When was the last time you experienced pure moonlight, undisturbed by the lights of town and city?
This is something I鈥檝e become more passionate about since spending time working in deepest, darkest Dartmoor. Out on the moors I鈥檝e rediscovered the wonders of moonlight, bathing the land in greys and leading naturally to thoughts the Romantics labelled 鈥渟ublime鈥�.听 With a full moon suspended in emptiness overhead, spellbindingly beautiful but utterly indifferent, you stand in awe of vast nature. And you鈥檙e glad of its light to help you home, too.
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But while a lament on how we are losing our connection with the natural may be true, it is terribly trite. So I was pleased to find deeper minds at work. My question about moonlight is key to an extraordinary exhibition called , running until 20 January 2019 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Humleb忙k, Denmark.
This is a rare example of a science-art exhibition that really works. While circling many moons 鈥� mythical, fictional, mysterious, poetic, scientific 鈥� it lands us on a moon not diminished by the modern age but re-enchanted and reborn with new meaning. We have lost and gained.
Urban dwellers lost their intimate relationship with the moon surprising recently. The Louisiana exhibition reminds us about the meetings of the Lunar Society, which brought together leading scientists and engineers of the 18th century, such as ,听听 and . The society was so named simply because it met on evenings with a full moon when it was easier for everyone to get home.
A deeply ironic exhibit makes the point about that loss. Close by a gallery full of wonderful moonlight pictures of moors, mountains, lakes and ruins from the Romantic period, is an installation from the artist Katie Paterson.
Inside a windowless room is a single light bulb, engineered with great difficulty by the Osram company (she worked on it with technicians at the company) to perfectly reproduce the quality of moonlight. To my surprise, you can stand there and experience that special light without any need for the real moon. What a blow for my romantic notions to find to conjures up the same feelings.
Across the gallery, we see the wonders of what space travel has brought us. A series of images of the moon, each constructed from thousands of photographs taken from a special camera flown around it, are utterly compelling. The distant moon I see from the moor can move over 鈥� these portraits allow you to know our satellite with great intimacy without for a moment diminishing its wonder.
Much of the exhibition (some 200 works) chronicles reactions to the moon over time, from the days of pure mystery to the all-too trodden 听and drilled into present. There are powerful reactions from artists including Salvador Dali and Robert Rauschenberg, early models of the moon, moons of myth, and many imaginary voyages to the moon, the first written by the Syrian satirist Lucian in the second century. Alongside are icons from the six journeys men have made to the moon: space suits, photographs of lunar landings, videos and animations.
I particularly loved the glove worn by astronaut Eugene Cernan, sitting in a glass case. Cernan was the last human to visit the moon and his glove is still covered in fine moon dust.
His visit represents a huge shift: we were not only able to look up at the distant moon, but gaze back from it. He writes that 鈥渢he Earth鈥檚 beauty was so predominant, there was a feeling that it was the most precious possession a man could stow in his memory. There was the beauty of the colours of the oceans and the clouds鈥� from the azure of the Caribbean to the deep dark blue shades of the Pacific鈥︹��
That view, seen for the last time in 1972, inspired the environmental movement. And that movement is itself now spawning something new 鈥� a profound view of humanity鈥檚 place in deep time. This emerging sentiment is reflected at the exhibition in the most recent artworks, especially in the installation Gleaming Lights of the Soul by Yayoi Kusama. In a mirrored room, into which only four people are allowed at a time, hundreds of tiny lights slowly change colour and are reflected to infinity in every direction. Here you feel a universe of unimaginable dimension and, strangely, you feel at home in it.
The Moon is an exhibition worth the journey. While I would still like everyone to experience pure moonlight far from a city, the moon is really many moons and represents something much richer than I had imagined.
Back in the 1970s, the artist Yves Klein (also at the show) criticised space exploration because he said we would 鈥渞emain always a tourist in space鈥� rather than 鈥渋nhabiting it in sensibility鈥�. Installations like that of Kusama and the emerging philosophy of deep time perhaps suggests he was calling for something that few people then felt.
His view is enigmatic, but well worth pondering throughout 2019.
