Smuggling Art to the Moon
Looking back 50 years later
Fifty years ago, on November 22, 1969, the New York Times broke a story about a handful of famous U.S. artists who claimed they smuggled art to the moon. The tiny work, titled “Moon Museum,” was spearheaded by sculptor Forrest “Frosty” Myers in collaboration with five icons of the 1960s American art scene: John Chamberlain, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. Each artist contributed a minuscule drawing that two engineers from Bell Laboratories, Fred Waldhauer and Robert Merkle, etched onto ceramic wafers smaller than postage stamps.
Myers wanted NASA to bring one of the “Moon Museum” wafers on the Apollo 12 mission to land men on the moon for the second time, just four months after Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind. He tried to go through official channels, but when NASA was unresponsive, he recruited another engineer at Cape Kennedy, Florida, who promised to attach one of the wafers onto the Intrepid lunar module that would be left behind on the moon during the Apollo 12 mission.
On this 50th anniversary year of the moon landings, museums across the U.S. — from the Metropolitan Museum in New York City to the Gregory Allicar Museum in Fort Collins, Colorado — have put “Moon Museum” wafers on display in art exhibits that celebrate NASA’s historic achievement.
In the Colorado show, Allicar Director and Chief Curator Lynn Boland plays up the mystery by displaying the kind of paraphernalia that fictional FBI Agent Fox Mulder might hoard in his basement office for investigating X-Files.
There is the telegram signed “John F” allegedly confirming that “Moon Museum” was successfully attached to the Intrepid. An aged newspaper clipping from the New York Times story, which broke while the Apollo 12 astronauts were en route back to Earth, details how “the engineer is said to have attached the wafer to the hatch of an access port on the Intrepid’s leg.” The stained schematic for the ceramic wafer, complete with its chemical composition, claims, “Aboard the LM on the APOLLO 12 flight Nov., 69.”
It is a mystery born out of ambivalence between art and science. Myers says that NASA initially “seemed optimistic” about bringing “Moon Museum” on the Apollo 12 mission before losing interest. When the Times reached out to NASA for comment, an assistant administrator for public affairs responded, “If it is true that they’ve succeeded in doing it by some clandestine means, I hope that the work represents the best in contemporary American art.” In light of this hope, consider Warhol’s contribution: according to the Times, he drew “a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature,” which was their euphemism for a penis and ballsack. Warhol’s “signature” is covered by a thumb in the photo that the Times ran with their story.
It’s hard to imagine an alien finding Warhol’s “signature” on “Moon Museum” and appreciating him as the best in contemporary American art. Indeed, Oldenburg seemed underwhelmed with the project when he wished “it could have been a more elaborate presentation. In fact it would have been nice if artists had worked with technologists on the design of the lunar module.” Perhaps, although the engineering feat of unprecedented space travel might have been complicated enough without added aesthetic burdens.
Myers, enthusiastic about his brainchild, said, “Now I know that there’s a soulful piece of art up there — a piece of software among all that hardware and junk.” But for Warhol, at least, it was a silly piece of art; the deepest interpretation of his dick doodle suggests it might reference both the shape of a rocket and the comparison of the Cold War to a dick-measuring contest between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., a conflict in which the race to the moon was a key front. If so, this is surface-level commentary.
A dick-measuring contest implies a petty display that is obnoxiously unnecessary — but the Cold War was neither petty nor unnecessary. Rather, it was a reckoning between clashing conceptions of human nature.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived the Soviet gulags to chronicle their horrors in The Gulag Archipelago, described the Soviet understanding of human nature as a Manichean struggle between the “haves” and the “have nots.” He explained how the Soviets pursued utopia by purging people they deemed evil, with a continuously expanding definition of evil as utopia remained elusive. Over time, the “haves” even included peasants who owned a couple cows, who were killed or imprisoned for having more than their neighbors. Notably, Stalin’s death toll of 20 million competes with Hitler’s. Solzhenitsyn wrote,
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Meanwhile, Americans were grappling with their failure to live up to their nation’s founding ideals of equality and liberty, corrupted by the inner demons within each American heart. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated the year before the moon landings. Feminists were fighting for access to birth control pills while unmarried, sexually-active women were often equated with prostitutes. In the same year as the moon landing, the Stonewall riots broke out in reaction to police raids in an era when homosexuality was widely illegal. (Warhol may have held this event close to his heart as a famous, openly gay artist.) Over time, these American “have nots” won many battles by appealing to the better angels of their opponents’ nature, epitomized in King’s I Have a Dream speech,
In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred… I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” …that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
King channeled an understanding of human nature that was fundamental to his country from its very inception. The American Founding Fathers prefigured Solzhenitsyn’s wisdom that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. When the U.S. was in its infancy, James Madison wrote in Federalist 55,
As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.
During the Cold War, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. fought proxy wars for global influence to spread their rival philosophies: identifying “evil” people for elimination in pursuit of utopia vs. cautioning people to constrain the evil in their own hearts. Neither nation was blameless. But if this was a dick-measuring contest, then I’m glad America had the bigger dick.
It’s hard to know whether Warhol was glad about America’s prowess, too. Perhaps his dick doodle was simply a puerile gesture, if the artist is to be taken at his word: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” At the very least, Warhol was glad to be an American,
I think of myself as an American artist; I like it here, I think it’s so great. It’s fantastic… I feel I represent the U.S. in my art, but I’m not a social critic. I just paint those objects in my paintings because those are the things I know best. I’m not trying to criticize the U.S. in any way, not trying to show up any ugliness at all. I’m just a pure artist, I guess. But I can’t say if I take myself seriously as an artist. I just hadn’t thought about it.
Warhol’s flippant persona clashes with the gravity of the moon landings and their historic context. Even as the Cold War fades into history, the Intrepid lunar module and other relics left on the moon live on as monuments to the human spirit. The Apollo missions gave us our first photographs of planet Earth in its entirety and launched the field of planetary science; in the words of the most well-known planetary scientist, Carl Sagan,
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
We escaped our provincial vantage point. And yet, Myers dismissed the technology that helped humanity touch another world as “hardware and junk,” and Oldenburg’s criticism disdains the breathtaking challenge that technology faced. Their comments, combined with Warhol’s juvenile contribution to “Moon Museum,” disregard the value of this historic accomplishment. Maybe NASA lost interest in “Moon Museum” because it is less soulful than Myers believes. The tiny ceramic wafer is more engaging as an enigma than as an artwork.
