Feature

Space Race

Rob La Frenais on the other side of the story

Cosmonaut Alexander Polischuk with Arthur Woods’s Cosmic Dancer sculpture aboard Mir space station in 1993

‘Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever.’ – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Most people who know something about space history – apart from the fact that the first man in space was Yuri Gagarin, whose launch in 1961 scared the hell out of the cold war West – are familiar with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s maxim. It appears at the very end of the Science Museum’s pioneering exhibition, ‘Cosmonauts – Birth of a Space Age’, which is the first large-scale attempt in this country to present the Russian/Soviet Union version of the space race, begun in 1957 with the successful orbit of Sputnik, to a general public. Born out of a long diplomatic dance between the UK and Russia, starting with the British Council’s ‘Gagarin in Britain’ in 2011, outside which Elena Gagarina unveiled a replica of a statue of her iconic father, the exhibition begins with a bang with a suprematist painting by Ilya Chasnik, less well known than Kazimir Malevich but no less impressive, and some never-before-seen drawings by cosmist thinker and engineer Tsiolkovsky, including extraordinary depictions of a spaceship from the late 19th century. Cosmism was a 19th-century natural philosophy founded by thinker Nicolai Fyodorov which advocated ‘storming the heavens’ and radical life extension, and accompanied the enthusiasm for space travel into the communist era.

But it is a long journey from the hopes of space enthusiast clubs of the 1920s, when ordinary Russians allegedly melted down household cutlery to build rockets, to the present, when a chastened NASA relies on former Soviet technology to get its astronauts back and forth from the International Space Station. Had the celebrated but shadowy chief designer Sergei Korolev, a Ukrainian whose portrait welcomes us as we enter, lived longer (he died in 1966), the Russians may well have been the first on the moon.

Boris Groys recently published an apposite essay in Supercommunity, ‘Cosmic Anxiety – The Russian Case’, which reflects on this era. He draws attention to the point in Russian history immediately before the Russian Revolution, when he says ‘writers and artists invoked the coming of chaos – in the staging of the mystery-opera Victory over the Sun. The most prominent members of the Russian avant-garde movement of the time participated in its production: Kazimir Malevich, Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Mikhail Matyushin. The opera celebrated the extinction of the sun and the descent of the cosmos into chaos, symbolised by the black square that Malevich painted for the first time as part of the scenography for the opera’. Unlike the culture surrounding NASA and Apollo, echoes of this era still animate Russian space culture and most cosmonauts are said to acknowledge the inspiration of avant-garde art and Cosmism.

Science Museum space curator Doug Millard collaborated with two contemporary art curators to build this blockbuster exhibition. They have clearly worked hard to reverse the popular notion that space history is exclusively about NASA and the Apollo mission, and this exhibition provides a useful public corrective. However, the only artworks that could be called contemporary in the gallery itself are those from the late 19th century and the 1920s. From then on, exhibition design puts any sense of contemporary art into second place. Unless, that is, you want to take a Context Art-style view of this exhibition; clearly, the objects and the backstories are the most impressive part of this epic presentation.

Where else would you see Tsiolkovsky’s ear trumpet, the space glove that belonged to the tragic Vladimir Komarov (who we now know insisted on piloting the ramshackle Soyuz 1 on a flight he knew to be doomed in order to save his friend Gagarin from what they both understood to be a suicide mission), a Sputnik-shaped samovar, a ‘to The Cosmos’ tea set, Sergei Krikalev’s (the human who has lived longest in space) engraved personal spoon from the MIR space station, Laika’s (the first dog in space) spacesuit, pneumatic cosmonaut trousers and, amazingly, a solar cell from Sputnik 3? Who knew they had them in 1958? This is a remarkable feat of collecting from institutes, museums and private collections from all over Russia. And that’s just the knicknacks. The spacecraft are spectacular objects in themselves, even if you didn’t know the stories behind them: from the never-before-exhibited Voshkhod, which transported Valentina Tereshkova (the first woman in space), to the LK vehicle, Russia’s human lunar lander, a carefully kept state secret until 1989. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, finally beating them in the space race, the Russians were within an inch of getting there with a single cosmonaut in this very vehicle. Although the Soviet Union was already landing on the moon with early robotic spacecraft (in the early 1970s it brought some moon rock back to Earth by means of an automated vehicle), the ignominy of being beaten by the US was such that they kept their own efforts to land a man on the moon under wraps until the break-up of the USSR. This vehicle, never seen before, exhibited alongside a similar engineering model of the Lunokhod (moon walker, still sitting on the dark side of the moon) is indeed a beautiful, alien artwork in its own right.

The exhibition is also surrounded by other fascinating ephemera, such as posters and popular music of the era of Gagarin marking the start of the atheist cult of this small, smiling man in the space helmet whose flight on 12 April 1961 is still celebrated worldwide each year by space enthusiasts – including artists. Despite losing the race to the moon, the Soviet triumphs in space continued into the 1970s: the first spacewalk by Alexei Leonov; the early space stations that led to the fascinating era of the MIR space station; forerunner of the International Space Station, the first human attempt to live in space and possibly the first humanised vision of space, with cosmonauts living day to day in a real-life version of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris. The break-up of the Soviet Union provided the backdrop to this version of the space race, with the ‘last Soviet citizen’, Krikalev, more or less stuck in the space station during the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Krikalev, along with Tereshkova, was there for the exhibition’s series of opening events, including an interesting talk by Tereshkova in which she stated that she would be prepared to die on Mars.

This era, at the end of the Soviet dream, is one that has inspired artists and filmmakers such as the Kabakovs and the Romanian Andre Ujica, whose 1996 film Out of the Present is one of the iconic interpretations of the atmosphere on the MIR station. His film, which features Krikalev, must surely have informed the organisers’ decision in this section of the show to project on the ceiling slow tracking shots of the space station which, in Ujica’s film, intersperse the human interactions on the station with TV footage of the tanks rolling in to besiege the Russian White House and the images of fellow cosmonauts on earth using unofficial radio ham equipment to reassure their beleaguered colleague. None of that is here, just the tracking shots, presumably available as archive, so we get art as recycled exhibition design. But the backstories around MIR provide inspiration for a number of artists, including the story that the first ever sculpture in space, Cosmic Dancer, 1993, by Arthur Woods, floated in MIR for a number of years and is now deep in the ocean along with the other fragments of the de-orbited station. The backstories are in fact the best thing about this exhibition, along with the flurry of interest in Russian space history, including a special exhibition of archive material from the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre at Calvert 22, Soviet Space Archive Configuration 11 and a special issue of the Calvert Journal entitled ‘Soviet Space Dreams’.

The extensive exhibition catalogue also includes backstories worthy of study, provided by, among others, Russian contemporary art curator Natalia Sidlina and Ukranian artist and curator Julia Tcharfas. Sidlina’s fascinating study of the Russian spacesuit (they are still produced to this day by a Soviet-era collective, Zvezda) reveals that, after Gagarin and the other pioneers’ flights, the Russians thought spaceflight so safe that they stopped wearing spacesuits for takeoff and landing. That was until a descending spacecraft depressurised, killing everyone on board, in one of Russia’s rare space accidents (the US, with the two shuttle disasters, holds the worst safety record). The Orlan spacesuit, developed by the collective for Leonov (who became, coincidentally, a painter like the Americans Buzz Aldrin and Alan Bean) to wear on the first spacewalk, is still the model for modern extra-vehicular attire. And it is interesting to discover that the words CCCP (Cyryllic for USSR) on Gagarin’s helmet in the famous shot of him taking off were painted there at the last minute in case the rural population mistook him for a western spy descending into the remote Russian countryside, just like the farmers who found the body of ‘Ivan Ivanovitch’ (the generic name for the test mannequins flown into space instead of humans) who thought they were finding a dead alien.

Tcharfas also writes interestingly about the work of the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems, another Soviet-era surviving institution, which in the 1960s locked volunteers in what we would now call a space analogue in the experiment ‘A Year In Space’ to see how they would survive. The well-researched catalogue is evidence that the organisers fully intended to integrate contemporary artists’ visions into the exhibition. So what happened? Like some of the rumours about the political pressures on the timing of this exhibition, the answer is not clear.

Instead, we see a number of contemporary art tropes integrated into the exhibition design (by Real Studio), such as video screens tilted at angles against the wall and yet another James Turrell appropriation in the end room, framing the quotation ‘Earth is a cradle …’ and shining down on a cradle with a mannequin (‘Ivan Ivanovitch’ again). To be fair to Millard and the curators, this mannequin is the actual one flown around the moon on Zond-7 in 1969 in preparation for the failed Soviet attempt on the moon in the year of the successful Apollo mission, but I am sure the cultural significance is lost on the public. Passing into this ‘installation’ is a standard piece of 1980s Russian kitsch, a sentimental painting by Oleg Vokolov, Sevastianov Family, 1981, of a cosmonaut pondering his destiny on Mars while his distraught wife mopes in the background. Perhaps it is intended to be ironic.

There are so many missed opportunities, considering that this exhibition claims to be the first to take a cultural view of Soviet and Russian space programmes. The list is long of contemporary artists who have been inspired by Star City and Baikonur: Simon Patterson, Jane & Louise Wilson, the Otolith Group, Louise K Wilson, Andrew Kötting, Black Audio Film Collective (Flow Motion), Stefan Gec and many others from the UK alone; Oleg Kulik, Vadim Fishkin, the Kabakovs, Yuri Leiderman, Andre Udjica, Dragan Zhivadinov and Marko Peljhan from Russia and Eastern/Central Europe; Laurie Anderson and Bradley Pitts (the first naked performance in weightlessness at Star City) from the US. I do not understand why the museum would have hired two clearly knowledgeable contemporary art curators (one is now at Tate) if there had not been an intention to include some work by at least one or two of these artists.

The Science Museum, like its neighbours the V&A and the Natural History Museum, is designed for a massive throughput of visitors, including children and tourists, and there are always compromises to be made. But, as someone who has worked with contemporary artists in these museums, I do feel that the institution should have done better here. Perhaps Groys points the way when he cites cosmist founder Fyodorov: ‘The museum does not punish the obsoleteness of the museum items by removing and destroying them. Thus the museum is fundamentally at odds with progress. Progress consists in replacing old things with new things. The museum, by contrast, is a machine for making things last, making them immortal.’ The Science Museum at least does not fail in this respect.

Rob La Frenais is an independent curator.

First published in Art Monthly 392: Dec-Jan 15-16.