Steve McQueen, Once Upon a Time, 2002. Image courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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In 1977, NASA turned to eminent astronomer Carl Sagan to lead a team of experts in creating the ultimate record of life on Earth. The record was sent into uncharted territory onboard the Voyager I and II spacecrafts. Although it could serve as a time capsule, the main purpose was to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations about our existence. To satisfy NASA’s unusual request, Sagan created the Golden Records, two identical gold-plated phonograph records comprised of carefully selected still images and sounds stored in binary format. Today, the Voyagers and their Records steadily approach the edge of our galaxy and are the furthest man-made objects in space.
The fact that these images and sounds were the first records ever compiled for “the extraterrestrial gaze” intrigued U.K. artist and now feature-length film director Steve McQueen. It wasn’t so much the individual selected photographs, diagrams or equations that caught the artist’s attention, but rather “how the images worked together in compilation,” he says in a recent interview with the National Post. That interest sparked Once Upon a Time (2002), a video installation in which McQueen digitized the 116 still images represented on the Records and arranged them into a slideshow with a new accompanying soundtrack of people speaking in tongues.
Once Upon a Time was purchased in 2005 by the National Gallery of Canada, thanks to Kitty Scott, the museum’s former contemporary art curator. Now director of visual arts at The Banff Centre, it seems only fitting that the work should follow Scott to the Walter Phillips Gallery. At both institutions the video piece was installed following a similar format: a short corridor and a sharp turn leads visitors into a very dark and expansive space with only a bench occupying the middle of the room. On the farthest wall, images appear and dissolve in succession at 35-second intervals.
In both the original record and McQueen’s version, the images are sorted into themes and ordered in a loose linear sequence, beginning with a black circle on a white background. The photographs and diagrams detail the stages of human life through various cultures. There are images depicting the evolution of our planet, our solar system, flora and fauna, the evolution of species, cultural traditions, industry, athleticism, education, eating habits, architecture, technology and transportation.
There are no images of war, of poverty, of natural disasters or of their devastating after-effects in the Records. Instead, the images that were chosen have a removed, scientific quality to them that is amplified by the occasional superimposed symbol or measurement. As the title of McQueen’s work suggests, Sagan and his team created an idyllic and fictitious view of life on Earth. But can we blame them? Just as we avoid revealing our faults in job interviews, we can assume that Sagan felt inclined to give aliens the best first impression of the human race.
It is clear that McQueen felt no artistic need to drastically alter or edit the visual portion of the Golden Records, and rightly so. The myth surrounding the original space curiosity lends an aura of mystery and layers of meaning far greater than what is objectively being portrayed. However, the artist’s choice to completely replace the original nature sounds and greetings spoken in 55 different languages with a new audio component of improvised languages deters from the simple joy of witnessing the Records.
Although the new soundtrack featuring glossolalia, or “repetitive nonmeaningful speech that is usually associated with trance states,” is at times intriguing, its ambiguity is at odds with the straightforwardness of the images. The artist explained in the National Post interview that he “was interested in complementing [the] images with sounds that were about us, but at the same time unrecognizable, familiar but unfamiliar, almost like acrobatics in some ways.”
Once Upon a Time is a classic example of how engaging and memorable simple artistic concepts can be. From winning the coveted Turner Prize for his Buster-Keaton-falling-house video stunt in 1999 to his recent Cannes Film Festival win for Hunger, McQueen might have what it takes to rule these two worlds for a long time to come.
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