The Moon as a Cultural Destination
Arthur Woods (*)
Roger Malina, an astrophysicist and editor of Leonardo – the journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, states (1991) : [1]
“The creation of contemporary art is inextricably tied to the process of creating human civilization. Within this perspective, art making will occur as a part of space exploration, and in fact art making must be encouraged in space as one of the ways without which, in the long run, human use of space will be incomplete and unsuccessful.”
From an historical perspective, the first literary description of trips to the Moon, the Sun, and other heavenly destinations was likely the work of Lucian of Samosota (125–180 CE) who anticipated modern science fiction themes. Johann Kepler’s Somnium, written in 1634, is considered to be the first science fiction book about space. Both a scientific treatise on lunar astronomy and a remarkably foresighted science fiction story about a voyage to the Moon, it accurately stated that that the Earth’s atmosphere becomes gradually thinner as one travels further from the planet. English clergyman John Wilkins wrote several books about trips to the Moon, the most famous being The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638). In it, he outlined the idea that someday people might inhabit our celestial neighbor.
In the mid-nineteenth century artists De Montant, A. De Neuville and Emile Bayard created woodcuts to illustrate Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel Around the Moon (1870). A few years later, James Nasmyth’s illustrations were the first space landscapes to appear in a non-fiction book. He co-wrote The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (1874) with James Carpenter. This book not only summed up lunar knowledge at the time but also contained an interesting series of “lunar photographs”. Because photography was not yet advanced enough to take actual pictures of the Moon, Nasmyth built his own telescope and created plaster models based on his visual observations of the Moon and then photographed the models. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the inventor of astronautics and the first to derive the rocket equation, was inspired by Jules Verne and penned his own novel, On the Moon (1893).
One of the most recognized paintings in the history of Western culture, The Starry Night (1889) is an oil painting by the Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh. It describes the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise. The Moon depicted in the painting is stylized, as astronomical records indicate that it actually was waning gibbous at the time Van Gogh painted the picture, and even if the phase of the Moon had been its waning crescent at the time, Van Gogh’s Moon would not have been astronomically correct but may have reflected his belief in an afterlife in the stars or planets.
Since then numerous works of science fiction in both literature and cinema have used the Moon as a setting. Notably, H.G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon (1901) Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Stanislaw Lem’s Peace on Earth (1987) depict the Moon deeply entangled in complex political agendas. Robert Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) is about three teenagers who land on the Moon and claim it on behalf of the United Nations but then discover a Nazi settlement and end up in a battle. Heinlein’s novella The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950) is about a businessman who is determined to personally reach and control the Moon which perhaps presages the current interest in developing the Moon by a number of wealthy entrepreneurs. Arthur C. Clarke’s The Exploration of Space (1951) outlined an expansive vision of the future, including rockets into Earth orbit, trips to the Moon, and voyages to the planets. In Earthlight (1955), Clarke’s first novel with a lunar setting, depicted the Moon as a desolate but beautiful landscape which was bathed in the warmth and blue light of the Earth, a setting which anticipated the famous Earthrise photo of Apollo 8, and, politically, the Moon as an area of confrontation by future global powers. This theme has been taken up by author Ben Bova, who has dedicated a number of his books including Moonrise (1996) to describing a break away lunar settlement that strives to become a sustainable settlement on the Moon and Moonwar (1998) which depicts the lunar settlement in a constant ideological and political conflict with planet Earth that results in war. In Bill White’s Platinum Moon (2010), a global entrepreneur rejects the notion that space exploration should be left to governments and creates a corporation to prospect for lunar platinum needed for fuel cells that will help mitigate global warming.
There is no doubt that the astronomical art of the first part of the 20th century, together with the rapid increase of scientifically plausible, or “hard”, science fiction literature, played an important role in preparing the public to accept – and financially support – the exploration of space. Among those early astronomical artists, two stand out distinctly.
The first of these was American artist Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986), artist, amateur astronomer and an architect that worked on the Chrysler Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and became a special-effects matte artist in Hollywood. Bonestell is sometimes called the “Father of Modern Space Art” because he illustrated the covers of science fiction magazines (primarily “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction”) and numerous book covers. Scientists invited him to illustrate their concepts of space flight and the terrain of planets. Sometimes reality didn’t match the beauty austere beauty imagined by Bonestell (e.g. the Moon). He is undoubtedly the best known and most influential of the space artists associated with the earliest steps of space exploration. He not only depicted scenery on the Moon and planets, but also very often incorporated the human aspects of exploration with the spacecraft and equipment necessary for that purpose. A documentary film: Chesley Bonestell: A Brush With The Future was released in 2018.
The other astronomical artist was Ludek Pesek (1919 – 1999) who came across a copy of Sur Les Autres Mondes (1937) by Lucien Rudaux as a young man in his native Czechoslovakia, and was also deeply impressed by that work. His paintings anticipated Moon landscapes and a series entitled The Planets of the Solar System (1963) were exhibited publicly and later on published internationally. Not only were his accurate depictions of the solar system highly acclaimed, his cosmic surreal and poetic visions of life spreading throughout the cosmos were influential to later artists.
Cinematic productions about space are among the most successful artworks of all time in terms of audience size, popularity and financial return and have played a major role in stimulating and maintaining the public’s ongoing interest in space exploration. A number of these productions have focused on the Moon.
A Trip to the Moon (1902) is a French silent film directed by Georges Méliès was likely inspired by Jules Verne’s work. The film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon’s surface, escape from an underground group of Selenites, and return with a splashdown to Earth with a captive Selenite.
Destination Moon (1950) was the first major science fiction film to deal with the dangers inherent in human space travel and the possible difficulties landing on and safely returning from our only natural satellite.
First Men in the Moon (1964) is a British science fiction film directed by Nathan Juran as an adaptation of H.G. Well’s 1901 book which finds that the Moon is inhabited by an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was an epic science fiction film directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke’s short story The Sentinel (1948) which follows a voyage to Jupiter with the sentient computer HAL after the discovery of a mysterious black monolith on the Moon affecting human evolution. It deals with themes of existentialism, human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
The film Apollo 13 (1995) depicts astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise aboard Apollo 13 for America’s third Moon landing mission. En route, an on-board explosion deprives their spacecraft of most of its oxygen supply and electric power, forcing NASA’s flight controllers to abort the Moon landing, and turning the mission into a struggle to get the three men home safely.
Moon (2009) is a film that follows a man who experiences a personal crisis as he nears the end of a three-year solitary stint mining helium-3 on the far side of the Moon.
Iron Sky (2012) is a Finnish-German-Australian comic-science-fiction action film directed by Timo Vuorensola which tells the story of a group of Nazi Germans who, having been defeated in 1945, fled to the Moon, where they built a space fleet to return in 2018 and conquer Earth.
First Man (2018) is a biographical film drama about Neil Armstrong and the years leading up to to Apollo 11.
In addition to these many imaginary, fictional and documentary works about the Moon, there are a number of artifacts and artworks that are actually on the Moon as well as a number of art projects that have been proposed or are in their planning stages.
All of the hardware from the precursor US and Soviet missions to the Moon, the subsequent Apollo missions as well as the more recent Chinese and Israeli lunar missions that is still on the Moon today, as well as the astronaut’s footprints and the tire tracks from the lunar rover are historical artifacts marking our culture’s extension unto another planet. Apollo 11, the spaceflight that landed the first humans on the Moon on July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent approximately 2 hours on the lunar surface and collected 21.5 kilograms of lunar materials for return to Earth while Michael Collins piloted the command spacecraft in lunar orbit. Included in Neil Armstrong’s PPK (Personal Preference Kit) was a piece of wood from the Wright brothers’ 1903 airplane’s left propeller and a piece of fabric from its wing, along with a diamond-studded astronaut pin originally given to Deke Slayton by the widows of the Apollo 1 crew. This pin had been intended to be flown on Apollo 1 and given to Slayton after the mission but following the disastrous launch pad fire and subsequent funerals, the widows gave the pin to Slayton and Armstrong took it on Apollo 11. When they returned to the orbiting command spacecraft, they left behind several scientific instruments, an American flag, an Apollo 1 mission patch and a plaque attached to the Lunar Module Descent Stage ladder which was signed by the crew and US President Nixon stating: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July, 1969. AD. We came in peace for all mankind”
In 1969, The Moon Museum, American artists Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Claus Oldenberg, John Chamberlain, Forrest Myers and David Novros drew designs on a small ceramic tile that was supposedly covertly attached to a leg of the Intrepid landing module, and subsequently left on the Moon during Apollo 12. Forrest Myers, the initiator of the project, tried to get NASA to approve and sanction the project, but as NASA was non-committal, Meyers eventually contacted a technician who apparently agreed to smuggle the tile onto the landing module.
On Aug. 2, 1971, Commander David Scott of the Apollo 15 mission placed an aluminum sculpture measuring 8.5 cm in height and a plaque onto the dusty surface of a small crater near his parked lunar rover. Called The Fallen Astronaut, a small human shaped figurine designed by Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonk, was intended to commemorate those astronauts and cosmonauts who had lost their lives in the furtherance of space exploration. The plaque was designed and made separately by astronaut David Scott. Van Hoeydonck was given a set of design restrictions: that the sculpture was to be both lightweight and sturdy, capable of withstanding the temperature extremes of the Moon; it could not be identifiably male or female, nor of any identifiable ethnic group. The Apollo 15 astronauts and the artist had a mutual agreement that this event would not be commercialized in any way which resulted in some controversy in subsequent years.
On December 14, 2013, the Chinese successfully landed their Yutu (Jade Rabbit) robot rover on the Moon as a part of their Chang’e-3 mission. This was the first soft landing on the Moon since 1976. The spacecraft – named after Chang’e – the goddess of the Moon in Chinese mythology – is a follow-up to the Chang’e 1 & 2 lunar orbiters. The rover was named Yutu – which in Chinese literally means “Jade Rabbit” after the mythological rabbit that lives on the Moon as a pet of the Moon goddess. On January 3, 2019 Change’4 achieved humanity’s first soft landing on the far side of the Moon. The Chinese have signaled their interest in expanding their economic sphere to include the Moon, specifically they are interested in the possibility of mining helium-3 for future fusion energy reactors.
Israel’s spacecraft Beresheet which launched on February 22, 2019 joined the list of artifacts now on the Moon when it crashed into the lunar surface on April 11 while attempting a soft landing. Making Israel the fourth nation to reach the Moon with a spacecraft, Beresheet, which is Hebrew for “in the beginning”, was a joint project between SpaceIL, a privately funded Israeli non-profit organization and Lunar X-Prize contender, and Israel Aerospace Industries. The private mission which reportably cost approximately $100 million, has paved the way for future low-cost lunar exploration and a Beresheet 2.0 mission is planned. Also in in 2019, India launched Chandrayaan-2 with a lunar rover aboard but the landing was also unsuccessful and a follow mission is planned.
Since Apollo, the artistic interest in the Moon as a cultural destination has continued to grow as innovative approaches have has achieved some success, as will some of the current art projects planned for the next few years.
In 1976, German artist Adolf Luther proposed placing mirrors in lunar orbit which would reflect sunlight in order to illuminate the far side of the Moon. This Moon project called Festival 2000, was proposed to celebrate the new millennium. This proposed artwork anticipates some later concepts of using the Moon to harness solar energy.
When Dreams are Born, a watercolor by Elisabeth Caroll Smith depicting two young children launching a sailboat in a pond reflecting the Moon in the sky was the winning artwork selected by the cosmonaut crew as part of “Ars Ad Astra, the 1st Art Exhibition in Earth Orbit” which included twenty original artworks sent to the Mir space station in 1995 as part of ESA’s Euromir 95 mission in collaboration with the OURS Foundation a Swiss cultural and astronautical organization. The crew’s announcement of the winner was communicated during a live transmission which took place as the Mir space station passed over the Euro Space Center in Transinne, Belgium on November 30, 1995. Smith’s work remained on the Mir while the other 19 artworks were returned to Earth and to the artists.
In 1997, Arthur Woods proposed EuroMoon Seed – an artwork from his EarthSeeds (SEEDS) project containing biological content that would be integrated into a lunar lander – to scientists working on the European Space Agency’s EuroMoon 2000 mission.
Earth-Moon-Earth (2007) a work by Katie Paterson, is a form of radio transmission whereby messages are sent from Earth, reflected off the surface of the Moon, and then received back on Earth. The Moon reflects only part of the information back: some is absorbed in its shadows or lost in its craters. For this work, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was translated into Morse code and sent to the Moon. Returning to Earth fragmented by the Moon’s surface, this historical composition was then re-translated into a new score, the gaps and absences becoming intervals and rests. The “Moon-altered” piece was then played on an automated grand piano.
In 2009, Daniela de Paulis, in collaboration with the CAMRAS radio amateur association based at Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands created OPTICKS – a live audio-visual performance during which digital images were transmitted as radio signals to the Moon which were then bounced back to public venues on Earth. Giant Leap, an artwork developed by Richard Clar in 2015 in collaboration with Danila de Paulis using her Moonbeam technique, bounced a recording of Neil Armstrong’s heartbeat set to a musical score off the Moon.
In 2013, NASA scientists used a laser to beam a picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to a spacecraft orbiting the Moon – the first laser communication at planetary distances. The team divided the famous da Vinci painting into sections measuring 150 by 200 pixels and then transmitted them via the pulsing of the laser to the orbiter at a data rate of about 300 bits per second.
Planned for launch in 2020, Carnegie Mellon University is hoping to send the first museum to the Moon aboard an Astrobotic lander. The project, called The MoonArk, is designed as a gift of life and hope to future humans embodied by all the arts, enlarging the lunar mission to ponder how the Moon stirs the tides, the growth patterns of life, the rhythms of society, and how the Moon always continues to pull us further into the heavens. Under the leadership of artist Lowry Burgess and with more than 300 artists involved, The MoonArk is a highly collaborative and massively integrated sculpture that poetically sparks wonderment through the integration of the arts, humanities, sciences, and technologies.
Art Moon Mars is a program for public engagement, outreach and space exploration through art with the goal to send a Moon Gallery – a 10cm, encased grid of 100 artworks resulting from an open call to artists – to the Moon in 2022. The project aims to serve as a focal point for ideas and visions of Moon Village community instigating intrigue, imagination and inspiration for space exploration. The project is supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) and has been exhibited at the ESTEC Space Expo at Noordwyck, The Netherlands.
In 2011, a touring exhibition organized by the British cultural agency Arts Catalyst combined lunar narratives, fantasies and futures to reimagine the future of the Moon. The group of participating artists including Liliane Lijn, Leonid Tishkov, Katie Paterson, Agnes Meyer Brandis, and WE COLONISED THE MOON (Sue Corke and Hagen Betzwieser), Moon Vehicle (Joanna Griffin and ISRO scientist P. Shreekumar) declared a Republic of the Moon to be a ‘micro-nation’ for alternative visions of lunar life.
Museum of the Moon is a current touring artwork by UK artist Luke Jerram. A sphere measuring seven meters in diameter depicting the Moon’s features is based on 120dpi detailed NASA imagery of the lunar surface. At an approximate scale of 1:500,000, each centimeter of the internally lit spherical sculpture represents 5km of the Moon’s surface. The installation is a fusion of lunar imagery, moonlight and a surround sound composition created by composer Dan Jones.
British artist Antony Gormley has collaborated with the Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan to create a virtual reality work, called Lunatick, on display in London (2019). The 15-minute immersive experience sees visitors don a virtual-reality (VR) headset to travel from an imagined version of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, through the Earth’s atmosphere to the Moon, where they can walk across its surface.
“MOONS” was a group art exhibition pondering wonder, worlds and orbiting mysteries that was held at the Pasadena Art Center from July 20 until December 16, 2018. Artists and Sources in the exhibition included: Alternative Moons (Nadine Schlieper & Robert Pufleb), Carnegie Observatories, Caltech Archives, Kevin Gill, James Griffith, Tim Hawkinson, Huntington Library, Melanie King, Sarah Perry, Steven Roden, Karley Sullivan, Penelope Umbrico and Jacqueline Woods. A number of Katie Paterson’s works about the Moon have been included in an exhibition with an accompanying book called “A place that exists only in moonlight: Katie Raterson and JMW Turner” at the Turner Contemporary Margate, UK, from January 26 to May 6, 2019.
“Fly me to the Moon. The Moon landing: 50 years on” is a major exhibition of space art at the Kunsthaus Zürich. Taking place between April 5 and June 30, 2019 in Zurich, Switzerland and later from July 20 until November 3, 2019 at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria, the exhibition, which spans almost 300 years of artistic exploration, is a journey through humanity’s fascination with the Moon. Beginning with the perception and portrayal of moonlight in both historical and contemporary artworks, the selected artworks depict the Moon’s influence on our moods and feelings, the Cold War between the US and the U.S.S.R. that stimulated the race to the Moon, the global consciousness that emerged after seeing images of our blue planet from the perspective of space, facsimiles of the two notable artworks sent to the Moon: Forest Meyer’s The Moon Museum and Paul Van Hoeydonk’s The Fallen Astronaut mentioned above, as well as the extraterrestrial sensation of being in a microgravity or zero gravity environment.
Curated by Cathérine Hug the artists in the exhibition include: Darren Almond, Pawel Althamer, Kader Attia, Knud Andreassen Baade, John Baldessari, Peder Balke, Hans Baluschek, Rosa Barba, Guido Baselgia, Marc Bauer, Oliver van den Berg, Nuotama Frances Bodomo, René Burri, John Chamberlain, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Johan Christian Dahl, Robert Delaunay, Vladimir Dubossarsky, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Sǿren Engsted, Max Ernst, Nir Evron, Sylvie Fleury, Lucio Fontana, Agnes Fuchs, Johann Heinrich Füssli, Galileo Galilei, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Romeo Grünfelder, Ingo Günther, Michael Günzburger, Richard Hamilton, Hannah Höch, Paul Van Hoeydonck, Philipp Keel, Albert von Keller, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Yves Klein, F.H. König, Kiki Kogelnik, David Lamelas, Fritz Lang, Lena Lapschina, Sonia Leimer, Alexei Leonov, Zilla Leutenegger, René Magritte, Hiroyuki Masuyama, Meister der Darmstädter Passion, Georges Méliès, Pierre Mennel, Anna Meschiari, Cristina de Middel, Jyoti Mistry, Edvard Munch, Forrest Myers, Friedrich Nerly, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg, Katie Paterson, Amalia Pica, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Hans Reichel, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Thomas Riess, Pipilotti Rist, Ugo Rondinone, Michael Sailstorfer, Niki de Saint Phalle, Peter Schamoni, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Roman Signer, Andrej Sokolov, Nedko Solakov, Edward Steichen, Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Ilja Tschaschnik, Konstantin Vialov, Alexander Vinogradov, Zhan Wang, Andy Warhol, Marianne von Werefkin, Nives Widauer, Arthur Woods and Konstantin Ziolkowski.
What is important in all of the above cultural developments related to the Moon is that there is an underlying cultural dimension to humanity’s space endeavors which is important to their eventual success. Since the beginning of our civilization, the artist and the scientist have been interconnected partners in the task of communicating humanity’s understandings about the nature of the universe. The idea of space exploration began in the mind of the artist and artists have been intimately involved in space exploration from the very beginning. Long before the first rocket penetrated the atmosphere of Earth, artists were making the concept of humanity traveling beyond Earth’s atmosphere and on to other cosmic locations a reality. As humanity’s breakout into space is surely one of its most significant achievements and, more importantly, one that is essential to its future well-being, it is no surprise that that space exploration should become firmly integrated into contemporary culture especially as it turns its sights on the Moon.
(*) This article was developed in cooperation with the Moon Village Association working group on Cultural Considerations. – Arthur Woods
