- Venue
- Djanogly Gallery
- Location
- East Midlands
The exhibition Earth-Moon-Earth is timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landing. The name is taken from Katie Paterson’s piece where Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was translated into Morse code and transmitted and reflected from the surface of the Moon back to Earth. Paterson in turn took the name ‘Earth-Moon-Earth’ (E.M.E) straight from this form of radio transmission.
The first piece you encounter is David Lamelas’ ‘Study of Relationships Between Inner and Outer Space’, a series of photographic stills from the original exhibition at Camden Arts Centre in 1969, and the film projected onto a large free-standing wall in the centre of the room. While examining the photos waiting for the film to start, barely audible strains of moonlight sonata drift into the room from an unknown source. The film begins, and immediately seems like a geographical or sociological study, blurring the artwork with these other disciplines through a scientific way of observing and measuring the environment. The deep, monotone male voice-over almost sounds like a radio transmission from NASA. Beginning with the interior details of the Camden Arts Centre, the film moves out into the surrounding area, then greater London, to different methods of transport, and onto newspaper headlines of the moon landing alluding to Outer Space. The film finishes firmly back on Earth with interviews with the public on the street about their feelings towards the moon landing, contrasting the small scale varying opinions of individuals to the large scale ‘sublime historical moment’.
This sense of the man on the street, of the everyday in contrast to something grander, is evident elsewhere: In the room with Paterson’s piece the Morse code version of Moonlight Sonata is played through a set of headphones, a more ordinary, less interesting sound compared to the romance associated with the piece playing on the piano, but even that becomes flawed and full of holes. It is also evident in Ian Breakwell and Mike Leggart’s film ONE, adapted from a previous work where CCTV was fed from a room in the gallery to a monitor in the window on the street at the time of the moon landing. As passers by witnessed astronauts digging up moon rock on monitors in shop windows everywhere else, the gallery monitor showed four men in a room quite pointlessly shovelling earth. The film shown at the Djanogly Gallery includes a voice-over repeating phrases like ‘so you’ve found work…what’s your job?’ and ‘they all shovelled simultaneously with periodic tea breaks’, again referencing the mundane. Another example is a phrase in Richard Long’s letter to curator Joy Sleeman: ‘one could read a newspaper in the moonlight, and to know there were men up there’. In this way the exhibition shows how close the sublime is to the mundane, how one without the other would not be possible, and even that they can be the same actions, just in different contexts or on a larger scale; the mundane made unfamiliar and distant.
Lured into a second room at the top of the top of the first by the sound of Moonlight Sonata, a solitary grand piano plays as though by the ghost of an amateur pianist, stumbling through learning a piece, hesitating and missing out notes. Like Lamelas, Paterson challenges the boundary between disciplines, between art and science, and the amateur and the professional. Her inspiration springs from ‘”moon-bouncers”, a network of mostly amateur radio enthusiasts who specialize in sending messages to the moon’. She enlists the help of people passionate about a subject, people who share the same thirst for exploration as NASA scientists or astronauts, who practice with the means available to them. She combines the formulaic rigours of conceptual art with romantic notions, again challenging a boundary between something previously thought not able to exist together, a challenge also being made by other artists such as Guido van der Werve.
The relationship between different sites and different times stands out, not just between the obvious of the Earth and the Moon, but between Camden Arts Centre London in 1969 and Lakeside Arts Gallery Nottingham in 2009, as Lamelas’ film investigates the gallery in detail there, you consider the space you are in presently in the same way. As you watch a woman in heels walk across the floor of the gallery there, you think of yourself performing the same action here. There is also a relationship made between Southampton, where Moonlight Sonata was transmitted from, to various participants in Sweden who collected the pieces and put it back together. There are strong connections to Land Art throughout, in the letter from Long, and the reference to soil and digging in Breakwell and Leggart’s film brings to mind Robert Smithson’s Site and Non-Site pieces, deeply concerned with the relationship between places.
The exhibition uses the power of the gallery to transport you somewhere else. It enables you to consider yourself not only in relation to other places, or the relation of other places to each other, but also to think of the infinite ways these relationships exist in the minds and imaginations of different people, people who gathered around radios and television sets in 1969 to witness the first man on the moon, who collected the memorabilia on display in the exhibition. People, who like so many, have never landed on the moon and can only experience it through the encounters of others.
