December 12, 2013

The Moon Museum.

A tiny little tile that might be on the moon.
There are six artworks located on the ceramic tile, each one in black and white only... [T]he last drawing in the upper left is by Andy Warhol. He created a stylized version of his initials which, when viewed at certain angles, can appear as a rocket ship or a crudely drawn penis. "He was being the terrible bad boy." says Myers. Warhol's work is covered by a thumb in the image often associated with Moon Museum, but other images with the drawing visible can be found.
Forrest "Frosty" Myers, who came up with the idea to get six great artists together and make a tiny little museum that would be on the moon." I find it very amusing that a little tile — it's 3/4" X 1/2" of  — should be called a "museum." For some reason, for the longest time, I've had a special love of humor that plays with or flips the largeness and smallness of things.

The discovery of The Moon Museum by chance today — why hadn't I heard of it before? — got me searching for "moon" in Andy Warhol's diaries, and I found this about some party in Aspen in 1982:
Buzz Aldrin came, from the moon. The astronaut. Took a lot of photographs of him. He’s aged but he was cute and glad to meet us. We decided to start lying that night— Chris told people he had a twelve-month-old baby and that he was watching it while his wife was back in New York and they all believed him. And I told them I was a deep-sea fisherman, and this lady invited me to Boca Raton. I haven’t been drinking at all.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm so glad that I never met Mr. Warhol.

Edmund said...

There are things like this in lots of space hardware. Some of the NASA honchos don't like it. For example, the US lab module on the Space Station is a metal tube covered with thermal blankets. The contractor building it asked NASA for permission to have the workers come by before the blankets were put on and sign the outside with special pens. (Most of these workers were going to be laid off when the lab was delivered and accepted, btw.) No possible harm could come of this - the pens were used in other places on the exterior. NASA management said "no".

Now, it might be possible that some equipment built for NASA has signatures of the designers and technicians on the inside of the lids, placed there after the "closeout photos" were taken. The lids will never be opened in use, so only the people that signed would know they were there.

CWJ said...

We went through the vatican museum. It was spectacular and on some level we realised that everything we saw was an attempt to curry favor with the pope.

But it came home to us when we saw the moon rock presented to the pope by Nixon.

no criticism on my part, but then I realised that ALL the art I had seen no matter how perfect had been nothing more than x-century moon rocks.

Smilin' Jack said...

Artists--always exploring where no man has gone before in the frontiers of stupid.