Windows on the universe
By CURTIS KRUEGER
Published February 1, 2005
Think of NASA'S most famous missions - moon landings, space shuttle flights, martian rovers - and Sun Rings probably won't come to mind.
Sun Rings is a 90-minute, 10-movement musical and visual composition performed by the Kronos Quartet "as a symbolic representation of the wanderings of space probes Voyager and Galileo."
NASA commissioned this work in two parts, in 2000 and 2002, at a combined cost of $44,000. The piece features the strains of the string quartet, plus "sounds of space" that were recorded on two Voyager spacecraft, and images of the solar system flashing onto a screen, all to help audiences feel firsthand the mysteries of the cosmos.
In these tight budget times, you might not expect a taxpayer-financed federal space agency to strike up the violins. But Sun Rings isn't the only time NASA has paid to launch artists on flights of inspiration.
During the past 40 years, NASA has become a little-known benefactor of the arts, commissioning hundreds of drawings, paintings and other works about itself. The same department that perfects the art of space travel also collects the art of space. The NASA art now includes works by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell and Annie Leibovitz.
NASA is granting $20,000 so avant garde performance artist Laurie Anderson can serve as the agency's first (and perhaps only) artist in residence; she's creating a film on the moons of the solar system, which will premiere later this year at the 2005 World Exposition in Japan.
Patti LaBelle was nominated for a Grammy in 2003 for her performance of the song Way Up There, written by a composer commissioned by NASA. The space agency also has sponsored poets, enlisted essayists and paid hundreds of artists to create sketches, watercolors and detailed oil paintings.
Not everyone is clapping.
"We're concerned that NASA is spending money on art," said David Williams, vice president of the group Citizens Against Government Waste. Considering the size of the federal deficit, and recent critiques by federal auditors of NASA spending, Williams says someone should be asking: Is this really a priority?
On the other hand, NASA's annual art budget has hovered between $35,000 and $90,000 during the past seven years, which amounts to a tiny particle of the agency's $11-billion annual spending. The total art budget during those seven years was $386,000.
Controversies have been few since the program was created in 1962 by then-NASA administrator James Webb.
"He thought that artists could provide a unique perspective in documenting the space program," said Bert Ulrich, who works as NASA's curator (along with other duties). Ulrich said artists document the space program in a way that goes beyond utilitarian photos of this launch and that astronaut crew.
"This is yet another way to inspire people about science and its wonders," Ulrich added.
Judith Powers-Jones, executive director of the Pinellas County Arts Council, is not too familiar with the collection itself, but said the national importance of the space program, plus "the potential for incredible imagery," make it a natural for artistic documentation.
Artists, she said, can use imagination and research to give the public glimpses of "the sort of special moments of what the astronauts would get to see which none of us will ever get to see."
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who flew aboard Columbia in 1986, supports the art program because "he feels that it records man's space accomplishments and also acts to inspire the possibilities of what could lie ahead," spokesman Bryan Gulley said.
Most of the 800 or so works in NASA's possession are housed at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, and many are on display there. About 2,100 other pieces that were created under NASA's auspices were given in the 1970s to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., Ulrich said.
Some works are loaned to museums. Many can be viewed on the Internet, especially at a NASA Web site called Copernica (www.hq.nasa.gov/copernica/) that is a commissioned work of art itself.
For the artists, getting a commission from NASA is usually considered a great opportunity, not a jackpot. NASA has often given artists what it calls an "honorarium" of $2,500 or so, even to artists who normally command $50,000 or $100,000 per painting.
Watercolorist Barbara Ernst Prey, who was chosen to paint the 2003 White House Christmas card, received a $2,500 commission from NASA to paint the international space station and another to paint the space shuttle. Asked how much those watercolors would normally cost a buyer, she laughed and said it would be hard to say.
"If I figured out the time I spent doing the paintings, I'm losing money, but this is something that I feel very strongly about, and I'm just honored to be part of the program. How could you not?"
After getting the space station commission, Prey traveled to the Kennedy Space Center, spoke with NASA workers, and saw some of the hardware about to be sent into orbit. She compares her opportunity to that of artists such as Frederic Remington, who seized the chance in the late 1800s and early 1900s to paint and sculpt scenes of the American West.
"We're doing amazing things in the space program . . . to be part of documenting space history is just amazing," said Prey of Oyster Bay, N.Y.
After the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated while re-entering Earth's atmosphere in 2003, Prey was asked by NASA to paint a memorial picture, a print of which would be given to each family of the astronauts who died.
While many remember the end of that flight, she decided to paint its beginning in Columbia Tribute, her portrait of the shuttle blasting off. "I chose something that celebrated their lives and was very positive."
Now she's at work on a new project, both for her and for NASA. She plans to paint the X-43A, an experimental NASA jet that reached a speed of Mach 9.7 - nearly 7,000 mph - in November. She witnessed the launch, but is still pondering how best to depict the 12-foot-long hypersonic plane.
Because part of the NASA program's goal is to document space, it's not surprising that many of the drawings and paintings are highly realistic. Some works Ulrich calls "hyperrealistic," such as Paul Calle's sketches in the 1960s of Gemini astronauts, which are so detailed it's "like they live and breathe."
And because many artists feel awe and pride for their American astronaut subjects, they often have created heroic portraits, such as Norman Rockwell's Behind the Apollo 11. It shows moonlit NASA astronauts, scientists and workers gazing to the heavens and the future.
But NASA's collection is broader than that. The art branches from realism to surrealism to the abstract, and sometimes reveals astronauts in moments when they do not appear bold or brave.
Henry Casselli's 1982 watercolor When Thoughts Turn Inward captures one of America's most accomplished astronauts, John Young, in an introspective moment with eyes cast downward.
"It's very extremely serious and the thing is that you realize that astronauts, they aren't necessarily these icons that are swaggering around, you know, with their chests up. They're human beings," Ulrich said.
Others aren't so easy to interpret. A landscape by Greg Mort shows a section of coastline, with an unusual round object resting in the shallow water. It's the moon.
A painting by Patrice Breteau shows a door opening, a gray sphere hovering the sky, and a red sphere floating farther back on the horizon. Ulrich sees the spheres as the moon and Mars, the painting outlining humans' continuing journeys through space.
Ulrich said former NASA administrator Daniel Goldin, who served through most of the 1990s, wanted the art program to "reach out to diverse audiences and different art forms." The Kronos Quartet's Sun Rings is one example.
David Harrington, who is the San Francisco-based quartet's first violinist and its artistic director, said the project began with a phone call from Ulrich. The NASA curator asked if Kronos would be interested in using sounds recorded by the Voyager probes in concerts.
"My response was, I didn't know there were any sounds out there," Harrington said.
After all, how could sounds travel through the vacuum of space?
Harrington traveled to visit University of Iowa physicist Don Gurnett, who explained that the sounds were actually waves that pass through rarified, electrically charged gases in space. These sounds have been recorded using a device Gurnett invented called a plasma wave receiver.
Harrington listened.
"I recognized these sounds as part of nature, but it was a part of nature I'd never heard before," Harrington said. A composer helped build music around the sounds, and later, artist Willie Williams was brought in to add the visual design to the music.
Ulrich said the project - which included a $24,000 commission for the music and a $20,000 commission for the accompanying film - is one of the NASA pieces he's most proud of.
"It was really exciting to take artists who really, really took a subject seriously and worked with a composer and worked with scientists and really tried to sort of thoughtfully celebrate a NASA mission," he said.
Besides NASA, the National Endowment for the Arts and other institutions also helped underwrite Sun Rings, which premiered in 2002.
NASA commissioned another musical work, a song to commemorate the 100th anniversary of flight in 2003.
But before the anniversary, Columbia crashed. So Patti LaBelle gave an emotional performance of the song Way Up There at a memorial service for the astronauts who perished.
"That was a situation," says Ulrich, "where the art actually did a service to the agency."
Curtis Krueger can be reached at krueger@sptimes.com or at 727 893-8232.
THE ART OF NASA.
NASA's art program was founded in 1962 by then-administrator James Webb
Well-known artists often accept relatively small commissions of $2,500 for the chance to be part of the program.
Many drawings and paintings can be viewed at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and also on the Web.
Sun Rings, a visual and musical work partly underwritten by NASA, will be performed by the Kronos Quartet on April 12 in Gainesville at the University of Florida's Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. Ticket information is available at (352) 392-2787.