The Brooklyn Rail

In 1982, Donald Fagen released “I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World),” an homage to the post-war optimism of his youth, singing of the advent of an era of science-propelled success: “Here at home we’ll play in the city / Powered by the sun / Perfect weather for a streamlined world / There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone.” The future is bright as the ringing chorus asserts, “What a beautiful world this will be / What a glorious time to be free.” The same year that Fagen sang of a retreating optimism for the future, both Tron and Blade Runner saw theatrical release, offering competing visions of technological verve and visual audacity. Each of these productions, with fully realized worlds now instantly recognizable for their singular design language, were in large part the vision of Syd Mead.

As a conceptual artist and self-proclaimed visual futurist, Mead believed in the possibility of the future, painstakingly rendering it in gouache with the tools of the drafting table until his death in 2019. The future, as seen by Mead, escapes the burdens of the past and often societal limitations. His images, usually the conceptual means to an end, are frequently viewed in the glossy spreads of art books, but in person, the delicacy of his gouaches is heightened, allowing the startling textures—the bristle of body hair or the cool luster of chrome rendered with a poignant tactility—to be perceived. In a commendable corrective, curators William Corman and Elon Solo present Future Pastime, an exhibition of sixteen works drawn from the span of Mead’s career (sans his best known Hollywood commissions), offering not only a survey but also a distillation of his recurring themes and preoccupations.

The mechanics of the future, while often Mead’s subject, serve as a basis from which to pivot toward the visually striking, and most importantly, the truly new. In one textbook Mead work, Entering Stargate (1991), various starships navigate the vast interior of a space station, while in the foreground, the passengers of a smaller private spacecraft study the astronomical ballet ahead of them, attracting the attention of an alien creature, drawn to the exotic energies of the interstellar propulsion systems. This scene, bathed in the light of obscured stars, could be a proposal or a fantasy. What is depicted here is not the practical, but rather the promise inherent in all futurity. Such extrapolation, written in the argot of science, was one of Mead’s gifts, and in the version of 2074 seen in Running of the 200th Kentucky Derby (1975), things seem to have appropriately advanced, with Churchill Downs now expanded dramatically through angled glassed-in levels joined by a massive hovering leaderboard to accommodate the extra spectators. While largely grounded in its predictions, there are several flourishes to this future, with fashion seemingly veering baroque, albeit chrome-accented, and the floating broadcasting structures that share the air with enormous graceful balloons shaped like towering spinning tops, appearing to bloom in the sky.

Although Mead’s futures revel in the polish of ethereal technology, they remain firmly situated in the physical and often, the flesh. Party 2000 (1977), depicts a hi-tech bacchanal, where nude and minimally clothed men and women swan around a complexly tiered terrace, enjoying hors d’oeuvres, conversation, and unknown pleasures involving various sensory enhancing rings. In this inescapably erotic milieu, the partygoers don technologically enhanced fetish-wear of masking helmets and cybernetic armatures, while the city beyond retreats out into an incandescent horizon. A later commission of similarly amplified hedonism, Pebble Beach (2000), is an intrepid fantasia of General Motors cars past, present, and future, resplendent in the classical glow of advertising. Unlike a sedate Concours d'Elegance, the car culture on display here is decidedly more libertine, as the golden light of the cinematic magic hour rakes across the bodies, both human and automotive, with equal erotic weight.

There is an unmistakably queer ambiguity to both of these works. Mead’s future is unequivocally sensual, and while its inhabitants can read as little more than beautiful ciphers they are the beneficiaries of a world in which the parameters of sexuality have been explicitly expanded. Such expansion is a through-line for Mead, and in his futures, society appears able to find a unifying equipoise in difference. As a gay man navigating very heteronormative corporate structures, Mead surely was aware that this professional queering of the future would at the very least, raise eyebrows, but this uniquely subversive torquing, arguably, was one of his greatest assets.

In a commissioned essay, writer Evan Moffitt places Mead’s work within José Esteban Muñoz’s framework of queer futurity, recalling the late academic’s 2009 landmark Cruising Utopia, which placed queerness as a horizon, a liminal continuity outside of the “temporal stranglehold” of heteronormative conceptions of history. Mead’s future is a perennial tomorrow, a place of possibility and endless conjecture, and it is this spaciousness that has granted his images their remarkably long half-lives. Throughout a remarkably varied career, Mead never lost the hope for the future and its construction, echoing the same ambition that Fagen sang of in the last verses of “I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)”: “A just machine to make big decisions / Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision / Well be clean when their work is done / We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young.” Without cynicism, Mead maintained a faith in that future, of the implicit promise that under an azure sky, boundless beauty awaits in a deathless tomorrow. It might be a tall order, but certainly the destination remains, just over the horizon.