For the Girls Who Wear Glasses and Get Sore Noses from Them
I’m in the process of ordering new glasses so it’s a funny time for the current eyeglasses to start giving me a problem. But, since getting the eye tests done, I’ve been getting red marks on the bridge of my nose from the plastic bits (nose pad, nose pieces, nose guard?) on my glasses.
The first thing I did was give them an extra cleaning – and washed my face well too, of course. The problem went away for a few days. But, it started up again, just on one side this time. It is really bothering me a lot. The skin is peeling off under the nose piece. It’s become very sore, raw and oozing a bit. So, I washed everything again. Used disinfectant again too. Then I put a plastic bandage on my face and went online to see if I could find the cause of the problem.
I wear my eyeglasses all the time (not in the shower or in bed, as some will be thinking). I don’t just wear them for reading or driving around in the car. So, a sore spot like this is something I want to deal with and fix right away.
Right away I found an answer to what it is and how to deal with it.
The Cause of the Problem
First, the cause – hot weather and skin being irritated by the nose piece. As you sweat from the heat you also sweat under the frame of your glasses. Not a problem for the skin that gets air to it and dries once you are not sweating. That patch of skin under the nose piece is not able to dry so the skin is always a bit wet with sweat and then irritated and rubbed by the glasses.
That was good to know. I don’t have some weird skin problem or infection, bacteria, whatever.
Get a Different Nose Piece
Secondly, I found out a couple of options which will help the problem, other than wearing a bandage.
You can go to the store where you bought your eyeglasses and ask them to change the plastic nose piece and give you a fabric/ cloth one instead. This will let the skin get some air under there and give it a chance to be a little drier. It’s also softer, so it won’t rub as much.
Try Adjusting/ Moving the Nose Piece
Another idea people wrote about was moving the nose pieces. Experiment a bit and see if you can loosen them by pushing them up or down a bit more or less. In my case, when I didn’t have a problem with red marks before, this seems a likely solution. Chances are the nose pieces were moved when they were checking my current prescription at the eye doctor’s office. So, that’s what I have done. I will have to wait and see if that works.
When I get the new eyeglasses I’m going to see if they will give me something different for a nose piece, maybe cloth which can be added on hot summer days. It’s good to know there are options!
Create your Own Solution to the Nose Piece Problem
I had a new idea for the problem of glasses which leave a mark on our nose.
Take one standard bandage, it must be the type with fabric not the plastic bandages. Cut off the ends to make two pieces of bandage, roughly the size of the nose piece on your glasses. Peel off the backing from the bandage piece then stick the piece onto the nose piece of your glasses frame. Trim the excess, leave a bit to act like overlap and wrap up and over the sides of the noise piece. This overlap bit keeps it from touching any of your skin and helps it to stay stuck on as well.
I’ve been using this idea all day today. It works great! It’s also fairly cheap and easy to do.
There’s a big difference between a woman who wears glasses and a woman with a pair of glasses on her face, and we’re not idiots. Has she ever pushed her specs repeatedly up her nose in an especially stuffy interview room, reached for them only to encounter the paradox of she who cannot see, cannot find her glasses? Slept on them or stepped on them? Wondered when to take them off pre-makeout? No, no, no and no. And you can tell that she and her specs are not One.
If Edward McPherson were a filmmaker instead of a writer, The History of the Futuremight begin with a sublime wide-angle shot — panning the length of an empty desert highway somewhere deep in West Texas — before zooming out to show the desiccated, veritable no-man’s-lands where the first nuclear bomb tests forever burned a hole into the United States’ collective psyche. Old black and white army newsreel footage of the blossoming mushroom clouds would be next; then fast-forward to the ruins and citywide aftermath of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks in New York. Abraham Zapruder’s iconic vintage 8mm Kodachrome footage of president John F. Kennedy’s assassination could fill in between clips of the television show Dallas — famous for its season-ending cliffhanger in which the character J.R. is shot, parodied with great success in The Simpsons episode “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” — before arriving, finally, at Civil War nostalgia. (McPherson was named after an ancestor born near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who became a major deputy of the Commission of Revenue in 1863 under Abraham Lincoln, after serving from 1859 to 1863 as a congressman.)
Edward McPherson (photo by Carly Ann Faye, courtesy Coffee House Press)
The History of the Future is a collection of essays on American history. These essays go down easily enough individually within their native habitat of the magazine — two appeared in Paris Review Daily, two others in Catapult and the American Scholar respectively; McPherson has also written for the New York Times Magazine — but they do not cohere meaningfully as a book. It would be much more resonant and engaging to read in 2017 if it were less ambitious in its scope – for example, the nation-wide, road-trip-style ramble of “Private streets, racism, and the St. Louis World’s Fair; fracking for oil and digging for dinosaurs in North Dakota boomtowns” — but more ambitious in its form and message. The latter half of the excerpt above sounds more like a description of an apocalyptic vacation package than the summary of the contents of a book of essays.
A chapter dedicated to fracking is among the more urgent and timely inclusions. “The idea of fracking isn’t new,” McPherson writes, “just improved upon.” He goes on to explain the process in detail, along with the history of its development. He also paints a bleak picture of a North Dakota town slowly ruined by its’ “booming” energy industry:
Next door is the No Place Bar, which welcomes bikers and today has a pink-and-black baby stroller abandoned out front. On the side of the Salvation Army, across a small parking lot, someone has put up a giant billboard of the Ten Commandments.
Between 2008 and 2012, the number of cases of gonorrhea in the western half of the state rose 72 percent. Chlamydia was up 240 percent.
One o’clock in the afternoon and there’s a guy sleeping in the shade of a stunted tree outside the train station. The landscaping smells of urine. In the small waiting room, a TV plays loudly as a train scrapes down the tracks.
All the essays are marked by such jump-cut-like paragraph breaks and present tense narration, which, at times, is weirdly reminiscent of the poet Frank O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that,” but without O’Hara’s lyricism. McPherson’s investigative reporting involves walking around, looking at things, talking to people, and then selecting a sequence of factoids to fill in the gaps amid his reflections. The History of the Future might instead feature more oral history and interviews with those countless Americans who can’t afford to do things like vacation. A variety of voices and opinions beyond that of the author’s, as well as photographs à la Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would enhance the argument, while decreasing the personal anecdotes and awkward math and statistics would clarify the writing and open up the possibility of a moral.
The ostensible bringing together of “…place, past and future…the popular, the personal, and the political,” as Rebecca Traister blurbs on the dust jacket, results in a literary kitchen sink in which no event or issue appears more important, relevant or newsworthy than any other, with so many proper nouns bobbing up through the non-fiction narrative. When the author highlights facts about segregated housing in St. Louis, right after relating that Judy Garland was forever imprinted upon his imagination after he watched the film Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), he’s not journalistically plumbing the depths of how, what, where, when and why these two phenomena relate to each other, to reveal something about certain questionable systems of power at work, and what to do about them. He’s juxtaposing them to produce a kind of “info-tainment” dramatics. The author seems more interested in simply holding the readers’ attention for as many pages as possible, when he might instead be identifying the perpetrators of this segregation — maybe greedy real estate developers, politicians who divert funding away from public schools, organized crime — and what is the history of their actions, and what do the people on the receiving end of it all have to say. It is also probably true, for instance, that Hollywood would like to ignore the real plight of the citizens that live in the towns depicted in their make-believe films.
In the St. Louis essay “Open Ye Gates, Swing Wide Ye Portals!” McPherson does quick work of highlighting the many ironies and contrasts inherent in the city’s national identity, as it devolved from hosting the World’s Fair over a century ago to being a contender for “worst ghetto in America” today, according to YouTube. Most ominous about this essay, especially if we are supposed to register it as a political commentary, is its ending. McPherson considers the iconic archway as a metaphor for the city, as he allegorizes its struggles:
The arch has no keystone; the north and south legs are of equal length. You’re either on one side or the other. Arches, it should be noted, hold themselves up: they rise on their own weight, they compress — higher pieces push down and out on those below. Some five hundred tons of pressure where needed to pry the legs apart to install the final four-foot pieces. That’s why the windows are so small: to preserve the structural integrity.
Is McPherson comparing the arch to the monumental and ultimately unfair and oppressive social structures that determine life in our cities, where the rich live in gated communities “push[ing] down and out on those below”? The arch sways some eighteen inches, he adds, like a chain or a gate, when the wind blows. In its presence one worries that it might fall down. McPherson confesses that he finds the arch beautiful, and that “the balance is an illusion.” He adds that “the fact does not comfort him,” alluding to how both the arch and cities are, in effect, held together by “forces great and unseen,” laws of physics and systematic social oppression.
The history of America in general is one of constant race and class oppression, environmental pollution, political corruption and murder. The future promises only more of the same, we read; McPherson opines, while on the set of a new season of Dallas, that we are “watching history being endlessly repeated” and we are complicit. The book is full of “Aha!” moments in which McPherson acknowledges his own complicity. “Fantasizing about the end is a way of sidestepping responsibility,” he writes, “of overlooking the problems, or systems of inequality, that we might actually be contributing to.” This is part of an essay entitled “Three Minutes To Midnight.” Its title is a reference to the Doomsday clock, and the conviction, currently held by a number of scientists and thinkers, that we are now closer to Doomsday — the proverbial midnight — than ever before, at least since the height of the Cold War in 1953. Just short of fantasizing, McPherson lists myriad apocalyptic scenarios: nuclear war, superbugs, climate change, solar flares, bees dying or killer asteroids.
“Three Minutes to Midnight” ends with the author’s somber consideration: “Is that the true final tragedy — to be trapped in our private visions of history?” If he is saying there is no way to escape complicity in America, maybe he’s right, but who wants to read another book about that, especially if the book contains no new ideas for a better possible future, despite the horrors of our history?
The History of the Future(2017) is published by Coffee House Press and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, ‘Early Jurassic Marine Reptiles’ (1876)
In addition to scientific specimens, the Princeton Natural History Museum collected artwork to contextualize its holdings and illustrate the flora and fauna of the ancient world. Displayed high above the viewer and wrapping around the central atrium of the museum, hung seventeen murals by Victorian artist and naturalist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Commissioned in 1876 by university president James McCosh, the paintings presented prehistoric life from various global regions and geological eras, providing museumgoers with a narrated timeline of the progression of life from the dawn of time.
Of Hawkins’s 17 commissioned paintings, 15 survive and remain at Princeton University and four feature his beloved dinosaurs. According to the Princeton Art Museum’s website, the works “constitute the earliest known representations of dinosaurs and prehistoric life as they were understood at the time.” Hawkins used fossil findings and scientific evidence to literally flesh out his representations of animals, with the intention of educating the public about past life. Earlier in his career, in 1852, he sculpted a menagerie of dinosaurs — the first life-size reconstructions of their type — for the grounds of the Crystal Palace in London. In celebration of the feat, Hawkins and 21 other scientists famously dined on a seven-course meal in the belly of “an Iguanodon” as they rang in the new year of 1854. Sir Richard Owen, the paleontologist who coined the term “Dinosauria,” sat at the head of the table.
The famous banquet in the mould of the Crystal Palace Iguanodon, New Year’s Eve, 1853. As depicted in the ‘Illustrated London News’ and scanned from ‘The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Dinosaurs’ (image courtesy Wikipedia)
Through his aesthetic decisions, Hawkins ascribed behaviors to dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals that neither he nor the scientists of his time had the capacity or data to deduce. The works demonstrate how, as prehistoric life was first unearthed, Hawkins pieced together fact and fantasy to produce representations of dinosaurs that we still recognize today. They set the paradigm for the successive portrayal of dinosaurs by later paleoartists like Charles Knight.
Despite beginning his career as an illustrator for Charles Darwin, Hawkins openly mocked Darwin’s views on evolution and natural selection. In the introduction to his book A Comparative View of the Human and Animal Frame, published in 1860, Hawkins points to the “oneness of plan upon all animals are constructed,” and credits the “omniscient wisdom” of the “Almighty Architect.” The medium of painting enabled Hawkins to advance his creationist and anti-Darwinian views. In the “Cretaceous Life of New Jersey,” Hawkins crowds the landscape with different species — at least four different ones, including the Dryptosaurus, Hadrosaurus, Mosasaurus, and Elasmosaurus— theatrically organizing them within the universe of the rectangular painting. Influenced by the staunch anti-evolution beliefs of Sir Owen, his scientific advisor, Hawkins modeled the physiology of dinosaurs on that of mammals, positioning them on all four legs to emphasize that the creatures, akin to today’s mammals, were “the highest form of life on earth at the time … suited to their time and place.” Hawkins’s 1853 Crystal Palace “Iguanodon” is particularly rotund and mammal-like with its soft belly and short limbs, demonstrating Owen’s ideological pull on Hawkins’s artistry.
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, “Cretaceous Life of New Jersey” (1877)
By demonstrating the interaction between species and their contemporary environments, Hawkins’s paintings served to educate university students about geological and biological history and animate ancient fossil specimens. The visceral nature of the works, says Robert McCracken Peck, Curator of Art and Artifacts and Senior Fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, “gave them enormous power to convince [contemporaries] of the reality of deep time,” and preceded the proliferation of dinosaur imagery in today’s pop culture.
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, “Jurassic Life of Europe” (1877)Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, “Triassic Life of Germany” (1877)
Charles R. Knight, “Laelaps” (1897), the predators may represent paleontologists Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, whose intense competition defined early American paleontology (courtesy American Museum of Natural History)
Earlier this summer, I visited a quiet park in south London, where families pushed strollers around a small lake, and solitary people read books on benches in the sun. Nestled in the foliage by the water is a curious relic from the Crystal Palace Exhibition which gives the Crystal Palace Park its name: a herd of concrete dinosaurs, lazing with gaping jaws, and standing scaly and proud by the trees. The prehistoric creatures were made by artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in the 1850s, and are recognized as the world’s first dinosaur sculptures. Yet they don’t look quite how we envision dinosaurs today; the Iguanodons appear like rotund iguanas, the Dicynodonts like overgrown turtles, although contemporary knowledge suggests they never had shells.
Cover of Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past (courtesy Taschen)
While their accuracy may vary (and is closer than many give him credit for), Hawkins was working with the most cutting edge 19th-century knowledge on dinosaurs to create sculptures both scientific and compellingly artistic. Paleoart has rarely been considered as part of the visual movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Nevertheless, as writer Zoë Lescaze explores in Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past, 1830-1980, out this month from Taschen, it has been vibrantly present, whether in the dynamic Art Nouveau mosaics by Heinrich Harder at the Berlin Aquarium (reconstructed in the 1980s by Hans Jochen Ihle following their destruction in WWII), or the foreboding postwar depictions of mammoths and early humanity by Czech artist Zdeněk Burian.
“I wanted to write this book precisely because paleoart is not a widely recognized genre, even though images of dinosaurs and their world are everywhere,” Lescaze told Hyperallergic. “It’s a fairly new branch of natural history illustration — the first painting of prehistoric reptiles only appeared in 1830 — and I’m interested in how artists and scientists collectively formed our current ideas of prehistory through these images.”
Heinrich Harder, reconstructed by Hans Jochen Ihle, “Pteranodon” (1982), the original was destroyed when explosives blasted the Berlin Aquarium in November 1943, destroying Harder’s mosaics on the façade. In 1982, the Aquarium reconstructed the mosaics, using photographs, tile fragments, and Harder’s original plans (courtesy TASCHEN)
Paleoart is a monstrous book in size, visuals, and design; take off its dust jacket, adorned with Alexei Petrovich Bystrow’s 1933 painting of an Inostrancevia with crimson Pareiasaurus flesh dripping from its teeth, and a scaly cover embedded with a dinosaur footprint is revealed. Tracking down this art was not easy and Lescaze had to delve into a diverse array of institutional and private archives, with some of the pieces published for the first time in the book. For instance, she describes in Paleoart how much of Burian’s “finest works languish out of sight, locked in museum storage” in the Czech Republic. Similarly, Hawkins’s London dinosaurs were abandoned for decades after the Crystal Palace burned in 1936, only later saved from the overgrowth and restored.
“Because fresh fossil discoveries tend to render older works of paleoart scientifically obsolete, many outdated images are neglected, lost, or destroyed,” Lescaze explained. “Some pieces in this book are still on public display, but finding the others involved visiting natural history museums, libraries, archives, universities, and private collections around the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Russia.”
Philip Henry Delamotte, “Model-Room at the Crystal Palace” (1853), showing concrete dinosaurs being built in a workshop on the grounds of the Crystal Palace, London (courtesy TASCHEN)
Paleoart is arranged chronologically, and flipping through its pages, some which fold out into panoramas of idyllic tableaux of the “Age of Reptiles” or bloody battles of dinosaur chaos, you can see how our idea of what a dinosaur looks like evolved. In one delightfully anachronistic mash-up from 1889, dinosaurs and mammoths mingle together, with one wooly mammoth grabbing a unicorn with its trunk. An incredibly detailed 1984 terracotta installation by Alexander Mikhailovich Belashov at the Moscow Paleontological Museum shows more familiarly lithe and reptilian dinosaurs, but the whole scene of Earth evolution is crowned by the Virgin Mary and Jesus.
Adolphe-François Pannemaker in the 19th century also added a biblical tone to his illustrations, with volcanoes bursting and lightning striking in one rather apocalyptic piece, while other artists in those early paleoart days favored the battling ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, their ocean confrontations referencing Victorian naval conflicts. Later in the 1970s to 1990s, Ely Kish painted the mass extinction of dinosaurs and extreme weather environments, her dramatic scenes echoing the contemporary anxiety about climate change and environmental catastrophe. And sometimes the double meanings of paleoart could only be glimpsed by those in the field. An 1897 painting by Charles R. Knight shows two Laelaps (Dryptosauruses) in a fight with claws and teeth bared. Some have interpreted it as a jab at paleontologists and specifically the vicious rivalry between Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, two renowned figures who were not above dynamiting each other’s dig sites.
Dinosaur bones have long been a blank slate for projecting the artistic sensibilities, popular media, and anxieties of the day onto their forms. With each reconstruction of the past, a bit of the present is reflected. As Lescaze said, “Paleoart is interesting to me because I think it often reveals as much about modern humans as it does about dinosaurs.”
Alexei Petrovich Bystrow, “Inostrancevia, devouring a Pareiasaurus” (1933); both species regularly appeared in Soviet-era paleoart (courtesy Borrissiak Paleontological Institute RAS)Pages from Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past (photo of the book for Hyperallergic)Adolphe François Pannemaker, “The Primitive World” (1857), the image was the frontispiece for W. F. A. Zimmerman’s Le monde avant la création de l’homme (1857) (courtesy TASCHEN)Pages from Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past (photo of the book for Hyperallergic)Edouard Riou; engraved by Laurent Hotelin and Alexandre Hurel, “The Ichthyosaur and the Plesiosaur (Lias Period)” (1863); from the beginning, artists and scientists portrayed ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs as enemies. The reptiles, battling above the waves, became the most prevalent motif in 19th-century paleoart (courtesy TASCHEN)Pages from Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past (photo of the book for Hyperallergic)Zdenek Burian, “Mammoth (Elephas primigenius)” (1941) (courtesy TASCHEN)Pages from Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past (photo of the book for Hyperallergic)Konstantin Konstantinovich Flyorov, “Tarbosaurus and Armored Dinosaur” (1955), oil on canvas (courtesy Borrissiak Paleontological Institute RAS)
Illustration from Albert Robida’s ‘Le vingtième siècle’ (‘The twentieth century,’ Paris, 1880s) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)
WASHINGTON, DC — Science fiction rose to prominence in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when authors like H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Mary Shelley imagined the extraordinary possibilities of advances in technology and exploration. Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction 1780–1910, on view in the newly renovated Smithsonian Libraries Gallery at the National Museum of American History, centers on this era of change and the dreams both dark and hopeful it inspired.
Curated by Kirsten van der Veen and Doug Dunlop, the exhibition is small, but ambitious. Everything from the laying of the transatlantic cable to the popularity of home aquariums is touched on, with plenty of early robots, airships, and Arctic explorers in between. The emphasis of the exhibition is on books, with some objects from the Smithsonian joining in the busy glass boxes in the dark gallery. It’s a shame there aren’t more of these objects though, as some are just teased in photographs, like an unsettling mechanized “creeping baby doll” from 1871 held by the museum.
One of the earliest aerial views of Earth, from Thomas Baldwin’s ‘Airopaidia: Containing the Narrative of a Balloon Excursion from Chester, the Eighth of September, 1785’ (London, 1785) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries, gift of the Burndy Library) (click to enlarge)
A coinciding online exhibition explores the ideas more thoroughly, with better room for text than the gallery walls. Nevertheless, the physical iteration of Fantastic Worlds includes many beautiful and rare books from the Smithsonian Libraries, such as Rudyard Kipling’s 1909 With the Night Mail — set in the year 2000 in a world populated by airships, its deep blue cover showing a dirigible soaring amid the stars — and Thomas Baldwin’s 1875 Airopaidia, which features some of the first aerial illustrations of the Earth.
Arranged in seven sections, including “Age of the Aeronaut” and “Terra Incognita,” Fantastic Worlds compares concrete science to the fiction it influenced. Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, with its reanimated corpse, followed physician Luigi Galvani’s experiments with the “animal electricity” he perceived when his charged scalpel touched a dead frog’s leg and made it kick, and coincided the rise of electrical shocks used for medical treatments in the 19th century. Jules Verne channeled the doomed Franklin expedition to the Arctic in his 1864 The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, although in that tale his fictional crew found a volcano at the North Pole instead of resorting to cannibalism. A few years later, Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea delved into pioneering ocean exploration, with Captain Nemo’s submersible the Nautilus inspired by the author’s viewing of a French submarine at the Paris Exposition of 1867.
Objects related to flight in ‘Fantastic Worlds’ (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)R.M. Ballantyne’s ‘The Battery and the Boiler, or Adventures in the Laying of Submarine Electric Cables’ (New York, 1883, left) and a transatlantic cable souvenir made by Glass, Elliot & Co., and Tiffany & Co. (right) in ‘Fantastic Worlds’ (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
Strangely for an exhibition at an institution of US history, much of the work is European, and it would have been interesting to explore how even American writers not generally inclined to write fantasy were experimenting with science fiction narratives. For example, Jack London wrote The Iron Heel (1908), musing on a future United States where democracy had turned to oligarchy, and Mark Twain’s 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court involved time travel.
However, one of the most fleshed out incidents — the “Great Moon Hoax” of 1885 — was based in New York City. Richard Adams Locke with The Sun newspaper published fictional reports from real British astronomer John Herschel that he had spotted life on the moon, specifically “manbats.” It was intended as satire, but the public loved it so much that, according to the Smithsonian, “the Sun’s owner would not allow Locke to expose the truth.” As an odd footnote, none other than horror and mystery writer Edgar Allan Poe had penned his own moon hoax before The Sun, and was outraged at what he perceived as plagiarism. Like much of Fantastic Worlds, the incident pivots at the intersection of science and fiction, at a time when both fields were looking to a future that would surely be just as wondrous as it was strange.
A medical induction coil by Benjamin Pike Jr. (New York, 1850) on view in ‘Fantastic Worlds’ (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)Sheet music for “Northward Ho!, or, Baffled, Not Beaten” (London, 1879) with words by Commander John P. Cheyne; music by Odoardi [i.e. Odoardo] Barri (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries). Cheyne was a veteran of three Arctic expeditions that searched for the missing explorer John Franklin and his crew. His lecture tour and the song publication were aimed at gaining public support.“Frank Reade, Jr. and His Engine of the Clouds” (New York, 1903), from ‘Frank Reade Weekly Magazine’ (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries, gift of the Burndy Library). The ‘Frank Reade Weekly Magazine’ was a popular series of dime novels, starring Reade as a brilliant, world-traveling inventor.Illustration from Albert Robida’s ‘Le vingtième siècle: la vie électrique’ (‘The twentieth century: the electric life,’ Paris, 1893) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)Harry Kennedy, ‘The Flying Man, or the Adventures of a Young Inventor,’ from The Boy’s Star Library (New York, 1891) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)Illustration from Leopoldo Galluzzo’s ‘Altre scoverte fatte nella luna dal Sigr. Herschel’ (‘Other lunar discoveries from Signor Herschel,’ Naples, 1836) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)Gustave Doré’s illustration of a ship sailing to the moon from ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’ (London, 1867) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)Illustration from Asa Smith’s ‘Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy: Designed for the Use of the Public or Common Schools in the United States’ (New York, 1849) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries, gift of the Burndy Library)
Installation view of Into the Unknown at the Barbican in London (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
LONDON — The 1982 film Blade Runner imagined 2019 Los Angeles as a dystopia of noirish neon and replicants, robots sent to do hard labor on off-world colonies. It’s a future in which engineered beings are so close to humans as to make the characters question the very nature of life. We’re now just a couple of years from this movie’s timeline, and although our robots are still far from mirroring humanity, our science fiction continues to envision giant leaps in technology that are often rooted in contemporary concerns of where our innovations are taking us.
Patrick Gyger, curator ofInto the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction at the Barbican Centre, told Hyperallergic that, for him, science fiction “allows creators to look beyond the horizon of knowledge and play with concepts and situations.” The exhibition is a sprawling examination of the genre of science fiction going back to the 19th century, with over 800 works. These include film memorabilia, vintage books, original art, and even a kinetic sculpture in a lower-level space by Conrad Shawcross. “In Light of The Machine” has a huge, robotic arm twisting within a henge-like circle of perforated walls, so visitors can only glimpse its strange dance at first, before moving to the center and seeing that it holds one bright light at the end of its body.
Film still from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (courtesy the Roger Grant Archive)
Most of Into the Unknown is concentrated in the Barbican’s Curve space, a winding gallery with a high ceiling that permits objects to be stacked to the ceiling. They range from spacesuits worn in Star Trek and Moon (2009), to the robot TARS from Interstellar (2014)and Ava from Ex Machina (2015), to drawings by H. R. Giger for the Alien series and paintings by James Gurney for his Dinotopia books. The post-war architecture of the Barbican is a fitting setting for Into the Unknown, with its concrete angles and utopian spirit. In conjunction with the show, Penguin Classics released a series of limited-edition science fiction books with Barbican architecture on their covers. The brutalist conservatory graces H. G. Well’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, and two of the triangular towers appear on George Orwell’s 1984.
Throughout the exhibition, niche and popular culture are juxtaposed, chronicling how science fiction emerged as a cultural force in the 20th century. Manuscripts by Jules Verne hold incredible insights into how much research the author put into works such as Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), and an adjacent display of dinosaur models sculpted by Ray Harryhausen for 1960s stop-motion shows how, by the mid-20th century, films were using recent scientific knowledge for entertainment. Artwork like Dino De Laurentiis’s storyboard drawings for the Sandworm battle in the 1984 Dune (and some nearby concept art by Giger for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unrealized version), testify to artists’ presence in shaping science fiction. An array of aerospace industry advertisements from the 1950s and ’60s feature fantastic spacecraft similar to those in Soviet postcards illustrated by Andrey Sokolov and Alexei Leonov (a cosmonaut who created the first artwork in space).
Gyger noted that the fact that the genre “has been so impactful” cannot be separated from the link to “its context of production and to the mass market that makes it flourish.” Over the years, this has involved pulp magazines, trading cards, comics, and paperbacks, often aimed at young audiences, or presented as a cheap thrills.
Certainly science fiction is incredibly popular at the moment — see the success of Westworld, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Black Mirror (which is featured in the exhibition through a six-foot video installation based on the unnerving virtual world in the episode “Fifteen Million Merits“). While these series explore serious issues in our reality, there’s still a tendency to overlook them as serious art (unless you count The Lord of the Rings, no science fiction film has won the “Best Picture” Oscar, for instance). Into the Unknown might not sway anyone without a curiosity for science fiction, being that you’re immediately immersed in a constellation of spaceships, dinosaurs, alien monsters, and robots. But for those with an interest, it demonstrates how these themes developed from “low” to “high” art.
Postcard of “On the first Lunar cosmodrome” (1968), by Andrey Sokolov and Alexei Leonov (courtesy Moscow Design Museum)Andrey Sokolov and Alexei Leonov, postcard series from the set “A man in space” (1965), offset printing on paper, full-color (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
The exhibition shows, but does not dwell on, who has been left out of a history mostly shaped by white men (there are rare exceptions on view, like the “Astro Black” video installation by Soda_Jerk that muses on Sun Ra’s theories of Afrofuturism). It would be worthwhile to spend more time on figures who broke through these barriers, such as author Octavia Butler. As discussed on a recent podcast from Imaginary Worlds, her black characters were sometimes portrayed as white on her book covers to make them more appealing to science fiction readers. The exhibition could also have a deeper context for why certain veins of science fiction are prominent in particular eras, and perhaps question why we don’t have a lot of science fiction narratives on current crises like climate change. For instance, the much smaller 2016 exhibition Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction 1780–1910 from the Smithsonian Libraries compared milestones like Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus with physician Luigi Galvani’s “animal electricity” experiments on animating dead frog legs, and highlighted how Jules Verne channeled the doomed Franklin expedition in his 1864 book The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.
Nevertheless, having an exhibition like Into the Unknown at a mainstream space like the Barbican is significant, showing the art world appreciates science fiction beyond kitsch. And science fiction continues to be one of our important portals for thinking about the ramifications of our technological choices, and where they might take us. There’s a reason that 1984 is now having a popular Broadway production in a year of “alternative facts,” and why Black Mirror episodes such as “Nosedive,” where a person’s worth is judged by their social media “likes,” resonate so deeply.
“It is the genre of ‘what if,’ shedding light on our hopes and fears for a future closely linked to our present and our environment,” Gyger said. “In doing so it inspires and warns us, while entertaining us, creating a plethora of iconography, and leaving a deep mark on culture.”
Dinosaurs designed for films in the 1950s and ’60s by Ray Harryhausen (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)Installation view of Into the Unknown at the Barbican in London (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)Glass plates for magic lantern depicting scenes from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (Paris,
1885), lithographic transfer on glass (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)Albert Badoureau, “Le Titan Moderne: Notes et observations remises à Jules Verne pour la rédaction de son roman sans dessus dessous” (“The Modern Titan: Notes and observations presented to Jules Verne for the writing of his novel The Purchase of the North Pole or Topsy-Turvy,” 1888), manuscript page (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)“L’an 2000” (“The year 2000,” 1901), print on cardboard; a collection of uncut sheets for confectionery cards showing life imagined in the future (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)Amazing Stories #1 (July 1933), Agence Martienne (courtesy Maison d’Ailleurs/Agence Martienne)8mm film reel boxes (1949–67) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)George Pal Productions, Luna spaceship miniature from the film Destination Moon (1950), mixed media (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)Installation view of Into the Unknown at the Barbican in London (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)Martian models by Ray Harryhausen for War of the Worlds (1949) and First Men in the Moon (1964) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)Anubis and Horus helmets by Patrick Tatopoulos for Stargate (1994), fiberglass with metallic surface (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)Art by H. R. Giger for Alien III (1992) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)The Original Science Fiction Stories #1 (November 1958), Agence Martienne (courtesy Maison d’Ailleurs/Agence Martienne)Dino De Laurentiis, series of three Sandworm battle storyboards for the film Dune (1984), pencil on vellum adhered to board (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)Magazine cover, Amazing Stories #1 (April 1926), Agence Martienne (courtesy Maison d’Ailleurs/Agence Martienne)Theta space station miniature from the TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century(1979–81); Kane (John Hurt) space suit from the film Alien (1979) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)Trevor Paglen, “Orbital Reflector (Diamond Variation)” (2017), freestanding model for inflatable spacecraft; aluminum, stainless steel, acrylic (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)Conrad Shawcross,” In Light of The Machine,” kinetic installation (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
![Illustration from Albert Robida's 'Le vingtième siècle [The twentieth century]' (Paris, 1880s) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)](https://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/fantasticworlds05.jpg)
![Sheet music for “Northward Ho!, or, Baffled, Not Beaten” (London, 1879) with words by Commander John P. Cheyne; music by Odoardi [i.e. Odoardo] Barri (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)](http://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/fantasticworlds01.jpg)
![Illustration from Leopoldo Galluzzo's 'Altre scoverte fatte nella luna dal Sigr. Herschel [Other lunar discoveries from Signor Herschel]' (Naples, 1836) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)](http://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/fantasticworlds07.jpg)
