Andy Warhol

Moon Arts, Part One: Moon Museum

cevans — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 14:43:00 +0000

Moon Arts, Part One: Moon Museum

This is the first in a series of posts about art, the moon, and art on the moon. You would think this would be a fairly limited subject, but...

Art on the moon has been happening for a long time.

In 1969, a coterie of American contemporary artists devised a plan to put an art museum on the Moon. When NASA's official channels proved too dauntingly bureaucratic, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest "Frosty" Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain weren't deterred. Instead, they managed to sneak their "museum" -- in reality a minuscule enamel wafer inscribed with six tiny drawings -- onto the leg of the Apollo 12 mission's landing module, Intrepid. Of course, NASA has no official record of this intervention, but the New York Times ran the story several days after Apollo 12 took off.

The museum, which looks like a paleo-modern computer chip, includes a drawing of a wavy line, courtesy of Rauschenberg, a doodle of a mouse by Oldenburg, John Chamberlain's template pattern, and a piece by Warhol that the Times in '69 called a "a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature," but is obviously a penis.

It seems to me that the artistry of this "museum" is as much about the gesture of sneaking it, illicitly, onto the leg of the lunar lander, as it is about the drawings themselves. The Moon Museum is a cosmic happening, an outer-space intervention, a performance piece with no human (or Selenite) witnesses. Whether or not it even exists is a point of contention; it bears a mystique that an official NASA presence would have irrevocably squelched. Which is perhaps what separates artists from those who seek the cosmos for scientific or technological reasons. To them, the objective may not necessarily be about the quest for knowledge, but rather the desire to play with and articulate Mystery, capital-M. Space inspires awe, feeling, and perspective -- the currency of the arts.

As much as the fierce nationalism of space history would suggest otherwise, space also belongs to no one. No nation, no species, and no ideological subcategory of humanity. Obviously astronomers, scientists and engineers have had the most serious crack at the interpretation of the vast impersonal Universe beyond our atmosphere -- but mystics, myth-makers, and shamans were at it for centuries beforehand. Of course the prevailing rhetoric since the Enlightenment has been to distance the rational sanctity of science from the taxonomy-barren mish-mash that came before it, but our interdisciplinary age, it seems, should allow us to appreciate the importance of one without devaluing the other. This isn't a new idea: even NASA gave Laurie Anderson an artists' residency.

As we expand our boundaries beyond the limits of our planet, the idea of "Moon Arts" or "Space Arts" won't seem any more sci-fi than regular old Terrestrial Art. Reality is fodder for exploration and creativity, so who's to say that artists, once they secure passage to orbit, the moon, Mars, and beyond, shouldn't have as much of a say in our understanding of space as the people who sent them there?

Footnote:

Incidentally, the Moon Museum wasn't the only rogue intervention on the Apollo 12 Mission. Pranksters back at Cape Canaveral snuck laminated, fire-proof Playboy Centerfolds into astronauts' Al Bean and Pete Conrad's checklist booklets. The bunnies, which had captions like "Seen any interesting hills and valleys?" and "Survey -- her activity," were the first American women in space.

cevans Mon, 04/11/2011 - 10:43

Shouldn't be to crowded, this museum on the moon...

Don't see your logic in claiming that no one will own space. The moon is going to get carved up into regions controlled by the colonizing nations just like the New World did before it. There will be competition for its mineral resources as well as its tourism potential.

The Military will get in on it too. How we can use the Moon to kill our own people back on Earth is most likely one of the first things we'll spend outrageous amounts of taxpayer dollars on, in my view.

I would be very cautious about projecting a well-planned lunar management by an enlightened humanity.

We don't have the enlightened humanity part yet.

Yogi-one had some good points, but why would we try to kill our own people on earth. There is no point in that because there would be no one to continue to make the earth better (if there is a way to reverse what we have already done to it).

Regarding the previous comments and your post above Claire, I am reminded of a lyric from Leonard Cohen's "Sing Another Song Boys" off his '71 album Songs of Love and Hate - "Ah, they'll never, they'll never ever reach the moon/At least not the one that we're after" - This sense of the moon which the poets, artists and astrologers alike attempt to convey is lost on the "beautiful desolation" which Buzz Aldrin described the lunar surface to be. The moon was arrived at by man at a superficial level, albeit through the work of countless minds pushing the boundaries of their rational knowledge. Yet, the moon and the Earth are inseparable from each other, and just as the artistic vision and the scientific vision must be reconciled within our Selves, each material body is not to be separated from its ontological symbology (defined by the other's existence) without the severest of consequences. I understand arguments against the actual lunar landings to be an unconscious recognition of the failure to truly arrive at the Moon, capital-M also emphasized. This is also, in my reading of the lyric, Cohen's lament.

Tele Gram, what a beautiful sentiment. It's true. Apollo astronauts didn't land on the moon, they landed on a rock.

The wan moon is setting behind the white wave
And time is setting with me, Oh

-- Robert Burns

I somehow agree to Yogi-one. There are just human beings who like to be over his own kind. Spending tooo much on projects that will ensure him wealth!

#1: Cannonballs and the Meaning of Truth

bcohen — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 07:00:00 +0000

#1: Cannonballs and the Meaning of Truth

"The world is full of light and life, and the true crime is not to be interested in it." A.S. Byatt

"What seems a detour has a way of becoming, in time, a direct route." Richard Powers

I had more fun doing this series than anything else in the past 3+ years here at the Fair. It was a unique opportunity and one that wouldn't have been possible without the blog format. I was able to start down a track and let it run as far as it would go. What seemed like a detour at times had a way of becoming a direct route so that, in the end, the meandering came to encircle epistemology, technology, and the ways we come to define truth. In summary, then, a possible alternative title for it might be the sub-title for Part 3: "But Which Thousand Words is the Picture Worth?"

The order of things toward an answer to that, the run of that track in the 14-part series, as it were, ran roughly like this: Daston and Galison's Objectivity + Errol Morris's series at the NYT on the truth of photography + Richard Powers's Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance + Roger Fenton, August Sander, snowflakes, solar radiation, Iraq, Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Stalin and Khrushchev and Kennedy, the A-bomb, Lawrence Weschler, David Foster Wallace, Dostoevsky, John Ruskin, and many more = a world full of light and life. Someday I'll hope to do something with this (14,000 word) series beyond these pages. I was interested in it all.

Preface: Objectivity has a history

Part 1: Some historians of science, L. Daston and P. Galison, wrote a book about it

Part 2: They also noted that "Subjectivity is the precondition for knowledge: the self who knows"

Part 3: Erroll Morris, the filmmaker, was asking similar questions about truth and visual evidence by reference to Crimean War photographs at his blog (also see here), wondering specifically: "Do pictures provide evidence? And if so, evidence of what? And, of course, the underlying question: do they tell the truth?"

Sidebar 1: Then a guest blogger weighed in, writing about "audience" and how that matters for the production of truth

Part 4: This allowed for a connection between Daston/Galison and Morris through the topic of judgment, audience, and truth

Part 5: Soon, with reference to the pathetic fallacy, I posited that Morris's essays about Fenton's Crimean War photographs at a road outside Sebastopol were a precis for studies of science and technology in society

Part 6: Then the problem of "the obvious" came up, wherein those weighing in on truth, evidence, and objectivity wanted to treat the complicated pursuit of knowledge as a straightforward enterprise in certainty

Part 7: Alas, by this point it became clear that the above was little more than a restatement of the central premise in Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, by Richard Powers

Sidebar 2a: Eventually, in this first half of a second sidebar, the visual convergences that were mapping onto the literary and epistemological convergences were coming to the fore. As Powers wrote: "Synchroneity. All times at one. My hobby."

Sidebar 2b: And this part finally expressed the full Weschlerian nature of this series, by reference to Lawrence Weschler's own commentaries on audience, A-bombs, and art

Part 8: In this part, I got back onto the main line to discuss "shadows" and what's visible beneath them. Closing in on a synthesis of all the prior posts, it was also about a relationship between objectivity and subjectivity (is one a shadow of the other?) that echoes with more physical reference (the shadows from the cannonballs) in Morris's Crimean photography-truth mystery (Andy Warhol, Shadows, 1979 (Dia Art Foundation])

Part 9: Making the Powers-Morris connections yet more direct and folding in the objectivity, judgment, and context points from prior parts, this one asked about the difference between seeing things 'as they are' and 'as they ought to be'

Conclusion: This was the end, where, as I noted at the top of this page, what seemed like a detour had a way of becoming a direct route.

Thank you for reading.
Be well.
Good bye.

(Ten Best of the Decade from Half of the World's Fair)

bcohen Thu, 12/24/2009 - 02:00