Dressing the Air - Home

Dressing The Air is the brainchild of the London-based artist Paul Schütze.

In a career spanning 30 years, Schütze has exhibited his photographic and installation works in galleries and museums around the world, released over thirty albums of original recordings, scored a number of films and performed numerous concerts. He has collaborated with artists such as James Turrell, Josiah McElheny and Isaac Julien and musicians as diverse as Bill Laswell, Raoul Björkenheim, Toshinori Kondo, Lol Coxhill and Jah Wobble.

Dressing The Air is a unique open resource that aims to enrich creative thinking by encouraging a multi-sensory approach. A constantly evolving archive and creative news feed, Dressing The Air monitors and reports on a diverse range of art-forms from cinema to sculpture, painting to furniture design, land-art to perfumery.

dressing the air: the bureau of sensory intelligence

a creative resource to provoke and inspire

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current events
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a rolling bulletin
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From the
Archive

Question
Air

The great and
the good answer
our sensory
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jacob Hashimoto

East Wing Biennial - Courtauld Institute - London

This student run Biennial inaugurated by Joshua Compston in 1991 when a student himself, finds the fabric of the institute being mined for meaning. A diverse selection of works by known and lesser ...
The Necks

Vertigo - The Necks -

Anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing this trio perform knows they are peerless. I've seen them regularly over the last three decades and, in that time, witnessed perhaps two shows which di...
Hauser & Worth

Anj Smith - Phosphor Of The Palms - Hauser & Worth - London

Perhaps it is the small scale of these works, the exquisite precision of the painting, the preciosity of Smith's technique, but they are uniformly engrossing in ways often unavailable to monume...
Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei - Royal Academy - London

Several years in the planning and informed significantly by the artist's parallel discipline of architecture, this ambitious show was designed remotely during Ai's lengthy "grounding&q...
Thames & Hudson

The World Atlas Of Tattoo - Anna Felicity Friedman - Thames & Hudson

This is a comprehensive, art-historical survey of the history and contemporary practice of tattooing. Friedman is a historian of the tattoo with an acute sense of thematic evolution and its extrapo...
Royal Academy

Joseph Cornell - Royal Academy

From a modest body of work constructed in quiet obscurity, Cornell's influence continues to resonate throughout the cultural landscape. Something universal in the urge to capture and classify, ...

Agnus Martin - Tate Modern

Tate Modern have installed a superlative selection of Martin's transcendent oeuvre. There is no doubt that at least an element of her relative obscurity (particularly in relation to her male co...
David Zwirner

Black Mould - Michaël Borremens - David Zwirner London

This show has been thoughtfully installed in the gallery spaces, enclosed by the high, dark painted walls and precisely lit with framed spots. For the most part the works are small, meticulously pa...
MIT Press

24/7 Late Capitalism And The Ends Of Sleep - Johnathan Crary

While the underpinning thesis of this book is a Marcusean reappraisal of the role of capitalism in the information age, it also, perhaps inadvertently, dwells with some elegance on the role of sensation, perception and attention and our increasingly deliquescent relationship with the physical world. Crary sees the mechanisms of the market relentlessly usurping every moment of wakeful attention ...
Eames Office

The World Of Charles And Ray Eames - Barbican - London

The Barbican continue an unbroken run of brilliant exhibitions with this detailed survey of the work of the celebrated designer couple. In a deftly articulate parade of media and materials the world of Charles and Ray Eames is unpacked across the gallery's perfectly sympathetic complex of spaces. Of particular interest are the many examples of publications and films expressly made to convey...
University Of Illinois Press

The Deepest Sense - A Cultural History Of Touch

It is almost impossible to open a collection of writings on sensory thought without coming across Constance Classens's name. She is one of the finest writers on the subject we have. This welcome study succinctly excavates the history of our most immediate and primal sense. Touch is so fundamental to our momentary experience that it goes largely unanalyzed and so the revelations in this work...
Thames & Hudson

Listening To Stone, The Life And Art Of Isamu Noguchi - Hayden Herrera - Thames & Hudson

This biography, assembled from correspondence, interviews and extensive research, is that rare thing: an invisible text. By this I mean that the writing is so direct, so self effacing in serving its subject, that the account it conveys feels like a direct memory. Herera has the skill to deploy words deftly enough that they carry information and nuance without leaving a trace of the author upon ...
Late Night Tales

Late Night Tales - Nils Frahm

Coincidentally, as I received this new disc,  I was musing over the wonderful cassette compellations my friends and I used to make for each other decades ago. I'm not sure I can think of a more personal gift than a selection of music, carefully curated, mixed and laboriously transferred to tape. This release, the latest in the ongoing Late Night Tales series, has the feel of a highly p...
Lauren Coleman.

Catch - Lindsey Adelman

Catch is a collection of lights designed by Lindsey Adelman. The forms suggest clusters of hanging plant life or insect larvae. There is an unexpected formal integrity which looks alien, beautiful and ordered all at once. Sometimes a designer manages to describe forms which feel as though they might usurps the materials used and move them into a new grammar of behavior. Lighting is littered wit...
Rubén D’hers

Chords Tunnel #1 - Rubén D’hers

Using tiny servo motors to agitate beaters and plectrums is not a new idea. I've seen literally dozens of sound-works over the decades which have done this with varying degrees of success. The real point is the physical placement of multiple acoustic sound sources within a space and the complexity/beauty of the resulting sonic environment. Chords Tunnel #1 is a highly effective deployment o...

The World Beyond Your Head - Matthew Crawford -

While this may at first seem a puzzling inclusion on DTA, it is, despite ranging freely through philosophical and political enquiry, a book concerned with our direct experience of the world. The author argues very elegantly for a resumption of physical engagement in actions which are increasingly disembodied. Not only is the finite resource of our attention being fought over with increasing fer...
Saatchi Gallery

20:50

A site-specific installation of used sump oil and steel. This work has been installed in each of the three consecutive locations of the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Jaisalmer

Cardamom, Incense, Cinnamon, Amber, Benzoin, Pimento Berries, Gaiac Wood, and Ebony - A striking and elusive scent with phantoms of aromatic woods and the warmth of cinnamon. Ultimately discreet, it's more a dialogue with yourself than with your surroundings.
Film still

Satyricon

Lavishly inventive, an evocation of ancient Rome loosely derived from fragments of a text by Petronius. The images and sounds are so vivid and exotic as to activate the other senses by default.

Institut Du Monde Arabe

As a center for Arab culture with galleries, libraries, archives and performance spaces, the building's elegantly sober exterior encloses a structure bursting with beauty,  ideas and innovations.
John Locke

Lightning Field

An installation of 400 stainless steel poles in a perfect grid measuring one mile by one kilometer.
More Ikura

Art Site Naoshima

A complex of buildings including the museum, an annex and the Minami- dera Art House Project
Film still

24 Hour Psycho

Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho slowed down to two frames per second so it lasts twenty four hours.

Vetiver Extraordinaire

Bergamot, Bigarade Orange, Pink pepper, Nutmeg, Floralozone, Haïtain Vetyver, Sandalwood, Cedarwood, Oak moss, Myrrh, Cashmeran, Musketone, Tonalide - A triumph of earthy, smoky opacity laden with gleaming detail and subtle flashes of light. It evolves constantly around the wearer. Like wearing the phantom of an impossibly majestic forest.
Penny Bradfield

Paul Kildea

Author of the recent magisterial biography Benjamin Britten: A Life In The Twentieth Century, Paul Kildea’s experience as an acclaimed conductor has helped ignite insights into both the poeti...

Martin Firrell

Martin Firrell has been described variously as a cultural activist, a campaigner, a public artist, or benevolent provocateur, stimulating debate in public space to promote positive social change. H...

William Lobb

William Lobb is director of one of the world’s most venerated shoe makers. In the same way that chairs, at their best, can concentrate the architectural impulse into one sculptural artefact, ...

Michael Bracewell

Novelist, essayist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell is the author of six novels and three works of non-fiction, including 'England Is Mine' (1997) and 'Perfect Tense' (200...
Amalia Pica

Jennifer Higgie

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer, art critic and co-editor of the London-based contemporary art magazine, frieze.

Bernat Klein

Textile designer Bernat Klein recently celebrated his 90th birthday with an exhibition of brilliant polychrome paintings. In the 1960s, establishing his own mill in the Scottish borders, Klein'...
International Herald Tribune

Alice Rawsthorn

Alice Rawsthorn is the design critic of the International Herald Tribune, global edition of the New York Times. She is a trustee of Arts Council England, the Michael Clark Company and Whitechapel a...