Art on the Moon

As I try to recover from the tragic reality that I no longer have access to a biomedical library and all its lovely research articles, let’s just take a look at some art.

Fallen Astronaut

Claire L. Evans of the Universe blog recently added two posts on art – actual art made by us humans – that is currently up there on the moon. The Moon Museum is a small tile inscribed with six drawings that is (maybe, maybe not) on the leg of the Apollo 12 mission’s landing module.

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.

The (tiny) sculpture, Fallen Astronaut, by artist Paul Van Hoeydonck and carried up and “installed” by astronauts David Scott and Jim Irwin, is a memorial to astronauts who had died and includes both Americans and Soviets on its accompanying plaque.

Both pieces were snuck up there by astronauts, lending them a somewhat pleasing, illicit quality. They also just happen to be up there where no humans can see them. Ms. Evans does a wonderful job of describing what is so lovely and mysterious about all of this:

While it’s ordinarily the artists who defend the formal importance of ideas for their own sake, on Apollo 15 it was, well, not the scientists — but the military-trained, engineer-pilot, non-artist astronauts who did. Which perhaps goes to show that the experience of space, the perspective-altering transcendence of the so-called “overview effect,” ultimately turns us all into poets..

The Voyager Spacecrafts also carried art – and also much more – into space.  Here, you can see lists of diagrams, images, sounds and greetings from earth that were included in the golden records which are currently in the heliosheath, 17,406,300,000 and 14,189,890,000 or so km from earth.