May 26, 2007
The Lunaphiles
Moonlight-Spectrum Collection Instrument, created by Interstellar Light Applications. 52 feet high, 60 feet across. Weight 25 tons. 84 mirrored collection panels. 360° rotational capability. Photo copyright David Olsen. More information here.
by Jerome du Bois
The first time I started this piece, it was all complicated and front-loaded with a pop cultural quiz comparing a number of big public artworks with the work of the folks I call the Lunaphiles, creators of the Moonlight Collector. They are not artists. But by the time I got to them I was tired of reading, so imagine what my readers would feel.
All to make an overfamiliar point to readers of this blog: that life trumps art; that art is always falling short, failing to match the scale, grandeur, and mystery of the efforts of serious non-artists, whether scientists or what used to be called amateur naturalists, unaffiliated and uncredentialed, but just as knowledgeable. And this is not to denigrate art, nor to say, "You'll never be as good as life." I write this piece only to bring attention to the fact that artists aren't even trying very hard to make work with the reach of life.
Now I'll just list the artworks I bloviated about in the first rumination of this rant --all public works, and all between $500K and $2M-- and then focus on the Lunaphiles, and let the reader make the comparisons: whether their work does some of the work that art should do, but doesn't anymore .
So, to the list: Doug Aitken's fourteen-minute multi-screen "Sleepwalkers" , at MoMA NY; also at MoMA, Frank Stella's overweight retrospective. Walter de Maria's "Lightning Field", Donald Lipski's "The Doors" (which I wrote about here), Anish Kapoor's Tate Marsyas, the Millennium Fountain in Chicago, Jeff Koons's "Puppy", Louise Bourgeois's "Maman", Antony Gormley's controversial scattered Crosby Beach piece in England, Maurizio Cattelan's Sicilian Hollywood sign of a few years ago, James Turrell's endless Roden Crater Project, and Olafur Eliasson's Tate Weather Project. Actually, the Moonlight Collector looks a lot like something Eliasson would do, doesn't it?
I first read about these researchers serious about moonlight in Dennis Wagner's May 6th Arizona Republic article, Google-cached here. It was a sweet article, but it was followed by some snippy comments. Yeesh. "Lunitic"? People! You should read Wagner's piece before the jump. And by the way, Wagner left one thing out of it: the blue moon.
After my first reading of Wagner's article, I heard a voice in my head:
How do you get moonlight into a chamber?
And I remembered --who knows how?-- that this was a written question posed to the librarian in Richard Powers' book The Gold-Bug Variations. I looked up her answer, on page 36:
A: Quince: Well, it shall be so. But there is two hard things: that is, to bring the moonlight into a chamber; for you know, Pyramus and Thisby meet by moonlight.
Snout: Doth the moon shine that night we play our play?
Bottom: A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac. Find out moonshine, find out moonshine.
Quince: Yes, it doth shine that night.
Bottom: Why, then may you leave a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open, and the moon may shine in at the casement.
Quince: Ay. Or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine.
--Midsummer Night's Dream, III,i.
The Chapins and ILA have gone Shakespeare's erstwhile stage-managers one better. Because the Collector is a reflector, it creates a trapezoidal chamber of moonlight itself. Who knows the benefits of bathing in its blue-white light, but who can doubt the sincerity --the complete lack of irony-- of its creators and researchers? They remind me of the guileless Rupert Sheldrake, patiently working an old folkloric seam out of its ancient shadows and into the light --the moonlight, in the Chapins' case.
Some of the critical commenters, thinking that the Chapins and their crew come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, made the apparently obvious point that moonlight is just reflected sunlight. Not quite. According to the ILA site:
Light cast by the moon is 500,000 times less bright than the sun. This light, reflected from the sun, presents a distinctive spectrum composed of more reds and yellows, and possesses a different frequency than sunlight. This specific light spectrum has never been artificially duplicated.
Nor researched, they might have added, which is what they're doing right now.
Critics who think that moonlight has no power should reflect (yes, I know) on what the power of sunlight has brought forth upon the earth --including the very eyes they roll in dismissal of "these frauds." Light makes eyes. The moon has been around nearly as long as the Earth itself, so why wouldn't its regular cycling have its own set of luminal influences? For almost four billion years some kind of solar light, directly blazing or downshifted, has poured down upon us without interruption. We are the children of the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon.
I'll have to imagine the experience of the Moonlight Collector, as I will for all the artworks I listed above (except "The Doors"). But motivations enter here as well, both the artist's and the one who experiences. The Chapins' motivation was and continues to be healing --not a usual element of aesthetics, to be sure. People don't go to those artworks to be healed, more's the pity. They go out of curiosity or amusement or, in the case of "Lightning Field" and Roden Crater, to tick items off an intinerary of artistic experiences. Stories for cocktail parties.
As for the artists' motivations, who knows, but often it's just an infantile fantasy realized: "I've always wanted to make that thing." And too often it doesn't reverberate with others. Here's where I went on and on in the earlier piece, and lost myself. So I'll cut to the fine point and say that what truly distinguishes the Moonlight Collector from those artworks, and most others, is that it's unselfish.
Enough said--
[Sleeve tug] But what about the blue moon?
The bl--oh yeah! thanks for reminding me. There was a full moon on May 2nd, four days before Wagner published his article. And there will be another full moon arriving in the nick of time to qualify as a blue moon, the second full moon of a single month: May 31st.
I'll bet the Chapins have already lined up a record crowd. Bless them all.
Posted by Jerome at May 26, 2007 02:30 PM | TrackBack