In 2018, the Japanese tycoon Yusaku Maezawa paid an undisclosed sum of money to become the first person to orbit the Moon since 1972. And it will be artists who continue to shatter the perceived limitations to our own intellectual frameworks. It was artists who first foresaw a world in which individuals might fly. It was artists who first envisioned and produced photographic technologies. They “transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen.”īut it is the artist, she writes, who gets “you out into that dark sea” in the first place. Scientists, the essayist Rebecca Solnit noted, certainly play an integral role in human discovery. In recent years, American education policy has increasingly emphasized the value of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, often at the expense of support for the arts.Īt what peril does education policy drift away from the arts? What sort of navigational cues might go missing? “The artist is the in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of actions and of the new knowledge in own time. As the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan observed in his 1964 classic, “ Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”: Perhaps, most simply, it is the power of the arts to cultivate the imagination – to render possible in the mind what has not yet been tangibly realized. What can be gleaned from this tale of outer space visionaries? “I wanted,” he explained, “to do the sort of thing the people were doing – build something incomprehensible then try to get it off the ground.” Pioneers of the imagination The artist Red Grooms, 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. “When I paint space, I am with the astronauts,” she said.
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In the 1970s, the color field painter Alma Thomas explored what she described as “the vastness and incomprehensibility of space” in abstract paintings like “ Blast Off,” “ Launch Pad” and “ New Galaxy.” Thomas’ 1970 painting ‘Blast Off.’ National Air and Space Museum 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.Īlma W. “Nothing will already be the same,” reads the text along the right edge of Robert Rauschenberg’s collage “Stoned Moon Drawing.” Published in the December 1969 issue of Studio International, Rauschenberg’s work combined images of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, Cape Canaveral and the Gemini print shop. This accomplishment would, in turn, inspire artists anew. In 1969, Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would realize the vision that Verne and others had instilled in the mind’s eye of millions. Walt Disney would follow with three made-for-TV movies that illustrated the ways people might one day be able to fly into space and land on the Moon. In the 1950s, the painter Chesley Bonestell further stoked the imagination of future space-farers with his visions of space stations, published in Collier’s.
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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.Īlmost a century later, RKO Pictures would release a film inspired by Verne’s adventure story, while a comic book version of the tale went through multiple printings between 19. Verne’s 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. In 1865, the French writer Jules Verne published his novel, “ From Earth to the Moon,” followed five years later by its sequel, “ Round the Moon.”
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An illustration from Jules Verne’s novel ‘From the Earth to the Moon,’ drawn by Henri de Montaut.