CULTURAL

GEOGRAPHIES IN PRACTICE
Anti-Ecumene
Denis Cosgrove

Moon miles are not the measure of a man, nor human miles the measure of
the Moon. The mile is both geodetic and experiential, registering a thousand
human paces taken along a straight line over earthly terrain. On the Moon, gravity, horizon, atmosphere and light fundamental presuppositions of terrestrial
existence are variously disrupted or absent. Geography is not a lunar practice,
and on the lunar surface earthly spatiality meets significant resistances. We know
this because men have walked and driven earthly miles across the Moons surface. The visual record of their locomotion and of the landscapes it produced
is complete, defined and strangely disturbing.
The artist Michael Light, with a photograhic eye formed in the desiccated
landscapes of the American south-west, has selected and curated Full moon from
over 32 000 hand-held and automatic photographs produced by the Apollo space
programme between 1968 and 1972.1 His exhibition moves away from those
images of the blue Earth that have become Apollos iconic legacy, to the ignored
archive of images generated by the 9 missions, twenty-seven astronauts and twelve
moon walkers who constituted Apollos encounter with lunar landscape. More
than a record of unique technical achievement, Lights selection of these images,
his arrangement and juxtaposition of them, the scale at which he has reproduced them, and the lighted spaces in which he has chosen to display them,
have turned them into an uncannily familiar yet unsettling gallery of landscape
art: familiar through the presence of so many of the formal conventions and
associations of landscape (including its sustained links with cartography suggested by the rseau of hairline crosses that mathematize their representational
space), uncanny and unsettling because so many of landscapes conventions and
associations are either stripped away or unaccountably absent.
Lights book treatment of the images sequences them in three stages, according to the narrative of an Apollo lunar mission: launch and outward journey
with the Moons surface clarifying into a photographic map of increasing scale,
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both close and panoramic views taken on lunar ground, and finally lift-off and
return from a retreating Moon towards the blue Earth, and a splashdown with
trailing coloured parachutes into a blue Pacific.2 The exhibited images generate a more purely spatial encounter with lunar landscape. The initial photograph in the exhibition is of the lunar highlands west of the Sea of Tranquillity
bathed in morning sun, taken from a height of 70 miles from Apollo 11. The
landscape hangs in the frame, a topography etched in tones of grey, and inverted
above that intense empty blackness which will be the invariant accompaniment
to each of these landscapes, whether in monochrome or colour. This pockmarked surface of craters, wrinkle ridges and lava plains in this and succeeding
images bears an unexpected resemblance to human skin seen under a microscope: the Moons ancient and battered face scrutinized and surveyed.
In these initial images, and through the lunar surface photographs that follow, another dimension of the uncanny is equally apparent: a complete inability to judge distance and scale. The planetary curve itself deceives the Moon
is a quarter of Earths size, and as scale increases with descent towards the surface, the crater we are seeing might be ten feet or one hundred miles in diameter, or any size in between. Loss of scale is even more apparent on the surface
itself. In the photographs, we share the astronauts own disorientation. A gently undulating topography resembling more the periglaciated swells and curves
of British moorland than the angular landscapes of the arid American southwest seems but a few miles distant and a few hundred feet in elevation. In fact
Mount Hadley, viewed beyond the desperately lonely track marks of the Lunar
Rover as they disappear into the lunar dust, rises 15 000 feet over the intervening, miles-wide Marsh of Decay. Every earthly clue to measure is absent: no
atmosphere softens the clarity of topographic form, no natural objects or human
artefacts hint at scale, direction or distance. Some photographs seem to give a
familiar measure, but this too is deceptive. With deep irony it is indeed the
human body, albeit scarcely recognizable within space suit, helmet and life-support backpack, that offers a kind of scale. But no Vitruvian grandeur or dignity
is apparent here. Despite their every second being controlled, directed and
costed (at over $3300 each second) from Earth, the men on the Moon seem
displaced, directionless, aimless. Only their footprints and the tracks of their
wheeled vehicle (once made, famously eternal) seem purposeful. But in these
grey landscapes the humans appear melancholic, almost tragic figures, icons of
loneliness rather than triumphant bearers of exploratory achievement. This
inversion of the heroic narrative of exploration intensifies in Alan Beans seemingly unintended snap of the descent engine bell and leg of the lunar module
Intrepid, in which the scattered survey instruments in the lunar dust and the
shining creases of aluminum foil bring to mind earlier explorers photographs
of scientific instruments set against tropical foliage.
Landscape is light. In earthly landscapes, the nocturne is conventionally illuminated by borrowed lunar light: cool, softening and romantic. In the Moons
own landscapes, lights presence and absence generate a metaphysical intensity.
In Michael Lights words, the images share a kind of delineation through distilled light that is at once highly abstract and yet brutally representational. It
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Denis Cosgrove

offers a sense of divine perception, and the astronauts themselves shared this
apprehension of god-like sublimity in lunar light. In the absence of atmosphere,
light and shadow etch across the Moons monochrome surface landscapes of
such crystal clarity and incised intensity that colour itself becomes the symbol
of a softer, gentler other. Items that in the context of earthly landscape might
appear coldly metallic or artefactual the struts or wheels of the lunar rover
for example, or a power cable gain in the colour photos an unexpected
warmth. And in one of the most moving images, the blue aura of exhaled water
vapour surrounding Alan Beans tiny figure as he stands against the lunar horizon serves as an intimate reprise of the most haunting distinction created by
the Apollo photographs: between the Moon as the embodiment of cold, dead

Figure 1 ~ Clockwise from top left: Figures 95, 58, 55 and 52 from Michael Light, Full
moon (London, Jonathan Cape, 1999)
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eternity and Earth as the waterly, blue home of life. A tiny human figure on the
edge of deep space, the breathing body become truly a microcosm and measure of Earth.
Michael Lights work with the Apollo photographs reveals the capacity of the
lunar surface to challenge and extend the spatialities of landscape art as profoundly as the Apollo images of Earth challenged ideas of terrestrial nature and
landscape. These are the first true landscapes of an other world.

Notes
1

Full moon: Apollo mission photographs of the lunar landscape, Hayward Gallery, London, 22
July19 Sept. 1999.
Michael Light, Full moon (London, Jonathan Cape, 1999).

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