Moon’s Mini Modern Art Museum

June 18, 2008 at 9:37 pm (media arts) (space art)

Guerrilla style, artist Forrest “Frosty” Myers stowed modern art on a lunar lander to the moon, in 1969. S contemporary artists in the Apollo days—Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest “Frosty” Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain—contributed a drawing each which were “miniaturized and baked onto an iridium-plated ceramic wafer measuring just 3/4″ x 1/2″ x 1/40″, with the assistance of engineers at Bell Labs.” Naturally NASA would reject a cool idea like that, which led Myers to secretly collaborate with an anonymous Northrop Grumman engineer who secretly installed the “museum” on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module. Some say that Warhol’s drawing was a squiggle of his initials but others say it’s his penis. Art is objective.

Astronaut/artist also left behind several rolls of undeveloped film on the lunar surface. Who knows what radiation has done to the film, but it would be great to get them processed and see what Bean documented.  Humans like to mark their territory, and artists do it with their work.

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