Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon_a_01353 byguest on 30 September 2021 LEONARDO, Vol. 51, No.5,pp.498–502,2018 498 ABSTRACT s r Sculpture inSpace e P l a c i r o t s i H specifically in terms of the dawning space age, calling his his calling age, space dawning the of terms in specifically sculpture floating of idea the framed Fontana Lucio artist andexperience knowledge. retical physics that were reshaping the parameters of human projects occurred alongside advents in aviation and in - theo Such [1]. ground the to connection obdurate its from ture with his kinetic light projectors, also sought to liberate sculp Moholy-Nagy László and mobiles, his with Calder exander with space. artists Other of the 1920s and 1930s, notably - Al lighter-than-air suspension and maximum interpenetration seeming of favor in mass sculptural rejected work radical time of social upheaval and cultural innovation, Rodchenko’s and free of the weighty tradition of sculpture itself. Made at a from above by a filament,without apedestal, lacking solidity 1920), which featured concentric elliptical forms suspended Rodchenko’s Alexandr included space. Early twentieth-century precedents for these attempts in freely floated that sculpture make to seeking own, their European and American artists undertook a spatial quest of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, a succession of Western Between the first U.S. Navy V-2 rocket test flights in 1946 and a timeofculturalandtechnologicalchange. trend,reflectinganewconceptionofart’sinternational meaningduring hadbecomean late 1960s,free-floating“aerial”and“pneumatic”art outer-space environmentand,inparticular, thezero-gravityfield.By magnets andballoonstoaddresscomplexaestheticissuesraisedbythe satellites andmannedspacecraft,usingsimpletechnologiesincluding gallery.acounterpointtothefirst art experimentsoffered Theseartistic projectswereattemptedbothinside—andoutside-the of floatingart War race for space. In and Milan, New Paris, York,Düsseldorf an array practiceduringthepostwardecades,amidCold art contemporary andhorizontalorientation,arosein in spacewithouttheusualvertical hovering The ideaofsculpturewithnovisiblecontacttheearth, associated withthisissue. forsupplementalfiles See
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(ca. (ca. - Ballo, was one of displacement and disorientation: “One disorientation: and displacement of one was Ballo, Guido critic the by described as effect, The head. viewer’s forms papier-mâché glowed with fluorescent colors, suspended appearing to floatabove the which in light, or “black” ultraviolet with only lit room, darkened a was 1) (Fig. Fontana’s astral, and Strange Milan. Fontana Lucio di spaziale space and through space” [3]. In 1949 he unveiled [2]. This newkind of saidart, Fontana, wouldtake place“in Art” Spatial making be will they painting—but be not will endeavor Society [ARS],NewYork/SIAE Rome.Photo:FondazioneLucioFontana.) Fig. 1.
Rights Lucio Fontana,SpatialEnvironment,1949. (©2015Artists Arte spaziale. He declared that “on the moon they doi:10.1162/LEON_a_01353 at the Galleria del Naviglio in in Naviglio del Galleria the at Spatial Environment Spatial ©2018 ISAST L’Ambiente could not contemplate it from one point of view. Everything obelisk in the Place de la Concorde by obscuring its base became unstable, allusive” [4]. in shadow while lighting in blue the obelisk itself, so that it Fontana argued that the coming space age would usher in would seem to hover in space [10]. Although permission to a new set of aesthetics and proportions reflecting the new do this was ultimately denied, he continued to envision how experience of space flight, in which a new dimension was he could cause sculpture to float free of its base. added to mundane reality. In a set of notes with drawings In 1959, Klein proposed an “aeromagnetic sculpture” con- from 1951 he diagrammed how both the earthbound sculp- sisting of a blue sponge floating in space above its base. This ture and the earthbound viewer were limited through their idea was at once an improvement on his sponge sculptures contact with the earth. Sculptures in contact with the ground of that year, which were held up by thin, stem-like rods, and “lost” a potential spatial dimension; meanwhile the earth- a critique of his fellow artist Vassilakis Takis, whose “tele bound viewer experienced a “horizon line limit” beyond sculptures” used magnets to hold metal forms suspended in which he or she could not see. Fontana then illustrated the air, attached to the ground only by filaments. Klein, wishing “Conquest of Space,” where both forms and human viewers to bypass the conspicuous and understandable technique floated freely in all-surrounding space. The hot-air balloon employed by Takis in favor of something more marvelous was, wrote Fontana, “the first spatial form that conquers and less explicable, wrote that he had discovered space, that is contained in space in all its dimensions.” De- the solution of pure imagination. The sculptures will float tachment from the earth allowed for the first time a truly fifty centimeters or more above the base . . . without filaments “infinite spatial point of view,” leaving behind the terrestrial or other tricks. It will be pure levitation. In this way the aero- horizon line. To show this new awareness, Fontana depicted magnetic sculpture will float in space, and one will be able a human figure in space at the center of axes extending in to pass one’s hand between the base and the sculpture [11]. all directions, labeled “infinite horizon lines” [5]. Fontana’s “fourth dimension,” a new experience of unbounded and Klein’s idea, which he submitted to the French patent of- unending spatiality, recalls Guillaume Apollinaire’s early- fice, involved using helium to cause the sponge to float and a twentieth-century discussion of the “artistic fourth dimen- magnet concealed in the base (which would attract a hidden sion,” defined as the “immensity of space eternalizing itself magnet in the sponge) to keep it from floating away, thereby in all directions” [6]. achieving an equilibrium that seemingly defied gravity. The For Fontana’s younger colleague and friend, the French work was never executed. artist Yves Klein, space likewise signified a release from a Echoing Fontana’s definition of “spatial form” as being restricted, terrestrial orientation, in favor of what he termed “contained in space in all its dimensions,” Klein imagined “extradimensional sensibility.” Klein, like Fontana, saw spa- the sculptural object in a state of suspended gravity, sur- tial conquest in terms of an awakened, unfettered aesthetic rounded by space on all sides, with no discernible contact awareness, arguing that “terrestrial attraction” needed to with the earth. be superseded by “total physical and spiritual freedom.” In On 2 July 1959, critic Claude Rivière published an article contrast to the oppressive force of gravity, Klein celebrated entitled “Vers la sculpture aérienne” in the daily Combat. “levitation,” embracing what he called the “force of upward Rivière’s ideas about “aerial sculpture” were largely a sum- attraction toward space, toward nothing and everything at mary of Yves Klein’s theories, beginning with the notion the same time” [7]. Known for his pure blue monochrome that “Sculpture is still hindered by the burden of its base,” paintings of the late 1950s, Klein declared that he had himself followed by a reference to the unrealized floating obelisk. “gone forth into monochrome space,” not in the conventional, Without mentioning Takis by name, Rivière described the bodily sense of futuristic space travel but rather in expanded problem of having a filament that the spectator could dis- sensibility: “I felt myself impregnating volumetrically, out of cover. Ideally, he suggested, invisible magnetic fields could be all proportions and dimensions, into the ALL” [8]. developed that would suspend objects in orbit-like states of To publicize his dual 1957 Paris exhibits of blue panels at motion, so that floating sculpture would be a real rather than Galerie Iris Clert and blue-coated objects at Galerie Colette illusory achievement: “The sculpture doesn’t suggest space. Allendy, Klein released a great number of blue balloons (said IT IS SPACE. We find ourselves before a ring of artificial to be 1,001) into the sky. He would later declare this “aero- satellites that dance in a steady, absolute space, baffling and static sculpture” to be his “favorite work.” With it he achieved yet implacable” [12]. the solution to a problem that he said had preoccupied him: Klein explored the issue of floating sculpture yet again in a “to liberate sculpture from its base” [9]. Coming several photograph published in the catalogue of his 1961 retrospec- months before Sputnik, Klein’s balloons offered an aesthetic tive exhibit at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany foray into the atmosphere. (Fig. 2). The image showed the artist sitting cross-legged be- Klein became obsessed with the idea of a sculpture sus- fore his sculpture Le globe bleu, a store-bought globe thickly pended in space as a new art form, pursuing it alongside coated in Klein’s signature blue pigment. In the photograph his ongoing investigation of the “immaterial.” In 1958, as a the globe is shown floating in the air above its stand, as if complement to his exhibition at the Galerie Iris Clert known Klein were participating in an act of levitation. Captioned as Le Vide—an absolutely empty gallery, presented with great “The Liberation of the Sculpture from the Base,” the pho- fanfare—Klein proposed to publicly “levitate” the Egyptian tograph of the floating “Blue Globe” appears on the page of
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon_a_01353 by guest on 30 September 2021 of the Galerie Schmela, featured the raising of a transpar- ent plastic balloon filled with hot air, lit by searchlights (Fig. 3). The balloon was “accompanied by thousands of soap bubbles,” which a group of female volunteers “produced in huge quantity” [16]. The following year, in front of television cameras for a documentary being made about Zero, the scene was reen- acted with a “thousand balloons . . . fired by powerful spot- lights” rising into the night sky along with countless soap bubbles [17]. Reminiscent of Yves Klein’s release of balloons into the Paris sky, this event would later be described by Jack Burnham in his Beyond Modern Sculpture as a mix of publicity stunt and meaningful artistic experiment: “In part propaganda for the group, more importantly these balloons signaled the migration of material forms toward another area of activity” [18]. This “other area of activity” was, quite liter-
Fig. 2. Yves Klein, The Liberation of Sculpture from the Base: The Blue Globe, ally, the atmosphere; conceptually, it had to do with letting 1960. (© Yves Klein/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP Paris, 2015.) go of earthbound art forms. Balloons and bubbles floating into space were, in any number of ways, the antithesis of the catalogue juxtaposed with a picture of the “Aerostatic stone, metal and clay. Durable objects were replaced by fleet- Sculpture” of 1,001 balloons from 1957 and placed directly ing spectacle. above the famous 1960 photograph of Klein’s “Leap into the For his part, Zero cofounder Piene had begun to create Void,” likewise an artfully constructed trick photograph on his Light Ballets—motorized, rotating screens through which the theme of levitation. In these images—one of the artist changing patterns of light were projected onto the gallery looking at Earth floating in space, one sending balloons into walls, causing luminous tracings to circle the viewer on all space and another flying into space himself—Klein was of- sides. Piene envisioned art taking place in an “astronautic fering an alternative vision of the so-called conquest of space then being undertaken (when Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space later that year, Klein republished the “Blue Globe” image to illustrate that he had himself been the first to see Earth from space) [13]. Meanwhile, Klein’s Italian contemporary Piero Manzoni had, starting in the summer of 1960, worked on what he would later describe as the “first sculpture in space” [14]. His Scultura nello spazio was a small plastic ball held aloft by a strong air jet (he also experimented with using the airflow to support a large inflated balloon). A short film shows a blasé Manzoni sitting and smoking a cigarette while the ball rises and hovers, oscillating slightly, in the space in front of him. Here as elsewhere, Manzoni’s work seemed to paral- lel or echo Klein’s but without the apparent mysticism with which Klein imbued his art. Manzoni was also making a nod to his Milanese predecessor Fontana, whose conceptualiza- tion of space as extension in all directions had profoundly influenced him. Manzoni became fascinated with inflatable balloons, with their wildly variable dimensions, their ephem- eral presence and the indeterminate relation between inner and outer spaces. Closely aligned with Klein and Manzoni, the German group Zero, founded in the late 1950s by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, was also directly inspired by Fontana, whom they called “something like a spiritual father” [15]. Piene and Mack, with the addition to the group of Günther Uecker in 1961, developed a distinctly “aerial” aesthetics, nowhere more evident than in a succession of Zero “Demonstra- tions” enacted in the streets of Düsseldorf in the early 1960s. Fig. 3. Zero: Edition Exposition Demonstration, Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf, The first such Demonstration, held on 5 July 1961, outside 5 July 1961. (Photo: Paul Brandenburg. Courtesy ZERO Foundation, Düsseldorf.)
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Since I didn’t want to paint anymore . . . I thought the only way is to make a paint- ing that floats. And I asked Billy Klüver to help me make a painting that floats . . . and the idea is to fill them with helium and let them out of your window and they’ll float away and that’s one less object [22].
The pillows were memorialized in a short experimental film by Robert Maas entitled Silver Flotations, which shows them drifting in an otherwise empty gallery, shot from a fluid, “floating” viewpoint and accompanied by a weird, space-age musical soundtrack. In 1968 Jack Burnham used the term “Air- Fig. 4. Andy Warhol, Silver Clouds, 1966. (© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Borne Sculpture” to describe the phenom- Inc./Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York. Photo: Rudy Burckhardt. Courtesy Leo Castelli Gallery.) enon of floating sculpture. “Within the past ten years,” he wrote,
theater,” describing the goal of his art as “the shooting of the attempts varying in resourcefulness have been made which viewer into space” [19]. go beyond the Constructivist ambition of the total libera- Writing three decades later, Nam June Paik recalled the tion of sculpture from the base. Short of shooting sculpture effect that Piene’s Light Ballet had had upon him. Piene, he into orbit . . . some sculptors have tried to free their forms said, “did show a floating b/w light flakes, which were floating of all contact with the Earth [23]. a weightless aesthetics!! [sic]” Paik reminds us that Piene’s lighter-than-air displays were “before the moonlanding or Floating sculpture signified an act of liberation, conceived the famous pillow of Andy Warhol”—a reference to Warhol’s as the leaving behind of an object-based approach to art. renowned 1966 exhibition of Silver Clouds, the floating Mylar As Willoughby Sharp put it in a May 1968 article entitled pillows designed in collaboration with Bell Lab engineer Billy “Air Art,” “Reality is events, not objects.” Sharp conceived “Air Klüver (Fig. 4). Paik found in Piene’s work a new approach to Art” as a timely expression of the desire to transcend bound- art, suited to a new era: “This weightless rotation somehow aries and absolutes. As he explained it, “Static structures are did hit me as a precursor of space-age aesthetics . . . non- anachronisms. They are irrelevant to today’s cultural and gravitational existence, which will grip the world” [20]. Art technological situation. . . . Objects perpetuate the fallacy of that floated in the space of the gallery offered a preview of the simple location” [24]. condition of zero gravity to be found in outer space. After citing as precedents Klein, Manzoni and the Zero The German artist Hans Haacke, who was associated with group, Sharp called attention to a current exhibit held by the Zero in the early 1960s in Düsseldorf, would himself make a Utopie group in Paris, entitled Structures gonflables, which number of “floating” works between 1965 and 1967, when he featured more than 100 “inflatable structures,” including a spoke of his admiration for Piene’s Light Ballets: “Some of his photograph of the monumental silver balloon communica- work gives you a feeling of weightlessness and phenomenal tions satellite Echo I. Meanwhile, Sharp had organized his involvement which I admire greatly.” Haacke understood own exhibition, Air Art, which opened at the Philadelphia Zero as pushing technology “to the point where it blossoms Arts Council and traveled to a number of other North Ameri- into something very poetic, weightless, and irrational” [21]. can venues. Featuring ten artists along with the Architectural In his 1966 exhibit Wind and Water Sculpture at the How- Association Group, the show included Haacke’s wind work ard Wise Gallery in New York, Haacke included a work con- and Warhol’s helium-filled silver pillows alongside newer sisting of a white balloon, three feet in diameter, held aloft by works using unstable media such as bubbles and steam. an air jet in a manner strongly reminiscent of Manzoni’s 1960 In the exhibition catalogue, William A. Leonard, direc- attempts. Haacke’s Floating Sphere was meant to provoke a tor of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, framed phenomenological encounter between the spectator and the Air Art as a direct response to humans going into space and nonstable entity of the balloon, thereby activating the specta- the resulting sense of dislocation, as well as to an increased tor’s awareness of space and time as nonstatic. environmental awareness: “Because of the space program Warhol’s Silver Clouds were shown in New York a few and the present concern for atmospheric conditions, some months later. Warhol later explained the impetus and inten- artists have turned to air as an esthetic medium.” Where, he
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References and Notes 17 G. Winkler, “When the Avant-Garde Become Classics: The ‘ZERO’ 1 See E. Kac, “Against Gravitation: Art and the Joys of Levitation,” in Group and the Consequences,” in Wiehager, ZERO aus Deutschland Zero Gravity: A Cultural User’s Guide (London: Arts Catalyst, 2005) [16] p. 71. pp. 18–25. 18 Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and 2 Lucio Fontana, letter to Giampiero Giani, 2 November 1949, in Jole Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Bra- De Sanna, Lucio Fontana: Materia, Spazio, Concetto (Milan: Mursia, ziller, 1968) p. 47. 1993) p. 168. Translations are by the author unless noted otherwise. 19 O. Piene, “Paths to Paradise” (1961), in O. Piene and H. Mack, eds., 3 L’Ambiente Spaziale di Lucio Fontana, exhibition invitation (Milan: Zero, H. Beckman, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973) p. 149. Galleria del Naviglio, 1949) n.p. 20 N.J. Paik, “Two Rails Make One Single Track” (1991), in Otto Piene: 4 Guido Ballo, “Albisola e Fontana,” Omnibus (4 June 1950), excerpted Retrospektive, 1952–1996, exh. cat., S. von Wiese and S. Rennert, eds. in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat. (Milan: Palazzo Reale, 1972) p. 262. (Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf im Ehrenhof; Cologne: Wienand, 1996) 5 Lucio Fontana, notes for the Technical Manifesto of Spatialism, 1951. p. 46. Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan. 21 Jack Burnham, “Hans Haacke Wind and Water Sculpture,” Tri-Quar- 6 G. Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters (1913), trans. anon., excerpted in terly Supplement, No. 1 (Spring 1967) p. 22. Edward Fry, Cubism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966) p. 116. 22 Andy Warhol, 1966 CBS television interview with Alan Solomon, 7 Yves Klein, “Discours prononcé à l’occasion de l’Exposition Tinguely quoted in Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol (New York: Praeger, 1970) p. à Düsseldorf (janvier 1959),” in Y. Klein, Le dépassement de la prob- 30. lématique de l’art (La Louvière: Montbliart, 1959) pp. 21–22. 23 Burnham [18] p. 44. See also Sean Topham, Blowup: Inflatable Art, 8 Klein, Le dépassement [7] p. 2. Archicture, and Design (New York: Prestel, 2002) pp. 80–119 (“Shock of the Pneu”). 9 Yves Klein, Dimanche: Le journal d’un seul jour, 27 November (1960), p. 1. 24 Willoughby Sharp, “Air Art,” Studio International 175, No. 900 (May 1968) p. 264. 10 Yves Klein, “Preparation et presentation de l’exposition du 28 avril 1958, Chez Iris Clert,” in Klein, Le dépassement [7] pp. 7–8. 25 W.A. Leonard, “Introduction,” in W. Sharp, Air Art, exh. cat. (Phila- delphia: Arts Council; New York: Kineticism Press, 1968) p. 3. 11 Yves Klein, letter to Iris Clert, dated 21 May 1959, cited in Iris Clert, Iris-Time: L’artventure (Paris: DeNoël, 1978) p. 182. 26 Annette Michelson, “Bodies in Space: Film as ‘Carnal Knowledge,’ ” Artforum 7, No. 6 (February 1969) p. 57. 12 Claude Rivière, “Vers la sculpture aérienne,” Combat, No. 4668 (2 July 1959) p. 3. 27 U. Eco, “Programmed Art” (1962), trans. anon., in G. Brett, Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Con- 13 Yves Klein le Monochrome: Il Nuovo Realismo del Colore, exh. cat. temporani de Barcelona, 2000) p. 268. (Milan: Galleria Apollinaire, 1961) n.p.
14 Piero Manzoni, “Alcuni realizzazioni, alcuni esperimenti, alcuni pro- Manuscript received 2 February 2015. getti,” Evoluzione delle lettere e delle arti (Milan) 1, No. 1 (January 1963) p. 221. Stephen Petersen is the author of Space-Age Aesthet- 15 Otto Piene, “The Development of Group Zero,”Times Literary Sup- ics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Postwar European plement, No. 3262 (3 September 1964) p. 812. Avant-Garde (Penn State Press, 2009). A frequent contributor 16 R. Wiehager, “The ZERO Spirit: Action, Demonstration, and Team- to Leonardo Reviews, he writes on topics relating to the space work,” in R. Wiehager, ed., ZERO aus Deutschland, 1957–1966. Und age, new media art, photography and 1960s counterculture. Heute/ZERO out of Germany, 1957–1966. And Today, exh. cat., M. Robinson and C. Spelsberg, trans. (Esslingen: Villa Merkel; Stutt- Currently he is preparing an exhibition on the Beats and sixties gart: Cantz Verlag, 2000) p. 24. culture for the University of Delaware Museums.
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