2023-08-11 15:54:00
Buzz Aldrin, one of the three American astronauts who landed on the Moon aboard Apollo 11, was a full-fledged Christian. As on Earth as in Heaven, he might say. For that reason, he took with him on the famous ship a piece of bread, a little wine and a small chalice. Was her goal of him to commune in space? Accompany that feat of science and technology with a testimony of faith in other worlds?
The history of space travel and the human creations that were sent on those expeditions has little-known aspects and oddities on the verge of plausibility.
Two new extravagances were known these days. On the one hand, the “Lunar Codex” project, which aims to leave some 30,000 works of art, music, movies, podcasts and books on Earth’s natural satellite from 157 countries. This digitized artistic corpus will travel in a time capsule as part of a NASA mission, in unmanned modules.
The other project was created by Jeff Koons, the most sought-after living artist. It is called “Moon Phases” and it will consist of reaching the Moon with sculptures documented by NFT, housed in a transparent cube, thermally coated. The module with the parts will be launched at the end of 2023 from the Kennedy Space Center.
The idea of taking art to space has a precedent in a very curious (and scatological) episode: the attempt to create the “Museum of the Moon”. It was the sculptor Forrest Myers who, enthusiastic about the first moon landing, thought that the next mission was the opportunity to leave some terrestrial art on the lunar surface.
The “Museum of the Moon” was actually a tiny piece of ceramic, barely larger than a cell phone chip, altered by some of the best-known American artists of their generation.
Robert Rauschenberg drew a line. David Novros made a black square with white lines. John Chamberlain executed a kind of template. Claes Oldenburg made a very sketchy version of Mickey Mouse. Meyer himself generated a computer drawing. Up to here all good.
There are different interpretations of the work of Andy Warhol, who drew a penis in hypersimplified forms, like the genitals that are scribbled on a stone or on the door of a bar bathroom. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which preserves one of the ceramics, they explain that it is actually Warhol’s initials arranged in a very unique way.
Forrest Myers never got NASA endorsement for his project, so the tiny wafer with the drawings would have been clandestinely embedded (thanks to the trades of an engineer) in the Apollo 12 Intrepid lunar module, which landed on Earth. Moon on November 19, 1969 in an area known as the “Ocean of Storms.”
With respect to Warhol’s drawing, it could be a rocket alluding to the trip, drawn with a childish line. But we all know what it really looks like.
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