Sculpture in the Solar System, 1978-1997
Orion’s extraordinary artistic conceptions, alongside his aspirations and ambitions, gains clear expression in his Mars Project on which he worked for two decades. This is a direct development of tectonic sculpture, but not on Earth: Orion sought to perform a sculpting act on another planet in the solar system. The planet chosen was Mars, following plans to land the first man made vehicle on it. Orion sought to sculpt a stone line, like the one in Sde Zin, in Valles Marineris, a system of canyons that runs along the Martian surface for over 4,000 kilometers. Orion contacted scientists in Israel and around the world, met with the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in the United States, managed to enlist the help of then Minister of Foreign Affairs Shimon Peres, and even met for discussions on the matter at NASA. The work itself was to be carried out by the Mars Rover, which was en route to Mars at the time. The plan was to aim the vehicle towards the edge of the rock face and instruct it to create the stone line upon completion of its operational mission. ‘Since the erosion process on Mars is as slow as astronomical time, these geometric stone outlines will not be erased for billions of years. This is a development of the launch pads for consciousness hundreds of millions of kilometers from here, to the astro-chasms,’ Orion wrote.
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