25th. Septr 1821 about from 2 to 3 afternoon, looking to the north—Strong Wind at west, bright light coming through the Clouds which were lying one on another.ⁱ

These jotted notes are on the back of a cloud study in oil on paper by John Constable dominated by dark, smoky clouds blotting out most of the sky and piling up like pillows. Red paint is employed as primer, and the clouds are teased up from that dark surface, smudged with the flat side of a brush in bold strokes of chiaroscuro. The overlapping colors give the sky an infinite depth and emphasize the reality that even as Constable was painting the scene its clouds and colors were shifting. As Constable wrote at the time, "We have had noble clouds & effects of light & dark & color—as is always the case in such seasons as the present."ⁱⁱ

When John Constable went "skying" in the English countryside in the early nineteenth century, paintbox resting on his knees, paper pinned to its lid, oils at his side, it was not merely to produce small sketches of clouds as exercises for the background of his larger "finished" paintings. These squares of sky, with careful notes about location, time and conditions scribbled on their backs, read today as surprisingly modern works that hover between minute documentation and textured abstraction. They are executed quickly, the paint applied in thick swaths and deliberate strokes as Constable followed the clouds across his own scumbled surface; in stormy skies, the studies take on a violent realism that led Constable's friend Leslie to remark that "Fuseli wished for an umbrella when standing before one of Constable's showers."ⁱⁱⁱ

These cloud studies are objective yet Romantic mappings of the sky fraught with anxieties felt by the artist in placing so much faith in a piece of air. The clouds can also be read, as Constable seemed to encourage in his many metaphorical attachments to the sky, as symbolic of thoughts themselves passing across the mind. William Wordsworth, Constable's contemporary, took such philosophy to the extreme when he wandered "lonely as a cloud" through his poem "Daffodils."

In celebrating the nature of clouds through a combination of scientific rigor and sentient experience, Constable created a fixed system for recording the epitome of transience in nature. These paintings emerged in part out of Constable's working through of the world's mutability, where "no two days are alike not even two hours�and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other."^iv

Clouds seem an apt metaphor for the contemporary art world that is so difficult to pin down on a page, and whose material becomes increasingly transient or virtual; the image world turning its objects, as T.J. Clark writes, into "water, or vapor, or pure spatiality�"^v Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his notebooks about the importance of looking closely at clouds to find forms and the fantasies of marvelous ideas.^vi It is one of the first imaginative exercises we perform in the world, looking up to find a horse, a flower, a belching dragon. Shakespeare writes in Antony and Cleopatra of clouds that take on various shapes "And mock our eyes with air."^vii Clouds transcend even the earthly realm; popular culture illustrates heaven as a place where each inhabitant has his own cloud and Hieronymus Bosch imagines hell in his Garden of Earthly Delights with a night choked in black clouds, a city skyline gasping under siege.

Mirroring Constable's prolific and persistent approach, Alfred Stieglitz took over four hundred black and white pictures of the sky and clouds from 1922 to 1931, making "small, carefully crafted images that were literally visual segments cut out of the skies."^viii Stieglitz, who named these intial photographic studies of the sky Music and Songs of the Sky before settling on Equivalents, is perhaps the artist most indebted to Constable's clouds. Like Constable, Stieglitz's work veers toward abstraction and embodies not simply visual representation of clouds but also a sense of shifting metaphorical states.

Decades later German artist Gerhard Richter would make monumental Wolke (Cloud) paintings using photographic images, merging the process of Constable and Stieglitz while undermining naturalism. The young German photographer Wolfmann Tillmans, a disciple of Richter's, takes numerous photographs of the sky; some show clouds as if they were nets snagging light or a figure poking up against a teeming horizon; they are the view outside of his putridly elegant windowsill still-lifes. Others depict eclipses or trace the Concord plane like a bird crossing through clouds; one is reminded of Constable's cloud studies that include birds or Felix Gonzalez-Torres' image of a lone bird flying across clouds which he placed in his billboard and stacked paper series in the 1990s. "Astronomy in a sense initiated me into the visual world," Tillmans has said, recalling a rich art-historical link.^ix

Roni Horn's Clowd and Cloun (Blue) from 2001, exhibited at Dia Center for the Arts, consisted of alternating photographs of a clown and a fluffy cloud displayed around the walls of a room. As Nancy Princenthal notes, "Horn calls this work a comedy: running with her camera, she had to chase the fast-moving cloud as it drifted and broke up, and something of the antic spirit of the shoot is preserved in the images."^x Like Constable, Horn was working quickly, impossibly against reeling time. Her cloud seems like a technicolor apparition against its hyper-blue background; juxtaposed with the constant character of the clown it laughs itself into oblivion around the room.

Sep. 28 1821 Noon—looking North West windy from the S.W. large bright clouds flying rather fast very stormy night followed.^xi

A periwinkle sky dominates the painting, overlaid by a series of large, chubby clouds with grayish-violet underbellies and bright white tips that carry a pink tinge. Near the horizon the clouds become smaller and darker puffs, a tonal gradation one would expect to see during a sunset, (not at noon when this picture was painted) �and to the left, the clouds sweep down upon the horizon. Four birds winging across the sky in tilted V's add a precise detail to the more abstracted plane of color and texture. The blackened clouds looming heavy in the study explain the storms that followed.

In 1966 Yoko Ono made her only video piece, one of the earliest video installations ever, Sky TV, in which a camera is trained on the sky and its image in real-time is then shown on a monitor in the gallery. Like Constable, Ono tracks the undulating skyscape as a marker of time, yet her work channels immediacy through the machine—the viewer can choose to watch or turn away.

Five years earlier, Ono created Painting to See the Skies, a canvas with a hole cut into it through which the viewer could watch the sky, and cards with the word "sky" written on them were "sold" through her Sky Dispenser, also from 1966. For Ono, air is the only link between people, and the sky persists as a motif throughout her work and the democratic presence that has always been there, the "only common factor" of her life.^xii

John Constable, Cloud Study, oil on paper, 19.8 x 32cm, 1822. Inscribed on back, "painted by John Constable RA bought by W.P. Frith."

John Constable, 6 September 1822, oil on paper, 24.4 x 30.7cm, 1822. Inscribed on back, "Sepr 6. 1822 Noon. Gentle wind at west, hot and fine."

Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds, first installed at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966, consists of a room filled with shiny square helium balloons which move with the air currents. Constable's en plein air practice is brought inside synthetically in Warhol's model, offering playful clouds that physically interact with the viewer, hovering at an accessible level and scale. Choreographer Merce Cunningham was so struck by this aspect of the clouds that he incorporated them into his dance Rainforest in 1968 which included a set by Warhol and costumes by Jasper Johns. Just as Stieglitz had traced clouds as music, Cunningham found them a catalyst for dance.

"I want to address the light we see in dreams,"^xiii James Turrell has said of his skyspaces, the first of which, Meeting, he made in 1986 at PS1. The work's title refers to the Quakers (Turrell is a second-generation Quaker), and the artist has since created a skyspace in a Quakers' meeting house in Houston for meditation. His 12 x 12 foot square that opens directly to outside in the ceiling has the effect of "bringing the sky down" and making us aware of how we move through space on earth "much more than we are prepared to admit."^xiv The physicality of Turrell's work—which also includes the decades-long project Roden Crater in Arizona, which on its completion will be the largest artwork in the world—is "sensual and emotional in the way that music is sensual and emotional." Like Stieglitz, Turrell locates the explicit experience of the sky in the metaphor of music. Like Constable, the sky is the "chief 'Organ of Sentiment'";^xv Turrell has directly cited Constable, along with artists like Vermeer, Turner, Rembrandt and the Impressionists as artists working with similar issues of space and light.

The architectural team Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scifidio also brought clouds down to the viewer in their Blur Pavilion at the sixth Swiss National Exhibition last summer. They created a breathtaking effect, suspending a platform inside a manmade cloud that up to 400 viewers at a time could walk into wearing special raincoats. Computers adjusted the 31,400 jets spraying miniscule droplets of lake water so that the cloud was always changing depending on climate and wind conditions. These droplets were so small that they remained suspended in the air, saturating a certain area and producing a hovering, ethereal cloud that seemed like a mirage above the horizon.

Augt 1. 1822 11 o clock A.M. very hot with large climbing Clouds under the Sun. wind westerly.^xvi

The clouds take on the most abstract embodiment of Constable's pure sky sketches in this study. Infused with thick swaths of paint, the dark blue sky is almost entirely covered by large squiggles of gray, ochre, white and violet clouds. Constable once wrote of the juxtaposition of light and dark color in his work as being infused with necessary feeling: "Perhaps the sacrifice I make for lightness and brightness is too much, but these things are the essence of landscape."^xvii

On June 29, 1996, Gary Simmons created his Sky Erasure Drawings commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, using a cloud's natural canvas. As Thelma Golden explained in the exhibition's catalogue, "Working with professional sky writer Mayne Mansfield, Simmons 'drew' several five-pointed stars in the Chicago sky. The stars, as documented in a series of photographs, naturally dissipate, appearing and slowly disappearing, at their faintest looking just like traces of chalk dusk."^xviii This work connects to Simmons best known erasure drawings done in chalk which explore in part the fragility and ephemeral nature of the image.

In conjunction with his exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art, Vik Muniz created the public art project Clouds with Creative Time which took place four times in February 2001. Like Gary Simmons' stars in Chicago, Muniz had a skywriter draw a series of cloud outlines over the Manhattan cityscape. The mode of skywriting emphasized the fleeting nature of images while its subject mirrored the existence of actual clouds—an artificially made cloud cavorting with its natural twin.

Spanish-born, Chicago-based artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, who, like Diller and Scifidio, just received a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, had an ambitious sculptural work in Chelsea through March 8 that is, according to Ken Johnson of the New York Times, "possibly the most beautiful object to be found in a contemporary art gallery in New York."^xix The fiberglass and titanium amorphous cloud sculpture is based on a cumulo-nimbus thundercloud modeled by the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois, and is over sixteen feet wide, suspended just inches off the gallery floor. With the help of architect Douglas Garafalo, Manglano-Ovalle scaled down the numerical data of the existing 50 kilometer-wide cloud and then had milling machines used by the automobile industry digitally sculpt its form. This sculpture is the latest in the artist's oeuvre which explores "ephemeral forces such as weather and clouds," as explained by the Orange County Museum of Art, to which this work traveled, "which neither recognize borders nor ideologies [and therefore] become metaphors for current and future global arrangements."^xx

Its shiny technological surfaces and mushroom form connect it also to the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang's work The Century with Mushroom Clouds (1996), which documents the artist making tiny mushroom clouds of gunpowder smoke at nuclear sites in Nevada. Cai sees the mushroom cloud created by the atomic bomb as the visual mark of the 20th century; his subsequent cloud works at famous land-art sites (such as those of Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson) pay homage to the artworks while contemplating the validity of art.

Then there is Irish artist Grace Weir, who projected a 360 degree simulation of a cloud on the ceiling of a circular bar in Dublin in November 2001. Weir, who represented Ireland at the 2001 Venice Biennale, has worked often with clouds and weather systems through technology. In her project Cloud, the public visited a specific website where they could control the direction and speed of the projected cloud's movement and watch this change on a live video web stream of the work. The turning cloud was also visible from the streets of Dublin, particularly late at night, when you'd least expect to see a cloud rotating above you.

Sepr 21. 1822_past one oclock. looking south. Wind very fresh at East, but warm.^xxi

The sky is opening up, the clouds seem to be blowing away, and the translucent blue of a sunny day permeates most of the pure sky sketch. These clouds are individual and delicate, sitting flat and horizontal. The thin blue paint of the sky is scattered near the bottom of the page with white and gray cotton-flower clouds, their undersides a dark violet and their blossoms crowned in white tips. The clouds seem to blow from the right of the picture across its composition and then out of the left frame, a movement supported by Constable's notes about the wind.

Considering today's climate, clouds seem a particularly potent metaphor as they drift, blow away, fall and dissipate. They are distant and intangible, yet buildings cut into them, planes fly through them, and people walk inside them like a dream. They are daily reminders in their formation, movement, and absence that things do not remain the same, no matter how much art attempts to belie this—even when art itself aspires to the ephemeral. Clouds take on the fickle forms of our emotions—the plastic, titanium, digitally projected, oil, photographic, liquid paraffin materials of our harnessed rendering—and also the after-effect of our technologies and devastations. In the words of poet Stephen Dobyns, "Where is that sense of the world you woke with/ this morning? Now it is smaller. Now it has gone away."^xxii

i. Thornes, J John Constable's Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science (Birmingham: The University of Birmingham Press, 1999) p.232
ii. These descriptions were made from the cloud studies on view at the British Art Center at Yale University, New Haven.
iii. Thornes, p.56
iv. Darracott, Joseph England's Constable: The Life and Letters of John Constable (London: The Folio Society, 1985) p. 124.
v. T.J. Clark, "Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam" October (Issue 100, Spring 2002) p. 162.
vi. da Vinci, Leonardo Treatise on Painting edited by Philip McMahon, vol. 1 (Princeton: University Press, 1956) pp 51-52.
vii. (Scene IV, xiii, 7) in The Riverside Shakespeare, The Complete Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997) p. 1426.
viii. Cornell, Daniel Alfred Stieglitz and the Equivalent (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1999) p. 1.
ix. View from Above: Wolfgang Tillmans (Hamburg, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002) p.11.
x. Nancy Princenthal, "Taking the Long View" Art in America (October 2002 No. 10.) p. 139.
xi. Thornes, p. 238.
xii. Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968) p.171
xiii. Michael Kimmelman "Inside a Lifelong Dream of Desert Light," The New York Times (Sunday, April 8, 2001, Section 2, p. 1.)
xiv. David Hay, "Using the Sky to Discover an Inner Light" The New York Times (Sunday, April 8, 2001, Section 2, p. 35).
xv. Thornes, p. 57.
xvi. Ibid, p. 259.
xvii. Darracott, p. 83.
xviii. Thelma Golden, "Sonic Boom" in Gary Simmons (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2002) p. 17.
xix. Ken Johnson, "Art in Review" The New York Times (Friday, February 14, 2003, Section E, Part 2, p. 45).
xx. www.ocma.net
xxi. Thornes, p. 269.
xxii. from the poem "The Gun" in Dobyns, Stephen Velocities (New York: Viking Books, 1994) p. 136.