A Recent History of Writing And Drawing

The first Sky Writing to be demonstrated in England was in May, 1922 by Captain Cyril Turner of the Royal Air Force. It was in the same year that Turner also demonstrated skywriting in the US, over Times Square in New York City. He wrote letters in the sky a half-mile high using oil dropped on the planes hot exhaust pipe and manipulated by levers.

(A technique developed in Britian by Major Savage was employed by Citroën in 1922).

One peculiar approach to the suspension of (ephemeral) forms in space is the use of vaporous substances through a technique known as Skywriting, which consists in the writing or drawing formed in the sky by smoke or another gaseous element released from an airplane, usually at approximately 10,000 feet.

In the late 1960s and early seventies, artists such as James Turrel, Sam Francis, and Marinus Boezem started to employ skywriting as a medium. Poet David Antin created skypoems over Los Angeles and San Diego in1987-1988. These and other artists and writers created evanescent forms within what is known as troposphere, that is, the lowest atmospheric layer.

Pushing the concept of a sky art into the space age, beyond aerial acrobatics and the design of evanescent forms, the Brazilian artist Paulo Bruscky proposed, in 1974, the creation of an artificial aurora borealis, which according to the artist would be produced by airplanes coloring cloud formations. Bruscky published adds in newspapers to both document the project and inform the public. The ads were also an instrument in his search for sponsors. They were published in the Brazilian papers Diário de Pernambuco, in Recife, September 22, 1974 and Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, December 29, 1976.

While on a Guggenheim fellowship in New York, he also published adds in the Village Voice, New York, May 25, 1982. The creation of artificial auroras was realized in 1992, not by Bruscky, but by NASA as part of environmental research. Approximately sixty artificial mini-auroras were created by employing electron guns to fire rays at the atmosphere from the space shuttle Atlantis.

The artistic use of skywriting further extended the aerial performances set forth in Futurist manifestoes. In addition to the well-known writings of Futurism's founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, of particular relevance is the 1919 manifesto "Futurist Aerial Theatre", by Fedele Azari, in which he wrote: "I HAVE MYSELF PERFORMED, IN 1918, MANY EXPRESSIVE FLIGHTS AND EXAMPLES OF ELEMENTARY AERIAL THEATRE OVER THE CAMP OF BUSTO ARSIZIO.

I perceived that it was easy for the spectators to follow all the nuances of the aviator's states of mind, given the absolute identification between the pilot and his airplane, which becomes like an extension of his body: his bones, tendons, muscles, and nerves extend into longerons and metallic wires." Another significant, albeit little known antecedent, is the "Dimensionist Manifesto", published in 1936 by the Hungarian poet Károly (aka Charles) Sirato and signed by Arp, Delaunay, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, and Picabia, among others. The "Dimensionist Manifesto" was published in Paris as a loose sheet attached to the magazine Revue N + 1. Its most ambitious proposal is four-dimensional sculpture: "Ensuite doit venir la creation d'un art absolument nouveau: l'art cosmique (Vaporisation de Ia sculpture, theatre Syno-Sens - denominations provisoires). La conquête totale de l'art de l'espace à quatre dimensions (un "Vacuum Artis" jusqu'ici). La matière rigide est abolie et remplacée par des matériaux gazéfiés. L'homme au lieu de regarder les objets d'art, devient lui-même le centre et le sujet de la création, et la création consiste en des effets sensoriels dirigés dans un espace cosmique fermé." This anticipatory vision would become a reality not only through the use of vapors and gases as new art materials (Pierre Huyghe's "L'Expédition Scintillante, Act II: Untitled (light show)", 2002, comes to mind), but through the continuous use of skywriting as a medium in contemporary art, as exemplified by "En el Cielo", an exhibition of skywriting projects created by several artists for the Venice Biennial in 2001 and organized by TRANS>, a New York organization that presents experimental art. In spite of its appeal to artists, though, skywriting is itself a vanishing art form, having been largely replaced in the commercial world by a faster skymessaging technique, known as "skytyping", in which several planes fly in formation and use a computer-controlled radio signal to emit puffs of smoke that form letters.

www.ekac.org/levitation.html

Works made for Venice Biennial

EN el CIELO, a portfolio of 11 photographs of the sky of Venice with a site specific drawings made by each artist re-drawn in sky-writing.

Janet Cardiff & Georges Bures Miller (BOO!), Olafur Eliasson (Cube), Valie EXPORT (Metanoia), Koo Jeong-a (Ouss), Glenn Ligon (Glenn Ligon), Gabriel Orozco (Circles), Paul McCarthy, Dave Muller (- Z -), Vik Muniz (cloud over cloud), Rirkrit Tiravanija (Blow Up), Jeff Wall (Ciao Jack)

This project has been written up by Hans Ulrich Obrist in C Magazine as the best exhibition in the Venice Biennial, 2001. It was also in the cover of Artforum as one of the best projects of the year with the photograph of the cloud by Vik Muniz.

www.mo-artgallery.nl/enelcieloplhr.htm

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