account, restora-
tion had long operated under a kind of substitutional logic by which
a painting could maintain its identity even if every individual inch
of its surface had been replaced. “The restorer was the person who
improved appearance, made the object complete, and brought it
in tune with the taste of his public, without regard to original style
and occasionally not even original form,” she explained. “Only
recently has this become a crime.”19
The “modern” approach to art restoration, according to Ales-
sandro Conti, treats the canvas as a historical record of an art-
ist’s gestural intent; according to Conti, this attitude emerged in
the late eighteenth century, when Romantic beliefs about artistic
expression formed modern notions of art’s autonomy.20 By some
accounts, then, the Kecks’ approach may not have been entirely
new. But local practices and attitudes toward conservation varied
widely across Europe and North America in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The Kecks witnessed numerous public con-
flicts surrounding art conservation, including the great “clean-
ing controversies” that emerged after the National Gallery in
London’s 1947 Exhibition of Cleaned Pictures, which spurred discus-
sion and debate well into the 1960s.21 The exhibition showcased
a group of Old Masters paintings (including works by Peter Paul
[[Link]] Project MUSE (2025-02-27 15:30 GMT) UW-Madison Libraries

Reubens, Rembrandt, and Diego Velázquez) returned to their

“original” states through new scientifically supported methods.
Conservators removed layers of varnish—some applied as recently
as the nineteenth century—that had darkened and yellowed with
age. The cleaned paintings appeared to many viewers shockingly,
even garishly, bright. Some London newspapers published letters
complaining that by making the paintings look “new,” conserva-
tors had somehow stripped the works of their historical aura.22
Years of debate ensued, but by 1962 the Burlington Magazine could
declare it “beyond dispute” that museums should present paint-
ings “as nearly as possible in the state in which the artist intended
them to be seen.”23 The image ideology, in short, was changing:
to remove the interventions of nineteenth-century collectors was
now an essential step toward revealing the truth of Rembrandt’s
art. The accumulated layers of care surrounding the artifact, to the
extent that these modified the work’s appearance, did not add to
the work’s significance but instead threatened it.
Keck described a similar shift in image ideology in her eleva-
tion of the term “conservation” over its purportedly old-fashioned
predecessor, “restoration.” The latter term “seems to connote only
Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 9

improved appearance.” Keck uses a somewhat cruel analogy of a

woman with cancer going to the beauty parlor and expecting it to
save her life. “If you can save a picture before it goes to pieces,” she
continues, “it won’t need to be ‘restored,’ you can ‘preserve’ it.”24
As opposed to restoration, conservation aims to ensure that struc-
tural threats to a painting’s integrity are not merely painted over
and thus ignored. The dangers latent in a picture’s material base
are addressed from the inside out as soon as they become appar-
ent, or even sooner.
Environmental conditions in the museum or gallery, the Kecks
repeatedly emphasized, are crucial determinants of a work’s struc-
ture and appearance. Consistent temperature and humidity could
prevent much visible wear from marring the surface of paintings,
and such preventative measures may even put the traditional
“restorer” out of a job, as in one vivid example:

During the 1930s in London at the National Gallery, a technician was

employed whose sole task, during the eight months of the year when
artificial heat was used, was to correct defects on the paintings as they
occurred. For the duration of World War II, the collection of the National
Gallery was removed for safekeeping to a specially prepared repository.
It had a temperature constant of 63F and a relative humidity of 58 per
cent. . . . The longer the pictures remained in their secure environ-
ment, the less he had to repair, and after five years his visits became a
mere formality.25

When the paintings returned to the National Gallery, the techni-

cian returned to his job in every part of the museum except “in
the newly installed air-conditioned rooms.” The lesson Keck drew
from the incident was this: “We can repair damage, but without a
controlled atmosphere we must realize that time works against us
in more ways than one.”26 Mere stability was not enough; even an
unchanging environment might offer its object the wrong climac-
tic conditions for long-term survival. In another anecdote, Keck
bemoans the fate of a Raphael painting that spent the war in a
severely dry bank vault and, upon emerging, turned to dust right in
front of its astonished owners.27 Both examples suggest that World
War II—a period in which many European museums and collectors
removed artworks to protected spaces—occasioned a reexamina-
tion of academic and popular thinking surrounding the care of
artworks.28 In Keck’s account, preservation work is the work of pro-
tection, not the work of making physical marks on the canvas sur-
face. Doing this work entails finding and maintaining a painting’s
optimal storage environment.
10 Mal Ahern

Recall the distinction, made at the start of this essay, between

the picture as an object and the image as an appearance. An older
model of art restoration sought to preserve the image by physically
replicating missing or damaged parts of the picture surface with
as much manual skill as possible. In the extreme examples Keck
describes, the restorer traces a new picture, wholesale, on top of its
model, effectively creating a mental image of the ideal artwork and
casting a new picture in its mold. The artwork in these cases main-
tained its identity through a good-enough resemblance, physical
continuity, and the restorer’s authority. (Conservation practices
in which restorers subtly—or not so subtly—update an object’s
appearance aspire to alternative models of authenticity than the
modern imperative to preserve the artist’s original intent or the
object’s historical integrity.) In Keck’s model of care, there is still
room for a judicious hand to inscribe the picture surface, but the
conservator’s ethics dictate that she does this as little as possible.
Moreover, any manual intervention into the picture surface must
be thoroughly reversible, and the conservator must keep a clear
and thorough record for her successors, who may choose to main-
tain or eliminate any of her small alterations.29 The conservator’s
authority still matters, but she is now less an artist in her own right
than she is the artwork’s historian. She is responsible for docu-
menting the specifics of every treatment or cleaning, thus drawing
a firm line between the artist’s work and her own.
The conservator also becomes the caretaker of a space. She
manages the rooms in which paintings are exhibited and stored,
participating in the delicate work of maintaining that environment.
In Still Life, a study of the museum as a social institution, Fernando
Domínguez Rubio attributes to the modern museum and its art-
works an “aesthetics of containment,” one that combines modern
ideas of aesthetic autonomy with practices of environmental enclo-
sure.30 The modern museum’s aim, according to Rubio, is to keep
“unruly objects” within their socially assigned boundaries, bound-
aries that include visual self-similarity over time.31 In the contem-
porary museum, AC is essential to this project. But containment
aesthetics long predate the advent of mechanical climate control:
in earlier centuries, Rubio writes, the application of varnishes and
frames sealed and enclosed paintings, offering them some limited
protection against dust and humidity.32
Modernist paintings—the kind championed by postwar critics
such as Clement Greenberg and preserved by powerful institutions
such as MoMA—necessitated a new aesthetic of containment and
larger spaces of enclosure. This is partly because they rejected ear-
lier containment strategies. Consider some of the formal novelties
Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 11

of Pollock’s large abstract paintings. Bits of bare canvas, without

even the protection of a painted ground, peek out from the gaps
between his splatters. No varnish mediates the visceral presence
of paint. The finished paintings often hang unframed, revealing
that Pollock painted them before stretching; his densely patterned
splatter fields continue off the painting’s surface and wrap around
its scant depth. (Many other notable postwar abstract painters used
similar strategies.) Without naming particular artists, Keck com-
mented despairingly on just these trends.33 In her telling, she was
often at pains to convince contemporary artists to embrace the pro-
tections of frames and varnish. She describes the small triumph
of convincing an abstract painter to let her use a thin, removable
varnish on “an almost all-white mat-surfaced painting that hung
in a New York office,” its monochromatic form offering a kind of
extreme case study in its capacity to show every speck of dust, every
accidental touch, every place where the pigment had yellowed or
faded unevenly.34
The monochrome is uniquely vulnerable to wear, according
to conservator Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, because its aesthetic effects
rely on subtleties of texture, such as the varied reflectance when
different paints of the same hue are mixed and juxtaposed.35 One
of the most famous botchings of modern art restoration was the
1991 revision of Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and
Blue III (1966–1967), which required repair after a museum patron
slashed the canvas with a knife. Critics complained that the restora-
tion must have required nothing more than a single hue of house
paint and a roller.36 The conservator, it would seem, misunderstood
the painting’s surface as a simple assertion of subject matter—its
red as merely red—and not as a play of subtle tonal effects. When,
eleven years later, the same vandal returned to attack Newman’s
blue monochrome Cathedra (1951), the Stedelijk Museum took the
opportunity to try a different restoration approach. Experts “pains-
takingly filled and expertly inpainted each intrusion locally.”37 But
restoring a monochrome by hand is risky. In Mancusi-Ungaro’s
words, “the touch of a watercolor brush can irreparably interrupt
the serene matteness of a surface,” and “compensations” that might
remain invisible in figurative painting reveal themselves on a subtly
patterned canvas.38
The challenges of preserving abstract paintings figure quite lit-
erally in Keck’s manuals: the first two images in How to Take Care of
Your Pictures illustrate, in nearly caricatured form, an abstract versus
a figurative painting (figure 1). One painting (figure 1b) depicts
a portrait of a woman in a hat holding a flower; it could represent
any number of portraits from several art historical periods. The
12 Mal Ahern

Figure 1. From Caroline Keck, How to Take Care of Your Paintings, 2nd ed.
(New York: Scribner, 1978), 12. Illustrations by Ruth Sheetz Eisendrath.

other painting (figure 1a), however, appears to explicitly reference

Piet Mondriaan’s colored grids. Curiously, these two paintings illus-
trate the exact same sentence: “Compared to most things around
us, a painting has almost no thickness at all.”39 The text never men-
tions differences between these paintings; the point, perhaps, is
that paintings are and remain relatively flat, whatever they depict.
(As Leo Steinberg once cleverly put it, “a cat walking over pictures
by Tiepolo and Barnett Newman gets the same support from each
one.”)40 But in Keck’s book, the formal flatness of the modernist
grid is far from immaterial when it comes to the painting’s physical
integrity. Throughout the text, it’s the faux Mondrian—and not
the portrait—that appears again and again to illustrate the varied
fates that paintings suffer. Over the course of Keck’s book, we see
the modernist grid touched with bare hands, leaned against walls,
and hung directly from its stretcher. Its canvas ripples and buck-
les, and these distortions appear more starkly against the imagi-
nary painting’s geometric, abstract forms, than they would if they
warped a figurative scene (figure 2).
Put another way, illusionism in painting accustoms viewers
to the task of looking through the canvas to an imagined three-
dimensional space behind it. This habit allows us to peer though
the patina of age—a yellowing varnish, a fine mesh of craquelure—
as we might a dusty or gridded windowpane. The viewer of an Old
Masters painting, Clement Greenberg wrote, could “peer through
the object-surface into what it is not.”41 Greenberg famously and
irascibly defined modernism as Western easel painting’s slow prog-
 Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 13

ress toward acknowledging its flat, bounded nature.42 For Green-

berg’s follower Michael Fried, this progression—toward paintings
more and more inclined to make plain the fact that they comprise
nothing more or less than paint on canvas—introduced the risk or
possibility that viewers might see paintings as mere objects. “The
fundamental difference between paintings and objects,” he wrote
in “Art and Objecthood,” “is that a painting is so to speak all surface,
nothing but surface, whereas no ordinary object, however thin or
flat, can be described in those terms.”43 In his notorious polemic,
Fried defended Greenbergian ideals of aesthetic autonomy and
medium specificity against direct challenges from new movements
such as Minimalism. For Fried, painting’s true task was to acknowl-
edge its materiality but also allow the pictorial to triumph, in every
instance, over the literal.
What interests me here is not whether this ultimate judgment
of 1960s art is correct. (For the record, I believe that Fried offers an
elegant summation of modernist painting’s achievements while fail-
ing to remain open to the beauty and interest of minimal and post-
miminal approaches to art.) Rather, Fried’s theorization articulates
many of the deep assumptions behind modern conservation prac-
tices as well as the challenges that modernist painting presented
to conservation. The midcentury theories of conservation I have
described regard the painting’s surface as a record of the artist’s
[[Link]] Project MUSE (2025-02-27 15:30 GMT) UW-Madison Libraries

Figure 2. From Caroline Keck, How to Take Care of Your

Paintings, 2nd ed. (New York: Scribner, 1978), 27. Illus-
trations by Ruth Sheetz Eisendrath.
14 Mal Ahern

expression and aim above all else to maintain the stable integrity
of that surface. Other historical interventions onto the work’s
surface—say, a previous conservator’s additions or a particular pat-
tern of fading derived from its specific placement in a gallery—are
not, strictly speaking, part of the painting itself. Put another way,
the painting may be an object in the literal sense of the word, but
the real art in it consists in whatever aspects of the painting are the
object of our aesthetic interest.44 The painting’s verso is not the art-
work, nor is a shadow that happens to fall across its surface. When
a vandal slashed Newman’s Cathedra with a knife, its sudden change
in appearance did not make it a bad painting or even a changed
painting. Instead, the damage opened a fissure between image and
object that the conservator set out to repair. The challenge that
Cathedra presented was that, in a work that thoroughly embraced
its flatness, “every grain or particle or atom of surface competes
for presentness with every other,” so even the smallest change to
the painting’s surface might fundamentally alter its meaning.45
If, according to high modernist dicta, art survives as art insofar as
it presents an autonomous visual world, one that is enclosed and
separate from the “real world,” how, then, was the viewer to react
when the real world impinged upon the canvas? The conservator’s
response was to prevent the real world from entering the museum
in the first place: to strengthen the spaces of environmental enclo-
sure surrounding the modernist artwork.
Artists themselves answered these questions differently. Take
another series of monochromes: Robert Rauschenberg’s 1951
series of White Paintings. Meant to refuse even a hint of painterly
gesture, these pure white monochromes had none of the subtle
tonal effects that appear in works such as Newman’s. They were
created using plain white latex house paint, sometimes applied
with rollers, and other times with a brushwork so fine as to be
barely visible.46 Rather than invite the viewer to become absorbed
in a bounded pictorial space, one that exists independently of its
surrounding environment, the White Paintings instead took their
surrounding environment as their subject matter.47 John Cage
famously called them “airports for the lights, shadows and par-
ticles” that surrounded them; Rosalind Krauss imagined them as
“screens on which to ‘trap’ (no matter how ephemerally) the shad-
ows of passerby.”48 The White Paintings heralded the arrival of works
in three dimensions that similarly challenged the enclosed, frontal
framing of modernist art: the human-scaled boxes of Robert Morris
and Donald Judd, Yvonne Rainer’s antispectacular form of dance,
and Eva Hesse’s delicately spun plastic nets. The irony, of course,
is that this aesthetic turn toward atmosphere occurred just as the
Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 15

spaces of art exhibition became more enclosed and controlled.

Anthony McCall once recalled the first time he showed his film
Line Describing a Cone in an art gallery; without the ambient dust
and cigarette smoke of the downtown lofts that usually screened
the film, its titular “cone” was invisible. The museum’s air was too
clean, too controlled. Today, McCall fits the galleries that screen
his films with artificial smoke machines.49
The White Paintings introduced yet another paradigm of con-
servation. What was important to preserve was not so much pic-
ture or object but, rather, concept. The content was their effect,
and their effect was to force the viewer to recognize the paint-
ings’ objecthood and thus the contingent environment structur-
ing the encounter between viewer and viewed. In this context,
a thin layer of dust could only enhance the paintings’ meaning.
But if the canvas became so scuffed or damaged as to threaten
its obdurate and insistent blankness, the entire effect suffered.
In these cases, Rauschenberg or one of his studio assistants sim-
ply repainted the entire surface or even fabricated entirely new
paintings in the same dimensions.50 The embrace of painting’s
“objecthood,” then, required a new conservation practice, one in
which, as Martha Buskirk has argued, the artist or the artist’s estate
becomes the administrative force issuing the terms and conditions
of reproduction. While “the artist’s touch may be less evident in the
physical process of making,” Buskirk writes, “the artist’s ongoing
presence and decision-­making have become more important.”51
The artist became less the artisan and more the factory foreman;
he harnessed a range of productive forces, from industrial fabrica-
tion to the work of assistants to the apparatus of publicity.52 These
forces now explicitly included the enclosed spaces of exhibition
and conservation.

The Mass Image: Standardizing the Routine

Le Corbusier once proclaimed that his design methods would

impose a “regime of 18 Celsius” upon all the buildings of the world.
“Every nation,” he wrote, “builds houses for its own climate. At this
time of international interpenetration of scientific techniques, I
propose: one single building for all nations and climates, the house
with exact respiration.”53 Le Corbusier numbered among the many
twentieth-century architects who attempted to regulate interior cli-
mate through structural (rather than mechanical) means: shading,
louvers, and awnings. Daniel Barber has argued that such modern-
ist projects introduced the idea that “the designed interior” can
16 Mal Ahern

and should be “a space of thermal optimization,” even as other

aspects of International Style architecture presented thermal disas-
ters.54 The window walls and open floor plans of Philip Johnson’s
and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building—completed in 1958
a few years after Johnson’s modernist additions to MoMA—have
made it one of the most energy-inefficient buildings in Manhattan.
Modernist architecture’s contradictions, Barber argues, thus paved
the way for widespread acceptance of AC. By 1969, Reyner Banham
was able to argue that energy-intensive AC had “demolished almost
all the environmental constraints on design. . . . For anyone who
is prepared to foot the consequent bill for power consumed, it is
now possible to live in almost any type or form of house one likes to
name in any region of the world that takes the fancy.”55
Put another way, AC allowed the building as an aesthetic object
to transcend the restraints of its environment: architecture could
achieve the sort of bounded, enclosed aesthetic autonomy that
had long characterized the modern easel painting. For Barber,
the effects of mechanical climate control range even wider. AC, he
writes, is a kind of “people conditioning,” a profound restructuring
of the human sensorium through which “a specific kind of human
was imagined to occupy interior space in new ways.”56 Historians
of art, architecture, and media typically take this to mean that AC
transformed the way people live. But it also restructured the way
they work.
AC was born in the factory. It emerged not as a technology of
human comfort but instead as a manufacturing tool, one that for
the majority of the twentieth century had a constitutive role in the
creation of mass-produced artifacts. Most of the early innovations
in climate control technology did not belong to the field of “com-
fort air conditioning,” as engineers called it; they developed within
the more dynamic and lucrative field of “process air conditioning.”
Process AC was temperature and humidity control for manufac-
turing facilities, an innovation designed not for worker comfort
but instead to ensure a consistency of materials that would allow
for increased mechanization and production speed.57 It was only
in the factory environment, according to Banham, that there were
“problems big enough, and profitable enough,” that AC became
cost-efficient, a way of “losing less, and making more, money.”58
The idea of humidity control initially came from a textile in-
dustry practice called “yarn conditioning,” a technique as simple
as keeping cotton and wool fiber wet as it was woven into fabric.59
Wet fiber, being already saturated, absorbed less moisture from the
air and so was slower to change its shape, feel, and working prop-
erties when environmental conditions shifted during the weaving
Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 17

process. In turn, dry air sometimes stole moisture back from damp-
ened fabric, so the textile industry preferred a humid factory envi-
ronment: British industrialists claimed that Lancashire’s natural
dampness accounted for the wild success of its cotton weaving in-
dustry.60 But soon natural humidity, even in Lancashire, was not
enough to keep pace with desired production. Mills in England
and the United States started to pump the air full of hot steam, in
many cases making already hazardous working conditions scarcely
bearable.61 Although modern AC would eventually improve condi-
tions for some workers, employee comfort and happiness figured
little in early corporate enthusiasm for the new technology. “No,
our ultimate goal is not comfort,” asserted L. L. Lewis, one of the
cofounders of Carrier Air Corporation. “It is to give man or woman
a fair chance to apply the fundamental of creating wealth by pro-
ducing up to the limit of his latent capacity.”62 Whose limits would
be tested and who would enjoy the resulting wealth Lewis did not
specify; he did not need to. He and other advocates for the technol-
ogy made it clear to potential clients that AC was not beneficence
toward workers. It was a tool for increasing profit by rationalizing
the working process.
Like most technologies, AC has its origin myth. While devel-
opment of modern AC systems was gradual—full of stops and
starts—one moment is repeatedly singled out as a first. In 1902, the
Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographic and Printing Company of Brooklyn,
New York, asked Buffalo Forge engineer Willis Carrier to develop
a process of humidity control for its pressroom.63 Sackett-Wilhelms
produced educational lithographic prints for classrooms as well as
the satirical color magazine Judge.64 Since the nineteenth century,
color printing processes have mostly shared the same basic prin-
ciples. A source image is divided into a finite number of predeter-
mined hues of translucent ink; these layers are then superimposed
in precise alignment in order to give the impression of a single and
seamless multicolored image.65 Printers use the term color registra-
tion to refer to the proper alignment of these color impressions
on a single piece of printing stock.66 In her genealogy of “ther-
mal media,” Nicole Starosielski describes how a fluctuating climate
might vex this process. “As individual sheets were passed multiple
times through a printer, if temperature and humidity changed, the
inks would be overlaid imperfectly. The image would vary from the
intended production, and each image might be slightly different
from the others.”67 Paper is inherently hygroscopic: it absorbs water
from the air and thus swells and contracts with fluctuating humid-
ity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many
small-job printers distributed color impressions over several days,
 18 Mal Ahern

giving ink time to dry. According to one 1921 trade journal, a color
job “may go through the press today and be printed in yellow, then
run through tomorrow for red and a day or two later for blue,”
but because humidity might vary significantly during this process,
paper dimensions could vary up to an eighth of an inch from one
day to another.68 In the 1880s, the Boston lithographer Louis Prang
described paper sheets as “so lively during the process of printing”
due to fluctuating weather that sometimes “a whole edition may
have to be given up as a sacrifice to the elements.”69
Carrier aimed to solve this problem by controlling pressroom
humidity. The device he created for Sackett-Wilhelms pulled room
air into a duct filled with small pipes running with cool water.
These cold surfaces attracted condensation, thus drawing moisture
from the air. An exhaust fan at the end of the duct then pushed
the dehumidified air back out into the pressroom. Later designs
for an “air washer” sprayed water over baffles, but the basic con-
cept remained the same: condensing water from the air to sap its
humidity.70 A salutary effect on the room’s temperature was a pleas-
ant side effect. Carrier called his product “Manufactured Weather”
and eventually developed a range of temperature and humidity
control devices for his Carrier Engineering Corporation, which is
still a leading manufacturer of HVAC systems in the United States.
Carrier’s corporate mascot was the “Mechanical Weatherman,” a
cartoon character who appeared in newsletters and instructional
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manuals touting his slogan: “Every Day a Good Day” (figure 3).
The 1919 promotional book Manufactured Weather used an image
of the Mechanical Weatherman to illustrate the principles of color
registration. “For instance, take the cut which appears on the title
page of this bulletin. . . . If the paper had swelled or shrunk while
the red ink was drying, . . . the black portions of the cut would not
have fitted the red portions. . . . But if the plant has equipment for
manufacturing its own weather, all of these difficulties are obviated
because . . . the controlled atmosphere standardizes the routine of
the shop.”71 The same 1919 booklet explains the influence of AC in
not only high-speed color printing but also numerous other indus-
tries including motion pictures, where stable atmospheric condi-
tions prevented the fogging or curling of individual film prints.
“Every time you see a movie,” Carrier reminds its readers, “think of
manufactured weather.”72
Indeed, Carrier’s own engineers published articles aimed at
the film industry: a 1931 article in the Journal of the Society of Motion
Picture Engineers compared the modern air-conditioned film pro-
cessing laboratory with a colorful description of its predecessors.
In a Bayonne, New Jersey, lab in 1909, the authors claim, “the
Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 19

Figure 3. Interior title page from The Story of

Manufactured Weather (New York: Carrier Air Cor-
poration, 1919), 7. Accessed at the Hathi Trust
Digital Library ([Link]).

entire equipment for the regulation of atmospheric conditions

consisted of two coal stoves” and a structure permeable enough
“to permit ice to form upon the floor. . . . The time of drying was
very indefinite, . . . varying from one-half to twenty-four hours.”73
As the authors concluded, “One can well imagine the regulation
obtainable with such equipment.”74 We cannot know how exagger-
ated this account is; certainly its authors had every reason to cast
the uncontrolled laboratory environment as the chaotic source of
inconsistent results. But the literature on film laboratories repeat-
edly describes atmospheric fluctuation as an enemy of print qual-
ity, standardization, and uniformity.75 When, for instance, wartime
shortages limited film laboratories’ access to the refrigerant Freon,
laboratory engineers declared it an emergency confronting the
whole industry.76 Projectionists also cited humidity fluctuation as a
source of potential vexation, as changes in print dimensions could
cause frame registration errors, or “overshooting,” at “the slightest
20 Mal Ahern

variation to the thickness of the film, or the condition of its dry-

ness.”77 In both production and exhibition, the standardization of
the film image—its capacity to offer different viewers of a film the
same visual experience across time and space—depended on the
maintenance of a stable atmosphere.78
This specific origin story, this entwinement of AC and image
standardization, is repeated again and again in histories of AC—
from workaday AC manufacturer websites to the US Department of
Energy website to the institutional history of the American Society
of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers.79 For
the AC industry, this narrative speaks to the scale of its ambitions.
Even as “comfort AC” began to match “process AC” in its cultural
and economic importance, industry publications stressed the fact
that the technology could achieve a mastery and control of the
environment that surpassed even conscious human perception.
This correlation of climate control and precision continues today:
Starosielski situates printing within a variety of industries, such as
data centers and semiconductor manufacture, that use thermal
control “to reduce the amount of error and noise in media repre-
sentations.” The energy burn fueling media industries, she argues,
continues to secure broader cultural values of purity, uniformity,
and standardization.80
But standardization of output is only one part of AC’s mean-
ing when it comes to mass production. There was also the stan-
dardization of what Carrier called “the routine of the shop”: the
habits and techniques of workers. In Air-Conditioning America, Gail
Cooper argues that process AC standards “did not represent any
greater insight into the response of natural materials to weather
fluctuations than that supplied by experienced spinners, weavers,
or overseers.”81 What AC did, rather, was provide management
with an alternative to its previous reliance on workers’ embodied
knowledge of the atmosphere. Prior to the rise of AC, hygroscopic
materials such as paper and pasta had required intermittent pro-
duction schedules. Macaroni, for example, “cannot be made every
day in the year or month or week,” a 1904 source explained; with
too much humidity, the dough could not hold its shape until dry.
Pasta factories thus relied on workers’ skilled judgment: it was the
workers, not the company owners, who had the experience and
insight to determine which days were suitable for drying pasta and
which days were not.82
Carrier even framed its innovations specifically in terms of de­
skilling labor and transferring control of production from workers
to management. As Cooper writes, the company had its own field
specialists devoted to adapting AC to the demands of specific man-
Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 21

ufacturing processes. Carrier’s macaroni specialist, for instance,

explicitly conceived of the company’s pasta-drying system as a
means of breaking labor’s control. Cooper quotes him at length:

When I say it does not require macaroni skill, I mean that it does not
require a man familiar with macaroni to dry it with our dryer. . . . You may
wonder what that may mean to the manufacturer. It means that instead
of a small field of men to hire from, he can chose [sic] from a large field.
Then too, if a man quits, there is no great loss, for a new one can be
taught in less than a week to do with our dryer what in the past men have
taken years to learn.83

By homogenizing the atmosphere of factories, pressrooms, and

workshops, managers who adopted AC in factories were able to
subject manufacturing processes to greater degrees of mechaniza-
tion and automation, thereby circumventing the worker’s control
of production. “Artificial climate replaced natural climate,” Coo-
per observes, “and the skills that went along with it.”84 Climate con-
trol therefore continued a process that, according to Manuel De
Landa, started in the early nineteenth century when “the sensual
relationship to matter, so integral a part of the artisan’s craft, was
gradually replaced by mechanized production.”85
In his classic essay on the emergence of capitalist “time-­
discipline” in England, E. P. Thompson charts the changing mean-
ing of such intermittent production patterns. Before the coming
of large-scale mechanized industry, many work schedules followed
a logic of need. “The working day might be lengthened or short-
ened,” Thompson wrote, “within the general demands of the
week’s or fortnight’s tasks.”86 But as industrialists became more
accustomed to timing labor “by the clock,” they saw irregular work
patterns as “wasteful and lacking in urgency.”87 Time, Thompson
famously argues, thus became a battleground, one on which work-
ers and management struggled for control of production. Work
slowdowns, often called “pacing” or “slacking,” became a tool with
which industrial workers resisted management either overtly or in
subtler, less organized terms.88 For many industries, particularly
those with low levels of mechanization or high standards of craft,
irregular production persisted into the twentieth century not as a
form of grievance but instead as a norm. Examples Thompson cites
include printing and pottery, both trades that, perhaps significantly,
make use of materials that are especially sensitive to the weather.89
Precision printing in fact existed before the advent of AC.
Chromolithography emerged in the 1830s, and immediately print-
ers were able to create color prints to fine registrations.90 It was
22 Mal Ahern

not until seventy years later that the printers at Sackett-Wilhelms

apparently complained that atmospheric fluctuations made inter-
color registration impossible. What changed? For one thing, the
scale and speed of print production increased; so did its degree
of mechanization. In the early twentieth century, wet-color sheet
presses became faster and incorporated mechanized paper feeds.91
Newspapers, meanwhile, adopted a continuous form of “web”
printing, so named for the long paper spools, or “webs,” fed con-
tinuously through a rotary press.92 Color reproduction eventually
spread beyond the confines of fine lithography and into news-
papers and magazines, in which color adorned comics, fashion
spreads, and the illustrated Sunday supplement. In web print-
ing, proper color registration required not only the alignment of
color layers in space but also the coordination of their imposition
in time, as a single spool of paper traveled continuously through
four different color cylinders. The comics pages integrated bold
blocks of color through web printing in four-color relief; for finer
and more detailed impressions, such as photo supplements, pub-
lishers used a high-speed rotary method of intaglio printing called
rotogravure.93 On such high-speed presses, color printing was no
longer a matter of aligning and timing individual impressions, one
after and atop another, on a single piece of printing stock. Rather,
four-color rotary printing was entrusted to the consistent operation
of the mechanized press and the consistent working properties of
paper stock and ink. Changes in the dimensions and flexibility of
paper or in the viscosity of ink were liable to cause uneven web ten-
sion. This, in turn, threatened not only color registration but also
the evenness of impressions and their placements on the page.94
For centuries, printers had managed inconsistent materials
through a combination of experience and instinct, knowing when
and how to dampen paper stock, when to wait for better condi-
tions, and when to permit a marginal difference in color registra-
tion.95 Printers’ own sensitivities to the weather were undoubtedly
crucial data incorporated, even subconsciously, back into working
processes. The kinds of embodied techniques that allowed printers
to respond to daily fluctuations in the weather were not easily ver-
balized; what printers did to maintain image quality—to do their
job well—may have looked to a publisher or a client like pacing or
slacking. Strict control of the pressroom’s climate made printers’
embodied expertise in the interactions between air and paper use-
less and unnecessary; indeed, climate control eliminated the very
material basis for this expertise. In mass media as in conservation,
AC transformed the work of image reproduction, in this case mak-
ing that labor more standardized.
 Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 23

A standardized production process requires standardized

materials. If it is difficult for us to grasp the constant changeabil-
ity, the ungovernability of things so supposedly inert as paper and
ink, it is because climate control imposed on mass production a
certain presumption that remains with us to this day: that raw mate-
rials are passive, and human volition is the only agential force that
molds them.96 Jane Bennett notes that American materialism—that
is, the culture of mass-produced commodities—is in fact a form of
“antimateriality,” a means of concealing “the vitality of matter.” Less
remarked upon is the fact that this commodity culture relies on a
mode of production that, in its turn, seeks to tame matter’s vibrancy
and agential power. Once one can presume that ink and paper will
hold their weight and dimensions to extremely fine degrees, other
aspects of the printing process can be further standardized through
mechanization and automation. In these cases, mass production
does not require the guidance of human beings who are alive to the
constant flux of their environment. It requires other skills instead.
Pressman J. Russell Parrish characterized the traditional pressroom
as a “World War I Jenny which the pilot had to fly ‘by the seat of his
pants,’” while the technique required to operate the massive press-
rooms of the 1950s resembled those of flying “a jet fighter plane,”
with its “numerous controls and complicated instrument panel.”97
“More than a craftsman,” Russell asserted, the new press operator
needed “the ability to supervise others working on his ‘team.’” Like
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the artist, the artisan too became a sort of manager.98

Was this change visible? Can we sense—in the look and feel of
illustrated newspapers, magazines, film prints, and projections—
the fact that AC froze the dimensions and working properties of
materials? Can we see the ways AC, as handmaiden to other forms
of mechanization and automation, drove human hands further
from the web of paper or the ribbon of film, just as it drove the con-
servator’s hand away from the canvas and toward the thermostat?
These questions are difficult to answer empirically, as are ques-
tions regarding so many other sweeping changes that transformed
mass media industries over the course of the twentieth century.
What is clear is that higher degrees of mechanization and auto-
mation in printing and other media industries bolstered ideas of
these media’s precision and exactitude as well as ideas about mass
media’s potential for endless growth. The less human labor image
reproduction seems to require, the easier it is to imagine that the
mass image might enter a state of limitless, instantaneous multipli-
cation and circulation.
24 Mal Ahern

Instantaneous Impressions

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson traces how the news-

paper created a national and global sense of “homogeneous, empty
time.”99 The coincidence of disparate news items on a front page
heightened the sense that events proceeded simultaneously even
in radically different geographical and cultural contexts; more-
over, the fact that the reader sees “exact replicas of his own paper
being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neigh-
bors” helped him imaginarily link his individual being to a broader
sense of simultaneous time.100 Print capitalism’s visual production
of simultaneous, homogeneous time thus relied on the visual pro-
duction of a mass image.
This production drew on a similar homogenization of the
pressroom. Just as corporate time-motion studies had treated time
as empty and homogeneous, so too did the increasing mechani-
zation of image reproduction require the homogenization of the
air, a smoothing out of atmospheric fluctuation. Variations in the
alignment or quality of printed images indexed fluctuations over
time in the environment of production. By erasing those fluctua-
tions, AC produced the illusion that each copy of a given news-
paper edition was produced as though simultaneously. A base level
of actual uniformity allows two readers hundreds of miles apart to
pick up different copies of a newspaper—printed in different facili-
ties, with different paper stocks and different raw materials—and
confidently say they are viewing the “same” front-page image. In
the mid-twentieth century, when cheaply available, highly detailed
colored images became a requisite part of the visual and print cul-
ture of the United States, AC allowed audiences to view these mass
images as punctual, even instantaneous visual impressions, as docu-
menting the world while issuing from some nonplace outside of it.
Thus transformed, print media became suitable for depict-
ing the very sorts of abstract art described in the first section of
this essay. As finely detailed colored images in near-perfect align-
ment became cheaply available on a mass scale, mass production
was suddenly suitable for reproducing tonally nuanced or dense
irregularly patterned fields of abstract color. In 1953, William Ivins
argued that it had been the late nineteenth-century emergence of
the photomechanical halftone that had finally allowed the artwork
to enter print without being translated into the manual “syntax” of
handmade engraving, where “the only personal qualities visible”
in the image “were those of the men who made the drawings that
were reproduced.”101 Evoking the set of concepts that Lorraine
Daston and Peter Galison would later call “mechanical objectiv-
Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 25

ity,” Ivins suggested that only impersonal, mechanical methods

of transcription allowed for the authentic transmission of the art-
ist’s hand.102 For such a mode of reproduction to progress from
its late nineteenth-century form (black-and-white reproduction, by
the tens of thousands) to the scale of the mid-twentieth century
(full color reproduction, by the millions) required the fine degrees
of control that AC provided. Reproducing Pollock’s delicate all-
over splatters for Life magazine, after all, required perfect color
alignment. Reproducing Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, on the
other hand, was both simple and impossible, impossible because
the work’s meaning consists in something other than its sheer
graphical impression.
This comparison suggests that the modernist aesthetic values
of flatness, opticality, and immediacy—all qualities that Greenberg
and Fried attributed to modernist painting—have an ironic reso-
nance with the visual culture of mass media. Greenberg’s theories,
as Caroline Jones has argued, emerged alongside discourses and
practices in commercial art that sought to “brand the retina” with
advertisements and corporate logos, and alongside the billboards,
magazine covers, and projected films that arguably achieve a truer
flatness and a more punctual interruption of the visual field than
their more rarified counterparts.103 For Jonathan Crary, modernist
aesthetics and mass-produced spectacle alike emerged from a mod-
ern regime of the optical, a “separation of the senses” that began
when physiological vision became an object of scientific inquiry.104
Similarly for Jones, the “highly reduced” and “intensified” visual
stimuli of modernist painting reflected and conditioned urban
Western modernity’s “bureaucratization of the senses.”105 Both of
these art historians suggest that opticality is an effect of scientific
and aesthetic discourses on human vision and subjectivity, that the
separation of the senses and the isolation of vision occurs within
the human subject of capitalism and modern physiology. With this
essay, I have added to these interventions an account of the picture
as an object, a “materialist media theory,” to use Grant Bollmer’s
term, that broadens existing genealogies of optical flatness.106
Material practices and cultural techniques—embodied in both the
workings of machines and in the cultures of craft and care that
surround images—ground regimes of opticality.107 And regimes of
opticality have in turn transformed the spaces, technologies, and
labor of image production.
Climate control thus supported a certain theory of an image’s
integral power. This theory can be expressed as a formula of sorts:
the more hands and labor that visibly mark an image’s surface
in processes of reproduction and transmission, the weaker that
26 Mal Ahern

image’s potency. To labor over the image by hand slows its circula-
tion (in the case of mass production) and threatens its authenticity
(in the case of painting). Yet, all images demand skilled care lest
their aesthetic or informative power decline with their reproduc-
tion or physical degradation. The modernist image was caught in
a double bind, one that demanded a technological solution. AC
offered one way to protect an image’s appearance from its fragile
material base with a minimum of visible manual intervention.
In Benjamin’s famous terms, mechanical reproduction sig-
naled the waning of “the age of auratic perception.”108 Not inciden-
tally to my aims in this essay, Benjamin repeatedly characterized
aura as an atmospheric phenomenon: a unique weave of space and
time linking perceiver and perceived. Media scholars have recently
situated Benjamin’s use of the term “aura” within its full range of
early twentieth-century meanings: its resonance with concepts of
milieu, Stimmung, and miasma.109 Aura, in Antonio Somaini’s inter-
pretation, is “the diaphanous halo, the haze, the atmosphere sur-
rounding a work of art; an atmosphere whose degrees of density
and transparency change with the passing of time.”110 In this con-
text, “aura” does not refer merely to an art object’s uniqueness;
rather, “aura” describes the unique spatiotemporal tissue that sur-
rounds any individual thing and makes it available to perception.
When we stand before a painting, we are linked to it by the “here
and now” of that specific encounter while also being acutely aware
that we stand in a space where many others, across time and in
various locales, once stood before. Through the long and varied
history of art conservation, we might expand Benjamin’s concept
of the “sphere of tradition” surrounding the artwork to include
the long history of care that work has received.111 Aura’s waning,
then, during the historical crescendo of the mass-produced image
may owe less to the literal existence of mass media technology and
more to the ideologies and practices of production, circulation,
and reception that surround it. If auratic experience waned in
the twentieth century, perhaps the fault was not in our art, but in
our air.

Notes

1. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xiv, 84–86.
2. Nicole Starosielski, “Thermocultures of Geological Media,” Cultural Politics
12, no. 3 (2016): 300.
3. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want, 84.
Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 27

4. The source quoted is Simone de Beauvoir’s account of her visit to Beijing’s

Forbidden City in the 1950s. See Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anach-
ronic Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Zone Books, 2010), 7. See also Simone de Beauvoir,
The Long March (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1958).
5. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 109.
6. Eva Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room 73 (Winter 2018): 6–25; John Dur-
ham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015); Nicole Starosielski, Media Hot and Cold (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2022); and Yuriko Furuhata, Climatic Media: Transpacific
Experiments in Atmospheric Control (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).
7. Starosielski, “Thermocultures of Geological Media,” 294.
8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry
35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 197–222.
9. Museum of Modern Art, “Museum to Be Closed for Five Days for Installation
of Air Conditioning Unit,” News release, February 28, 1958, [Link]
.org/research-and-learning/archives/press-archives.
10. Museum of Modern Art, “Museum to Be Closed.”
11. Museum of Modern Art.
12. Museum of Modern Art.
13. Museum of Modern Art, “MoMA on Fire,” June 2019, [Link]/
interactives/moma_through_time/1950/moma-on-fire.
14. Museum of Modern Art, “Rising from the Ashes: Conservation,” June 2019,
[Link]/interactives/moma_through_time/1950/birth-of-momas-conservation​
-department.
15. Ken Johnson, “Caroline K. Keck, Art Conservator, Dies at 99,” New York
Times, January 15, 2008, B8.
16. Sheldon Keck, “On Education in Art Conservation,” Brooklyn Museum Bul-
letin 19, no. 3 (Summer 1958): 6.
17. Caroline Keck, A Handbook on the Care of Paintings (New York: Watson-­Guptill
Publications, for the American Association of State and Local History, 1967), 62.
18. Keck, Handbook on the Care of Paintings, 64.
19. Caroline Keck, “History and Philosophy of Conservation,” Bulletin of the
American Group, International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works 5,
no. 1 (1964): 2.
20. Paula Hills, “Preface,” in Alessandro Conti, History of the Restoration and
Conservation of Works of Art, trans. Helen Glanville (Oxford, UK: Butterworth-­
Heinemann, 2007), viii.
21. “The National Gallery Cleaning Controversy,” Burlington Magazine 104,
no. 7 (February 1962), 49–50; and Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the
Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960): 60–72.
 28 Mal Ahern

22. Francis Kelly, Art Restoration: A Guide to the Care and Restoration of Works of
Art (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), 179–80. For the first “shot fired” in the series
of letters, see Gerald Kelly, “The National Gallery,” The Times, October 30, 1946, 5.
23. “The National Gallery Cleaning Controversy,” 49.
24. Keck, Care of Paintings, ix.
25. Keck, 37.
26. Keck, 37.
27. Keck, x.
28. Indeed, Keck’s husband, Sheldon, participated in such wartime preserva-
tion efforts as a member of the Allied armies’ program for monuments, fine arts,
and archives, a team more commonly known the “Monuments Men.” See William
H. Honan, “Sheldon Keck, 83, Pioneer in the Field of Art Conservation,” New York
Times, June 17, 1993, D22.
29. Barbara Appelbaum, “Criteria for Treatment: Reversibility,” Journal of the
American Institute for Conservation 26, no. 2 (1987), 65–73.
30. Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at
the Art Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Books, 2020), 147.
31. Rubio, Still Life, 49.
32. Rubio, 162.
33. Keck, Care of Paintings, 60.
34. Caroline Keck, How to Take Care of Your Pictures (New York: Museum of
Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum, 1954), 24.
[[Link]] Project MUSE (2025-02-27 15:30 GMT) UW-Madison Libraries

35. Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, “Landmarks Preservation: Conserving the Mono-

chrome,” Artforum (Summer 2011), [Link]
landmarks​-preservation-conserving-the-monochrome-28368.
36. Barry James, “Roller Controversy in Amsterdam,” New York Times, Novem-
ber 2, 1991.
37. Mancusi-Ungaro, “Landmarks Preservation.”
38. Mancusi-Ungaro, “Landmarks Preservation.”
39. Keck, How to Take Care of Your Pictures, 7. This book appeared in several
editions. The 1954 edition depicts the two paintings arranged vertically, with the
abstract painting on top. The image included in this essay comes from the 1973
edition, where the images appear side by side.
40. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with
Twentieth-­Century Art, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 81.
41. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961),
173.
42. Greenberg, Art and Culture, 173.
43. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), 197.
Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 29

44. Another way of saying “object of aesthetic interest” is to say the object of
our judgment. The allusion to Kant here is purposeful: in a footnote to “Art and
Objecthood,” Fried quotes his friend Stanley Cavell’s observation that “for Kant in
the Critique of Judgment a work of art is not an object.” See Fried, Art and Objecthood,
170n15.
45. Fried, Art and Objecthood, 197.
46. Rauschenberg Research Project, “Conservation Notes relating to Robert
Rauschenberg’s White Painting [three panel] (1951),” San Francisco Museum of Art,
2012, [Link]
47. For the history of this reading of the paintings and Rauschenberg’s own
changing interpretation of them, see Branden W. Joseph, “White on White,” in
Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo–Avant-Garde, 25–72 (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003).
48. Rosalind Krauss, “Perpetual Inventory,” in October Files: Robert Rauschenberg,
ed. Branden W. Joseph (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 106.
49. Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (London: Verso, 2011), 273n1.
50. Sarah Roberts, “White Painting [three panel],” Rauschenberg Research
Project, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, July 2013, [Link]
.org/essay/white-painting-three-panel/
51. Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003), 14.
52. “After I did the thing called ‘art’ or whatever it’s called, I went into business
art.” See Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (New
York: Harcourt, 1975), 92.
53. Quoted in Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment
(London: Architectural Press, 1969), 151.
54. Daniel A. Barber, Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Condition-
ing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 10.
55. Banham, Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, 187.
56. Barber, Modern Architecture and Climate, 262. Or, as Eva Horn puts it, “to be
‘modern’ means to be independent of such negligible things as air temperature
or the degree of humidity.” Eva Horn, “Air Conditioning: Taming of the Climate
as a Dream of Civilization,” Avery Review 16 (May 2016), [Link]
issues/16/air-conditioning.
57. Gail Cooper, Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environ-
ment (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 29–30.
58. Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, 174.
59. Cooper, Air-Conditioning America, 19.
60. “Indoor Climate,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 83, no. 4325 (1935):
1114.
61. Janet Greenlees, When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New
England and Lancashire Textile Industries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2019), 1–14.
30 Mal Ahern

62. Marsha Ackerman, Cool Comfort: America’s Romance with Air-Conditioning

(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2002), 144. Cited in Wolf Boër, “Synthetic
Air,” Future Anterior 13, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 96.
63. Cooper, Air-Conditioning America, 24.
64. Most accounts of AC’s origin fail to mention that Judge’s color illustrations
regularly featured racist caricatures, such as a now notorious comic by children’s
author Dr. Seuss. Brian Boucher, “Offensively Racist Dr. Seuss Drawing Heading
to Auction—Why?,” Artnet News, May 28, 2015, [Link]
racist-dr-seuss-drawing-auction-302586. Just as color film technology developed
according to a racist optics of exclusion, the history of print technology is pro-
foundly entwined with historical processes of racialization.
65. Michael Twyman, A History of Chromolithography: Printed Colour for All (Lon-
don: Printing Historical Society, 2013), 16–19; and Bamber Gascoigne, How to Iden-
tify Prints, revised 2nd ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), sections 21a–24b.
66. Twyman, History of Chromolithography, 505.
67. Starosielski, “Thermocultures of Geological Media,” 300.
68. “Delivering a Climate,” Inland Printer 64 (March 1920): 704.
69. Twyman, History of Chromolithography, 517.
70. Cooper, Air-Conditioning America, 25.
71. The Story of Manufactured Weather, by the Mechanical Weatherman (Carrier
Engineering Corporation, 1919), 48.
72. The Story of Manufactured Weather, 35.
73. A. H. Simonds and L. H. Polderman, “Air Conditioning in Film Laborato-
ries,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 17, no. 4 (October 1931): 605–6.
74. Simonds and Polderman, “Air Conditioning in Film Laboratories,” 605.
75. See F. E. Garbutt, “Air Conditioning System for a Modern Film Labora-
tory,” Heating and Ventilation Magazine 20, no. 12 (December 1923): 39–44; and
William Still, “Fred Gage Creates Great Lab at Warners’ Burbank Studio,” American
Cinematographer (March 1938): 105.
76. A. C. Buensod and R. W. Waterfill, “Sensible Use of Refrigerants under
the Emergency Now Confronting the Industry,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture
Engineers (November 1943): 426–31.
77. “Film Shrinkage and Frame Registration,” International Projectionist 38, no.
8 (August 1963): 4–7.
78. The climate requirements of cinematic production and storage also figure
in Nadia Bozak’s assessment of cinema’s environmental impacts in The Cinematic
Footprint: Lights, Cameras, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2011).
79. US Department of Energy, “History of Air Conditioning,” July 20, 2015,
[Link] and American Society of
Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, “ASHRAE History,” n.d.,
[Link]
80. Starosielski, “Thermocultures of Geological Media,” 302.
Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production 31

81. Cooper, Air-Conditioning America, 45.

82. Cooper, 46.
83. Quoted in Cooper, 47.
84. Cooper, 45.
85. Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone
Books, 1991), 31.
86. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past
and Present 38 (1967): 71.
87. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline,” 60
88. As David F. Noble observes, “The same skills that make production possible
also make pacing possible.” See David F. Noble, The Forces of Production: A Social
History of Industrial Automation, 2nd ed. (London: Transaction, 2011), 34.
89. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline,” 71–75.
90. Wilhelm Weber, “Introduction,” in A History of Lithography (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1966), 9–16; and Twyman, History of Chromolithography, 505–16.
91. J. Russell Parrish, “Presses and Presswork,” in Printing Progress: A Mid-Century
Report, ed. Clifford L. Herbert, 233–35 (Cincinnati, OH: International Association
of Printing House Craftsmen, 1959).
92. Helmut Müller-Sievers, The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 75.
93. This technology lent its name—also in its shortened form, “roto”—to refer
to any color newspaper supplement. In Holiday Inn (Mark Sandrich, 1942), Bing
Crosby sings to Marjorie Reynolds: “On Fifth Avenue, the photographers will snap
us / And you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure.”
94. Parrish cites humidity changes, among other factors, for subtly warping
paper rolls and thus introducing uneven web tension into the printing process.
Parrish, “Presses and Presswork,” 249. On ink viscosity’s effect on intercolor register,
see Parrish, 236–37.
95. For a summary of many of these methods, along with changes in paper
technology that increased the predictable workability of printing stock, see Twyman,
History of Chromolithography, 517–24.
96. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Economy of Things (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010): 5.
97. Parrish, “Presses and Presswork,” 251.
98. Both of these shifts away from manual craft and toward the labor of man-
agement correspond to a broader postwar shift in the capitalist West to forms of
“immaterial labor.” Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in
Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, 142–57 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996). For a rich assessment of the way this shift
impacted another segment of the printing industry, typesetting and typographic
design, see J. Dakota Brown’s pamphlet Typography, Automation, and the Division of
Labor: A Brief History (Chicago: Other Press Books, 2019).
32 Mal Ahern

99. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and

Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 24.
100. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35–36.
101. William Ivins, Prints and Visual Communications (New York: Perseus, 1953),
127. Image reproduction also lent its formal resources to modernism’s flat, opti-
cal image. Ivins’s description of the coarse but regular texture of early photome-
chanical reproduction finds its echo in Greenberg’s descriptions of Claude Monet’s
paintings, which comprise “a multiplicity of identical or similar elements” requiring
“every part of the canvas to be treated with the same emphasis of touch.” See Clem-
ent Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Arrogant Purpose: The Collected
Essays and Criticism, Vol. 2, ed. John O’Brien (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986), 222.
102. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representa-
tions 40 (Autumn 1992): 120.
103. Caroline Jones, The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American
Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 159.
104. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
105. Caroline Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureau-
cratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xviii.
106. Grant Bollmer, Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2019).
107. For an elaboration of the term “cultural techniques,” see Geoffrey
Winthrop-­Young, “Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks,” Theory and Society
30, no. 6 (2013): 3–19; and Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors,
and Other Articulations of the Real (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
108. Recall his description of aura as “the unique apparition of a distance,
however near the thing may be.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of
Its Technological Reproducibility” (second version), trans. Edmund Jephcott and
Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Vol. 3, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002), 104–5.
109. See Antonio Somaini, “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium
and the Apparat,” Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016): 6-41; Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin’s
Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 336–75; Inga Pollman, Cinematic Vital-
ism: Film Theory and the Question of Life (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2018); and Boër, “Synthetic Air.”
110. Somaini, “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory,” 16.
111. Thus, we might read the “cleaned paintings” controversy at London’s
National Gallery as an instance in which a simple haze of yellowing varnish came to
represent the sphere of tradition in its entirety.