There is a surprising amount of art on the moon. There’s a whole museum, allegedly – although it’s very hard to confirm it’s really up there. Who’s going to check? You? Me?
The Moon Museum is pretty small as museums go – it’s a piece of ceramic wafer, 19 by 13mm in size. It contains tiny images from six artists, and it’s attached – allegedly – to the Apollo 12 Lunar Module, Intrepid. That means it’s been up there and open to visitors since November 1969.
Nice museum! What about sculpture? There’s some sculpture on the moon too. I first discovered the Fallen Astronaut several years back in the beautiful, mind-expanding Phaidon book, Universe: Exploring the Astronomical World. Buy this book. I am not being paid to say that. I am compelled. Universe is one of those books I would rescue from my house if it was burning – a massive thing that shuffles together images from space exploration and scientific study with artefacts that speak of humanity’s response to the cosmos over the last few thousand years.
Anyway, the Fallen Astronaut stopped me for about ten minutes when I first found it: a little aluminium model of a human space explorer, resting on a clumped mound of moondust, next to a note listing the names of people who had died during the space race. The model is lovely and quietly heartbreaking, and the names and so many, too many. But the mound, the mound it lies on is the thing that really gets to me. We have gone into space, and yet here we are right back at the beginning of it all, the beginning of human consciousness, the first flares and splatters of creativity, shaping the earth with our hands.
The Fallen Astronaut and the Moon Museum both have mysterious, sometimes controversial backstories. More importantly, though, they are both illicit works. When the Fallen Astronaut was placed at Hadley Rille by the crew of Apollo 15 in 1971, there was no sign-off from NASA, and no awareness it was being installed. (Hadley Rille! The lonely poetry of it! Bereft.) Similarly, the Moon Museum’s creators asked NASA for its blessing, before getting tired of the bureaucracy and smuggling it up there. Allegedly.
Give it a bit of thought and this all makes sense. Twelve people have been to the moon so far. It would be weird if there wasn’t art up there after all that. And what also makes sense is that not all of the art is that great. I find the Fallen Astronaut profoundly moving, but the Moon Museum in particular has been criticised for being deeply unrepresentative of the people back on earth. It can seem rather inert, a lone embarrassed cough in the dark planetarium.