an exhibition celebRating 50 yeaRs since the fiRst human spacefiight
The Lauriston Gallery, Waterside Arts Centre, Sale, M33 7ZF. www.gagarin50.co.uk
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There was no fanfare before Yuri Gagarin’s flight, no countdown to his 108 minutes in space. The Soviet authorities dismissed NASA’s dramatic 10-9-8 procedure as theatre and so there was no clock ticking before Vostok lifted off on 12th April 1961. It’s almost as if he appeared from nowhere into the pages of history. Three press releases had been prepared to cover Gagarin’s flight – one for disaster and two in the event that he survived.
THE FATES SMILED AND GAGARIN DID SURVIVE - JUST - AND BECAME THE MOST FAMOUS MAN ON THE PLANET. OVERNIGHT.
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April 1961 was tense, just a few months before the Berlin Wall divided the European continent and a matter of days before Kennedy’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of communist Cuba.
Born in 1934 in the town of Klushino, 160 kilometres west of Moscow, Gagarin’s early life is dramatic and well-documented.
Not even twenty years since the horrors of World War 2, a decade since the Korean War missed turning nuclear, the East and West now pointed missiles at each other and there were the first rumblings of war in Vietnam. The West was buoyed by growing car ownership, home automation that relieved years of drudge work, the pill had popped and the Boeing 707 opened a new era of jet travel. The East has closed the 1950s with Sputnik and a dog called Laika that welcomed in the Space Age. Out of this maelstrom came a Soviet air force second-lieutenant, Yuri Gagarin. He was one of a group of airmen selected for cosmonaut training by the Chief Designer, Sergei Korolev.
His village was invaded by Nazi forces and his brother and sister were imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. This young Russian boy grew no taller than 158 centimetres and longed to fly, a dream that eventually came to pass when the war was over and he joined an aeroclub in the Soviet town of Saratov. Gagarin reached adulthood in an era when Europe was divided by conflicting ideologies. New technologies appeared that estranged us from our humanity - nuclear energy, pressurised spacesuits, artificial environments in space, all contrived to present us with a future in which we were separated from that which, just a decade earlier, had been the familiar and the traditional.
Image credit: RIA NOVOSTI
THE FUTURE W THE FUTURE WAS NOW
Space was the new frontier. Isolation became the new norm and with it came the paranoia and distrust of the Cold War. This translated easily into the creative sphere, in cinema – 2001: A Space Odyssey, in literature – Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and in music – David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Designers too started using new materials and shapes for buildings, furniture and clothing. The future was now and the possibilities were endless. Technology, new materials and new energy sources offered thrilling, terrifying futures populated by strange new creatures. The star of Kubrick’s 2001 was not a person, but a machine. HAL 9000 was an intelligent computer that portrayed technology – the future – as inhuman and malevolent.
Yet in contrast, Gagarin gave the future a public face. His achievement – and those of his space-faring colleagues - allowed him to become transcendent. His flight aboard Vostok represented the best of humanity, the Soviets used the phrase ‘for all mankind’ almost a decade before the Apollo astronauts left a plaque with the same words on the surface of the Moon. Through the eyes of the cosmonauts and the astronauts, we became aware of what Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman called ‘the good earth’ - our planet as one planet for the first time. The vision back then was of Earth orbit, space stations, Moon landings, lunar colonies and then onto Mars. All in the days of computers that were barely as powerful as a pocket calculator.
E WAS BOTH THRILLING AND TERRIFYING. W AND THE POSSIBILITIES WERE ENDLESS.
It’s as if the 1960s were a decade out of time. Somewhere between then and now, the dream has faded. Technology isn’t on a linear path of constant expansion and improvement – for in 2011 there are no more moon rockets, no more supersonic passenger travel, no schedule for human missions to Mars. Today, we merely circle the globe and look in on ourselves instead of exploring out there. The International Space Station is an impressive achievement but make no mistake, this 2011 is not the future that Gagarin envisaged when he visited Manchester in July 1961. If the 1960s opened our imaginations – what does this new age of restriction do to science, to creativity, to culture? So Gagarin was the first. His death aged 34 in 1968 has endowed him with eternal youth in the public consciousness. In Moscow, his face adorns t-shirts and badges and posters, just like that of any other pop culture icon. From being a little boy who loved his mother and stuffed potatoes in the tailpipes of invading Nazi military vehicles, he
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 became what Soviet Premier Brezhnev called the First Cosmonaut. But this being was beyond politics, beyond East and West, beyond them and us. He was for everyone and that showed in the spontaneous reaction of people who greeted him wherever he went – Prague, Helsinki, Kyoto and Manchester. Space exploration, once something purely of the future, has become part of our heritage, both locally and internationally. Gagarin50 celebrates Gagarin as family man, as cosmonaut, as icon.
All images: RIA NOVOSTI
Gagarin 50
He is all those things and something more. What he achieved was truly transcendent and became - to use that old phrase - for all mankind. Richard Evans, 2011 www.richardevansonline.com
HE WAS FOR EVERYONE AND THAT SHOWED IN THE REACTION OF PEOPLE WHEREVER HE WENT - PRAGUE, HELSINKI, KYOTO, MANCHESTER
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS BlackLab
Walter Kershaw
Cosmodrome, the latest film from BlackLab, is a poetic exploration of humanity’s first flight to space, set against the rise of an empire as it evolves from rural agriculture to industrial and technological might. An homage to some of the greatest Soviet directors including Tarkovsky and Eisenstein, the film includes scenes spanning the lifespan of the Soviet Union remixed to a mesmerizing contemporary soundtrack.
Walter Kershaw is a Rochdale-born pioneer of large scale, external, mural paintings in England and Brazil. He is perhaps best-known for the famous Trafford Park Murals at White City, Manchester, during the 1980s and 1990s. His original painting of Gagarin was created in 1996 to cover up shopfronts damaged by the IRA bombing of central Manchester. That work has now been lost.
BlackLab is a collaborative project that experiments with stills, sound and moving images through the re-mixing and re-contextualising of archive material. Previous works include the film-based event ‘Trawling the Visual Wreckage’, an event combining video mash-up with live readings and online works which can be seen on the website: blacklab. visualsociety.com
He works in oils and watercolours, and has work in public collections worldwide; including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Arts Council, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the National Collection of Brazilian Art, FAAP in São Paulo. www.walterkershaw.co.uk
A POETIC EXPLORATION OF HUMANITY’S FIRST FLIGHT TO SPACE. AN HOMAGE TO SOME OF THE GREATEST SOVIET DIRECTORS.
All images: RIA NOVOSTI
BENEFITS OF SPACE EXPLORATION SATELLITE TV GEO-LOCATION INTEGRATED CIRCUITS BONE DENSITY MEASUREMENTS HEART PUMPS WATER FILTRATION SYSTEMS WIRELESS LIGHTING KIDNEY DIALYSIS FIRE RESISTANT MATERIALS AVIATION SAFETY WEATHER PREDICTION THE LAWS OF PHYSICS INSULATION TECHNOLOGIES DARK MATTER THE GOOD EARTH THE JAWS OF LIFE
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WITH THANKS Gagarin50 is here because of the vision, funding and hard work of the following people. Special thanks are due to: Rebecca Mason and Catherine Bowdren of Heritage Lottery Fund; Debbie Cowley, Rosie Scott, Joel Clements, Gareth Starkey, Jenny Waterson and Emily Lyons of Waterside Arts Centre; Natalie Persoglio for design, print and press. Exhibition materials The following have generously agreed to share their collections to bring this exhibition together – The Working Class Movement Library for the Soviet Union flag, Nick Forder at The Museum of Science & Industry for the space models, Rohan Gausden for the Soviet memorabilia, Marta Sylvestrova of the Moravian Gallery in Brno for the Soviet-era posters, North West Film Archive for the footage of Gagarin in Manchester and Ralph Gibson of RIA Novosti for the Gagarin images, Chris Riley for the use of ‘First Orbit’ and Gurbir Singh of AstroTalkUK for the witness accounts. Additional help & enthusiasm To Professor Jim Aulich, Professor Ian Morison, the team from YuriGagarin50.org, Julie Clarke, Tricia Paton and Valerie Clarke for sharing their Gagarin memories and Joel ‘The Benefactor’ Clements (again) for space hardware wrangling. Sergey Abramov and Nina Milechina of RusAdventures and Arts Council England for funding for the trip to Star City. Print by Sketch 360. Brochure design: natalie@freelancemedia.co.uk. Framing by County Galleries, Altrincham. Gagarin50 is conceived and directed by Richard Evans.
All images: RIA NOVOSTI
Design: Natalie Persoglio natalie@freelancemedia.co.uk