Leonardo 2018 Memoir: 50 Years away from the Planetary Cradle

Fig. 1.

Four collage-slides hand-painted by the author Jürgen Claus for multimedia performances in 1968. (© Jürgen Claus)

YES, THIS YEAR WE CELEBRATE THE 50TH BIRTHDAY OF "LEONARDO II."

Knowing and accepting that the genius of Leonardo the First will never be surpassed, we humbly present with Leo II not only a journal, not only contributors, readers, editorial crew and the one and only global doctor honoris causa at Texas University (Roger Malina), we present moreover a community, based from Dunedin, New Zealand, to Vladivostok, Russia. Congratulations to the Leonardo II congress, a basically democratic virtual congress, well balanced between male and female art and science-inventors-distributors. All seats in this harmonious, even peaceful congress are of course virtually extremely well interconnected with advanced teleprompting machines. So we ought to know and will know: celebrating does not mean excluding. Cheers?

In regard to our 50th-birthday art-and-science-angel, it should not be forgotten that his/her birthday year is also that of an even broader movement, the spirit-of-1968 art generation (Fig. 1). This implicates art and politics, spiritual awareness, sexual liberation, expansion of film and theater and many other topics. In 1968 the Vietnam War was present in every artist's studio and on the streets. American artist Edward Kienholz created the "Portable War Memorial" about this "chickenshit war." Wolf Vostell, his German friend, burned a window puppet for "Miss Vietnam" and composed a Vietnam Symphony. Women's sexual-liberation art culminated in performances like Shigeko Kubota's "Vagina painting" and Caroline Schneemann rolling on stage with meat. In Paris, Leo II founder, artist and scientist Frank Malina was able to witness some of the most extreme developments in the history of art: Happenings and Information Theory; feminist protests; cybernetics; the computer and the arts ("Cybernetic Serendipity"); and siege of universities. Exrevolutionary writer André Malraux, in 1968 the French Culture Minister, faced tens of thousands of students fighting on the streets of Paris!

It is time to give the last words on these contradictions to founder Frank Malina. He made a brilliant lumino-sculpture, Cosmos, back in the sixties for founding Leonardo publisher Robert Maxwell's office in Oxford, planned as an "expression of a 'peaceful Cosmos' " [1]. Yet, as science writer Patrick Mc-Cray wrote in 2016, quoting the artist-scientist: " 'Events of cataclysmic proportion are constantly occurring,' yet people were still willing to dare to 'venture forth farther and farther' from the 'planetary cradle,' he wrote. This profound shift in position and perspective was something that should challenge the artist" [2].