Art and Flight: Historical Origins to Contemporary Works

Leonardo

Art and Flight: Historical Origins to Contemporary WorksAuthor(s): Steve PoleskieSource: Leonardo, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1985), pp. 69-80Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577873 .

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Art and Flight: Historical Origins to Contemporary Works

Steve Poleskie

Abstract-The author traces the origins of flight in early works of art and literature, where flight is seen centuries before it existed as a thing of function. In more recent times artists have begun to use the actual tools of flight as tools for making art. This article documents the work of some of these artists and the author's own Aerial Theatre, in which he flies an aerobatic biplane trailing smoke to perform multi- dimensional events in the sky.

We'll fly insatiably! when the oily motor will have closed its lips on its lugubrious and trembling grumble

(like a cat in love! The propeller will turn like a chopper blade double rotating We will scythe the stars like wheat! Take care, then, to gather them in the hollow of your hands, since for you, fearful men, we'll climb up to the infinite

(hanging gardens of the sky!

Enrico Cavacchioli Futurist Poet

I. INTRODUCTION

Since their beginnings, art and flight have been brought together by countless artists in a dialogue with the sky and the machines lifting skyward. The expressive possibility of airplanes and other flying objects concerns contemporary artists just as it engaged artists of the past. Whether they paint from an airplane looking down or paint the airplane itself while looking up from the ground, whether they conceive of designs to put on the surfaces of the flying objects or use the flying object as a tool for creating designs in the sky, these artists share a common love of the freedom that comes when the wind and sky and soul are in harmony.

II. EARLY EXPERIMENTS

The beginnings of flight lie in the aesthetic. The aircraft as a thing of magic and beauty was created in art and literature centuries before its existence as a thing of function. The thirteenth century Franciscan monk Roger Bacon described in his Secrets of Art andNature (ca 1250), "Engines for flying, a man sitting in the midst thereof, by turning onely about an Instrument, which moves

artificial wings made to beat the Aire, much after the fashion of a bird's flight" [1].

In the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci designed a series of machines that

bear a striking resemblance to the ultralight aircraft popular today. Created for their beauty and fantasy, there is little evidence that the great master gave much thought to making his designs actually fly. Yet this Italian genius of the arts received a place in aeronautical history. In effect, he discovered the parachute and the helicopter. He was perhaps the first man to apply scientific principles to the problem of flight. He turned to his profound knowledge of anatomy to investigate how man could imitate the flight of birds. A model of da Vinci's flapping wing machine (Fig. 1), built according to his sketches and notes, is in the collection of the I.B.M. Corporation in New York. He

Steve Poleskie (artist, teacher), 306 Stone Quarry Road, Ithaca, NY 14850, U.S.A.

Received 3 May 1984.

? 1985 ISAST Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094X/85 $3.00+0.00

Fig. 1. A model of a Flapping Wing Flying Machine built according to sketch and notes by Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo made many unsuccessful attempts to design a flying machine based on the principle of flapping flight with a flexible wing, an idea again being seriously studied today. This design, one of his earliest, consisted of a wooden framework and two movable wings. The aviator was to lie prone in the framework and work the wings by pulleys connected with stirrups moved with his feet, aided by the windlass worked with his hands and arms. In later designs, often with more than a single pair of wings,

Leonardo had the operator standing upright. (Collection of IBM Corporation.)

LEONARDO, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 69-80, 1985 69



compared bird flight with "swimming in the water" and designed his wings to "row downwards and backwards". Un- fortunately, the power of human muscle could never have lifted one of these flapping machines, or ornithopters, off the ground.

Later drawings showed a fixed-wing glider which, had da Vinci pursued its mechanics, might have had a greater chance of success. One of these crafts featured a remarkable head harness that worked an elevator causing the aircraft to climb or descend. This portended the harnesses developed hundreds of years later by Otto Lilienthal for his successful gliders, and still later by Vladimir Tatlin for his unsuccessful glider which remains a famous and mysterious work of art.

Da Vinci intended his drawings to be published and perhaps to inspire others. This did not happen until late in the nineteenth century, by which time his pyramid-shaped parachute and helical or spiral screw helicopter had already been reinvented and credited to others such as Sir George Cayley. A model in the Science Museum in London, based on an 1843 design by Cayley for a four-rotored, vertical lifting craft, looks amazingly similar to a far earlier proposal for a helicopter in a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci.

Some early experiments with flying machines influenced popular fashion in decoration. For example, when in 1783 Etienne Montgolfier demonstrated his hot-air balloon before King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and 130,000 spectators at Versaille, the highly decorated craft set off a trend that swept Europe. Artists and craftsmen decorated every conceivable object, from cabinets and bureaus to vases and snuff boxes, with paintings of balloons. The wealthy even arranged 'balloon rooms', where everything in- cluding the chandeliers was decorated with or took the shape of a hot-air balloon. An engraving of the period (Fig. 2) shows the elaborate artwork on the Montgolfier balloon used by Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes for the first aerial voyage in history, from one side of Paris to the other, on 21 November 1783. When the first woman to fly, Madame Thible, made her ascent at Lyon in a 'montgolfiere', she took with her the French painter Fleurant.

III. WAR'S FLYING MACHINES AS ART- THEIR INFLUENCE

THROUGH THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Montgolfier's colorful craft was not the first painted object to fly in Europe's

Fig. 2. The Montgolfier hot air balloon. The highly decoraied balloons of Etienne Montgolfier set off a fashion for flight that swept through Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. These colorful craft were not only flying art objects themselves but also the inspiration for numerous other artists as well. This engraving of the period shows the elaborate artwork on the Montgolfier balloon used by Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes to complete the first manned aerial voyage in history, which took

place over Paris on 21 November 1783.

skies. Throughout the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries warriors on horseback trailed brightly painted pennon-kites behind them into battle. These kites were apparently designed as offensive weapons. Medieval manuscript illuminations show them dropping fire bombs onto enemy territory. The origins of these kites in the West is obscure. Marco Polo is known to have described a Chinese warfare kite

without really knowing what he was looking at, giving rise to the theory that kites were unknown in Italy at that time.

The tradition of artists decorating flying objects of warfare did not end with medieval kites but continues today. During the First World War many pilots, some of them artists before the war, applied highly individualized decorations to their airplanes. A photo from the

Poleskie, Art and Flight 70



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Fig. 3. Individualized artistic motifs were painted on the fuselages of combat planes by the artists of World Wars I and II. These decorations were often commissioned by the pilots to express their personalities and to distinguish their aircraft. 'A Fighting Cock' motif is shown on the side of a WWI SPAD Type XI (Fig. 3a) (Collection of the Imperial War Museum, London). This photo must have been taken in the early days of the war before both sides adopted standardized paint schemes. During WWII the tradition for painting on warplanes was continued mainly by the bombers of the United States Air Force. The

female nude on the nose of this B-29 bomber (Fig. 3b) was photographed on Saipan in 1944. (Photo courtesy of Richard Mackin).




Imperial War Museum (Fig. 3a) shows a 'Fighting Cock' motif on the side of a Type XI SPAD. Ernst Udet, the second- greatest German ace of World War I, with 62 'victories', showed a talent for art in his youth. He never gave up the art he loved and during the war made pictures of airplanes and the men who flew them [2].

The heroes of World War I and their airplanes hold a special fascination for American art historian Stephen Long- street. His book The Canvas Falcons details various war aces and describes the motifs and schemes they painted on their aircraft.

During the less romantic Second World War, airplane painting was more standardized, but artists on both sides applied individual motifs to the fuselages of fighters and bombers, much as decorations were applied on the shields of medieval knights. Often these designs were merely 'pinups', like that depicted on the nose of a B-29 somewhere in the Pacific (Fig. 3b).

Of the many artists whose lives were changed by World War II, one of the more fortunate was the American Sam Francis. In 1943, while Francis was flying for the United States Army Air Force near Tucson, Arizona, severe turbulence struck his plane and he injured his back. This injury developed into spinal tuber- culosis, a condition that confined him to a hospital in casts and braces, able only to move his head and arms. As a distraction from his pain and to help himself deal with the frustration of his physical con- straint, he began to paint [3]. Flying, the activity that almost killed him, remains a spiritual fascination for Sam Francis. He sees his work as being about suspension and levitation as opposed to gravity. He told art historian Peter Selz, "I like to fly, to soar, to float like a cloud, but I am tied down to place no matter where I am ... It's always the same. Painting is a way in and out" [4].

Many have difficulty seeing the airplane as art because of its association with war. Some of our greatest artworks have as their subject war or the heroes of war, but this does not lessen their worth as art. Rather, art has been used to glorify war, which is unfortunate.

Futurist Fedele Azari, an aviator in the Italian Air Force in World War I, hoped to use airplanes from that war for art. In 1918 he issued a manifesto proposing that the airplanes be painted and signed by artists and then flown through elaborate maneuvers to create performances in the sky. In his manifesto, "II Teatro Aereo Futurista", he wrote,

The artistic form that we create with flight is analogous to dance, but is infinitely superior because of its grandiose background, its super dynamism and the greatly varied possibilities which it permits, though we must complete the evolutions according to the three dimensions of space [5].

While Azari is purported to have performed flights of 'elementary aerial theatre' over Busto Arsizio near Milan in the spring of 1918, little documentation exists of his work. Michael Kirby in Futurist Performances states, "Some- where there may be photographs of early performances; somewhere, perhaps there is a photograph of the airplane in Azari's Aerial Theatre painted in bold futurist patterns" [6]. The Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti refers to Azari's flying in his writing, but one cannot be sure whether he is describing fact or fantasy when he writes:

A powerful rumbling in the air draws Reginella into the street to applaud Azari doing, as he says, 'what a mad hornet does over Milanese houses' with his light touring plane.

In Piazza Cavour Reginella Arno and I enjoy Azari's touring plane doing a dance of the seven veils up there at 500 meters and Azari jotting down notes between maneuvering the levers and shouting through his megaphone descriptions of the theatrical variety of the roles his fuselage can play. Paunchy Banker, then jealous lover, then faded whore, whom the afternoon heat strips shamelessly to the shouting crowd.

'There's her naked thigh, there's the plane's naked thigh and it looks like flesh and the plane really looks like a naked dancer' [7].

Azari hoped to create through flight a new artistic form expressing the most complex states of mind. His manifesto did not deal with the 'fourth dimension' although earlier Futurist performers spoke of breaking the 'fourth wall'.

The feat of 'looping the loop', first accomplished in 1913 by the Frenchman Adolphe Pegoud, caught the imagination of the times and was the inspiration for a number of poets and artists. Among these was F.T. Marinetti who with Azari had once proposed to start a 'Society for the Protection of Machines'. A 'Parole in Liberta' [8] called "Aerial Bombard- ment" depicts looping patterns of airplanes that are dropping missiles on the letters of Marinetti's name. Marinetti, who also used whirling propellers and dirigibles as materials in his drawings, stated that when he was flying and looking at objects from a new point of view, he was "able to break apart the old shackles of logic and the plumb lines of the ancient way of thinking" [9].

There is an irony in this love of flight by the Italian Futurists who embraced modernity with such fervor, yet suffered much from its darker side. Marinetti's "Aerial Bombardment" is a metaphor that captures man's vulnerability in war to the very machines that in peace give him pleasure and inspiration. Marinetti himself was seriously wounded in World War I. Other leading proponents of the Futurist movement also suffered injury or death during the war: Russolo, an artist also concerned with sound and sound waves, was seriously wounded; Boccioni, a painter and sculptor concerned with depicting motion, died in 1916; and 2 months later Sant'Elia, an artist and architect who attempted to devise a Futurist Architecture, was killed in action. Azari survived the war to die in flight in 1930 [10].

Charles A. Lindbergh, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, expressed his dismay at the destruction wrought by such a thing of beauty as the aircraft:

Why, I ask myself, should I spend my life developing aviation if the aircraft are to ruin the nations which produce them? Why work for the idol of science when it demands the sacrifice of cities full of children; when it makes robots out of men and blinds their eyes to God? What artificial gift is worth the dulling of vision, the deadening of senses, the morbid destructiveness that modern industry has brought? What military victory can pay for a civilization's loss? To survive on more than a temporary time scale, one must look beyond the speed and power of aircraft - beyond the material strength of science [11].

IV. ARTISTS AND PILOTS

Artists have not often been pilots, but

pilots have always been artists. The magic of flight and the beauty of its lifting surfaces have caused even those not

aesthetically inclined to express themselves by artistic means. The flying surfaces themselves, designed as functional things, possess a unique beauty among man-made objects. The Ader Eole and the 1894 Maxim Biplane are machines of beauty and remain with us as such. Like many of their genre, though designed to fly, they never did. The

graceful, birdlike gliders of the German Otto Lilienthal flew successfully, but did this make them lesser works of art? And perhaps the beauty of the Antoinette series of monoplanes produced by Leon Levasseur in 1908 can be attributed to his having been an artist before he became an engineer [12].

Lilienthal flew his gliders between 1891




and 1896 to gain practical experience for the powered ornithopters, or flapping wing aircraft, that he hoped to build. Lilienthal died in a glider crash before

gasoline-driven engines and propellers came into being. Thus he never saw the advent of powered flight, an event greatly influenced by his early experiments.

Between 1919 and 1932 the Russian Constructivist painter Vladimir Tatlin worked on a glider. An inventor and constructor as well as a painter, Tatlin, like Leonardo da Vinci, found no contradiction in the simultaneous study of painting and the design of machinery. At the time, Tatlin was teaching a course on the culture of materials at the Moscow Vkhutern and exploring the flexible

properties of bent wood. He used this in his glider project called 'Letatlin' from 'letat', the Russian word to fly, plus his name. He also studied the flight of birds and insects with a group of researchers in the Novodevich Monastery in Moscow. While Letatlin was a flying machine in the artistic tradition of da Vinci, it more closely resembled the actual gliders constructed and flown by the German aeronautical pioneer Lilienthal [13].

Although human flight was highly mechanized by the 1930s, Tatlin rejected the geometry associated with modern aircraft and engines. He preferred to

explore the quality of materials and their articulation with minimum modification rather than to form them according to a

predetermined plan. "My machine", he observed, "is built on the principle of life, of organic forms", and to this end he worked with a surgeon to incorporate the structure of the human being into his craft [14]. Tatlin designed his construc- tion to "give back to man the feeling of

flight". He wrote, "we have been robbed of this by the mechanical flight of the

aeroplane. We cannot feel the movement of our body in the air." He hoped his

glider would become "an everyday object for the Soviet masses, an ordinary item of use" [15]. While his dream was never realized, in many other parts of the world

today hang gliders remarkably similar to Tatlin's design are commonly flown for

sport. Other Russian poets and painters were

also interested in flight. Malevich painted Aviator in 1914 and commented in his On New Systems in Art that "we may compare the aeroplane with a bird which develops into many kinds of iron birds and dragonflies" [16]. In 1923 Tatlin and the poet Velimir Khlebnikov, whose father was an ornithologist, collaborated in a performance called Cast Iron Wings. A collage made by Rodechenko in 1923 contains a picture of an airship moored in

its hangar. Along the side of the hangar is inscribed 'Agaraambra', from the first line of a poem by Vassily Kamensky, who was a pilot and made reliefs on the theme of flight [17].

The invention of the airplane was of interest to the early Cubists as well. A favorite slogan in France was, 'our future is in the air'. Picasso and Braque recognized the airplane's importance. "We were very interested in the efforts of those who were making airplanes", said Picasso. "When one wing was not enough to keep them in the air, they joined on another with string and wire." Picasso jokingly addressed his friend Braque in a letter as 'Mon cher Wilbur', in what Roland Penrose believes is a reference to Wilbur Wright. Penrose also feels that the airplane was the only modern tech- nological invention to have any direct influence on Picasso. Penrose wrote:

In fact the resemblance between the angular shapes of Monsieur Bleriot's flying machine held together by struts and cables and the overlapping facets and tenuous lines of an analytical Cubist painting are not fortuitous. It is the result of observation and a discerning interest in the changing form of life, in particular in efforts to conquer another dimension in space [18].

During the period 1936-1937, pioneer American abstract painter Arshile Gorky executed a series of murals for the airport in Newark, New Jersey. Unfortunately, these paintings were another casualty of World War II when the War Department stripped them off the walls to make structural changes in the building. An abstractionist in the purest sense, Gorky simplified and extrapolated from photographs of airplanes and other airport paraphernalia to arrive at the elements

incorporated in his compositions [19].

V. CONTEMPORARY WORKS

In more recent times artists have used actual aircraft to make art that is seen not in a gallery or museum, but in the sky itself. The making of kites as works of art is practiced today in all parts of the world. Tsutomu Hiroi of Japan and Rolf Lieberknecht from Germany both work extensively with kites of tremendous size. The Spaniard Jose Maria Yturralde

produced flying geometrical structures at the Venice Biennial in 1978. American sculptor Tal Streeter has done numerous projects with kites and written a book on the subject, The Art of the Japanese Kite [20].

Always fascinated with flight, Sam Francis, in the winter of 1966, created a large aerial painting over the Bay of

Tokyo at the request of the Tokyo newspaper, Yomi Youri Shinbum. For this he hired five helicopters which trailed colored smoke in streams of blue, magenta, yellow, red and white as they flew patterns of his design. These were photographed from above and below. In 1968, to protest the fatal shooting by police of an innocent bystander during a demonstration for "People's Park" near the University of California at Berkeley, Francis hired a helicopter to fly over the area trailing a banner that read, "Let a Thousand Parks Bloom" [21].

The artist Christo has also used a helicopter in an artistic event. In 1966 he attempted to have 42,390 Cubic Feet Package towed by a helicopter (Fig. 4) from the campus of the Minneapolis School of Art to the front lawn of the nearby Minneapolis Institute of Arts. However, due to the heavy weight of the package (which consisted of several weather balloons and numerous smaller balloons wrapped in nylon with Manila rope) and the turbulent air on the day of the event, the fearful helicopter pilot lifted the package a mere 20 feet off the ground before returning it to the same spot [22].

During the 1970s numerous artists used pilots flying conventional aircraft to perform conceptual art events in the sky. Among these artists were Wayne Williams, Domenick Capobianco, Leila Daw and H.A. Schult. Schult used a Cessna 150, painted black with stars and stripes on its tail and his name on the side, to perform The Crash in June 1977. The airplane was flown over Manhattan and deliberately nosedived into a rubbish field on Staten Island. Schult stated, "The airplane became entangled in the consumers' thicket, was brutally stopped from high flying-field and drilled itself into the mutation world of Staten Island" [23].

While most of these artists have moved on to other creative endeavors, Leila Daw continues to use airplanes in her art. In 1981 she presented Pre-Historic River Channel. An agricultural airplane modified to emit smoke was used to draw a diagram in the sky. The drawing mapped the probable course of the Mississippi River at a point in pre-Columbian time when the river completely bypassed the area now known as St Louis. The aircraft traced a projection of the river valley both backward in time and upward in space to its prehistoric level.

American poet Peter Payack writes poems in the sky with an airplane flown by a commercial pilot, using a grid of lights on the bottom of the wings which flash in a pre-ordered computerized




Fig. 4. A helicopter was used by the artist Christo in an event in 1966. His plan was to fly 42,390 Cubic Feet Package, an inflatable constructed of 2800 colored balloons wrapped in clear polyethylene and tied with Manila rope, from the campus of the Minneapolis School of Art to the front lawn of the nearby Minneapolis Institute of Arts. On the day of the event, due to the weight of the inflatable and turbulent air, the fearful helicopter pilot lifted the package a mere 20 feet off the ground before depositing it again

in the same spot. (Photo: Carroll T. Hartwell).

sequence to create the words. His Star Poems is an environmental project in which poems and drawings are projected from the underside of the airplane to give the effect of the stars rearranging themselves into words and images [24].

The spirit of flight is the subject of the opera Icarus by artist Otto Piene. It is based on the Greek myth of Icarus, who was imprisoned in a labyrinth with his father, Daedalus, by King Minos of Crete. Daedalus made wax wings so that they could fly out of the maze. However, Icarus flew too near the sun, causing his wings to melt, and he fell into the sea. Piene's opera uses inflatable balloon sculptures as characters. An outdoor performance of this opera was given in October 1983 in Munich. In the scene

illustrated in Fig. 5, one of the characters is seen flying onto the stage with the aid of wires. The starry night sky plus the occasional flashing lights of a passing airplane helped to heighten the drama. Piene has also used his inflatables to 'fly' the cellist, Charlotte Moorman, in a collaboration called Sky Kiss [25].

Another artist fascinated with flight and the Icarus myth has taken his work to the streets of Manhattan. In 1980 the Italian Paolo Buggiani fashioned himself a set of wings which he 'flew' through the streets of New York, propelled by roller skates [26].

Numerous contemporary artists have used flight as the subject of their paintings. Among these are Jim Catalano, Eleanore Mikus, Lucio Pozzi and James

Rosenquist. Rosenquist's F-lll is well known, having been widely reproduced. In Lucio Pozzi's painting, Traveling Cavaliers (Fig. 6), we see a child in the foreground gazing at what could be an early airplane prototype or the latest version of an ultralight aircraft. Pozzi has always been interested in flight and flying things. In a letter to me he stated, "That which moves and that which is motion- less, that which is bound to the ground and that which takes off away from gravity are all ranges of existence. I am puzzled by the birds and their egocentric leaving" [27].

In recent years a number of artists have made and exhibited airplane-shaped sculptures. Among these are the Canadian Murray Favro and the Belgian Pana- marenko. In the work of Panamarenko, one sees a sort of naive nostalgia embodied in a series of absurd airplanes and airships that seem to be hybrids of aircraft that have been and aircraft that are yet to come. Murray Favro's Flying Flea, meant to be taken for a real airplane, was exhibited in 1977 [28]. A real airplane, the ubiquitous Cessna 150, which had flown but crashed and would not fly again, was shown as art at the Kunstforum Maximillianstrasse in Munich by artists Nino Longobardi and Eresto Tatafiore in 1980. I exhibited my aerobatic biplane (after first disassem- bling it so it could pass through the door and then reassembling it) in a New York City art gallery in 1978.

In April 1984 the Redding (California) Museum mounted the exhibition "Aviat- ion and Art". The museum borrowed actual aircraft and aircraft components to display alongside paintings and drawings. An ultralight plane shown in the gallery leaves the viewer to ponder what difference exists between this mass- produced functional object and the artistic experiments of Leonardo or Tatlin. In addition, the wing 'skin' removed from my biplane when I had to re-cover it was shown in one gallery along with the fiberglass fuselage from an amateur airplane built from a kit. Other artists in the exhibition included Ay-O, John Battenberg, William Garnett, Robert Hartman and Robert Andrew Parker.

In the fall of 1983 the Hollywood Art Center in Florida held an exhibition called "Sky Art: Paintings in the Air". This was an exhibition of artists' proposals for works to be executed in the sky by a commercial skywriter trailing smoke. Most of the artists invited had never worked in the sky before and many of their projects were not suited for the medium. Among the more successful




Fig. 5. The legend of Icarus is the subject of a Sky Opera by the artist Otto Piene, who has arranged conferences on Sky Art in Cambridge, Munich and Linz, Austria. At an outdoor performance of the opera Icarus given in Munich in 1983 the character of Icarus was 'flown' onto the stage with the aid of wires. The starry night plus the flashing lights of the occasional passing airplane only helped to heighten

the drama of this event. (Photo: Walter Dent).

pieces executed by the skywriter were those by Richard Anuszkiewicz, Lynda Benglis and Audrey Flack. My project, Bermuda Triangles, was also performed. In this piece a series of triangles with 3- mile-long sides descending in 500-feet increments was created off the coast of Florida. Approximately 33' miles off shore, due to the curvature of the earth, the triangles seemed to disappear in the area of the actual Bermuda Triangle.

VI. AERIAL THEATRE

Although I was originally a painter, from my vantage point in the sky the flat

landscapes I had been painting no longer made sense. I tried working with aerial perspective but the work lacked the sense of motion I felt necessary. I abandoned painting completely and spent my summers flying in aerobatic competit- ions. I began to see the airplane as a tool in itself, rather than a platform from which to observe ideas to be conveyed in some other manner.

For more than a decade I have been using an aerobatic biplane, which I built and fly, to perform four-dimensional works in the sky (Fig. 7). In this Aerial Theatre the aircraft trails smoke to aid in its tracking. The machine is the medium,

its painted wings and fuselage the costume.

The action of the aircraft does not cause the creation of a tangible object. This is difficult for a viewer accustomed to equating artistic activity with a resulting product. But the flight of my airplane exists, like a dance, as a remembrance of something seen. The art is in the process of communication between the doer and the observer.

Before I do a performance I make thorough plans for the event by drawing the projected pieces in an illustrative manner. These drawings are often done on top of actual aerial photographs I have taken (Fig. 8). I then translate these illustrations into a schematic drawing. I use the schematic in the cockpit while performing the pieces, referring to it much as a musician would refer to a score.

The schematics are all of a standard size to fit a holder on my instrument panel. They sometimes use symbols from the Aresti Manual of Aerocryptography (a reference which governs aerobatic com- petitions), but more often I must improvise symbols because my pieces are not always formed of standard maneuvers. Nor does this manual deal with the four-dimensional aspect of flight, which is one of the main differences between my Aerial Theatre and an ordinary aerobatic demonstration.

Usually I fly the airplane in my Aerial Theatre, as making the event becomes more important than the event itself. The spectator sees the action of the artist's tool. The smoke trailed by the aircraft aids in its tracking, and this action, working against the elements of nature, the sky, wind and gravity, gives form to the design. It is the intrusion of this action upon the ever-changing sky that causes it to take on an infinite shape and thus become 'four-dimensional'.

As the movement of my airplane is essentially drawing geometric figures in space, scientifically my use of the term 'four-dimensional' closely parallels the use of the term in n-dimensional geometry, a concept developed in the nineteenth century by the British mathematician Arthur Cayley.

Any point in the physical universe can be located by reference to three given axes; the physical universe is said, therefore, to be three-dimensional. The same space, however, becomes four-dimensional if it is regarded as made up not of points but an infinity of spheres, for then four references must be given to determine or locate each individual sphere: the three co-ordinates of its center point and the length of its radius... The use of




Fig. 6. Lucio Pozzi, Traveling Cavaliers, oil on canvas, 120 x 132 inches, 1984. This painting depicts a child gazing at what could be either an early airplane prototype or the latest version of an ultralight aircraft. Pozzi has always been interested in flight and flying things. He is fascinated by the mystery of flight and states that he is "puzzled by the birds and their egocentric leaving". (Photo: Fred Sutton.

Courtesy of John Weber Gallery, New York).

geometrical concepts involving more than three dimensions has had a number of important applications in the physical sciences, particularly in the development of the theory of relativity [29].

People seeing the illustrative drawings wrongfully assume the purpose of my flight is to re-create these drawings in the sky. They expect to see a large object of smoke standing in space for some period of time. This reflects their previously conditioned two- and three-dimensional mentality which fails to perceive the greater-dimensional character of the event.

The fourth dimension in this usage is not to be thought of as time, as is the case in physics, for instance. Many theatrical events performed by humans, as well as by machines, take place over an extended period of time but do not involve the fourth dimension in this sense. While a great deal of time may elapse, no amount of movement on a proscenium can cause a work of conventional theater to become four-dimensional.

In my performances I attempt to surround the viewers with a highly charged environment of movement and sound. Drawing, sculpture and dance are all absorbed into the act of flying itself. Although the separate parts of each piece

Fig. 7. The aerobatic biplane belonging to the artist, rebuilt and repainted in an artistic motif. The airplane is a modified Pitts Special with a 360-cubic-inch engine. Its empty weight is 733 pounds. It can cruise at 140 miles per hour and climbs at 2500 feet per minute. The wing span is only 17 feet. (Photo: Jeanne

Mackin).




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Fig. 8. Sky Dances of the Muamee, pencil on Xerox, 8 x 10 inches. One of a series of drawings used in planning an Aerial Theatre event for Toledo, Ohio. These drawings are made on top of Xerox reproductions of aerial photographs taken of the site by me on an earlier flight. These illustrative drawings are used to show the flight path of the aircraft and the pattern this flight will create. While the aircraft does trail smoke during the event this is merely to aid in its tracking with no intention to recreate the drawing in space. These illustrative drawings are translated into schematic drawings which I carry in the cockpit and refer to, as a musician would to a score, during the performance of the flight.

- the loops, rolls, hammerheads, etc. are known aerobatic maneuvers and practiced beforehand, by themselves they have little if any artistic identity. It is only when a selection of these previously experienced elements comes together in an integrated multi-dimensional performance in space that art occurs.

In his 1919 "Futurist Aerial Theatre Manifesto", the pilot-artist Fedele Azari foresaw the potential of the airplane for communication:

Today we are able to create by means of flight a new artistic form with expressions of the most complex states of mind ... looping denotes happiness, spins denote impatience or irritation, repeatedly tilting the wings from right to left indicates light-heartedness... all the infinite varieties of maneuvres joined and coordinated in a planned succession, give the spectator an immediate and clear comprehension of how much the aviator wishes to represent or disclaim with the airplane [30].

While I cannot entirely agree with Azari's symbolism, his manifesto sug- gests much of what I do today, except that Azari did not deal with the 'fourth dimension'. In contrast, in 1929 a group of Italian artists led by Balla and Crali issued a "Manifesto dell'Aeropittura" whose basic idea was that "in the new perception of the world the elements of vision are without a fixed point of reference, are part of swift unceasing

movement. And so is the artist, who is no longer a stationary observer-narrator but an organic part of this movement" [31]. Recently in Milan I had a conversation with Tulio Crali, the last living member of this group, who stressed to me the importance of the concept of ever- expanding space to the understanding of the 'fourth dimension'.

There is no fixed reference for my aerial pieces, no given vantage point or perspective; rather, there is infinite ever- expanding space. Thus, each person watching my work from an individual vantage point can have a unique idea of what the piece looks like. Individuals, often able to see only segments of a piece due to the immensity of its scale, can draw their own conclusions about the appear- ance of the whole. Unlike conventional works of art, which are designed to remain basically unchanged forever, my pieces do not have one existence but many, constantly emerging as the event unfolds. This is what gives the work its 'four-dimensional' character.

There are also parallels in my concept of the fourth dimension and that space described by Guillaume Appolinaire in Les Peintre Cubistes. "Considered from a plastic point of view, the fourth dimension is brought into existence through the three known measurements: it represents the immensity of space in all directions at one time. It is space itself, the dimension of infinity; it is what gives objects their plasticity" [32].

While they are often documented, my pieces are not designed for documentation. Documentation destroys their multi-dimensional quality. Rather, the pieces belong to those who see the work and so participate in it. This is the only way one can observe the infinite shape possibilities of the event. Aerial Theatre remains in the mind, its original place of existence, long after the movements and sounds of its external spatial inception have ceased.

Normally the scale of my pieces is such that they easily dominate the surrounding landscape. Even in Washington D.C., where I was required by the Federal Aviation Agency of the U.S.A. to stay below 1000 feet above ground due to the proximity to the landing pattern of National Airport, I was still able to make pieces almost 500 feet higher than the tallest nearby structure, the 555-foot Washington Monument.

In Manhattan, due to the proximity of the landing pattern at La Guardia Airport, I had to stay below 1000 feet. This put my airplane 200 feet below the top of the World Trade Center. This was the first time, and will probably be the only time, that I was not allowed to fly higher than the nearby buildings (Fig. 9a). This height restriction prevented me from using vertical maneuvers such as the 'hammerhead' turn depicted in Fig. 9b, in which the airplane climbs straight up until it runs out of airspeed and is then pivoted to reverse direction and heads straight downward.

My Aerial Theatre presents several unique problems of space. Pieces flown low to the ground are the most dramatic, as the sense of size is greatly enhanced and the spectator has more possibility for actually feeling 'in the piece'. However, due to air currents and the density of the air, the smoke tends to dissipate faster. Many viewers come expecting to see an object created in the sky, and they are disappointed when the image blows away quickly, not realizing that the image itself is not the intention of the event. If I fly higher, at 5000 feet for example (skywriting operations normally are conducted from 10,000 to 15,000 feet above ground level), the smoke trails last longer but the actual presence of the airplane, its colors and sounds, are lost. This is evidenced in the photo sequence shown in Fig. 10, where the unfurling of the smoke pattern occurring at about 5000 feet above ground level is quite apparent, while the airplane is all but invisible. However, the piece becomes more acceptable to the average viewer because a smoke pattern remains to be seen. Also, because of the distance, the




Fig. 9a. The twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City Fig. 9b. The patterns on the wings of the biplane are readily visible as it dwarfed the 17-foot wing span of my aerobatic biplane during an Aerial climbs straight up trailing smoke during a performance. The craft is Theatre event over the Hudson River in October 1980. Federal Aviation capable of climbing almost 2000 feet vertically before losing all airspeed. A Administration regulations required me to remain below 1000 feet above maneuver called a 'hammerhead turn' can be accomplished when the ground level to stay clear of the flight path of airplanes arriving at La rudder is applied just as the airplane runs out of forward speed and begins Guardia Airport. Because of this restriction I had to perform the entire to slide backwards. This is a rather spectacular air show maneuver which

flight below the height of the top of the Trade Center buildings. I often incorporate into my Aerial Theatre. Care must be taken at the top of the maneuver when applying full rudder not to induce excessive forward elevator pressure, as the airplane is in an incipient flat spin configuration and can easily be put into a spin by rough control handling. (Photo: Jon

great size of the piece is seemingly reduced to something one can hold in one's hand. Thus the piece takes on a 'friendly' scale, much as a distant mountain does not seem as threatening as a mountain one is climbing.

This 'friendly' scale belies the violence done to both the airplane and myself during a flying event. Seen from the ground, the airplane seems to dance across the sky with the grace of a butterfly. Inside the cockpit one can observe the struggle of man and machine with the forces of gravity.

In a performance, the speed of the aircraft varies from zero, when it pivots at the top of a vertical line before plummeting downward in a hammerhead stall, to 200 miles per hour at the bottom of a dive. The pull up from a dive to vertical creates a load on the pilot and

airplane that often exceeds seven times the force of gravity. Thus my normal 165- pound body pulling out of a dive weighs 1155 pounds. Likewise, a negative maneuver, in which the airplane pitches forward and the pilot is thrown against the restraining harnesses rather than being forced down into the seat, can cause the body to achieve weightlessness of minus five times gravity.

This change in gravitational pull also causes the blood in the body to move about in a rather erratic way. Under positive gravitational pull the blood is drained away from the brain and the sense of vision is grayed. This may lead ultimately to a blackout or loss of consciousness. A more painful process is 'red out'. This occurs under negative gravitational pull when excess blood is forced into the brain. The pilot's vision is

Reis.)

blurred by redness and the center of the brain becomes hot, causing extreme pain. Either of these conditions can have serious consequences. When doing an Aerial Theatre performance I must be aware of my tolerances and not exceed

my limits. The airplane I fly is also subject to

gravitational stress, and I must likewise take care not to exceed its limits. The aircraft I use, a modified version of a Pitts Special S-1S, based on a design originally conceived in the 1940s by Curtiss Pitts, was originally built for competition aerobatics in 1969. I bought the original aircraft in 1973 and immediately modified it and installed a new engine. While the 1940s plans called for a 65- horsepower engine, mine is capable of turning out 210 horsepower.

The stress limit on this airplane is




Fig. 10. Trails of smoke unfold behind my aircraft as I perform over the campus of the State University of New York at Brockport as part of an Earth Day celebration in 1980. While this sequence of photographs cannot capture the sound and the space of the actual event, they can document the piece's linear development. Although the pieces are not designed for documentation, as this destroys the four-dimensional' aspect of the work, the folding and unfolding

apparent in this series of photographs give a hint of the infinite shape possibilities of the event. (Photos: Greg Benson).

purported to be + 13-13 and no aircraft of this type has ever come apart in competition, but the limit is certified to only +9 and -6. Thus, I work very close to the airplane's performance limits.

Weather is an obvious problem with my Aerial Theatre work. I rarely have a 'perfect' day. In fact, if the sky is clear, it is usually quite windy. The wind blows away clouds and smog, but also the smoke trailed by my airplane. Con- versely, on a calm day the air is usually filled with haze or there is a solid cloud background which makes my track difficult or impossible to see. The best time to fly is usually right after the

passage of a cold front. Unfortunately, my public performances are scheduled far in advance and there is no guarantee of the weather.

More recently I have attempted to

incorporate activities on the ground with my solo performances in the sky. In 1984 I accomplished Sky Dances of the Maumee in collaboration with a dance company and a brass quintet [33]. The five pieces I flew were coordinated with simultaneous music and dance on the

ground. Original music was adapted for

my event and the choreography fitted the motif of my flight. The dancers wore costumes of my design.

I plan more collaborative efforts in the future to expand the scope of my Aerial Theatre. I also hope to include other aerobatic pilots in flying elaborately choreographed spectacles in which the planes can fly pas de deux as well as solos accompanied by chorus pieces.

I have designed as-yet unrealized performances with string quartets, marching bands, fireworks, spotlights, and poets circling in planes reading the libretto through loudspeakers.

I use the airplane not for its novelty but as a means of communication. The technology itself is not especially advanced; the canvas-covered biplane and the internal combustion engine are relics of another era. They have been replaced by aluminum and jet propul- sion, which even now are in their turn being replaced.

I feel that art must reflect the sum of human knowledge in an age. I seek to return the airplane to its origin in art and

fantasy. I use it in my Aerial Theatre to communicate with the greatest number of people in the shortest possible time. This is something I am sure Leonardo da Vinci would have done had he been able to successfully fly one of his many flying designs.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. John W.R. Taylor and Kenneth Munson, History of Aviation (New York: Crown Publishers, 1972) p. 17. I have relied on this work for my subsequent remarks on the early history of aviation.

2. Stephen Longstreet, The Canvas Falcons (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970) p. 235.

3. Peter Selz, Sam Francis (New York: Harry Abrams, 1982) p. 19.

4. Michael Kirby, Futurist Performances (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971), p. 219.

5. Kirby [4] p. viii. 6. R.W. Flint, ed., Marinetti, Selected

Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) p. 297.

7. Anne Coffin Hansen, ed., The Futurist Imagination: Word and Image in Italian Futurist Painting, Drawing, Collage and Free-Word Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1983) p. 74.




8. 'Parole in Liberta', or 'free-word poetry': in a 1913 manifesto Marinetti wrote that "The whirling propeller" of the airplane told him "one must destroy syntax". Thus, his aerial experience caused him to create this new poetic form using analogical juxtapositions of sights, sounds and smells, expressive typo- graphic and orthographic variations, and an unstructured spatial organization.

9. Hansen [7] p. 74. 10. Hansen [7] p. 74. 11. Charles A. Lindbergh, Of Flight andLife

(New York: Scribner's, 1948) pp.51-52. 12. Taylor [1] pp. 4143. 13. John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the

Russian Avant-Garde (New Haven: Yale University Press) p. 217.

14. Milner [13] pp. 218-220. 15. Milner [13] p. 220.

16. Milner [13] p. 218. 17. Milner [13] p. 218. 18. Roland Penrose, Picasso, His Life and

Work, 3rd Ed. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1981) p. 171.

19. Ruth Bowman, Murals Without Walls (Newark, N.J.: Newark Museum, 1978) pp. 17-39.

20. Tal Streeter, The Art of the Japanese Kite (New York: Weatherhill/Lippincott, 1974, 1982).

21. Selz [3] pp. 93-95. 22. Otto Piene and Elizabeth Goldring, eds.,

Sky Art Conference 1981 (Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1981) pp. 28-29.

23. Edward Lucie-Smith, Art in the Seventies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 88.

24. Piene and Goldring [22] p. 64. 25. Piene and Goldring [22] p. 43. 26. Lamberto Pignotti, "Grattacieli",

D'ARS XXV, No. 105, 27-31 (1984). 27. Statement in letter to author, November

1984. 28. Lucie-Smith [23] p. 112. 29. Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia, Vol.

11 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls). 30. Kirby [4] pp. 218-219. 31. Zbigniew Folejewski, Futurism and Its

Place in the Development of Modern Poetry (Ottawa, Canada: University of Ottawa Press, 1980) p. 37.

32. L.C. Brenning and J.C.I. Chevalier, eds., Les Peintres Cubistes (Paris: Herman, 1965) p. 52.

33. This work was performed in Toledo, Ohio with the Valois Dance Company and the Tower Brass Quintet.

Poleski, Art and Flight 80



Art and Flight: Historical Origins to Contemporary Works

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