Syd Mead

If you thought the future would be cooler, you may have Syd Mead to blame. His serene and sensual landscapes, full of muscular androgynes and chrome-coated spacecraft, informed everything from automotive and electronics design to the appearance of more than a dozen iconic Hollywood movies. His paintings, which shaped our image of the future as much as any twentieth century art, are aglow with the promise of what might have been—and hopefully may yet be.

Although best known for his designs for dystopian sci-fi films such as Blade Runner, Tron and Aliens, Mead was unshakably optimistic, and in his own work technology is always put to good use. This idealism was grounded in scientific fact: guided by his industrial design training, Mead drafted future architecture and technology to seem plausibly real. As a result, his paintings are as prescient as they are fantastical: from gleaming new hyperbuildings in Asia to our arti- ficially intelligent mobile phones, much of our contemporary world looks just as he envisioned it. Mead’s prediction for the Los Angeles Skyline 2015 (1985), painted just a few years after he designed the dingy street scapes in Blade Runner, feels like a sunny riposte to that neo-noir LA, with boulevards that are sparkling clean. Behind the iconic City Hall, an angular skyscraper rising beyond the painting’s frame seems to presage the downtown towers that have broken ground over the past decade.

Mead’s images are blueprints for a world he believed we could actually build, many of them accompanied by instructions on how to erect their most far-fetched forms. And yet, looking at them, it’s possible to feel nostalgic for a time still to come. The deliciously retro aesthetic of their flying cars, ships, and space suits is a product of Mead’s omnivorous appetite for art history and world culture. In a style he termed “supersonic baroque,” mid-century automotive design collides with ancient Chinese lacquerware motifs and the floral tracery of medieval mosques. Biomorphic lines grace slickly manufactured surfaces, as on the luminous flying saucers in Entering Stargate (1991) or the sleek, polished exterior of the vehicle in Hypervan – Crimson Plaza (2003). The latter’s mirrored chassis and bullet nose recall Sput- nik or the Studebaker Starlight, a favorite car of Mead’s whose designer, Raymond Loewy, he worked with in the 1960s.

Space in a Syd Mead painting is always radiant and dynamic, full of elements moving gracefully at supersonic speed. Although in- spired by early futurist illustrations by Chelsey Bonestell and others, it has few true precedents in the art-historical canon. On the other hand, Mead’s process, which he likened to analogue computer mapping, links him with the great painters of an earlier age. His favored medium, gouache on panel, is shared by artists as disparate as Hans Holbein and JMW Turner. Mead called it “old school”, the deceptively simple trick of “applying paint to cardboard with animal hairs at the end of a stick.” The light in his paintings, meanwhile, is soft and lustrous as if viewed through a camera lens or a pool of still, clear water. It has a distinctly Pre-Raphaelite feel. That school of Victorian painting was informed by advances in photography; Mead’s art similarly depicts quantum machines with a much older technology.

Like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, every work by Mead is its own self contained story. The artist constructed entire worlds around his build- ings and machines, populating them with characters who, as well as establishing scale in each composition, are endowed with complex narratives. These glamorous burghers of all races and genders are most often engaged in ostentatious leisure, whether watching a sport- ing event—a race between six mammoth, robotic canines in Running of the Six Drgxx (1983) and real horses in the Running of the 200th Kentucky Derby (1975)—or dancing in the dim, kaleidoscopic cav- ern of a Tokyo Disco (1987). Their revealing garments, meanwhile, are stitched from fashion references as diverse as English fop suits and Arabic thobes. Anticipating globalization and our endless recycling of cultural trends, Mead built his future from the best parts of humanity’s present and past.

Mead was a child of the Great Depression who joined the US Army after World War II and launched his career in the midst of the Cold War nuclear arms race. He was openly gay years before Stonewall. His optimism seems even more singular at a time at least as scary as our own, and not just for those like him. In 1956, while a student at Art Center College of Design, Mead imagined that human- kind might flourish “in the absence of the insatiable consumption of a war machine”, supported by design that would “surround functional elements with the sensuous uselessness of pure fancy”. His idea of progress was a democratic world of flamboyant pleasure—the kind of “fancy” our militaristic, homophobic, and patriarchal society would dismiss as frivolous or vain. This wasn’t a sketch, but rather a hopeful manifestation: “We have to rehearse for a bright future,” he liked to say.

There’s something profoundly queer about a vision of the future that rejects entrenched hierarchies and notions of linearity. Mead’s paintings portray a universe in which we’ve learned from the mistakes of history, and a time long after the sexual revolution has been won. The beautiful bodies enjoying each other in his phospho- rescent nightclubs and interstellar idylls feel no shame or judgment expressing their desires. There’s an undeniable homoeroticism to the hung, masked clubbers in Party 2000 (1977), placing ‘sensation enhancing’ rings around each others’ chiseled frames, and the mus- cular males in Cavalcade to the Crimson Castle (1996), bursting out of their chaps and G-strings. The women around them, meanwhile, seem to be wearing nothing at all; flashing skin in shades that range from mauve to orange—as well as one Amazon striped like a zebra—they belong to a post-human future in which evolution has made us powerfully virile and free.

As the theorist José Esteban Muñoz argued, queerness is a utopian temporality, a “horizon” that is “not yet here”. For Mead, the future was likewise “reality ahead of schedule”. Science fiction offered him the tools to momentarily leave the ignorance of his era and this planet far behind, just as it has for many others. Every painting he created is a wish for the world he wanted. It’s up to us to get there.

—Evan Moffitt