Project Vanguard, however, was a spectacular failure. The scientific satellite of Project Vanguard in space, 300 miles beyond our planet.” This was, said the caption: “The dream of centuries come true. history: the launching of Vanguard, the first artificial space satellite.” The frontispiece of Caiden’s book shows a gleaming sphere in space.
The author seemed so sure of the imminent success of the project that he devoted large portions of the book to a detailed, present-tense narration of “one of the greatest moments in. government, in its bid to lead the way in the “conquest of outer space” following World War II, called its pioneering satellite program of the mid-1950s, “Vanguard.” In a highly visible public relations effort, books and articles were devoted, as it turned out prematurely, to the anticipated success of Project Vanguard, most notably Martin Caidin’s 1957 popular-science book, Vanguard! The Story of the First Man-Made Satellite. Lawrence Gowing and Richard Hamilton, Man, Machine and Motion Even now, in the interstellar spaces, the myth, the fiction, is again ahead. It was a fantasy for centuries before any man flew. Through persuasive arguments that reveal the many-layered interconnections between the artists’ aesthetics and theoretical responses to the dawn of an age of revolutionary technologies, this book offers new ways to think about the historical emergence of pop, conceptual, postmodern, and installation art and serves to fill the long-neglected gap in material on the post–World War II European avant-garde. Space-Age Aesthetics begins by addressing the imagery of space exploration as a field of mythical representation informed by Cold War politics and acted out in an expansive variety of media, from the picture press to comic books. The artists discussed in Space-Age Aesthetics looked beyond the limits of the picture, exploring space, mass media, pop culture, nuclear power, and science fiction to connect new art to the dramatic changes taking place through the encroaching Space Age. Fifteen years before Andy Warhol said he wanted to be as much a part of his times as rockets and television, Fontana’s large-scale light-and-space installations became a short-lived but ultimately influential art-world phenomenon. “In the Space Age,” wrote Italian artist Lucio Fontana, “spatial art.” Fontana’s desire to create art in space came in response to unprecedented technological advances and contemporary fantasies of space travel.
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