Art and Symbolism in Space
I’m an art nerd, according to my husband, who has the art degree and is the fabulous person who has turned me onto contemporary art. He’s introduced me to dozens of new artists and talked me through enough background at museums and installations that I’ve grown a new appreciation for the breadth and creativity beyond the classics I learned about in my high school art history class. All that to say, we visit a lot of art while we’re on vacation, and we notice and look for it in public spaces, too.
Like the need for greenery, I am a firm believer that we need art in space.
I’m also a firm believer that not all the art is going to be good 😄.
A large sculpture of a fish with living plants making up its body. This was part of an Under the Sea exhibit at the Phipps Conservatory (botanical gardens) in Pittsburgh, in Spring 2024.
So picture this: In the world of The Dementia, the year is 2224, Aster Reeves, who is the director of the generation ships project holds a couple of contests as a publicity effort to generate goodwill for her hideously expensive and controversial space ships. One is a naming contest, which is where we get the uplifting and borderline pretentious names of Destiny, Grace, Peace, and Hope.
She (or rather her staff) hold a second contest for artists to design the pillar and the Middeck public parks for both cities in each ship. It’s a grueling year-long selection process. The first couple proposals are easy. What better way to commemorate their connection to Earth than by representing the land and the ocean on Destiny and Grace. Trees and mushrooms have trunks and stalks and lend themselves to the structural support requirements of the central pillar. Likewise, with a few adjustments, a vertical coral reef and the tall kelp forests of the deeper ocean make a seamless representation of underwater ecosystems.
But the last two selections are more difficult.
The Mountain theme is deemed too similar to the Forest theme, and the Ice Core theme pillar is too scientific and its park design too depressing. No one quite knows what to do with a Australia theme because every element is poisonous, venomous, or both.
The Great Artists theme is a strong contender, but the selection committee gets stuck on the list of who is to be commemorated, and after six months of infighting, Aster Reeves tells them to scrap it and start again.
Katz Plaza in Pittsburgh has a 25-foot bronze fountain, with chairs shaped like eyes.
One design that is brought up again is the celestial bodies of the solar system, a memorial to humanity’s origins. It was originally scrapped because no one wanted giant balls that represent the planets cluttering the view in the Promenade. The idea was for the Promenade to feel open, not like you were about to get rained on. So they send the artist back to the drawing board and she comes up with something a little more abstract and representative of their home planets and star for the alpha city, and the classic constellations and galaxies for the beta city. It gets the job done, and goes on Hope.
Peace, the perpetual problem child ship, is the last to have its design finalized. The selection committee really liked one idea to make the micro-universe macro-sized, but were not keen on the evolution of life in the original proposal. Too many slime molds and ameoba, not enough inspiration. The DNA double helix was suggested early on, but argued against because wrapping it around the pillar would render it scientifically inaccurate. But there was no way to do it without the pillar. Despite the artists suggestion to get rid of it, the pillar was in fact an engineering requirement. They had a similar argument about the atomic structures proposed for the beta city (antiquated! wrong! but what about quantum theory!).
In the end though, they didn’t have any better alternatives by the time Aster Reeves locked them in a conference room and told them she wasn’t sending in dinner until they’d made their decision. So up went the double helix, with RNA strands for the branching support structures. Up went the antiquated models of atomic structures. Both had the pillar “ruining the aesthetic integrity of my vision!” said the artist. Both were done, which was most important to the project managers, Aster Reeves, and their budget. Even if Peace’s sculptures did look more like a horror show than the scientific inspiration it was intended to be.
