“In this thoroughly original book, Christian traces discourses on the external spaces and atmospheres that surround works of art. She thereby elucidates the artwork’s ec-stasis—its reaching out into its environment—as an aesthetic category in its own right. A stylistic and intellectual pleasure to read, Objects in Air adds significantly to our understanding of early twentieth-century aesthetic thought.”

Lucia Ruprecht, author of Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century

“Objects in Air is an important and finely conceptualized study of turn-of-the-century writing about the aesthetics of visual phenomena and the conceptualizing of art history. It brings to light a new understanding of the artwork as making its impact, not as a self-contained bounded object, but by way of expanding outward beyond itself in space and time. The carefully honed historical analysis of thinking about the work of art in its spatial and temporal milieus stands as a study in aesthetic theory in its own right, timely and engagingly readable.”

Alex Potts, author of Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art

“This book takes the reader on a journey with surprising views on art and modernism. Focusing on the aerial dimensions, the in-between, and the environmental space of works of art, Christian provides an exciting reframing of the aesthetic and kinesthetic dimensions of art and art theory. She turns our attention to what might be the dance within objects of art: movement, breath, and unboundedness of form.”

Gabriele Brandstetter, author of Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes