Diana Baldon
One-Minute Tales on Cosmic Aviation and the Art of Failing

Vadim Fishkin is not one to disappoint achievers’ aspirations. The first time I saw his work, it consisted of a picture of a large hot-air balloon flying in Postojna Cave in Slovenia. Realized as a performance in 2000 in which the artist hired a pilot to fly a sixteen-meter balloon inside one of the world’s largest caves, this image brought back to me the memory of a dream buried in my mind. I remember the absurdity of a scene whose oneiric license could subvert the scale and volume of things to allow their incompatibilities to happily coexist. It was then that I grasped that there are ways to squeeze a giant balloon into an indoor space so it touches the ceiling (a bit unsurprisingly for a short person like me). Situated on the threshold between impossible apparition and visual plausibility, the surrealism of Fishkin’s project becomes highly iconic. It draws sense – and, to some extent, nonsense – from both the psychic realm and that of scientific speculation, without, however, belonging to either. It is this fine line of incompatible ambitions that particularly distinguishes Fishkin’s practice: it deliberately reaches toward physical dead ends where logical and illogical superstructural laws are validated within a romantic vocation and the “precision” with which their inevitable impasse is staged.
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In many respects, it would appear that Fishkin’s main area of investigation is science, its study methods and use of technological innovation. Many of Fishkin’s installations deal with chemistry, geography, meteorological phenomena, time, light, velocity, and so on. Analytical systems appear in early drawings like Investigation of the Head (1989), which depicts analytical cross-sections of a person’s head, as seen from above, at the top, and at the level of the nose, teeth, and neck, but their sketched quality and comical immediacy show more a degeneration in the desire to understand everything about the human mind. Similarly, in Lighthouse (1995–1997), the artist’s own heartbeat is recorded by a transmitter connected to the famously ornate dome of the Secession building in Vienna. Beyond the sophisticated technical setup, which – quite literally – gives life to his work, Fishkin’s intention is to direct our attention to how emotions can be inscribed as light signs. In a kind of Morse code, he takes the pulsation of each beat to a spectacular scale, with an incandescent light at the heart of the building throbbing against the skyline of the capital of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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Modern science is not always right. On the contrary, it is based on “fallibility,” a principle enunciated at the beginning of the twentieth century by Charles Sanders Peirce. This American philosopher allowed scientific achievements the freedom to admit mistakes in order to prove that certain lines of research and experimentation are wrong. Fishkin seems to support this view. Projects like Hot Air Balloon in the Cave (2000), Kaplegraf_Zero_G (2003), and What’s on the Other Side? (1997–2000) follow Peirce’s “fallibilist” rule, on which most modern science relies. Fishkin’s empirical inquiries can in principle be answered, or at least should not be assumed to be unanswerable, and are susceptible to variables that nevertheless have an objective place in the universe. Executed at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, Kaplegraf_Zero_G is a “sculpture” designed by zero gravity using a kaplegraf, a device invented by the artist that translates sonic data into water drops, a sort of language code made with a form of matter rather than sounds or signs. In 2003, he installed this new device in the heart of the Russian space program and let it hover inside a custom-made plastic container connected to a CD player. The point was to give graphic representation to a weightless and transparent physical agent that circulated in space in the same way we understand sound waves to move through the ether. In other words, a mass of “words,” at first invisible, becomes visible only to be retransformed into an ephemeral substance through levitation. In an earlier project, What’s on the Other Side? (1997–2000), Fishkin extrapolated from data about the earth’s surface provided by New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmosphere to work out the geographic coordinates and geological conditions of “the antipode of the Antipodes.” He calculated this “land” to be at a latitude of 49°40’ N and a longitude of 1°10’ W (a point in Haute-Normandie, France), after first drawing a line through the center of the earth starting at the Antipodes, a group of small islands in the South Pacific Ocean discovered by a British vessel in 1800. If the “fallibilist” plan of the first project involved a cul-de-sac performed through the invention of a “liquid language” that is both silent and invisible, in the latter project, the artist focused instead on an imaginary cartography that is the construct of an “antipode” that may not correspond to the real one – somewhat like Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876), in which the ocean is mapped on a blank sheet of paper. This is one way to direct overly curious fanatical adventurers to strange vertices, or graphs…

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Fishkin’s concerns are not far from those of Renaissance artists who strove to mirror nature, exploring the minutest details so as to properly represent their subjects. According to Western popular thought, art became science when Leonardo da Vinci, the first true artist-inventor, put artistic creativity at the service of neoplatonic symbolism. Less than fifty years later, the astronomical theories of the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei inspired generations of artists, who managed to reconsider in philosophical terms Man’s position in relation to Nature. The ensuing ideological antagonism continued to be disputed on an invisible battleground until Man, having finally removed from the equation the once-unquestioned existence of God, assumed total control of the powerful forces of Nature and became the sole deus ex machina.

A few centuries later, the dichotomy between science and art, both disciplines that engage with natural laws in order to analyze how they shape everyday reality, has been redefined in the era of technology. In the 1960s, a technophile climate favored valuable collaborations between artists and engineers, right up to recent times, when over the past five years, projects have been cropping up that comfortably occupy a middle ground between scientific exercise and illusionist art. I am thinking of Ólafur Elíasson’s The Weather Project (2004), which, by means of an artificial sky, sun and mist, mimicked the environment outside the Tate Modern, or Christoph Keller’s Cloudbuster (2003), which reenacted Wilhelm Reich’s scientific attempts to influence the atmosphere by means of sexual “Orgone-energies,” among other things. Fishkin’s inventiveness shows a similar sensibility. Behind the high-tech appearance of these works, these artists all take ingenium back to its double etymological meaning: mental ability and (mad) genius. But, unlike the others, Fishkin’s empirical emphasis on an elemental practice of color, light, water, or temperature conceals a playground for epic and romantic finales, where the complex apparatus and rigorous calculations are overshadowed by fantasy and emotion. Moments of intense aesthetic pleasure govern his scenographic installations A Speedy Day, Snow_Show, and Choose Your Day, where each viewer becomes the center of a meteorological miracle, viewing a spectacle created especially for him or her.

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Fishkin’s fascination with the sky is a constant throughout the work he has been doing since the mid-1990s. So far, this has taken the form of installations, photographs or videos that, in varying degrees, deal with air and the “art” of flying. Sun_Stop (2003) is a live-stream video projection of the sun captured in real time as it is observed by cameras placed in different places around the globe. These communicate among themselves to keep the sun “frozen” in the same spot in the sky, just before it sets. Fishkin dedicated this work to A. L. Chizhevsky, an early-twentieth-century Russian scientist and the father of “heliobiology,” who theorized the cosmic influence of the sun’s activities on all living systems, whether biological or social.
The mesmerizing effect of stopping the setting sun so it becomes an unmoving image (an image we have all, at least once in our lives, romantically immortalized in a snapshot as the backdrop to our loved ones) recalls a video by the Atlas Group, The Operator #17 File: I Think It Would Be Better If I Could Weep (2000). Made to look as if it were an amateur videotape crafted by secret agents that was sent anonymously to the organization, this work shows footage from Beirut’s seaside esplanade, a “favourite meeting place for political pundits, spies, double agents, fortune-tellers and phrenologists.” According to official “reports,” every afternoon the operator diverted the camera away from its intended target to focus on the setting sun. For both Fishkin and Walid Raad – the perpetrator of this Lebanese fiction – technology and political conspiracy give way to the powerful hypnotism of a daily event. Both are swayed by the magical power of a sunset, a time of day that, according to the French surrealist writer Roger Caillois, exists in order “to crystallize upon human sensitivity emotions and an instinct of abandonment” (The Noon Complex, 1936).

Fishkin’s infatuation with the firmament is, yet again, in symbiosis with Leonardo’s famous obsession with flying machines. Many of Fishkin’s works showcase correlated aspects of the sky, manifested across a range of physical conditions but also as an infinite screen for thought. To date, the artist has managed to speed up the phases of time and the light of a day to 12 seconds (A Speedy Day), experiment with different kinds of meteorological conditions from snow storms to sunny weather (Changing the Climate, Snow_Show, Choose Your Day), and engage in air tourism (Fly and Air Balloon in the Cave) and space travel (Kaplegraf_Zero_G).

Now it would be an impossible task to list the impressive number of artists who have been inspired by the sky – from Vija Celmins’s “celestial” drawings of stars to Thomas Ruff’s photos of the night sky above Chile from the archives of the European Southern Observatory, from the helicopter films of Jef Cornelis to the floating installations of Tomas Saraceno; nor should we forget En el Cielo (In the Sky) – epic drawings made by a plane in the skies above the 2001 Venice Biennial. There are a million more words that could be written about mankind’s perennial fascination with the sky but, at the end of the day, what makes us smile, cry, or simply look up in ecstatic contemplation is not only the spectacle of nature but the way we feel it resonate in our heart (Buddha). You fucking hippie.