On a very windy day in 1969 my father and I were queuing in a long line to enter the Royal Scottish Museum on Chambers Street in Edinburgh. While we were waiting, a large corrugated metal sheet flew over our heads and crashed against the museum walls. It just narrowly missed us and the other people in the queue but the wind was so strong and the sudden movement and noise of the sheet metal scared us while we waited to see the moon dust.
I still have a postcard (Crown/RSM 1969) from the moon dust exhibition. The image on the front shows a 15-foot model of the Apollo 11 mission rocket Apollo Saturn 5 in scale with the museum. It would tower over the building so it gave us some form of gauge to judge the enormity of Space with. The card also has a faded out ink print on the address side saying,
“I saw the Moon dust at the Royal Scottish Museum September 1969”
So this must have been what we saw in that small glass test tube like capsule in the display case. It looked like coal dust to us, but it was in a museum so it must have been from the Moon as they said. Why would we doubt that it was from the Moon?
The Polish born, London based artist Aleksandra Mir has a new exhibition (e-flux 2013) at the M, Museum Leuven in Belgium. It starts just this week and it presents artworks, which Mir has developed over the past 15 years exploring a fictional/non-fictional rendering of Space age activity. The exhibition consists of films, public events and works on paper such as a crashed satellite in Brazil, a film documenting the first woman on the moon and collages of the Madonna as an astronaut.
Mir (her surname also happens to be the name of the now defunct Russian space station) plays with and shapes the beliefs and doubts that enter our minds about the space age, we remember and now doubt the Moon landings that were above our heads while we were growing up. Within her artwork Mir produces fictions to make us suspend our disbelief in things. Her artwork isn’t just about the images and objects but also it is her constructed creative narratives, which find their way out into the public. The crashed satellite that appeared in Brazil was front page in the newspapers and online so maybe it must be a true event. The satellite was in fact a sculpture of found objects and materials, which Mir had constructed, and by adding to its narrative by reporting that it was owned and launched by an unidentified country or corporate organisation just added to the mystery. It makes us think about what is out there and maybe who is keeping a record of all that space debris up there.
Returning to my thoughts of the queue for the museum in 1969 when I was eight years old – maybe that corrugated sheet metal wasn’t just some protective shuttering ripped from a building site by the strong wind, it may well have come from elsewhere even from some rogue satellite falling to Earth.
References.
e-flux, 2013. Aleksandra Mir – The Space Age. [online]. 311 East Broadway New York, NY 10002, USA: e-flux. Available from: http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/aleksandra-mir-gerard-herman/ [Accessed 21 November 2013].
Crown/Royal Scottish Museum, 1969. Man on the Moon: Apollo 11 [postcard]. Crown Office/Royal Scottish Museum; Edinburgh.
Iain Irving, 2013
Iain Irving 