{"id":17177,"date":"2019-07-12T03:04:16","date_gmt":"2019-07-12T03:04:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=17177"},"modified":"2019-07-13T05:42:01","modified_gmt":"2019-07-13T05:42:01","slug":"long-before-armstrong-and-aldrin-artists-were-stoking-dreams-of-space-travel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/long-before-armstrong-and-aldrin-artists-were-stoking-dreams-of-space-travel\/","title":{"rendered":"Long before Armstrong and Aldrin, artists were stoking dreams of space travel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anne Collins Goodyear<\/a>, Bowdoin College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

In the midst of the space race, Hereward Lester Cooke, the former co-director of the NASA Art Program, observed<\/a>, \u201cSpace travel started in the imagination of the artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing is an opportunity to celebrate a remarkable technological achievement, it\u2019s also a good time to reflect on the creative vision that made it possible.<\/p>\n

Long before Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, artists and writers were crafting visions of extraterrestrial exploration that would make space flight possible.<\/p>\n

Cultivating possibility<\/h2>\n

For centuries, the dream of human travel into the cosmos has fired imaginations.<\/p>\n

Ancient mythologies teemed with deities who suffused the skies, glimmered from stars and rode the Sun and Moon. Pythagoras, Philolaus and Plutarch each contemplated the Moon as a world of its own<\/a>. Leonardo da Vinci famously imagined<\/a> flying machines that would take their occupants skyward. Authors such as Cyrano de Bergerac \u2013 who\u2019s credited<\/a> with being the first to imagine a rocket being used for space travel \u2013 fed a growing appetite for stories of celestial exploration.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
An illustration from Jules Verne\u2019s novel \u2018From the Earth to the Moon,\u2019 drawn by Henri de Montaut.<\/span>
\nWikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1865, the French writer Jules Verne published his novel, \u201cFrom Earth to the Moon<\/a>,\u201d followed five years later by its sequel, \u201cRound the Moon<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Verne\u2019s tale provides an uncannily prescient account of the development of space travel: Three astronauts blast off from Florida in a small aluminum capsule, fired from the end of an enormous cast iron gun. After orbiting the Moon and making observations with a pair of opera glasses, the three men return to Earth, splashing into the ocean as heroes.<\/p>\n

Almost a century later, RKO Pictures would release a film<\/a> inspired by Verne\u2019s adventure story, while a comic book version of the tale<\/a> went through multiple printings between 1953 and 1971<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the 1950s, the painter Chesley Bonestell further stoked the imagination of future space-farers with his visions of space stations, published in Collier\u2019s. Walt Disney would follow<\/a> with three made-for-TV movies that illustrated the ways people might one day be able to fly into space<\/a> and land on the Moon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After touch down, artists inspired anew<\/h2>\n

In 1969, Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would realize the vision that Verne and others had instilled in the mind\u2019s eye of millions.<\/p>\n

This accomplishment would, in turn, inspire artists anew.<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing will already be the same,\u201d reads the text<\/a> along the right edge of Robert Rauschenberg\u2019s collage \u201cStoned Moon Drawing.\u201d Published in the December 1969 issue of Studio International, Rauschenberg\u2019s work combined images of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, Cape Canaveral and the Gemini print shop. Rauschenberg wanted to draw attention to the deep collaboration required in the worlds of art and science, whether it was for print-making or lunar landings.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Alma W. Thomas\u2019 1970 painting \u2018Blast Off.\u2019<\/span>
\nNational Air and Space Museum<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the 1970s, the color field painter Alma Thomas explored what she described as \u201cthe vastness and incomprehensibility of space\u201d in abstract paintings like \u201cBlast Off<\/a>,\u201d \u201cLaunch Pad<\/a>\u201d and \u201cNew Galaxy<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I paint space, I am with the astronauts,\u201d she said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The artist Red Grooms<\/a>, who attended the Apollo 15 launch, turned to official NASA photographs to create a gigantic sculptural installation of astronauts David Scott and James Irwin exploring the lunar surface with cameras and a lunar rover.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted,\u201d he explained<\/a>, \u201cto do the sort of thing the [NASA] people were doing \u2013 build something incomprehensible then try to get it off the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pioneers of the imagination<\/h2>\n

What can be gleaned from this tale of outer space visionaries?<\/p>\n

Perhaps, most simply, it is the power of the arts to cultivate the imagination \u2013 to render possible in the mind what has not yet been tangibly realized. As the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan observed in his 1964 classic, \u201cUnderstanding Media: The Extensions of Man<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe artist is the [person] in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of [their] actions and of the new knowledge in [their] own time. [The artist] is the [person] of integral awareness.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In recent years, American education policy has increasingly emphasized<\/a> the value of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, often at the expense of support for the arts.<\/p>\n

At what peril does education policy drift away from the arts? What sort of navigational cues might go missing?<\/p>\n

Scientists, the essayist Rebecca Solnit noted<\/a>, certainly play an integral role in human discovery. They \u201ctransform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it is the artist, she writes, who gets \u201cyou out into that dark sea\u201d in the first place.<\/p>\n

It was artists who first envisioned and produced photographic technologies<\/a>. It was artists who first foresaw a world in which individuals might fly<\/a>. And it will be artists who continue to shatter the perceived limitations to our own intellectual frameworks.<\/p>\n

In 2018, the Japanese tycoon Yusaku Maezawa paid an undisclosed sum of money to become the first person to orbit the Moon since 1972. If all goes according to plan, he\u2019ll depart in 2023 with companions of his choosing.<\/p>\n

I find his selection fitting: He intends to take along a group of artists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[ Deep knowledge, daily.<\/em> Sign up for The Conversation\u2019s newsletter<\/a>. ]\"The<\/p>\n

Anne Collins Goodyear<\/a>, Co-Director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anne Collins Goodyear, Bowdoin College In the midst of the space race, Hereward Lester Cooke, the former co-director of the NASA Art Program, observed, \u201cSpace travel started in the imagination of the artist.\u201d If the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing is an opportunity to celebrate a remarkable technological achievement, it\u2019s also a good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":17172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[6642,2933,3181,1743,2034,6167,4832,6641,6625,6643,3169],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17177"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17182,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177\/revisions\/17182"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}