American and Russian Voices from Outer Space: Constructing the Unknown in Popular Space Art Kornelia Agnieszka Boczkowska, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland Abstract: This paper aims to examine the art of space travel and extraterrestrial landscape, where I inquire into the American cultural construct of the unknown and compare it with its Soviet/Russian counterpart. A visual semiotic analysis is based on varied space art works pervading 20th century visual media, including science and popular magazines. The genre of space art, so far hardly explored in scholarly terms, proves to be a valuable cultural artifact, representing an array of encoded meanings whose analysis blurs the boundaries between cultural studies, conceptual art, semiotics, cognition and visual communication. Investigating selected works of scientists, artists or space travelers, including Georgi Kurnin, Aleksei Leonov, Andrei Sokolov, Chesley Bonestell, David Hardy or William K. Hartmann, aims to reveal certain cross-cultural differences between the two nations’ construction of the unknown. Its representation sheds lights on the nations’ disparate systems of depicting yet unexplored realms of experience, generating fear and mysticism or utilizing familiar semiotic codes to communicate ideas related to outer space. These ideas turn out to be to a large extent culturally-determined, ranging from dread, awe, wonder and excitement to mystery, mysticism, elusiveness and magic. Keywords: Cultural Studies, American-Russian Studies, Space Art, Visual Grammar he paper aims to examine the art of space travel and extraterrestrial landscape, where I inquire into the American construct of the unknown and compare it with its Soviet counterpart. The study is based on one hundred and twelve early space art works, particularly those published between 1940 and 1980 in popular science magazines and science fiction novels. Investigating selected works of space artists, scientists and space travelers, including Nikolai Kolchitzkiy, Aleksey Leonov, Andrey Sokolov, Charles Bittinger, Chesley Bonestell and William K. Hartmann, aims to reveal certain cross-cultural differences in the two nations’ construction of the unknown. Its visual representation sheds light on the nations’ disparate systems of depicting yet unexplored realms of experience, generating fear and awe or utilizing familiar semiotic codes to communicate ideas related to outer space. These ideas turn out to be to a large extent culturally-determined, ranging from dread, awe, wonder and excitement to mystery, mysticism, elusiveness and magic. Methodology The notion under investigation is that of a semiotic representation of the unknown, where the sign, including signifieds and signifiers, as well as sign-making processes, remain the key theoretical concepts (Crow 2010; Rose 2001). In the light of visual grammar, all space art works, similarly to other visual images depicting possible conditions of our cosmic environment, are iconic, that is they consist of signs in which a signifier represents a signified through a strong and apparent resemblance. For example, a signifier of Mars, due to its outward form, will most presumably represent a signified of Mars rather than any other concept arbitrarily or inherently related to this signifier. Iconic space representations tend to perform three metafunctions, first proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 40-42), in order to fully engage in a set of meaning making processes: i) representational metafunction which examines the represented participants or objects within an image, ii) interpersonal metafunction which investigates the relation between the producer, the viewer and the represented object, iii) textual metafunction which studies complex compositional arrangements to reveal various textual meanings. Such a methodology allows me to analyze space and astronomical art as a communicational and representational T The International Journal of the Image Volume 3, 2013, www.ontheimage.com, ISSN 2154-8560 © Common Ground, Kornelia Agnieszka Boczkowska, All Rights Reserved Permissions: cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com