“The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.” — Neil Armstrong, 1969
“I described the moon shot once as a very expensive non-site…To an extent I thought that after they got to the moon there was a strange demoralization that set in that they didn’t discover little green men, or something.” — Robert Smithson, 1972
Various Small Fires presents LIFE: ON THE MOON, a group exhibition tracing the immediate influence and lasting significance of the epochal July 20, 1969 moon landing on the early development of Land Art, represented by Robert Smithson and Michelle Stuart, in dialogue with recent works by Christopher Badger, Trevor Paglen, Katie Paterson, and Tavares Strachan.
In August 1969, LIFE Magazine published dozens of full-page stills from films of the moon’s surface shot by Neil Armstrong in an issue titled “LIFE: On The Moon.” The colonization and documentation of the moon’s previously mysterious lunar landscape revealed it to be a desolate “non-site”, while also forever shifting perception of fundamental landscape concepts such as scale, distance, accessibility, and jurisdiction.
Concurrently with the military-industrial “space race” leading up to the moon landing, American artists began to experiment outside of traditional studio practice, intervening at a terrestrial scale to initiate the Land Art movement. Michelle Stuart, an early member of this movement, produced a series of haunting mixed media meditations on paper in 1969 including Magnetic Forces, exhibited here for the first time, that subtly critique the techno-scientific mandate to strip the moon of its mystery.
