Mother Earth Sister Moon

Holding onto one’s heroes can be tricky in today’s world.

Pavlik Morozov turned out to mostly be a fiction. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya shouldn’t have ever gotten herself involved with those fascists.

But Valentina Tereshkova?

There was nothing so sacred in my childhood as the space race. I can still remember staying up as a young child to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. Our television was black and white, of course, but more importantly I think it was somehow in the middle of a light brown wood console – it’s that I remember, the large piece of furniture in the corner of our “den,” with a fairly fuzzy, smallish screen in the center.

More important to my future was Yuri Gagarin. After all, there’s no way my suburban Chicago high school would have offered Russian language if it weren’t for the threat of that brave young man, that spaceman, the reason Neil Armstrong was so eager to enter space, and his commanders so eager to send him. (True, I’ve heard it said that Neil, and John Glenn for that matter, were mostly trying to escape their boring lives in Ohio. But they, and Yuri Gagarin, blazed a trail into the upper atmosphere for many of the rest of us who wanted lives that transcended the cornfields, pig farms, and even suburbs of those mostly-vowelled states that run below the Great Lakes across the continental United States.)

If I’d known about Valentina Tereshkova as a child, I really would have striven for the stars.

The first woman in space, Tereshkova was the heroine of women – and maybe even men – across the Soviet bloc. In the postwar period, when everything was difficult – finding decent living conditions, well-paying jobs, nutrition for your family, even a spouse who would stick around and help raise the children – Valentina offered hope that the myth of women’s equality, the latent feminism within Soviet ideology (lurking deep within, granted, but for those of us with an optimistic bent, still there if you thought about it hard enough) was made flesh in Tereshkova. Women could do anything men could do, even on the highest government level. Sure, there were no female GenSeks in the Soviet era, but flying to outer space was more important (and though the flight made her nauseous, I'm guessing she was more nauseous during those later interminable, boring speeches during her political career).

The race for space became the race for gender equality. Khrushchev banged his shoe at the United Nations – but Tereshkova donned a space suit and made history.

Which is why the dismantling of the Tereshkova myth in the current exhibition at the Warsaw Zachęta Art Museum is that much more depressing.

The huge gallery devoted to Tereshkova in the current “Splendor of Textiles” exhibit opened with a fashion show: women prancing about in space-like outfits, all of which – including some pretty hideous space boots, as well as felt boots that evoke the Russian countryside – are currently on display on a clothes rack within the body of the main part of the exhibit.

Yes, those attributes of space-age fashion now reside within a larger costume: a huger-than-life version of Valentina Tereshkova’s space suit. Groovy laced boots the size of a Volkswagen station wagon, a round, helmeted head larger than one of those bubbles you now see at the seaside, you know, the ones you can ride inside like an oversized hamster…

There were a number of disturbing things about the exhibit, conceived of and executed by Joanna Malinowska and Christian Tomaszewski and entitled “Mother Earth Sister Moon.”

First, it was possible to climb the scaffolding over the costume, which was not collapsed, despite the lack of body, but formed as if to hold a huge Valentina. Secondly, one of the boots had been torn off and lay near by, and a glove lay in a nearby gallery. Valentina dismembered, with two missing limbs. But finally, it was possible not only to examine and observe the costume from all sides including the top, one could enter it (and find inside the fashion show clothes rack) – and when it came time to leave, one had the option of exiting through … yes … Valentina’s vagina. A zipper on the external part of the costume helped us understand how she might have managed certain biological imperatives in space before the invention of Depends, but the costume itself featured padded white lips, so passing through it really seemed like some surreal pristine birthing experience – or potentially a sexual experience, if one were to take the reverse path into Valentina’s costume.

Wanting to be Valentina was surely one of my earliest thoughts when I learned of her existence: the idea that one could compete to represent one’s country beyond even the earth itself was utterly entrancing for an ambitious young woman. But here we see represented an ironic commentary on a gendered connection I hadn’t even dreamed of: the idea that we, particularly we women, have all come out of Valentina’s birth canal – just as Russian writers were once said to have come out from under Gogol’s overcoat.

Valentina’s white, go-go-booted costume was more than just an overcoat, though. Its whiteness symbolizes purity: purity of purpose, of spirit, of body. It reminds one of the labcoat – in space, too, women were scientists, not just pilots or the drivers of gravity-defying vehicles. Its hugeness swallows up all female ambition, but also all Soviet ambition; after all, in the race to prove that the Soviet Union was a utopian world, the illusion imploded, leaving space-related fashion and its heroines abandoned and bereft. Its dismemberment made me rush to Wikipedia to see just how Tereshkova died – but I am thinking that the severed limbs surely symbolize the dismemberment of the Warsaw Pact and the essential illusion of pan-Slavism. (In fact, Tereshkova is still alive. I wonder what she would think of this sendup of her early heroic flight.)

More than anything this exhibit, and its attempt at post-Socialist irony, demonstrates the strong position from which Poland – a full-fledged member of the EU and the Schengen zone – now looks at its erstwhile Slavic brethren.

Because this exhibit did not even pretend to celebrate Tereshkova. Granted, she's been celebrated a lot, and we are indeed in a high-irony zone. But still.

In the gallery text, curators explain that the artists were pairing Tereshkova with Soviet era sci-fi fiction and film. The mock vintage magazine covers of sci-fi film and fantasy on the surrounding gallery walls almost looked authentic. One celebrated Stanislaw Lem and Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, a legitimate Polish-Russian collaboration, but another illustrated an old Soviet joke: Lenin in Poland. (If you don't know it, there are lots of variants, mostly art historical: "When Brezhnev wanted to give the Polish people a gift, he commissioned a portrait of Vladimir Ilych Lenin. In a ceremony at the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, he struck a pose, and the painting "Lenin in Poland" was unveiled. The assembled crowd gasped: on the canvas was Leon Trotsky, in bed with a naked Nadezhda Krupskaya. Brezhnev turned aghast to his assistant and fired off: 'Where is Lenin?' "Lenin is in Poland," came the reply.")

The magazine covers imply that Poland – and other rational actors – never took Soviet science seriously – not the science fiction, nor the “real” science of cosmonauts like Tereshkova. The accomplishments of the Soviet regime have been leveled, flattened along with their heroine. 

Sure, in hindsight we might find her, and even her male counterpart Gagarin, to be merely tools of a totalitarian state. Gagarin, son of collective farmers, orbited the earth in 1961; Tereshkova, daughter of a WWII hero and a textile worker, and herself a textile worker chosen for the space program because of her amateur parachuting, spent 3 days in Vostok 6, orbiting the earth 48 times in 1963. Her subsequent career in the Soviet government, where she served in the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Supreme Soviet, among other roles, added a female face among all those suits – perhaps a propaganda move, but even tokenism can have a positive effect on young girls.

There was something noble about the idea of a woman in space. And all that white silk – or more likely shiny synthetic fabric – displayed under the elaborate scaffolding of building a new world order made me feel mournful for a time of achievement. Now we mock it, but wasn’t there something pure in striving to achieve new heights?