Chapter Twenty-Six -- Visual Art in the Third Century
Tebazeder visual art experienced three distinct phases during the third century. The first, encompassing the early Interstellar Age through the beginning of the First Varelviv War, was characterized by a continued devotion to the forms of the late pre-interstellar era. Two-dimensional paintings and three-dimensional sculptures predominated. Artists took inspiration from landscapes beamed back from distant worlds by probes and exploration vessels, creating figurative and abstract visuals that faithfully or metaphorically reflected the wholly alien nature of these vistas.
Kanrig den Thracus' Of a Star, 228 [1]
The subsequent phase began with the onset of the first major interstellar war with the varelvivi. After Emperor Spagruum’s sudden declaration of war, fear permeated the air on Tebazed and its colonies. The Unified Navy was caught off-guard and outnumbered by its varelviv counterpart, and the immense destructive power of orbital bombardment appeared to be an imminent threat to the homeworld. Existential terror characterized much of the work of this period. Kanrig den Thracus’ 228 painting Of a Star is representative; it depicted a multicolor swirl of a nova dabbed with wild brushstrokes, words scrawled across the left side of the image, simultaneous symbolizing both the bright potential and nearly incomprehensible dangers of the age of interstellar travel. Meanwhile, the Directory of the Arts began its own campaign in concert with the military preparations for invasion. Direct spending by the various bureaus commissioned artwork that expressed patriotic sentiments and raised morale among the general public. The campaign was controversial for its perceived intrusion into freedom of expression, and it generated intense debate among the literati as to its propriety and effectiveness. A case in point was the 236 holo-sculpture [2] Forward!, designed by Jargim den Vendiga and installed in the plaza in front of the Hall of the Assembly in Sedrin. The rotating projection developed an iconography for the war: three vailons, striding in lockstep, representing a united front against all threats; each carrying a different object — a book, a scale, a shield — symbolizing the three great advances of the Governance — learning, meritocracy, non-violence; and floating above their heads, a field of stars forming the wave-wheel of the TUG flag. The monumental work loomed over Members of the Assembly every day as they went to debate matters of policy both domestic and military, casting a shadow of propaganda over the free and fair discussion of the Assembly. Suldirm den Harak, leader of the opposition party Peaceful Progress Initiative, frequently mocked the sculpture in his floor speeches for its overweening presence in the courtyard.
For the next several decades, the art world remained locked in these dueling camps, with competing narratives about progress and society. In the 260s, with the inconclusive end of the Second Varelviv War and the beginning of a new era of interstellar migration and cooperation, a new paradigm emerged. A younger generation of artists came of age, a group that no longer remembered the dark days of the First Varelviv War, when invasion and occupation loomed just over the horizon. While the first wave of these “New Spirits” were vailon, very quickly they were joined in rejecting the old orthodoxy by numerous xenos. Instead of tired old political fights, the “New Spirit” movement explored new ideas about inter-species relations and an interconnected galactic culture. Works like Ceremony by the mith-fell Plume of Azure, a massive 2D work depicting a mith-fell and a vailon walking past each other on a nondescript street, and 500 Cooks by Bakrig den Philiog, an installation featuring hundreds of dining plates (the exact number was disputed) mounted on the walls of a bare room, were typical of the early period of the movement in their shared sensibility of outreach and a new normalcy. Some developed ideas of prosperity, its hopes and discontents, as the frontier of the galaxy closed, while others in the movement focused on the conceptual challenges and shattered physical universe of quantum physics. A small splinter group concentrated their energies on the obscure branch of science studying The Loop phenomenon, obsessively scouring press releases and scientific journals for scraps of news that might fuel their next project.
Many artists in the “New Spirit” movement used their work to make forceful protests against the warmaking Directors-General of the later decades of the the third century. The Governance had been touched and shaped by external violence throughout the century, and though its leaders preached peace and stability, for the two most recent Directors-General, Valdrig den Subir and Birm den Boknar, those statements had as often come at the point of the sword as not. These artists, and those who shared their sentiments, saw in the Third Varelviv War War of 275 to 283 a perfect example of encroaching imperialist attitudes. No longer were Tebazeders forced into combat in order to defend themselves against unprovoked aggression by hostile neighbors; instead, they were engaged in a “war of choice” to install a puppet regime over the varelvivi, long after the slaving empire had ceased to be a threat. Philiog’s 500 Cooks project, for instance, was inspired in part by the 500 guns allegedly carried on the Unified Navy’s warships into varelviv territory during the invasion. [3] Many other works featured more overt references to the death and destruction wrought by Tebazeder arms; for instance, the varelviv Kaghoreem’s A Child’s View of War was comprised of a series of child-like drawings depicting a brutal invasion of a town, which culminates in the leveling of the buildings and the decimation of the population. Highly controversial upon its unveiling, A Child’s View of War became a rallying cry for a generation of anti-war activists, who seized upon the artwork’s depiction of vailon atrocities to claim that all Tebazeder military actions were illegitimate. [4]
The cradonian artist Mikvu Tenju’s 299 work, Untitled Varelviv Book Project, presented a particularly incisive exploration of the Tebazeder approach to war. The work, first exhibited on the eve of yet another war of aggression against the varelvivi, featured 64 holo-tablets on desks neatly arranged in rows, where individuals could sit and peruse the reading materials on the tablets. Each contained a randomized set of two thousand articles describing various aspects of the Third Varelviv War, accounting for an estimated .04% of the published news items covering the conflict. The vast volume of material confronted visitors with the immense scale of interstellar war, where gun ranges were measured in light-years and data uplinks passed yottabytes of information daily. At the same time, the silence of the reading room forced the visitors to acknowledge their ignorance of and complicity in the invasion. Though so much had been written about the war, the event had played very little role in the public consciousness. It was almost as if most Tebazeders would prefer to forget about the sins of the past — even as those sins were repeated in real time.
Early artist's treatment of Parent, circa 294.
Parent, a sculpture and installation by Birghagh, a varelviv who immigrated to the Governance after the Third Varelviv War, represented a synthesis of the xeno-cosmopolitan and anti-war strands of the “New Spirit” movement. Upon first glance, the floating bust appeared to be a vailon head and torso. As the viewer moved closer, however, strange aspects of the figure came into focus; it appeared to be halfway into a transformation into a varelviv. Its nose had faded, and four large pores appeared centered on its forehead, while the torso seemed to melt into thin tentacles. Wafts of colored smoke emanated from the body, rendering visible the usually imperceptible spores that allowed the fungoid species to reproduce. Playing on the vailons’ overdeveloped affinity for xeno assimilation, Parent manifested the Governance’s very active betrayal of its own liberal ethics: as it adapted around and responded to the external threat posed by its varelviv neighbors, it replaced the slaving varelviv state as the imperialist power in the region, intentionally imposing its will over lesser states as a local hegemon.
Footnotes
Kanrig den Thracus' Of a Star, 228 [1]
For the next several decades, the art world remained locked in these dueling camps, with competing narratives about progress and society. In the 260s, with the inconclusive end of the Second Varelviv War and the beginning of a new era of interstellar migration and cooperation, a new paradigm emerged. A younger generation of artists came of age, a group that no longer remembered the dark days of the First Varelviv War, when invasion and occupation loomed just over the horizon. While the first wave of these “New Spirits” were vailon, very quickly they were joined in rejecting the old orthodoxy by numerous xenos. Instead of tired old political fights, the “New Spirit” movement explored new ideas about inter-species relations and an interconnected galactic culture. Works like Ceremony by the mith-fell Plume of Azure, a massive 2D work depicting a mith-fell and a vailon walking past each other on a nondescript street, and 500 Cooks by Bakrig den Philiog, an installation featuring hundreds of dining plates (the exact number was disputed) mounted on the walls of a bare room, were typical of the early period of the movement in their shared sensibility of outreach and a new normalcy. Some developed ideas of prosperity, its hopes and discontents, as the frontier of the galaxy closed, while others in the movement focused on the conceptual challenges and shattered physical universe of quantum physics. A small splinter group concentrated their energies on the obscure branch of science studying The Loop phenomenon, obsessively scouring press releases and scientific journals for scraps of news that might fuel their next project.
Many artists in the “New Spirit” movement used their work to make forceful protests against the warmaking Directors-General of the later decades of the the third century. The Governance had been touched and shaped by external violence throughout the century, and though its leaders preached peace and stability, for the two most recent Directors-General, Valdrig den Subir and Birm den Boknar, those statements had as often come at the point of the sword as not. These artists, and those who shared their sentiments, saw in the Third Varelviv War War of 275 to 283 a perfect example of encroaching imperialist attitudes. No longer were Tebazeders forced into combat in order to defend themselves against unprovoked aggression by hostile neighbors; instead, they were engaged in a “war of choice” to install a puppet regime over the varelvivi, long after the slaving empire had ceased to be a threat. Philiog’s 500 Cooks project, for instance, was inspired in part by the 500 guns allegedly carried on the Unified Navy’s warships into varelviv territory during the invasion. [3] Many other works featured more overt references to the death and destruction wrought by Tebazeder arms; for instance, the varelviv Kaghoreem’s A Child’s View of War was comprised of a series of child-like drawings depicting a brutal invasion of a town, which culminates in the leveling of the buildings and the decimation of the population. Highly controversial upon its unveiling, A Child’s View of War became a rallying cry for a generation of anti-war activists, who seized upon the artwork’s depiction of vailon atrocities to claim that all Tebazeder military actions were illegitimate. [4]
The cradonian artist Mikvu Tenju’s 299 work, Untitled Varelviv Book Project, presented a particularly incisive exploration of the Tebazeder approach to war. The work, first exhibited on the eve of yet another war of aggression against the varelvivi, featured 64 holo-tablets on desks neatly arranged in rows, where individuals could sit and peruse the reading materials on the tablets. Each contained a randomized set of two thousand articles describing various aspects of the Third Varelviv War, accounting for an estimated .04% of the published news items covering the conflict. The vast volume of material confronted visitors with the immense scale of interstellar war, where gun ranges were measured in light-years and data uplinks passed yottabytes of information daily. At the same time, the silence of the reading room forced the visitors to acknowledge their ignorance of and complicity in the invasion. Though so much had been written about the war, the event had played very little role in the public consciousness. It was almost as if most Tebazeders would prefer to forget about the sins of the past — even as those sins were repeated in real time.
Early artist's treatment of Parent, circa 294.
Parent, a sculpture and installation by Birghagh, a varelviv who immigrated to the Governance after the Third Varelviv War, represented a synthesis of the xeno-cosmopolitan and anti-war strands of the “New Spirit” movement. Upon first glance, the floating bust appeared to be a vailon head and torso. As the viewer moved closer, however, strange aspects of the figure came into focus; it appeared to be halfway into a transformation into a varelviv. Its nose had faded, and four large pores appeared centered on its forehead, while the torso seemed to melt into thin tentacles. Wafts of colored smoke emanated from the body, rendering visible the usually imperceptible spores that allowed the fungoid species to reproduce. Playing on the vailons’ overdeveloped affinity for xeno assimilation, Parent manifested the Governance’s very active betrayal of its own liberal ethics: as it adapted around and responded to the external threat posed by its varelviv neighbors, it replaced the slaving varelviv state as the imperialist power in the region, intentionally imposing its will over lesser states as a local hegemon.
Footnotes
[1] Author's note: I have shamelessly stolen this image from Battlestar Galactica (the 2004 version).
[2] Holographic projections-as-sculpture dated back to the mid-second century, but only came into vogue after the development of seamless graphical detection interfaces in the late 220s. These GDIs used dozens of microsensors to detect backgrounds at every angle so that viewers of the object, no matter what direction they were looking from, would always experience the intended visual stimulation.
[3] The actual number of operational weapons systems in the entire Unified Navy was less than 250, but that didn’t stop media efforts to hype up the might of Tebazeder arms.
[4] A Child’s View of War was all the more controversial for its relationship to actual events, which seemed to be nonexistent. Indeed, varelviv slavers were responsible for far more, and far worse, documented atrocities over the years than any Governance-aligned force. Kaghoreem’s recollection of their own childhood on Viverva was never disputed by administration officials, though they did note that no incidents of mass murder by the UGF had ever been recorded.
[2] Holographic projections-as-sculpture dated back to the mid-second century, but only came into vogue after the development of seamless graphical detection interfaces in the late 220s. These GDIs used dozens of microsensors to detect backgrounds at every angle so that viewers of the object, no matter what direction they were looking from, would always experience the intended visual stimulation.
[3] The actual number of operational weapons systems in the entire Unified Navy was less than 250, but that didn’t stop media efforts to hype up the might of Tebazeder arms.
[4] A Child’s View of War was all the more controversial for its relationship to actual events, which seemed to be nonexistent. Indeed, varelviv slavers were responsible for far more, and far worse, documented atrocities over the years than any Governance-aligned force. Kaghoreem’s recollection of their own childhood on Viverva was never disputed by administration officials, though they did note that no incidents of mass murder by the UGF had ever been recorded.
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