Space Art
Anomalie Digital_Arts Issue, no.4
Festival of @rt Outsiders, Orleans, France,
2003
288 pp.,
euros 22
ISBN: 2-910385-33-7
Distributors Website: http://www.Editions-Hyx.com.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
This summer four Dartmouth College varsity
athletes, all women, tested an exercise
regimen for muscles in microgravity environments
they had developed aboard the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration's
KC135 "Weightless Wonder" aircraft as
participate in the 2004 Reduced Gravity
Student Flight Opportunities Program.
If even college jocks are going
weightless, what of artists?
The Space Art Anomalie Digital_Arts
Issue no.4 chronicles work by artists
around the world involved in microgravity
research exhibited or discussed at the
Festival of @rt Outsiders at Orleans,
France in 2003. The Festival's guiding
spirit was Henry Chapier, and its artistic
directors were Jean-Luc Soret and Emmanuelle
Quinz. Readers of Space Art
will find it helpful that every essay
in French was translated into English,
and vice versa, yet each essay followed
by its translationor all essays
in a single language grouped togethermay
have meant quicker reading.
There are reports on gallery-friendly
installations making use of video and
multiple photographic images, Ewen Chardronnet's
"Open Sky," "Spaced Out" by Addictive
TV (Graham Daniels and Nick Clarke), plus
works by Miguel Chevalier and Pierre Comte.
Richard Clar investigates the sculptural
qualities and potential of orbital debris,
whether in space or fallen to earth. Among
its cultural effects, space exploration
and travel will have an impact even upon
the exhibition and curatorial/pedagogic
explication of art, which inspires Susan
Collins' "Tate in Space" website, housing
essays and discussions of art in space.
This reviewer recalls proposals
for space art put forth at the International
Sculpture Conference in Oakland, CA over
twenty years ago. Work still in
the conceptual realm is publicized online,
as at Marc Battier's Art Technologies
site (http:// www.arttechnologies.com).
All terrestrial cultures and their artworks
unquestioningly accept the masses and
weights of both objects and the human
body under the gravitational conditions
that we are used to and take for granted.
There is great potential for space
art innovation to work unaffected by normal
gravity and question these assumptions,
and such investigation is underway by
the MIR (Microgravity Interdisciplinary
Research) group and others. Rob
La Frenais' video "Gravitation Off!" documents
a 1999 project that employed an Ilyusahin
MDK-76 Flying Laboratory airplane to give
artists the experience of Zero G. Yet
with knowledge gained from his participation,
La Frenais forswears space travel until
the technology is improved.
Astrophysicist and Leonardo publisher
Roger Malina notes in his essay that over
two dozen artists have explored zero-gravity
art production and experiences. Photographs
in the Space Art issue show the amazement,
delight (and, occasionally, nausea) of
artists violating some of the most unforgiving
laws of all, those of gravity.