M17 Enrico Baj

Interplanetary Art (1959)

In September 1959 the avant-garde Italian artist Enrico Baj (1924–2003) published the ‘Interplanetary Art’ manifesto (‘Arte interplanetaria’) in the avant-garde journal Il gesto (The Gesture). The manifesto was announced on the cover in five languages: English, Italian, German, French and, finally, Russian – the last in recognition of the Soviet Union’s visionary space programme, and also as a rebuke to Cold War ideology.

Baj had founded the Arte nucleare (Nuclear Art) movement some seven years earlier, which had sought to respond to the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation through vividly gestural abstract works in oil and enamel. The Interplanetary movement was less apocalyptic and more open-minded and exploratory, embracing the unknown future in playful and ironic ways by incorporating references to popular science fiction. The fluid abstract paintings of the group’s artists also suggested the possibilities of alien worlds and strange atmospheres out in the vast unknown.

At the heart of the movement’s ideology was the optimistic belief that nuclear energy could be harnessed for interplanetary space flight. In this way, nuclear power could be transformed from a metaphor of total destruction into the essence of imaginative opportunity. Using the example of the Roman philosopher Lucretius, who had promoted the idea of atomism in his poetry, the manifesto argues that space flight and extraterrestrials should be just as important to art as they are to science.

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It is time to make known that these days the force of gravity oppresses only fools, fat people, and abstract painters, or rather concrete painters, as many of them like to define themselves, concretely revealing their non-abstract ineptitude in art.

Our imagination roams to the ashen, volcanic regions before the arrival of the stinking, clattering metal carcasses full of horns and spheres, dreamed up by technicians and scientists. Ever greater is the creative need to celebrate the new interplanetary conquests, eternal myth kindred to the flight of Icarus, the Wright brothers’ wings of tarred linen, and the mysterious confusion of cosmic radiation.

Nor does the force of gravity oppress our own minds any more with its petty earthly blackmail, for it has been overcome by Nuclear Art, atomic premium gasoline, intellectual leavening for our interplanetary travels.

…

Those who deny the possibility that artistic inducements might derive from nuclear intuitions and discoveries are those same intellectually and physically fat fools who want to limit their use to the catastrophic destruction of humanity.

…

When the world learned of the first space launches, we hoped, for a moment, with relief, that the attention of governments might shift from the study of even larger nuclear bombs to that of ever more potent rocket engines, and that the diabolical plans for earthly destruction might give way to plans for astral navigation and interplanetary conquest. Other disappointments have already followed since, and yet in spite of this, a new hope now guides our sensitivity toward the interplanetary aspect of artistic pursuits.

Space flight and extra-terrestrial bodies concern not only science, but above all culture, myth, art. Similarly, the myth, poetry and mystery of the atom, the investigation of the tiniest structure of matter, were of greater interest to the poet Lucretius than to the fat, bearded sages of Alexandria. Do not ask too much of our works, but ask a lot: They contain our passionate and innovative desire, in the face of sterile, rotten abstractionism, to participate in the latest developments of human consciousness, to raise ourselves up from our tyrannical earth by overcoming the conventional and hence rescinded laws of gravity – even though our paintbrushes and colours might escape human control and our words and letters might float in mid-air, insubordinate to canvas and paper, like the sodium vapours and lithium crystals suspended in the dense atmosphere of Mars, the pink oceans of Venus, the sooty abysses of Neptune, the rainbow-like rings of Saturn.

From Planet Earth.