ON THE EARTH AND IN THE AIR, PANAMARENKO
IN THE LATE ’60s and early ’70s the Belgian artist, inventor, and scientist Panamarenko began to concentrate on designing and making vehicles of different kinds, particularly airplanes that couldn’t fly. Often, he would buttress his plans, models, and actual construction of these machines with elaborate scientific theories.1 The work was seen with a certain suspicion in artistic circles; the arguments about it went something like this: if Panamarenko really knew his physics and engineering, as his theoretical proofs seemed to show, then his airplanes, airships, cars, speedboats, and spacecraft should actually work. Yet despite its constant references to scientific ideas, and its detailed technical drawings and layouts, which abounded to the point of redundancy, his pursuit met only limited success. To some, in consequence, Panamarenko appeared no more than a kind of hobbyist. Others recognized the work’s fragile, ungainly, manual character as its “poetry,” and by this light the pieces’ strength lay in the fact that they didn’t work. This approach, however, failed to address the fact that Panamarenko had thoroughly analyzed and experimentally investigated the various scientific and engineering problems involved in his research, and that a few of his aircraft did achieve a degree of flight. In terms of the modern taste for specialization, for divisions between fields of thought, the work posed a paradox: as an engineer, Panamarenko was expected to make working objects, or run the risk of being called a charlatan; yet if he did succeed in his supposed purpose, he could not be thought of as an artist.
The solution to this by-now-old paradox lies in Panamarenko’s disregard of it. He is interested in the idea of flight, and in understanding the physical rules that govern it; coming to grips with these issues is of greater concern to him than perfecting an individual aircraft. Furthermore, he seems to enjoy the ambiguity his work raises between the art object and the functional object, and the way that ambiguity undermines the distinction that has sprung up between art and science. In his view, the two belong to a single field of investigation. To separate them is to court trouble; furthermore, calling something “art” can provide an out for people who don’t really want to understand what it’s saying. Conventionally, science is seen as a matter of theory, experiment, and proof rather than of intuitive thought, while for art the situation is reversed. By regarding art and science as an indivisible whole—in contradiction of the gradual separation between the two, and of the individual scientific disciplines from each other, that has been developing since the 16th century—Panamarenko addresses the problem of achieving harmony within a broader unity than one’s own. Proceeding through both scientific system and intuition, he argues for the commonality of the questions the artist asks and the questions the scientist asks; when his results prove unreliable, this is attributable not so much to flaws in his research as to the fact that in our present state of knowledge it is impossible to correlate all natural phenomena with each other, particularly when one’s data are both objective and subjective. Panamarenko often turns to concepts that tend to elude visual rendering—atomic and subatomic phenomena, say, which to everyday intents and purposes lie in the realm of ideas rather than that of visible occurrences—and exposure to these has contributed to his desire to free himself from the strictures of traditional pictorial language. He repeatedly noted a hollow formalism in the visual arts when they were coming more and more to insist on their “what you see is what you get” material reality, and to go after their desire for pure autonomous form. To give expression to his philosophical views, he needs both color theory and the theory of relativity.
While it is misleading to divide Panamarenko’s oeuvre into phases or periods, an early body of work is fairly well defined. In the mid ’60s, he was producing what he called “poetic objects,” including Magneetschoenen (Magnetic shoes, 1965–66), a pair of shoes into which he built electromagnets so that the wearer could walk upside down on a metal ceiling. The shoes came with a cap padded with cotton, in case of power failure. Here Panamarenko offered a metaphor to turn the world on its head, and expressed his dream of leaving the ground. Much of the work to come, of course, develops this idea, on a scale both intimate (in the air-powered “backpacks,” for example, with which one might dart about one’s room) and vast (the spacecraft he designed in the late ’60s and again in the late ’70s and ’80s). It also revolves around the issues prefigured here of power, mass, energy, magnetism, and so on, and of the relationship between human energy and motor functions and the technological devices that extend them (with variable consequences). Most significantly, Magneetschoenen is an early expression of an important image for Panamarenko, the image of humanity liberated from gravity, but always accompanying that liberation with a qualifying clause.
The 1966 Sneeuw (Snow) comprises three items standing next to each other: a pair of rubber boots, a bundle of sticks, and a leather case, all of them coated with artificial snow—snow created by the artist. Besides covering these small objects with snow, in 1968 Panamarenko conceived a project, ultimately unrealized, to blanket the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels with it; later, in Le Siècle de Kafka (Kafka’s century, 1984), snow is again an intrinsic component. Although the works with snow do not reflect the artist’s interest in movement, with all that movement implies of liberation (but, for Panamarenko, a nonutopian liberation, a liberation aware of its own shortcomings), they do show his interest in nature, in its metamorphic effects, its cycles and processes, whether vicious or kind, whether spectacular or not. In the three crocodiles, made of plastic wrap stuffed with sand, of Krokodillen (Crocodiles, 1967), aggressive nature is represented as the bottom-line reality, as the will to power latent in living things, a power that humans need to keep in check, whether in themselves or in others. (Each reptile is enclosed in a fishnet.) More rarefied, and foreshadowing the later flying machines based on insects, is the 1967 Motten in het riet (Moths in the reeds). Amid a clump of real rushes moves a swarm of “moths,” wads of cotton hanging by thin wires and made to rotate by an electric motor that gives off a humming sound. The tenuous, fragile, but rapid motion of the make-believe moths suggests the lightness and transparency of many of the artist’s constructions of the ’70s. In Motten in het net, Panamarenko showed himself a virtuoso of poetic mimesis. Through a personal application of a technological device, the electric motor, he was able to mimic a kind of motion that in nature is almost visually ungraspable, so vague and undirected it seems, though it must in fact be mappable. Here, Panamarenko took as his model a particular natural phenomenon which incorporated both order and chaos. Soon, he would come to rely more on the objects of his own imagination; his approach would become more ideal, perhaps more absurdist- the impossible is often not far away from the absurd. Creating new images quite remote from everyday routines, Panamarenko would resist both the real and the artistic (in the formalist sense), imbricating his imaginings with science.
In 1969–71, Panamarenko built the giant airship The Aeromodeller. Inspired by the zeppelins of the early decades of aviation, this is a cigar-shaped balloon, nearly 100 feet long; four small engines drive propellers, and the enclosed gondola is made of wicker, so that it both holds its shape and is soft enough that it could safely, softly bump into a similar light craft. In 1972, at the Documenta 5 exhibition in Kassel, West Germany, the curator Harald Szeemann set this ship in the section of the show entitled “Individuelle Mythologie,” or “individual mythology.” Although Szeemann intended the term to cover a wide variety of attitudes and objects, the label was perhaps too airy a container for Panamarenko’s airship, which seems more common and human than mythic or utopian in its quality, and which also depends on rigorous technological hypotheses, despite its poetic evocativeness. Such theories also underlie Panamarenko’s Polistes—Gummiauto kit Düsenantrieb (Polistes—rubber car with jet propulsion, 1974), a racing car powered by jet engines and crafted out of polyurethane and rubber so as to cushion the impact of a collision. Ironically, this work was shown in Documenta 6, in 1977, in the section headed “Utopisches Design” (Utopian design).
The Aeromodeller marks the first appearance in Panamarenko’s work of a cool, almost studied functionalism, involving countless preliminary drawings and calculations and a long process of manual facture. His wishes crystallized by the actual physical existence of this craft that he had designed and brought into being, the artist made plans to fly the ship from Antwerp to Arnhem for the Sonsbeek exhibition of 1971. Official resistance and poor weather conditions caused the flight to be canceled, but Panamarenko had made his intentions clear. His relationship to his airship was profound; he had built not a static art object but a working, living thing, and he was prepared to prove it at considerable risk to himself. Henceforth he would seek to feel, test, and risk the impulses of his imagination with his own body and senses. One of Nietzsche’s most subversive ideas, “live dangerously,” might seem to be in operation here, and might appear to result in a kind of self-destructiveness, but a self-conscious and world-conscious irony is really the undertone that permeates Panamarenko’s wonderfully qualified grandiose notions. He is thumbing his nose at the alienating effects of modern technology, bringing them out, and this gives his work an imprint not so much of the self-destructive as of the wryly tragic and poignant.
In a subsequent body of work, Panamarenko attempted to reproduce the flight of the dragonfly, specifically the large prehistoric dragonfly whose generic name is Meganeura. The flapping wings of insects like this may entail a more efficient form of flight than the fixed wings of aircraft; the high frequency of the wing beat provides lift, drag, and thrust. Beginning in 1973, Panamarenko produced a variety of machines based on the dragonfly. In Umbilly I, 1976, for example, the pilot sits in a small cabin, pedaling with bicycle pedals to operate the mechanism of a pair of fluttering wings to the rear. An arrangement of springs in the drive system introduces the vibration typical of insect wings. Where Leonardo, in the design for a flying machine that he called an “ornithopter,” sought to imitate the flight of birds (clearly Leonardo is more the paradigm for Panamarenko’s work than the utopian projects of the 19th and 20th centuries), Panamarenko keeps to the class of insects, eventually resulting in some of his most ingenious, sophisticated, and visually appealing aircraft. When one says that these systems for gliding and flying are “transparent,” one refers not only to the openness of their structures, and to the silky, light, porous, translucent quality of their wings, but also to their open declarations of their workings. Almost didactically, Panamarenko brings out the function of each part by laying open to view each airplane’s propellers, cables, belts and chains, pedals, gears, levers, tension rods, fuselage, wing structure, and landing mechanisms. The craft seem serviceable, airworthy, ready to take off, and the obviousness of their function and method of working contributes to their expressiveness as objects.
Panamarenko’s work focuses on a few central themes, but it deals with them in a multitude of ways. Certain ideas tend to recur, so that an approach that had seemed abandoned ten years before may be reopened and reexplored. Paradox I and II, both 1975, for example, are flying machines intended to generate their lift through the wash from propellers mounted under a parachute. Through elaborate calculations, Panamarenko has proven theoretically that they can fly; so far, however, they exist only in model form. Nevertheless, the ideas behind them reappear in a number of “backpacks” made in the mid ’80s, which, like the Paradox works, involve the idea of flight through the deployment of blasts of air (here produced by jet tubes pointing toward the ground). The first model was demonstrated in 1984, at the Furka Pass in the, Swiss Alps, where it was to enable Panamarenko to leap from peak to peak. Further models have followed, and engines for these machines have been designed and tested.2 Since a backpack is generally thought of as a load, a burden, the idea of using one to fly is playful, but also meaningful: flight is a responsibility—not only a freedom, not only a “victory over the sun,” but a sphere for moral, philosophical travel. At the same time, these objects symbolize a sort of revolt of the slaves—the slaves of gravity.
Another issue to which Panamarenko has returned is the design of spacecraft. In General Spinaxis, 1968, he designed a spaceship in which solar energy would power an “acceleration engine,” an engine of his own design based on the theory of the “closed system.” Closed System Power, 1969, is a model for a similarly propelled space vehicle, though here the engine is driven by atomic power. The theory of a “closed system of speed alteration,” simply summarized, states that when a mass is exposed to a force that is out of alignment with its center of gravity, it responds not only by moving forward in a straight line but also by turning on its axis. Panamarenko incorporated this idea in a series of 16 “accelerators,” all of them involving masses set in both acceleration and rotation within a closed system. That double motion, Panamarenko believed, could be arranged to result in further acceleration within the system; the whole object would be powered by this movement, and would move faster and faster forward. The accelerators—strange, esoteric-looking machine assemblages—have been tested, and typed comments on their performance accompany them when they are exhibited, but the results so far have been reported as meager.
After he built these engines, Panamarenko discovered that there was after all a possible solution, involving a relativistic view of the various speeds of a turning object, that would make them efficient, and he returned to the problem of their design. In 1978 he wrote a paper about spacecraft whose engines would be based on the idea of the closed system, and would be powered by the magnetic field of the earth, and any other magnetic fields present in the cosmos. In the paper, Panamarenko arrives at the idea of tapping these magnetic fields by analyzing the history of various methods of propulsion. Only the rocket, he remarks, has so far proved adequate for travel in space, and the rocket is problematic in that it can carry only a limited amount of fuel: “It is of course possible to fire an electronic robot out of the solar system using an atomic rocket, but then it would be about fifty years before it would reach the nearest star, and it could never come back.”3 He goes on to discuss the energy, in order of increasing magnitude, of earth, sun, planets, stars, and galaxies. He specifies what kind of magnetic circuit might guide the spaceship. The craft would ascend, he says, like a giant balloon repelled by the earth’s magnetic field. Not without poetry and irony, he adds that the earth’s field wouldn’t take us to other stars: “the forces to propel the craft are supplied by the magnetic fields in the universe.”
Having worked up this bit of theory, Panamarenko built models to illustrate his spaceships. Needless to say, these don’t really appear the perfect solution for travel in space, but they do suggest possibilities in the application of the elementary principles of magnetism. In Flying Cigar called Flying Tiger I, 1980, a cigar-shaped central body of copper wire carries long moving tubes as arms, like the groping tentacles of an octopus. The 1981 Verti Vortex is a lighter variant of this design. Zwevend blad (Floating leaf, 1985), Plumbiet-Motor (Plumbite motor, 1983), and Grote Plumbiet (Big plumbite, 1986) are heavier than the earlier works; their physical substance consists of impressively massive rotating block magnets from which depends a sort of shield, like a tree or plant leaf in metal. Despite the compact, dense character of their rugged construction, however, these bulky machines pursue much the same purpose as before: namely, to explore the fragile territory between humanity’s interest and technology’s possibilities.
Panamarenko refers to the models of both art and science, but conforms strictly to neither. His diagrams and detailed drawings of the ’80s are more atmospheric, colorful, and lyrical than those of the ’70s; the recent plans spill over with an abundance of data, calculations, and graphic sketches to such an extent that their overall appearance is almost baroque, in diametric contrast with the usual principles of scientific papers. Under the “can do” motto of modern technology, some murky brews indeed are being compounded today, and in works like Polistes, Keep the opposing poles in balance and lift the machine, 1980, and the various backpack pieces, the artist expresses a healthy suspicion of the complex of technology, industry, and science. But by the same token, he distances himself from the common conventions of contemporary art, with its apocalyptic interests, and its “neos,” “posts,” and “transes.” Against the reductivist formalism that much of Modernist art came to espouse, he opposes a vision of energy, a vision of life seen as a never-ending process of initiation, of taking off.
Panamarenko doesn’t try to present human enterprise as prettier than it is, but he refuses to see human nature as fixed and definite, or as immutably established on a path it cannot change or control. In the 20th century, both science and art have tended to see themselves as progressively advancing forward to some final goal, beyond which is the abyss. Panamarenko sidesteps this kind of dead-end, fated evolution. He seeks not so much to break new ground as to find a way through—”I use the holes in existing physics,” he has said—in such a way as to undermine any sense of a predetermined ending. He opposes a pessimistic view. His work speaks of unity and difference, the individual and the whole, the static and the dynamic, contraction and expansion. In a culture that often either belittles or is in awe of what it fails to understand, Panamarenko’s inspired inventions function as a barrier to fragmentation, but also as an alternative to the streamlined, empty success machine. Rattling, vibrating, bumping, and shaking away, his machines disturb the infinite quiet that is usually set aside for art.
Wim Van Guiders is an art critic who lives in Antwerp and teaches at the Academie voor Schone Kunsten, Gent.
Translated from the Flemish by Ernst van Haagen.
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NOTES
1. For example in his essays “The Mechanism of Gravity, Closed Systems of Speed Alteration”; “Insect Flight, Seen from Inside the Body of the Insect”; “The Helicopter as a Potential Winner”; “‘U-Kontrol III,’ an Improved Airplane Driven by Human Power”; “Polistes, Rubber Car with Jet Propulsion”; and “‘Scotch-Gambit,’ The Design of a Urge Fast Flying Boat,” all collected in Panamarenko, Bielefeld, West Germany: Edition Marzona, 1975.
2. One of Panamarenko’s backpacks is to be exhibited at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Parc de la Villette, Paris, this month; at press time, the dates of the show have not been finalized.
3. Panamarenko, “Het relativistische, interstellaire, magnetische ruimteschip,” 1978.
