Eva Díaz's "After Spaceship Earth"

Eva Díaz is a professor of contemporary art in the Department of the History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions, and reported the following:

After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions is concerned with the legacy of architect-designer Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art. It was written following the publication of my book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (2015) that focuses on models of experimental testing—I’m ready for this test!—in the works and teachings of three important Black Mountain College figures in the late 1940s: Josef Albers, John Cage, and Fuller. I came down quite hard on Fuller’s anti-political technocratic utilitarianism in that earlier work, suspicious as I am about his unbounded faith in the power of technology. Yet in the period I was writing about Fuller’s years at Black Mountain I was also a full-time curator of contemporary art, and it was in studio visits and discussions with artists that I regularly heard them express delight about “Bucky’s” projects. In particular, many contemporary artists respond enthusiastically to Fuller’s concept of a hybrid artist-scientist role, as well as his arguments for radical equity in design. Fuller maintained that we have the means to feed, house and clothe the world’s population, and tirelessly sought to redistribute global resources to that end. This is a powerful call for ecological and social justice.

Page 99 is uncharacteristic. In a book that takes up nearly fifty living artists, this page sits in the most historical section of the book when I discuss Fuller’s quixotic life: a figure beloved on college campuses and a designer for the U.S. armed forces; both a guru for the 1960s counterculture and an advocate for global telecommunications networks used for corporate and governmental surveillance. On this page is a large illustration—one of 150 in the book—of a sculpture by Black Mountain College student Kenneth Snelson, an artist whom I interviewed a few years before his death, and whose work was the catalyst for Fuller’s development of tensegrity, a principle of continuous tension/discontinuous compression used in geodesic dome designs. Here my analysis of Fuller’s legacy is embedded in a brief history of his work for the U.S. military constructing radomes, geodesic shelters housing radar defense installations, often in remote arctic outposts.

This chapter ends part 1 of my book, titled “Terrestrial,” which considers works of art and design that use geodesic domes in various ways: as ad-hoc architectural projects grappling with climate change, as spaces of exhibition display and communication design, as proposals to solve housing crises, and, as this chapter probes, as critiques of the pervasiveness of surveillance. The book’s second half, “Extraplanetary,” takes up the influence of Fuller and his acolyte Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, in artworks examining outer space exploration and colonization. The four chapters in this second section interject the important corrective of Afrofuturist thinking into Fuller’s and Brand’s space optimism, and investigate artists’ challenges to a privatized and highly-surveilled future in outer space: how the space “race” and off-planet colonization are being reformulated as powerful tools to readdress economic, gender, and racial inequality, as well as ecological injustices.

Visit Eva Díaz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue