<em>Fallen Astronaut:</em> Violence Bodies and 'Moon Art'

"The only piece of art on the moon is a 3″-tall aluminium sculpture titled Fallen Astronaut. It was created by Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonck and installed by Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott, along with a plaque bearing the names of the 14 astronauts and cosmonauts who died in the service of space exploration prior to 1971". This surprising message on a website called The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society captured my imagination in connection with the call for papers for the Tampere conference with its theme: American bodies, American violence. The art piece in question seems to raise a number of issues of relevance for this theme: First of all, the art-work is commemorative in nature, as much American art honouring the heroic, violently dead is. Often such art uses the body metonymically in its representation strategy. Secondly, the role of the astronaut in ‘installing' the art-work raises interesting issues about the production of art and agency vis-à-vis an individual piece. Third, the role of the spectator or audience for this work seems particularly problematic - after all the piece is on the Moon and has never been revisited, seen or documented since its original installation, or to be even more precise, may very likely no longer be intact, given the extreme temperature spectrum of the environment it was placed in and the lack of a protective atmosphere up there. The moon, in other words seems a particularly violent milieu for a work of art to be in.Fourth, taking into consideration that the piece is not on public display itself and known to us exclusively through its mediated forms, to wit, a photo kept in NASA's archives and reproduced in various ways on web sites and in other mass media, and a replica of the sculpture found at the Space Museum in Houston, we are forced to reflect on wherein the piece really consists: Hoeydonck's preparation of the figurine and plaque (not documented), the original gesture of installation performed by Scott when he dropped the figurine into the moon dust in 1971 (not preserved in images), the act of documenting the piece with a camera, performed by him immediately after, or the act of publicising the performance which the astronauts carried out at their press conference after returning to Earth - or all of the above.Fifth, the apparently simple homage to heroism embedded in the installation seems to be problematized by the peculiar contract between Van Hoeydonck and the Apollo 15 crew not to make money off the event, the piece or replicas thereof - and not least the fact that this contract was broken by Van Hoeydonck in 1972 when he sold 950 signed replicas of the piece at 750$ a pop (against NASAs wishes, since NASA religiously guarded the non-commercialization of space for fear the Russians would use any American attempts at monetary gains off space against them in the Cold War propaganda effort) As a nice twist in that side plot the Apollo 15 crew were severely reprimanded for selling stamped envelopes that they had brought with them to the moon without the prior knowledge of and approval by NASA... Finally, the fact that the names on the memorial plaque are those of both American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts points to a surprisingly political gesture on the part of the Apollo 15 crew: in the midst of the Cold War space race this reminder of the shared respect for the profession of space traveller and fellow soldier harks back to traditions from other wars where soldiers from the warring sides found a common ground and respect, before proceeding again to attempt to slaughter one another. Thus rather than a gesture of détente the inclusion of Russian names in an American memorial is a nostalgic gesture backward to ‘good' wars of the past where enemies were also fellow human beings - an innocence the loss of which was marked by WW II (Holocaust and Hiroshima) and proved gone for good by the horrors of Vietnam.