Putting art on launchpad
Moody Center’s ‘Moon Shot’ exhibition explores ways lunar landing still affects works across disciplines
Moody Center’s “Moon Shot” exhibition explores ways the first lunar landing still affects art.
With the 50th anniversary year of the Apollo 11 mission waning, the “Moon Shot” exhibition at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts is riding the tail of a cometlike blitz of commemorative shows. But artists aren’t ready to leave the first moon walk behind, at least until a Mars walk rocks their world again.
Moody director Alison Weaver wanted to put the poetic response to the first moon landing on equal footing with the history and science, in part because President John F. Kennedy launched the Apollo program from the Rice campus with his lofty “We choose the moon”
speech in 1962.
The achievement of that goal inspired diverse artists in the 1960s and still resonates today, Weaver notes. “It was a pivotal moment in the world’s cultural history, when artists started to think about the relationship to the universe differently.”
The show’s high point is the trippy, 15-minute virtual reality piece “To the Moon” by the avant-garde master Laurie Anderson. NASA’s first official artist-in-residence, she created “To the Moon” last year with her longtime multimedia collaborator Hsin-Chien Huang. The experience sends your brain to a fantastical lunarscape in low gravity. Above you and all around in the black sky, constellations shaped like things that are endangered on Earth (polar bears, for instance) sparkle and fizzle.
Things you can’t see crackle, pop, churp. Ominous electronic music envelops you like a cold wind. Occasionally, Anderson’s steady voice reassures you, leading the way although you feel very much alone. You aren’t just in your head; you’re in hers as you fly through transparent dinosaurs made of DNA strands, dodge space trash, zoom over a snowy peak and ride a donkey past asteroids that become giant black diamonds. Your hands morph into prime numbers. Ultimately, you’re as untethered as a space walker whose cord has snapped. Even so, you hate for the ride to end.
The ending is hopeful. Ecstatic, even.
“To the Moon” was inspired partly by a Chinese fable about a landscape painter who spent a lifetime perfecting the trees, rocks and other details of a single painting, then merged into it when he died. In an interview posted online by Denmark’s Louisiana Museum, Anderson explains the lure of virtual reality — “being able to disappear into something.”
“This work is about anger and fear in many ways, and territory and possessiveness, and falling — and also, you’re free,” she says. It also reminds you that you’re a tiny spec in the universe yet “part of something that is beyond awesome.”
“To the Moon” is tucked away in the Moody’s soundproof video room. Save it for last, to savor it.
Life magazine and Robert Rauschenberg
Matthew Day Jackson’s “LIFE To the Moon and Back,” also made last year, exerts a strong magnetic pull in the Moody’s dedicated gallery because it’s super-scaled, intense and tactile-looking. From a series of collages depicting Life Magazine covers, it reimagines the iconic image taken by Neil Armstrong
that celebrated the first moon walk.
Jackson’s domestic, human-made materials give his collage metaphoric as well as physical weight. The textile of his lunar surface, for example, isn’t just some smudgy greenish fabric; it’s printed with real lunar-surface imagery. The Buzz Aldrin figure wears a helmet with a face shield of reflective gold foil that has clear implications: See yourself here.
“The Moon,” Kay Schimert’s sculptural tapestry from 1995, hangs across the gallery. Meticulously handshaped with pins and aluminum screening, it’s a quiet beacon of desire, full of sensual peaks, valleys and craters.
Siah Armajani’s “Moon Landing” installation, on a long pedestal, dissects the wide-open room. Anticipating how the Apollo 11 mission would be mediated by technology as people watched it, Armajani bought a TV in Minneapolis in 1969. He turned it on for the duration of the Apollo 11 flight then locked the plug, as if to seal in the history. Behind the installation’s little analog TV are other relics: framed pages from the New York Times’ special-edition coverage of the moon landing. Armajani handtraced every word of each page, letter by letter, underscoring how the techdriven enterprise began with human hands and eyes.
A number of smaller works get lost in the expanse of the gallery. It’s hard to focus on the intimate prints with tiny text and delicate marks, or know quite where to look next.
A complete set of Robert Rauschenberg’s 34 “Stoned Moon” lithographs fills the back wall, on public view for the first time. NASA invited Rauschenberg to observe the Apollo 11 launch firsthand at Cape Kennedy, as the Florida launch site was called then. Within the next year, he combined NASA charts, maps and photographs with found images of astronauts, technical equipment, egrets, palm trees and free-form drawings to create the lithographs, plus 19 drawings and collages.
Displayed salon style, the prints reveal a mind in a whirlwind. They’re wildly different. The 7-foot-tall “Sky Garden” was the largest litho that had been made, Weaver explains,
“So in tandem with the technical advancements of the space program, they were trying to push the boundaries of lithography.”
“Sky Garden” also is the most complex, documentary and fever-dreamish work of the series, with a halfdozen layers of color and loaded imagery of the launch pad. (Is that something phallic behind the big rocket?)
Michelle Stuart, a multidisciplinary artist who worked as a topographer in the 1950s, incorporated NASA imagery of the moon’s surface into drawings with finely rendered grids and frottage, rubbings of Earth’s surface, in 1969.
“At the time, people were very interested in the moon’s surface, and this idea that we could know it firsthand — what is it made out of ?” Weaver says.
Younger artists may have to think further afield if they want to ponder that sort of question.
“Hopefully, we’re going to get back to the moon sooner rather than later,” former astronaut and International Space Station commander Leroy Chiao said recently during a panel talk at the Moody. “It’s a very different place than the Earth — very much
black and white, beautiful in its own way, but cold and dead.”
During his longest flight, what Chiao missed most was “nature,” he said — meaning the green grass and trees, the heaven on Earth.
Poetic experience
On stage with Jackson and Matthew Ritchie, a 2018 Moody resident artist, Chiao showed photographs he shot of sensational landscapes from the vantage point of the upper atmosphere. “If that doesn’t inspire you, I don’t know what will,” he said.
Out in the lobby, Rachel Rose’s monumental 2015 video installation “Everything and More” — inspired by the films “Gravity” and “Interstellar” — concerns the disorienting nature of space travel and how it changes our sense of the world. The screen is deliberately placed between viewers and the Moody’s big windows, so viewers can’t forget where they are.
Ritchie, who helped Weaver with the show, insisted that she include a panel in the gallery printed with Gil Scott Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon,” a spoken-word poem from 1970 about Americans living in poverty while the government was burning up $25 billion in space. (A recording could have brought the lines more vividly to life.)
Even Kennedy’s science adviser thought the Apollo program was too costly, Ritchie said. “There was a tremendous amount of questioning. One of the thoughts about the show, and artists looking back at the moon landing, is how did we come to remember it so fondly? What distinguishes it from all the other stories of the 20th century?”
He thinks the answer has more to do with creative thinking and human nature than scientific achievement. He grew up in the United Kingdom and remembers the Apollo 11 landing as the first thing he ever saw on TV.
“The moon shot is remembered because it was a story, shared globally,” he said. “It was one of the most poetic experiences we could have together.”