Quoted in John F. Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra (Pantheon Books, 1997), 261.
In a forthcoming essay titled “Art in the ‘New Space’ Age” I take up the privatization of space exploration, the hardship of capsule life, and artificial ecologies in the work of contemporary artists Matthew Day Jackson, MPA, Rachel Rose, Tom Sachs, Connie Samaras, Tavares Strachen, and Jane and Louise Wilson. My work on feminism, space ecologies, and climate change will soon appear in Texte zur Kunst as “Feminist Futures in the Anthropocene,” in which I consider works by Dawn DeDeaux, Sylvie Fleury, Aleksandra Mir, and Martine Syms. The relationship between satellite technologies, surveillance, and the corporate occupation of near space focusing on projects by Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl is the topic of another chapter of my book-in-progress, After Spaceship Earth, about the legacy of Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art.
Fuller coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth” in 1951, according to Claude Lichtenstein. See Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, eds. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (Lars Muller Publishers, 2001), 279. Fuller foregrounded the concept in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (E. P. Dutton & Co., 1963). Further speculations about life in outer space were propagated by Fuller’s acolyte Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and editor of the 1977 volume Space Colonies (Penguin Books, 1977). Brand is discussed in depth in my essay “Feminist Futures in the Anthropocene” (forthcoming in Texte zur Kunst).
These projects join my earlier effort, published in the fall of 2010, that explored Fuller’s influence in contemporary art: Eva Díaz, “Dome Culture in the Twenty-First Century,” in Grey Room 42 (Winter 2011), 80–105. We Are All Astronauts: The Universe of Richard Buckminster Fuller as Reflected in Contemporary Art, ed. Markus Richter (Kerber Verlag, 2012); The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside, eds. Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke (Haus der Kulteren der Welt and Sternberg Press, 2013); and Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Walker Art Center, 2015).
A longer version of this essay includes a discussion of works by Neil Beloufa and Daniel Ortega.
My project focuses on works that go beyond imaginatively depicting outer space or fantastical space journeys, and that see in outer space stakes further than futuristic style. Several recent exhibitions have tackled topics of space exploration and colonization, most notably Space Is the Place, a 2006–08 exhibition that traveled to multiple venues throughout the US (Alex Baker and Toby Kamps, curators and editors, Space is the Place, Independent Curators International and Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, 2007), and Space: About a Dream, a 2011 exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien (Cathérine Hug, curator and editor, Space: About a Dream, Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2011). These shows placed a not-insignificant emphasis on artworks representing the starry heavens as a kind of transcendent site of sublime but inhospitable beauty and vastness.
Sun Ra proclaimed himself an alien from Saturn. He also used the phrase “Spaceship Earth,” often coupled with a near mystical sense that leaving the Earth would inaugurate humanity’s spiritual redemption. See Szwed, Space Is the Place, 261. For recent scholarship on Ra and afrofuturism, see Paul Youngquist, A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of afrofuturism (University of Texas Press, 2016). For more about the legacy of afrofuturism in contemporary art, see The Shadows Took Shape, eds. Naima J. Keith and Zoe Whitley (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013). For a consideration of the fascination with futurity and space travel from a Latin American perspective, see the catalog for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art show of the same name: Past Futures: Science Fiction, Space Travel, and Postwar Art of the Americas, ed. Sarah J. Montross (MIT Press, 2015). Though more focused on afrofuturist literature, the issue of the journal Social Text (no. 71, June 2002) dedicated to the topic is of interest.
The term “afrofuturism” was coined in 1993 by cultural critic Mark Dery in his interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose titled “Black to the Future,” in Flame Wars: Discourses of Cyberculture, ed. Dery (Duke University Press, 1994).
That this flight to outer space for Ra often involved apocalyptic musings about the end of life on Earth as punishment for the vicious treatment of Africans by Europeans is part of the trajectory of forms of radical black millenarianism that Aria Dean has termed “blacceleration.” See her “Notes on Blacceleration,” e-flux journal 87 (December 2017) →. Ra’s proposal differs greatly from the vision of outer space promoted by white rock groups in the 1960s and 1970s, which emphasized, as Diedrich Diederichsen has written, a “structural connection between the trip to outer space and the journey inward to the self … in which outer and inner cosmos comingled.” The new vantage provided of the Earth from outer space was revolutionary in this connection between identity and cosmos. Diederichsen, “Pop Music and the Counterculture: The Whole World and Now,” in The Whole Earth, eds. Diederichsen and Anselm Franke, 20–31, quote is on pages 22 and 24. See also Päivi Väätänen, “Sun Ra: Myth, Science, and Science Fiction,” Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research 1, no. 4 (2014): 39–46.
A large part of Ra’s cosmic mythology draws on his views about the technological and philosophical advancement of ancient black Egyptian Hamitic culture, which predated Judeo-Christian ideologies of white supremacy that claimed Hamitics as a Caucasian tribe. To Ra, understanding the glory of the African past could allow blacks to reclaim their heroic blackness and build a future in outer space. Quote is Ra in 1969, Szwed, Space Is the Place, 276.
Joe Gonçalves, “Sun Ra at the End of the World,” The Cricket, no. 4 (1969): 9–11, quoted in Szwed, Space Is the Place, 140. Gonçalves was reviewing the Arkestra’s first West Coast appearance in 1969.
Saraceno chose the Salar de Uyuni as the site for the project in part because of the reflective qualities of the lake bed, which after rainfall becomes covered with a thin layer of water that creates the illusion of a limitless landscape of clouds.
The concept of a space elevator is credited to Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who in 1895 published a design for a compression-based tower that would reach a height of geostationary orbit. Fuller, in a conversation with sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, claimed that in 1951 he came up with an idea for a tensile structure that would act as a “ring-bridge” to be accessed by a future space elevator. See Fuller’s sleeve notes for Clarke’s audio book The Fountain of Paradise (1979) recording (Caedmon TC 1606).
From aerocene.org →.
Sueli Ferreira Lima Fortin in conversation with Saraceno, published August 6, 2012 in CO2* Art and Sustainability →.
For a discussion of a socialism of technology, see pages 45–46 in Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest (Tor Books, 2016), originally published in China in 2008.
David Valentine, “Exit Strategy: Profit, Cosmology, and the Future of Humans in Space,” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 1066 fn. 6. See also my essay “Art in the ‘New Space’ Age.”
Akomfrah, in Tess Thackara, “John Akomfrah Summons the History of Migration in Chillingly Beautiful New Films,” Artsy, June 23, 2016 →.
Bryant, video interview in KCET and Martin Syms, “Artbound Episode: The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” November 18, 2015 →.
“Alien landing” is the phrase employed to describe the project by the Polish Institute of the Cultural Service of the Polish Embassy in Belgium, which helped sponsor Althamer’s project.
Excerpts from video interview with Weerasethakul at Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2009 →.
Aily Nash, “We Are Primitive: Apichatpong’s Ineffable Experience of Nabua,” The Brooklyn Rail, July 11, 2011 →.
What artist Robert Smithson called “Where remote futures meet remote pasts” in his essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” (1968), discussed in Sarah J. Montross, “Cosmic Orbits: Observing Postwar Art of the Americas from Outer Space,” in Past Futures: Science Fiction, Space Travel, and Postwar Art of the Americas, ed. Montross (MIT Press, 2015), 14–47.
A work such as Erik Sanner’s Mars Tea Room (2016–17), in which a modest mobile geodesic structure is offered for drinking tea crops to be grown on Mars, may serve as a counterpoint to the slick visions of Mars presented by the interview subjects in Altindere’s film. Felicity D. Scott provides a brief genealogy connecting “controlled interior spaces” like greenhouses and corporate atria, see Scott, “Earthlike,” Grey Room 65 (Fall 2016): 17.
Fredric Jameson, “Progress Versus Utopia: or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (July 1982): 151.
Henry Dumas, “Outer Space Blues,” poem dedicated to Sun Ra, c. 1965–68. Henry, or Hank, Dumas, wrote the liner notes to Sun Ra’s 1967 album Cosmic Tones, and was a close associate of Ra’s, especially between 1965–66. Henry Dumas, “Outer Space Blues,” in Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas, ed. Eugene B. Redmond (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989), 66–67. Dumas was shot dead in 1968 by a New York City Transit policeman. According to John Szwed, “When Sun Ra heard about it, he became angrier than anyone had ever seen him before, and he raged on and on for days.” Szwed, Space Is the Place, 223.