Space is just out there waiting, an undiscovered, unspoilt quantum wilderness. I’ve written before about a planet of poets, trying to poet their way to a new society and watching the crops they sowed wilt in a blight of pretentsion.
Where do artists fit in in this creative universe? Well, I figure perhaps the best place would be the asteroid belt, great grey rocks that may soon turn out to be the future prosperity of Earth as the corporations mine them out for iridium, titanium and all manner of valuable metals.
But in the meantime, they are lifeless boulders with the complexion of ashes. From the size of footballs to hundreds of kilometres across.
Ready, and waiting, for interplanetary gentrification. Enter the artists.
“Art for an Intergalactic Race” proclaimed the flyers in every city. “One Small Step for a Man, a Giant Leap for Human Culture” was emblazoned on giant banners over the motorways/freeways/interstrada. “Leave Your Mark on God’s Creation” was painted down the side of a skyscraper in Salt Lake City. Applicants were required to do nothing more than proclaim their fitness, after all, there were plenty of asteroids to go round…
Every artist is given a small spaceship and a very large supply of paint, special paint that can coat with thick colour in layers only a molecule thick. The spaceships are on preprogrammed autopilot so all the artists have to do is eat their freeze-dried space food and urinate into a rubber hose. It is a very boring voyage, and all the artists have to do is talk to twelve other artists of their choice. All these thirteen way conversations are beamed back to Earth to be broadcast on very very earnest radio stations in the dead of night, listened to by no-one but a few insomniacs and deranged cultural commentators.
Eventually each spacecraft arrives at its randomly allocated asteroid, and every artist disembarks to begin their project under a glittering hail of stars. All wear spacesuits part from the Japense conceptualist Umagi who walks out of his spaceship naked and allows his decompressing intestines to form a ribbon around a minor planet the size of a house.
“Is he encompassing the asteroid, or is the asteroid encompassing him?” was the debate back on earth.
Other artists went for entire coatings of one colour, including one who claimed to have used transparent paint. One had taken along some of Rothko’s ashes, and used two colours before he realised he had hung the asteroid upside down. Abstract space squiggles - very tedious and predictable - decorated others, while another carved out the huge asteroid Vesta into the likeness of female genitals and coloured them in crimson reflective paint. He thought he was celebrating womanhood on an unprecedented scale. Most said he was a sad exploitative old man.
Asteroids ended up as moon sized pastoral scenes, fluffy clouds above fluffy sheep, green fields on a bedrock of scheiss and silicate. Thee are impressionist asteroids, expressionist asteroids, and a descendant of Duchamp urinated on the surface of one and said that asteroid was now both a urinal AND a work of art.
The urine froze into yellow space crystals before it hit the ground.
Asteroids were red, asteroids were blue, asteroids were Mondrians, others were Koons.
The asteroid that eventually caused a mass extinction on Earth was a Vettriano...retro dancers on the beach wiped out all life, as others had previously thought Vettriano had wiped out at.
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26.07.14
