Art and Culture: Imagining Space Travel

Fascinating lecture at the Science Museum by the curator of the Cosmonauts exhibition, Natalia Sidlina.

It turned out she is an art historian not a scientist and had approached the show with an eye to the art of the objects and the art it has inspired.

I hadn’t really understood the last room of the show which just had one a wooden mannequin in it on a platform in a red and blue room but she talked us thought the significance of it. The red represents Mars and the blue the sky. The mannequin was designed to take around the moon before man went to test space’s influence on organic matter which was placed in small cavities in the body. It hadn’t needed to be in the shape of a man or to have the face of Yuri Gagarin but it showed how the philosophy and science of space were entwined together.

She went into a lot of detail on the early philosophy of space in Russia. I’m not sure I understood all of it but I could see how it came from the same sources as the influences on modernist art. She described how artists both imagined space and then reacted to it once man had gone there. She also talked about how many of the imagined ideas turned out how close to reality there were.

She also talked about how contemporary artists were adopting some of these ideas, often unwittingly, such as a work in this year’s Biennale in Venice which resembled the mannequin mentioned earlier but the artist claimed not to have seen it.