When Ridley Scott recruited Syd Mead for his 1982 film Blade Runner, he had a simple assignment for the designer: devise the futuristic vehicle driven by the film’s protagonist Deckard. Mead took to the task with gusto, creating a car detailed with a dense assemblage of mechanical parts, a sleek glass exterior, and stickers indicating its legal authority. But he didn’t stop there. After designing the vehicle, he sketched the dystopic urban environment the car would be navigating—its architecture, its inhabitants, its neon glow, right down to the near-constant rain that fell on it. In short, he built a world.
“He could not just keep this object, this car, in isolation,” curator William Corman told me. “He had to build everything around it.”
The late designer’s world-spanning visions are now coming to life in “Future Pastime,” a major show in New York dedicated to his oeuvre. Curated by Elon Solo and Corman with access to the artist’s archives, the exhibition spotlights Mead’s decades-spanning painting practice, during which he gave shape to the science fiction imagination. Mead’s future, Corman noted, was “a place of possibility.”
Syd Mead, (1977). Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate.
As a child in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he was born in 1933, Mead displayed a knack for drawing, spurred by his reading of comic books and pulp magazines. After graduating from Los Angeles’s Art Center School in 1959, he embarked on a fruitful career in industrial design, working with clients including Ford, Philips, and Sony. He also created architectural designs for hotels and promotional material for manufacturers—most notably U.S. Steel Corporation, for which Mead developed a now-iconic catalog stacked with his vivid futuristic scenes.
“We’re talking technology, innovation, industrial design, automotive, architecture, advertising,” Solo told me. “He really just touched everything.”
Syd Mead, (1985). Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate.
Mead’s entry into film, Solo added, was almost by happenstance, when the team behind Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) reached out to the designer to troubleshoot a visual effect. His eventual creation of the movie’s V’ger—”a mechanical chaperone of planetoid size,” in Mead’s words—would land him on Hollywood’s radar. Ridley Scott came calling for Blade Runner (and later, Denis Villeneuve for the 2017 sequel ), as did Steven Lisberger for Tron (1982), Peter Hyams for 2010 (1984), and James Cameron for Aliens (1986).
“There are no singular world builders on the scale of Syd prior to his entry into the film world,” Solo said.
(Even the films Mead did not work on weren’t untouched by his presence: for 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas lifted the film’s four-legged AT-AT walkers directly from Mead’s U.S. Steel catalog.)
Syd Mead, (1996). Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate.
Where science fiction once tended toward the whimsical and cartoonish, Mead’s worlds were emotionally charged, dramatically lit, and, significantly, grounded in real world dynamics and mechanics (thanks to his expertise in industrial design and engineering). His designs would become synonymous with imaginary worlds in which man and machine coexist, and in which postmodernism arrives at its technological conclusion. They depicted, as Mead was wont to say, a “reality ahead of schedule.”
This reality, as “Future Pastime” will show, wasn’t always dystopian to Mead. At the heart of the exhibition is his body of gouache works from the 1970s through the 2000s depicting an idealized future, where familiar activities are rendered fantastical by technology. His metropolises are tactile with sensual glass and mirrors that reflect the pinks and blues of a galactic sky; a party’s attendees arrive in curious pods; and a horse racing event is hovered over by alien-like drones just as a dog race is run by large mechanical hounds.
Syd Mead, (1983). Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate.
In his depictions of leisure, Solo noted, Mead was walking in the wake of the Impressionist and Ashcan movements, which saw the painting of everyday scenes as a revolutionary act. When viewed together, his compositions appear to portray “this one unified future in which common people are enjoying the fruits of this bounty side by side, shoulder to shoulder,” Solo said. It’s a utopian beckoning.
“His future wasn’t this distant, outlandish fantasy. It was always this extension of reality, refined and inevitable,” said Corman. “I love to say that Syd’s futures are the present stretched gracefully forward. It was always with logic and beauty and purpose in mind.”
“Future Pastime” is on view at 534 West 26th Street, March 27–May 21.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
