Space Trash and Hubris

What’s the difference between Elon Musk firing one of his own cars into space and an artist installing 100 iron statues of his own figure on a beach?

It sounds like the start of a joke, but I don’t know what the punchline is.

Still crossing items off of my To See and Do list, I take the bus into the center of town and then the train a short way to Waterloo for the purpose of seeing Antony Gormley’s “Another Place” installation at Crosby Beach.

Before too long, I’ve arrived. Stepping off the train and going up the station’s steps, I make my way through the town, past the lake, and then over the dunes which give the landscape an other worldly feel—a feeling of barrenness, aloneness, beauty, and science fiction.

The clouds above me, layered with color and texture, seem to push the sky lower, not oppressively but strangely rather, almost as if the bubble of the atmosphere itself has shrunk. The feeling that I’ve stepped onto another planet increases the further away from the buildings that I get and the more the sand separates me from them.

In no real hurry, I’ve got the day before me, I scramble over the last dune and onto the beach. I’m not the only one out and about. Although chilly it’s a nice dry afternoon and perfect for outdoor activity. Other tourists are here for the same reason I am; the art installation has been good for bringing the interested away from museums and out into the fresh sea air. Additionally, there are dog walkers with their dogs, other locals sans dogs, birds, and, of course, the statues.

I stand still for a moment and take stock of it all.

The waves of the Irish Sea sing in and echo back out again. Across the way, forming the end of the channel, runs a faint line of low blue mountains. A brick red freight ship sails by heading away from the River Mersey and out to sea. The clouds are a story all of their own. When they’re like this, they make me want to become a permanent installation myself and take up landscape painting. Almost.

With all this as its backdrop is the artwork of Antony Gormley, British sculptor.

Instead of the single line of figures that I’d imagined – like the infinite image of a person seeing themselves in parallel mirrors—the statues are scattered over two miles of the beach. Some are high up on the sand, stranded at low tide, and others are always covered to some extent by the water regardless of whether the tide is in or out.

The first one I see, the closest one to me, is knee deep in sand with its arms held down straight to each side and faced out towards the now incoming tide. The one beyond it, positioned exactly the same way, stands waist deep in the sea with the waves splashing up against the chest. Another has its feet firmly on the sand. Another is ankle deep in water. 

From where I stand I don’t see the pattern. The statues seem to be placed with a kind of random abandon. While there might be one hundred of them—clones of the artist himself—they do not seem to be there together. Each one stands in self-absorbed or location-absorbed reflection locked into its own thoughts, its own struggles.

Is it because the placement of the statues doesn’t fit my own idea of how I thought it would be that I almost resent them here now littered as they are across the beach? I wrinkle my brow and try to pin down what bothers me about them. If there were only one statue that would be interesting. If there were a line of ten going from sand to sea, that would be interesting. But one hundred? What is that? Is that hubris?

Hubris, in a Greek tragedy, is a behavior or mindset by a hero which attracts the wrong kind of attention from the gods, usually because of the hero’s (obviously false) belief that he can live his life and perform his heroic deeds without help from above. Greek gods found that to be quite annoying and unacceptable. It was bad enough that the gods had to fight for power amongst themselves all the time (and there’s nothing more deadly to humans than the Greek gods godly squabbles) but don’t let the mortals get delusions of grandeur. That could not be allowed. God forbid. That type of arrogance, inevitably, was a dead end street for the mortal individual (and usually all his friends as well). As an example, think of Achilles’ downfall near the gates of Troy where he was shot in the foot by Paris while believing he was invincible; a warrior wrapped up in his armor and his skill, thinking that he was practically a god himself because of the immortal bath given him by his mother when he was a baby. She’d dipped him into the water holding only his foot. In the end, though, he simply wasn’t god enough. Not completely god. Although quite the warrior, Achilles let his pride and his legendary anger drive him to his own end. He was heedless, rash. Some versions of the story claim that the god Apollo (for some grudge against Achilles or simply because he liked the Trojans better) guided Paris’s aim to the one part of Achilles that hadn’t been touched by the immortalizing waters. We don’t use the phrase regarding someone’s weakness as an Achilles’ Heel for nothing. Let that be a lesson to us all, don’t assume immortality despite what your mother has told you. Also, don’t tempt the gods.

But what does all this have to do with statues on a beach? What does this have to do with Elon Musk and a space car?

In its simplest form, hubris is an overabundance of pride which leads a hero to his doom. Our more modern, less Greek tragedy explanation of hubris still shows an unflattering portrait of conceit, arrogance, and excessive pride.

Are 100 statues of a man an enactment of pride or simply art? Could it be argued that all art is a form of hubris? A saying of, Come here, look at what I did? Yes and no. Of course and of course not. Nothing is that simple. Art is not only one thing. Art is not only one form. Art is not only one expression. Art is often, like beauty, left to the eye (and the interpretation) of the beholder.  

Gormley himself, speaking of this installation, said, “In this work human life is tested against planetary time. This sculpture exposes to the light and time the nakedness of a particular and peculiar body. It is no hero, no ideal, just the industrially reproduced body of a middle-aged man trying to remain standing and trying to breathe, facing a horizon busy with ships moving materials and manufactured things around the planet.”

From that perspective, one could argue that it’s anti-pride, anti-hubris that Gormley has acted from in the making of this installation.

But still. But yet. By making himself into one hundred selves does idealization arrive by sheer number? Is heroism attempted (or achieved) by him baring his body for all to see? Is humankind’s triumph of industrialization a subjugation of this natural space and therefore an exultation of man? Are these reproduced figures that same exultation? Oh, the questions. Not least of which is: What makes art art?

I stare out around me. Why should I look upon these statues any differently than I do the windmills that are set out in the water just there? Do they add to the landscape or take away from it? Why look differently upon them than the buildings and cranes and the other structures over to my left? Because it’s art, right? Right. The difference is in the matter of function. The matter of use. The matter of aesthetics. I look from windmill to crane to statue. Would I feel differently if these statues were inside a building rather than in a natural setting? For, though intrigued, though driven to contemplation, I’m also a little averse to them. Why is that?

With the sea to my left and the cranes behind me, I walk across the sand.

Because I’ve imagined the statues as being littered across the beach, my train of thought is carried along to the litter I’ve seen pressed in among leaves, marring curbsides and fields, cluttering in against buildings, and destroying the sanctity of forest, wilderness, river, ocean, and mountain. Dirty proof of humankind’s interference with the face of the earth. How I hate litter. Obviously, this is a soapbox I cart along with me. Yet, almost worse than the litter we strew about here on the earth or that we dump in the ocean is the tons of litter we’ve left up in space. An astounding amount of junk is flying around our planet. This is not counting active satellites. Simply space trash. The upside of 170 million leftover pieces of defunct satellites, no longer needed rockets, out of use space stations, and even lost tools are orbiting Earth like rings of rubbish. And there is the Elon Musk connection.

Recently, Musk successfully launched SpaceX’s biggest rocket with its payload of a Tesla Roadster which is being “driven” on its hyperbolic orbit between the Sun and Mars by a dummy named Starman who is listening to David Bowie’s Space Oddity on full blast.

The achievement of a non-governmental venture into space is pretty darn cool. The budding potential for space exploration by the common astronaut is exciting. SpaceX’s success does move the regular human a little higher off the pages of science fiction and out above the stratosphere. That’s something.

So, why do I, like a Greek god nettled by the arrogance of man, find that I don’t like the idea of a red Roadster floating around in space? Some have said that this payload of Musk’s is art. Is it? Hmm. Why am I offended by the idea of music blasting at full volume in the vastness of the universe? I mean, it’s David Bowie, come on. And who would actually hear it in the near vacuum of space? Still, I’ve never liked noise pollution, and in fact, the universe has its own music (and the sound is capturable by human devices that pick up electromagnetic vibrations), so why try to drown it out? What I find offensive is the human hubris to dominate every environment we encounter. To adapt it to us rather than adapt to it. To blast out our voices rather than listen for the voices already singing there. To act like a teenager who’s just gotten their first car or a mid-life crisiser with a new hotrod to show off. Musk’s action toward space was not a going boldly where no one has gone before, not a joining of humanity in the next great adventure, but rather it was the expression of one man’s pride and one man’s achievements.

Hubris? In this instance, of course, it’s the modern version not the Greek Tragic one.

Well. Probably. Even if so, what’s wrong with that? Only this, space does not belong to one person. One man. One country. One planet. It’s not for owning. It’s not for claiming. It’s not for making a mark upon. The ocean, the beaches, the air, the sky, the lakes, the land, the wilderness, the vastness of outer space do not belong to one person and should not. 

By shooting up anything we like, we’ve made space a junkyard. To be fair, Elon Musk did not start that, he only added to it. The thought of all that space trash makes me sad. For, in this place that we’re privileged to inhabit, in the places we venture out into, we should be respectful. We should pick up after ourselves. We should leave the places and spaces we travel into better than they were when we arrived, not worse, not junked up.

Does that apply here on Crosby Beach as well?

I step down off my soapbox and wonder if it’s only a sad attempt on my part for some kind of moral superiority. But from what and over whom?

I walk a good length of the beach until I believe I’ve seen all one hundred of the statues, stare at the clouds to some satisfaction (can I ever be satisfied with the time spent with these clouds?), watch the tide come in fully and start its receding again, and get asked by a passing man (with dog) if I was watching the tide come in and am told if I wanted to see something really grand I should come back at sunset.

“Have you ever been here for that?”

“This is my first time here.”

“Well.” He stands and looks out at the waves for a while as if trying to be here for the first time too. “People come to get pictures of that. If you’re one for the photographs,” he motions to the camera in my lap and that gesture completes his sentence for him. He talks on, but when he moves a few steps farther away like the ebbing tide, I have to strain to make sense of his words; his accent, the wind, the low roar of the sea override them. “It is beautiful. I come here all the time. It’s easy to take it for granted.” Then he’s gone, his dog far ahead of him now, and I turn back to my clouds, to the sea, to the statues that have given me cause to think.

Later, I remember some lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Hamlet saying, “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

Is Gormley’s installation a different way of asking the same question as Hamlet, a way to explore what this quintessence of dust really is? Maybe.

What a piece of work is man. What a piece of work are these statues. What piece of work is a car in space? Are we all just trying to be gods? Hands in my pockets and face turned seaward, I walk along the promenade heading back the way I came.

Then there I am, back to the beginning of my punchlineless joke: Is Elon Musk’s firing one of his own cars into space different from Antony Gormley installing 100 iron statues of his own figure on a beach? I stand looking out at the statues, the water washing back away from their shoulders, their chests, their waists, their thighs, their knees, their ankles, their feet. Yes and no. This installation is art in a way that Musk’s car is not. Yes, the statues do represent one man, but they also represent the idea of man in a way that Musk’s space car does not. They seek to answer a question or, at the least, to pose one. On the other hand, no, for in some way, aren’t we all just shouting out into the void (all of us humans with our vulnerable heels), blasting like a radio into outer space hoping that someone hears, “Look, I am here!”?

Well. Anyway. I make it back to the first statue I’d seen hours ago. From the promenade, I bid farewell with a touch of sadness to the otherness of this place, then to the clouds, to the dunes, to the lake, to the town. What a day. With a sigh, I settle in my seat on the train and watch the world pass me by through the window there. There’s nothing like art and nature to provide the material for a nice good existential musing. 

What I want now is dinner and a glass of wine. What a piece of work am I. At that, I smile. Who am I to judge anyone or anything? That’s one question that’s easy to answer. Nobody. Though not the Nobody that Odysseus claimed to be to Polyphemos the Cyclops who broke the rule of hospitality—to throw out some more Greek mythology here. There’s a great saying, though not Shakespeare this time, to guide me along: Judge not, lest ye also be judged (or are smote down by some irritated, capricious Greek god), and while not dinner it’s easy enough to chew on that.

Leaving the train station, I wander the streets of Liverpool’s center looking for just the right place to get something more substantial than words and settle on a place across the road from the bus stop I’ll need to use to get home. At a corner table, I sip on my wine, scan through the pictures I’ve taken, and write down a few notes. I don’t miss out on the irony of that. For after all, in the end, aren’t these reflections of mine their own form of hubris?

Look! I was here.

*Like this? You can find more fun stuff on my Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/amandawhite