Space travel: it’s the stuff of childhood dreams and real-life heroism, and its history is laced with equal parts triumph and tragedy. In Are We There Yet, the first U.S. exhibition by Australian artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, the Space Age and the Corcoran’s Beaux Arts architecture is as a launch pad for ideas about art, consumerism, and the universe. Their work is at times whimsical, meditative, and provocative.
The exhibition was commissioned by the Corcoran as the third in their NOW at the Corcoran series, a showcase for emerging and mid-career artists. Healy and Cordeiro write, “This project … was an inspiration that came upon visiting Washington, D.C., for our site visit. It made sense that within the precinct of so many museums that we engage with the city in such a fashion.” If their work is informed by tourism, this suggests too that space travel, is tourism on a grander scale, where we engage with the greater universe and leave our marks behind. The artists continue: “purchasing some freeze-dried ice cream from the Air and Space Museum and a visit to Costco, seeing the perceived basic necessities that go into the shopping trolley, got us thinking …”
The work in Are We There Yet? is two-fold. The wall works on the Corcoran’s first floor, from the series, Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why (2010-2011), were constructed from Legos, but this is not child’s play. The colorful “canvases” are based on images of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, individual bricks registering as pixels. The artists, born in the early seventies, were adolescents when the Challenger broke apart in 1986. They were perhaps a little old for Legos, but the manual labor that takes them through this creative process suggests the tasks that guide us through mourning. Each work took about three weeks to put together, and time becomes a medtation on process and grief. Cordeiro explained to me that the artists did not get a real sense of the piece until it was completed and they could see it hung at a distance. This is a metaphor at once for the emotional distance we may need in order to comprehend tragedy, and the great distances travelled in space, which renders our vast planet a mere speck in space. Cordeiro remarked on a quote attributed to Neil Armstrong: “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” The quote may be apocryphal, but it’s prevalence as a kind of space-age wisdom is a testament to the power that space travel has on the popular imagination.
Just as painstaking but even more ambitious is the artists’ installation in one of the Corcoran’s second-floor gallries. The gallery floor is covered with a reflective gold anodized aluminum. A space suit (on loan from NASA) lies face-down on a hunter orange IKEA bed, clutching a Sam’s Club-sized jar of cheese balls. It’s a low-brow variation on the neo-classical bedroom in 2001: A Space Odyssey, surrounded by a solar system whose sun and planets are made up of items suggested by a list of the most popular supermarket items in America. The artists also tabulated the amount of food a typical astronaut would need to make a theoretical 520-day trip to Mars and back, based on the average American consumption of 3800 calories per day.
The stacked provisions recall Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, reveling in the color and craft that can be found even in mass-produced packaging. But this marriage of pop culture with the space program has a practical side. “Just as when we go on a camping trip we must analyze what is considered essential to take with us, we must do so on an even more acute level when thinking about space exploration,” the artists assert. The assembled provisions are a clear sign that man does not live on best-sellers alone.
With copious amounts of Bud Light, Velveeta and Coke, one might think the work a critique of a specifically American consumption. Healy points out that this was a function of logistics. Much of the pre-show “shopping” was done remotely, as the artist “couldn’t stroll down the grocery aisle” from across the globe. Sam’s Club was the go-to source of their shopping list, which included 360 cans of Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli, 624 cans of Carnation Evaporated Milk, 95 cases of Coca-Cola, 41 35 oz. jars of Utz cheese balls, as well as beer and cigarettes. So as not to perpetuate the cycle of wasteful consumption, Non-perishables will be donated after the show closes, though things like booze and Marlboros will be harder to dispose of. If the artists can find enough people do put away the 83 cases of Bud Light, a closing night space-themed costume party would bring this mission to celebratory closure. Next stop, Jupiter!
Are We There Yet? opens December 3 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art located at 500 17th St NW. The museum is open Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Friday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. $10.