In space art, the canvas is infinite

Zero gravity almost ruined painting for Frank Pietronigro. Several years ago Pietronigro put on a pair of goggles, sealed himself in a clear plastic bag bigger than a refrigerator and flew high into the atmosphere on a NASA KC-135 turbojet that swooped in parabolic arcs, creating 15-second intervals of near-weightlessness. With each turn, Pietronigro floated free of gravity and squeezed pastry bags filled with acrylic paint that coiled like smoke.

By the end of the flight, Pietronigro was a mess, horribly sick, unable to see out of his paint-covered goggles, barely able to breathe through all the fumes. He looked like a human dropcloth. He had created his first -- and so far only -- drift painting. Sort of a Jackson Pollock without the canvas, as he puts it.

“I consider this painting realism,” Pietronigro says. “What I experienced was in the painting. I was sick. I was tired. It was like life. It was a profound emotional experience. I plan to do it again and see what comes up.”

Next time, he hopes it won’t be his lunch.

Of course, there isn’t a painting per se, only some splattered clothing, which the artist displayed recently at the first conference in the United States dedicated to space art -- a loosely defined genre in which either the subject or the medium involves leaving the Earth.

He also played a video of the 1998 flight that had a crowd of several dozen laughing like crazy.

For three days in February three dozen space artists gathered at the Carnegie Mellon University’s West Coast campus at the NASA Ames Research Center near Mountain View to talk about their work, toss around ideas and dream aloud about making art freed from the fetters of gravity.

“The space art community is large and extensive and we’re trying to institutionalize it, so it’s not just folks on the fringe,” says Lowry Burgess, former dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon, which was a sponsor.

“Space Artists: The Cultural Frontiers of Space Travel” was the first of its kind in the U.S.; last year a similar workshop was sponsored by the European Space Agency in the Netherlands.

Artists aren’t the only ones hoping to rush into space. London’s Tate, home to such earthbound work as J.M.W. Turner’s archive, has launched a program to put the first gallery in orbit. Although “Tate in Space” is so far limited to architectural drawings posted on its website, trustees have announced that, as program director Sandy Nairne put it, “The next Tate site should be in space.” In your face, Thomas Krens.

In some sense, space art, as Burgess notes, has existed as long as man has been fascinated by the stars. “Space art is a useful moniker for a large territory of activity,” he says. “The first space art was people looking at the sky and registering marks about celestial occurrences. As soon as humans became human they were looking at the sky and making marks. The benchmark comes when human beings can actually place works of art in space. That changes the equation from Earth to space itself.”

Burgess approached NASA early in the shuttle program about taking artistic payloads into space, which years later resulted in the space agency calling for project proposals. Burgess won, and in 1989 his “Boundless Cubic Lunar Aperture” roared into space. The conceptual project was almost as complicated as a shuttle launch: Burgess collected water from many of the world’s major rivers, made a hologram of an empty mine and packed it in a cube, which was sent into orbit and then buried in the Earth.

“All my work is involved with the cosmos,” he says. “My work comes from the feeling of rehanging the Earth in the sky.”

There are other forms of space art as well. Arthur Woods, who grew up near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, created a small sculpture of geometric cubes called “Cosmic Dancer” that was carried to the Russian Mir space station in 1993, where it was allowed to float free.

Ioannis Michalou(di)S, who is affiliated with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, makes sculptures out of aerogel, the lightest material in the world. “It’s 99% air,” he explained at the conference. “It represents the weightless future we want. There’s no materiality .... The common point between science and art is strong imagination.”

Space artists say there’s a practical side to what they do too.

Pietronigro, who lives in San Francisco and is a founder of the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium, an organization of space artists, suggests that art can make space travel less tedious. “We want to enrich the cultural frontiers of space exploration,” he says. “How might art reduce stress, boredom and promote relationships between people on long-term space flights? As a painter I lose all sense of time and space. The time it takes to get to Mars will stay the same, but maybe there are activities that will help them lose sense of time and space.”

A galaxy of sand

Others see art as a way of creating images to explain science. In 2003, La Canada Flintridge’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory hired Daniel Goods as its first artist in residence. One of his projects, which has yet to be built, is called Playground. One grain of sand represents an entire galaxy and a hole drilled into the grain (which can be seen only under a microscope) represents the part of space where 120 planets have been discovered; seven rooms full of sand represent the entire known galaxy.

“The type of projects I come up with are presented in a way different than audiences are used to seeing NASA-types of information,” Goods says. “Normally you see posters and that sort of thing. I try to make more of an experiential way of experiencing the information.”

Goods’ work “Light/Shadow” dramatizes how difficult it is to look for dim planets in other solar systems because of the huge amount of light thrown off by stars. Goods projects a movie on a wall and then shines a white light from the ground onto the same space, which blots out the film. But when people walk in front of the light their shadows allow the movie to be seen; the more people walk in front of the light, the more the movie can be seen, a metaphor for scientific collaboration.

“In science people kind of stumble across discoveries,” Goods says. “I try to do that in my work. People work together to block out the light. In a way that’s what the JPL mission is all about. We’re yearning to know if there’s someone else out there like us.”

That’s true for space artists as well. At the final night of the conference, Goods asked for all who call themselves space artists to raise their hands. Only a couple of arms shot up.

“Is there something called space art?” Goods said later. “I’m an artist who’s working with the cosmos. I work with space now. Eventually I want to do something else.”

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‘Light/Shadow’

What: Daniel Goods’ work “Light/Shadow” will be shown in the entrance pavilion area of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino.

When: 6:30 p.m. March 29

Price: Free

Contact: (626) 304-0270