art?

Or more specifically, let’s talk about the intersection between art and science fiction, which seems to be an important intersection for sci-fi writers and fans in their desire to be “taken seriously” as a genre and, by extension, an art form. Before we start, it’s worth considering that maybe this desire and our preoccupation with this desire is total farce; that it’s been invented by the Casaubons of the 20th century so that the university hench-men and -women of the 21st century can hash and rehash this debate ad nauseam while the rest of the normal, functioning world carries on oblivious to or else disinterested in the designations between art and not, and honestly, who’s to say?

Well, questions of art and aestheticism govern not only the multi-billion dollar world of fine art, but also the similarly saturated advertising industry, not to mention pretty much all of pop culture and its web of production, media, print, development, and performance, so certainly someone is interested.

Plus, if all of these dazzling, beautiful, eye-catching, ~capitalist~ ramifications for art don’t compel you, there are whole volumes of scholarship on art and aestheticism that aren’t particularly concerned with the dollar value attached, but rather with what constitutes art and what doesn’t, among other questions.

but wait, it’s art if it makes you feel something, right? ugh. I challenge you to find absolutely anything in the entire universe that, when drawn to attention, doesn’t make someone feel something. (No seriously — if you made this sort of find, you could certainly put it in a museum and call it “The Void” or something similarly existential and you would make oodles of money from some art collector because the concept of true, universal nothingness is limited to death and maybe also the DMV.)

Okay, okay, yes, the definition of art as “inspiring the feeling of something” was critically important in the rebellion against the expectations and limitations inherent in canonical Western high art and, paradoxically, the continued development of that same canon, but we’re now living in a capitalist, post-modern, internet age in which art has been commodified and implicated in the very fabric of day-to-day human experience (thanks Uncle Andy, you rock). In consequence, “feeling something” just isn’t an appropriately nuanced answer to the increasingly nuanced, complicated, and important question of what precisely art is.

Exhausted yet? Me too. I’m not particular well-versed in the many opinions and theories circulating what is and is not art, as important as it is. It’s difficult and heady and complex, so I just want to bite off a tiny piece of it. To do that, let’s give ourselves some guiding assumptions:

1) art exists (rad)

2) for the purposes of this discussion, let’s limit our consideration of art to high visual art in the Western canon to see if and when science fiction intersects with that very particular, prevalent section of art (less rad, but alas, this canon is a close cousin of the canon in which the science fiction genre grew up).

3) I started this article hoping to discover a “science fiction visual art,” but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t exist given the limitations we’ve put on our definition of “art.” We have a lot of religious artwork, which can interact with questions of science and fictions (see Galileo before the Holy Office or “Christian painting of God creating the cosmos”), but so far, much of the canonical artwork that we have struggles to represent science fiction within the constraints of that canon and the limitations inherent in visual art. This may be because science fiction struggles to define itself against other genres like fantasy and speculative fiction, making the search for “science fiction art” vague, or it may be because the development of science fictions often requires scientific discourse (which is difficult to communicate aesthetically) and semi-complex plot structures (which require a kind of development that a single image resists). I want The Blue Marble to count, because it radically altered the human conception of ourselves in the universe and therefore informed so much of the dialogue critical to the science fiction genre, but it’s not a fiction, just a stark truth.

So what are the visual artworks that we’ve come to associate with science fiction? Well, movies.

Critic: Are movies even art?

Us: Boooooooooooooo

Us, but more reasonable: Let’s say yes, because it’s more interesting that way.

So, what’s in our canon of sci-fi scenes that exemplify or characterize the visual art of the genre? Well for one, the staircase scene in Gattaca. For me, this was one of the single, greatest scenes I’ve encountered in cinematic sci-fi — the crippled but genetically flawless anti-hero struggling to crawl up the helix of his own DNA. Yes, it’s on the nose. Yes, the person struggling is white and male. Yes, it’s basically every white man who’s ever struggled to unlock the secrets of the universe masturbating all over himself and his struggle. That being said, it is also an incredibly powerful image in the discourse on genetic determinism and manipulation, not to mention that the whiteness and maleness of the protagonist implicate themselves appropriately within that discourse.

Or take Planet of the Apes (1968) for example. In the final scene, our hero is riding a horse along the beach, reduced to the clothing we would associate with our primitive ancestors, and he discovers the remains of the Statue of Liberty. In reaction, he declares that he is home, but that his ancestors – us – were maniacs for destroying that home. All the while, the ocean tide rushes in and out, symbolizing the onslaught of time that is complicit in the destruction of the Statue of Liberty (and all that it represents) while simultaneously threatening to wash our hero away. Is the scene white and male, with gender politics that could make pretty much anyone a little sad? Yeah. Does it implicate that maleness and whiteness at least a little? Sort of, although probably only to a modern eye, because we have a better idea of what our primitive ancestors looked like and that they weren’t predominantly blonde-haired and blue-eyed. As a result, we can recognize that the hero doesn’t represent all of humanity, but maybe just the section responsible for it’s downfall. Similarly, the woman is covered in pretty tight clothes, which just isn’t representative of prehistoric women or even women in 1968. This means that this pair’s image as the inheritors of humanity doesn’t look quite right, therefore implicating the expectations of those who made the movie and the tastes and standards that they encourage.

Last, but not least, let’s talk about Ex Machina. In the second half of the movie, Ava, our AI maybe-heroine, discovers a closet full of the dismembered bodies of of her AI ancestors (all women), and must ultimately take their skin in order to recreate a normal appearance for her body. The discovery of this closet eerily reflects the story of Bluebeard, who marries over and over again with the only stipulation that the wife not go to the attic or whatever, and when she inevitably does, she discovers the dismembered bodies of his former wives who similarly disobeyed him. In reflecting this story within this scene, we as viewers are forced to consider not only the humanity of Ava, but our own, creating a really powerful image in a society that not only has to answer answer for the humanity of AI as we work tirelessly for its creation, but also must answer for the violence that has been enacted against women for most of human history and the ways that modern women must grapple with this violence against their ancestry every single day.

In this way, movies have actually created a language of complex images to communicate not only the preoccupations of science fiction, but also of our society at large (which, coincidentally, is usually what sci-fi aims to do). Are these images art? It’s hard to say. Given that so much of science fiction is a product of the 20th and 21st centuries, it seems that an artistic rendering may be tied up in a cinematic medium rather than more traditional mediums like drawing, painting, or sculpture. Alternatively, perhaps sci-fi is in need of a new genre of art to couple with its preoccupations, meaning that we could be on the brink of cutting edge artistic development. Even more possible, “sci-fi art” may already exist at the high art level, but has yet to be explicitly associated with the sci-fi genre, and with these images forwarded in cinematic sci-fi, meaning the conversation is about to get a lot more interesting. All in all, when we consider science fiction, it’s visual components certainly warrant consideration as high art, with the ramifications being not only a greater understanding of science fiction as an art form, but also perhaps a reimagining of the definition of high art.

-makbookpro30

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