Making Art In Outer Space

I was covering the Voyager fly-by of Saturn for Mankind magazine. OK, it wasn’t the most prestigious magazine, but it was a way to secure my credentials to get into JPL for the fly-by. It also allowed me to attend the daily press briefings and receive all the photos that were coming down from the spacecraft. There was little question in my mind that I was one of the least knowledgeable persons in the room. So, I was continually asking the other journalists what was going on during briefings. What’s a bow shock? What’s a… I met some brilliant space journalists by asking these questions, and it sparked my career writing about space and science, which had always fascinated me, but about which I knew basically nothing. I want to be clear, this essay is not simply about remembrance. It’s about the courage to explore the outer edges of what we know and how that shows up. For my money, that’s the responsibility of the artist.

Beyond that, being at JPL was also an opportunity to get lots of amazing space stuff. I was not prepared, however, and completely gobsmacked by the beauty of the images of Saturn being passed out daily. I had recently produced a pictorial article for Ozark Airlines magazine, yes Ozark Airlines, on art and outer space. The idea had emerged after I had purchased a 13 inch Dobsonian telescope – the mirror was 13 inches in diameter and the telescope it itself was nearly five feet tall. It was basically a big light bucket, capable of gathering light from some of the most distant and beautiful deep sky objects. Space was now my thing. Gazing out into the night sky, it wasn’t hard to make the connection between art and space. All I had to do was focus the telescope out at massive star clusters, distant galaxies, and those magically ethereal birthplace of stars, nebula. Immediately, my associative mind was triggered; this stuff looks exactly like abstract expressionist artworks. There’s a Pollock. That’s a Frankenthaler. C’mon, that’s a Clifford Styll.

I did what I thought was the logical thing, and in doing so, convinced Ozark on the idea. I assembled five or six spectacular deep sky objects and matched an equal number of abstract expressionist paintings that approximated these amazing space objects, got permissions from the various museums that housed them, and two months later, the piece was flying all over the Midwest on the now defunct Ozark Airlines.

At our most challenging times, we look to the heavens, and what we find is art, transforming our souls and making us realize what is far greater than we mere mortals.

The truth was, it was not much of a stretch when seeing these incredibly colorful images being beamed down from the distant Voyager to envision art in outer space. Then the gods of synchronicity spoke and the clouds parted and… No it wasn’t quite so biblical. Nonetheless, in the middle of the flyby, NASA was getting ready to launch the Space Shuttle, an event still new enough to be broadcast nationally. During a delay of the launch, T-minus something and not counting, I happened to walk by a television screen in the press room as NASA tried to fill the waiting space. Then the gods spoke. Still too biblical? In this case, no. They were showing an interview of this rather wild looking guy who had secured what was being called a “getaway special” on the Space Shuttle, from which he planned to produce art. Hazah, hazeh. The edge was being exposed and on national TV.

This guy they were showing was Joe Davis and he was describing the art piece he was planning to produce from the space shuttle. It was called, “New Wave Ruby Falls.” As drawn up, Davis’ piece would send an electronic charge from the Shuttle into the ionosphere, igniting it, which would then produce a ring of aurora-like color around the globe. Before I realized what I was watching the interview ended. One thing I knew I had to do was to find this Joe Davis and tell his story. It took me six months, in this pre-Internet era, to find him and track him down.

He was a fellow at the MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. So, now that I finally found him, how do I get to Boston, and which airline magazine would do the trick? The answer, Western Airlines “the only way to fly.” I called my editor and sold him on Joe Davis over the phone. “You had me at Space Art.” Finding Davis was one thing, getting him on the phone was another. Finally, he picked up his phone, no cell phones at the time, and he agreed to an interview, which is good because I already sold the article. With the alignment of the planets now in place, my reservations were set, and within a week, I was flying from LA to Boston.

Joe had offered to pick me up at Logan airport, which was very kind. But then he added, “You know what I look like?” I told him I had seen his face, and he then said, “I have a peg leg.” I told him I was OK with that as long as he didn’t bring the parrot.

At the airport, Davis hadn’t lied, and fortunately, he had left the parrot at his MIT studio.

What followed were two days of absolutely inebriated wildness that fortunately included our recorded interviews, meeting all the other artists hanging around at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, as well as it’s Director, Otto Penne, a drunken night at The Plough and Stars Pub, and a freaky night sleeping on the floor of Joe’s dilapidated squat in Somerville. That was my fault, thinking it would be cool to stay with him rather than getting a hotel. It was, in my mind, the full immersive experience. The story of how an artist working on the edges of what we perceive lived and how his work emerged out of that space. In reality, it was just creepy. But as it turned out, it was very Joe Davis.

In his studio at MIT, he displayed drawings and schematics of his various projects other than New Wave Ruby Falls. One that would one day gain national attention, and a fair bit of teasing, was Poetica Vaginalis. Joe took vaginal recordings of women having orgasms, translated and digitized those recorded impulses, which he would then project out into the universe. It wasn’t just some perverted dream. He actually did it.

There were also great drawings of this moon crawler, that would be deposited onto the lunar surface and then spend the next few decades tracing out the patterns he had encoded into it into the lunar soil. Since there were no winds or tides to disturb these images, they would remain for millennia.

There were also great drawings of his moon crawler, that would be deposited onto the lunar surface and then spend the next few decades tracing out the patterns he had encoded into it onto the lunar soil. Since there were no winds or tides to disturb these images, they would remain for millennia.

Art is more than paint on a canvas or figures being pulled from marble. It is also greater than the artist, although I did have a bizarre moment interviewing the artist, Robert Irwin, who had proclaimed rather pompously, “I am the art.” Ego aside, although there was no denying Joe Davis’ ego, real art transcends even that. And contrary to the plebian claim, “I know it when I see it,” great art rattles authority and charges our perception to see something more than itself.

Through Joe, I was introduced to a variety of other space artists, some of whom had also secured Getaway Specials on the space shuttle. Unfortunately, only one, by the artist Joe McShane, actually flew before the challenger disaster ended the program. But that was not the end of art being produced in outer space. One of those artists, Richard Clar, whose Seti project, Spaceflight Dolphin, a sculpture that emitted cetacean sounds out into space, in case other extraterrestrial lifeforms were other than human, was also a Challenger casualty. That didn’t stop Clar who continued doing projects in space. One, in celebration the anniversary of Alan Armstrong, used lasers to bounce the digitized words of Armstrong’s first steps off reflectors left on the moon (See image). It was not only gorgeous, it was a rather spectacular display. Another space artist, Tom Van Sant, produced extraordinary works by bouncing sunlight off vast mirror displays, one of which had been arranged into a massive sculpture of an eye between two small hill formations in the Mojave Desert. The sunlight that was reflected off the mirrors was then captured by LandSat as it orbited over the earth. It produced a breath-taking image called Ryan’s Eye.

In the late 1980s I was introduced to Andre Sakharov, who was the head of the Cosmic Division of Soviet Artists, and we met at his apartment in Moscow in 1989. After the traditional vodka toasts, I proposed that we should discuss the possibility of creating a joint US-USSR art project in space. It was the height of Glasnost. The following year, Sakharov let me know that he and the head of the Union of Soviet Artists would be coming to New York City. I told him, I would assemble a meeting while they were there to discuss my proposal. I then went into action and made the calls to Davis, Clar, another artist with a slot on the Shuttle, Al Wunderlicht, who at the time was the head of the painting department at Rhode Island School of Design (RSDI). All agreed to attend the meeting. I then contacted the Guggenheim Museum in New York and was able to arrange the use of the Guggenheim library room on a Monday, the day the museum was closed to the public.

Everyone showed up in New York. When the American contingent met the night before at a bar, the space artists were in rare form. Davis had also showed up with a small entourage, including a girlfriend and a 23 year old fellow who introduced himself as a philosopher. Needless to say, the drinking commenced. The next day, we all somehow made it to the Guggenheim and were ushered into the small library room, where we were shortly joined by Sakharov and his boss, the Head of the Union of Soviet Artists. When it was explained what we Americans were proposing, the Soviets stared at us with blank faces. They didn’t understand that we were proposing an art project that would take place in outer space. To them, space art was about painting and drawing pictures of planets and space ships floating among them. It soon became clear that this historic meeting of the world’s first space artists was a bust. We did get a great picture, taken by “the philosopher” but that’s all that came from our glorious plan to bring the US and USSR together around a joint art project in space.

The outer space visionaries we had gathered at the Guggenheim on that winter day, turned out to be a small core band of those who saw their canvas not as cloth, but of the stuff of stars. What the Soviets failed to see, was that this literal groundbreaking vision of art taught us to see differently. It demonstrated the vastness of the possible. And it encouraged us to be courageous: to not stop at what we know and fear what we don’t. It is a message of art that shatters perception and allows for something new to emerge, especially today when society wants to collapse down on itself.

At our most challenging times, we look to the heavens, and what we find is art, transforming our souls and making us realize what is far greater than we mere mortals.