What is the point of an art gallery on the Moon?

This article was originally published on Domus 1092.

It’s the gloomy depth of the pandemic, and a polymath poet-physicist mourns the planet’s art galleries. He’d been happy curating an art show. (His father the scientist and his mother the artist were also curators.) But the whole Earth is in trouble. His plague-stricken audience can’t attend the show. Then it occurs to him: why not place a gallery on the Moon? The result is the Lunar Codex, an actual, existent art gallery on the Moon. It’s not the first art ever placed on the Moon – there’s been moon art on lunar soil since 1969. However, it’s likely the most site-specific gallery/museum/time capsule ever assembled. It’s rare for such a poetic, frankly visionary gesture to be practically achieved. 

However, Dr Samuel Peralta likes to hand-build wristwatches for fun. So he performed this feat and achieved it. Circumstances favoured him. Rockets became cheaper. Electronics shrank drastically. In the 2020s, a typical American moon lander is an off-the-shelf platform. It ships components owned by customers. We’ve entered an era of self-declared “commercial lunar payload services”. 

Market-centric space-tech outfits like Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, OrbitBeyond and Masten Space Systems meet the lunar need. They build moon machines that are remarkably ugly. Unlike sleek sci-fi rocket ships, they look like solar-powered aluminium crates on stilts. But, like with a grocery cart, there’s always a little spare room inside. As a tech entrepreneur himself, Peralta befriended the upstart space merchants. His approach was persistent and practical. He quietly bought small, patchworked niches of unused lunar spacecraft. He refined the miniaturisation techniques. He invited curatorial friends, and friends of his curatorial friends, to find artistic material suitable for the time and the venue. He financed it all personally. Since he provided free Moon storage as an act of curatorial noblesse oblige, soon he had thousands of artists following worldwide. They provided Peralta with heaps of art-filled brochures and catalogues, ready to be copied and shrunk to fit. Then the project launched for the Moon. It landed, repeatedly, on different lunar areas of the Moon, carrying art content. One of the launches failed. The entire tiny art gallery was vaporised on re-entry. But that was no great cultural loss. On the contrary – since it’s digital, you can back it up, and there’s plenty more. It’s become trendy. The pace of lunar art is accelerating. Along with Peralta’s chosen artworks, the Moon now boasts two editions of the vast Lunar Library, from the busy Billion-Year Archive. Moon-shipping vendors appeared, who will offer to ship authors’ vanity books direct to the Moon, for a very reasonable 75 dollars. 

Unlike “space tourism” – where a millionaire might break a bank for just a few personal hours in orbit – putting a few dozen grams of concentrated art on the Moon has become a modern hobby. It’s a quirky, entertaining niche activity, well-suited to small groups of enthusiasts, an effort akin to, say, skydiving or ham radio. As a work of performance art, the Lunar Codex is truly admirable. For one lone Filipino-Canadian poet-artist-physicist to emotionally suffer under lockdown, to gaze up at the night sky, and decide to change the gully venue, and just place his favourite art on the Moon – that’s a feat worthy of a Jules Verne novel. (Specifically, the Verne novel From the Earth to the Moon, 1865, featuring the hero Michel Ardan, directly modelled on Félix Nadar, artistic photographer and microfilm enthusiast). 

The Lunar Codex is as marvellous as Verne, but that’s because the Moon is inherently marvellous. The Lunar Codex artwork itself is contemporary work the curator admires and can find online. He certainly knows what he likes, and he likes poetry, space art, science fiction illustration, and Filipino pop music. People periodically reach to the Moon, and they even grip it for a while, but they never possess it. They can park some art on it. That art might well survive in the ultra-dry lunar vacuum for a million years. There are already 187 metric tons of human artefacts on the Moon. It’s not beautiful and pretty material. It’s abandoned space junk deprived of human care, and some scattered, violently crashed debris. The Lunar Codex, by contrast, is compact and weighs just a few grams. It’s the size and shape of ladies’ earrings in a portable jewellery box. Shiny little metal disks, like laser-engraved coins, and small, ruggedised memory chips. It’s dainty; it’s cute. The Moon has art and archives, but it lacks human audiences. Also, critically, the Moon has no creative people. Not even one. It has no architecture; no one lives there. Sometimes, space travellers become artists – Nicole Stott, Alan Bean, Alexei Leonov. 

But no lunar artists paint any patriotic landscape art. There is no native lunar culture. People have lived in orbit for 20 years this century. The International Space Station is the most expensive palace that mankind has ever designed and built. The Moon is also reachable, and it’s not merely a “station”, it’s another round world. No one builds any native way of life up there. Why not? Because there’s nothing on that world that anybody wants. Apparently. At least, it has seemed that way. But in 2008, some ice was discovered on the Moon. Water ice, deep-frozen within a few scattered craters. In 2015, the US Congress made it legal to find and mine moon ice. Ice is not commercially valuable. However, ice does make human life on the Moon seem more physically feasible. It’s strange to realise that our Moon might feature some water oases. But it might, and a slow-motion “ice rush” has been quietly developing. It centres around the Moon’s south pole, which is known to be frosted with icy comet dust. The Indians have sent two water-sniffing devices there. The Russians unfortunately crashed one. The Chinese also plan to land there. The Americans have been quite brazen about it – they have ice-mining start-up companies. If, somehow, there happens to be enough water – a big frozen moon lake, a genuine lunar glacier – well, there’s still no compelling economic, political or military reason to ever live on the Moon. There was no compelling reason to place any art galleries there, either. They exist. 

There’s a Lunar Codex installation sitting quite near the Moon, bolted to a half-topped probe near the icy south pole. In theory, a Codex art audience – as visionary as its creator – might somehow feel compelled to go grab it. As dwelling places on another world, lunar ice caves, igloos, swimming pools and saunas have not as yet received much sustained design attention. However, a lunar-ice glacier might be the most promising real estate in our stark and barren solar system. Why venture up there? Why try to live there? Because it’s there. Because it can be done. For the sake of the statement, the demonstration. As an avant[1]garde art performance. For the deed.

Opening image: Victor Gadino, Robot Betty, 2023. Photo © Lunar Codex