Since humanity is humanity, since the first man or woman picked up a tarnished brand or put pigment on her finger to scribble on the walls of a cave, something fascinated For the artistically inclined: penises.

Archaeologists found them scrawled among thousands of years old representations in remote caves of the Taurus Mountains and at Riba de Saelices. Also in a stone carving recovered in Hohle Fel, Germany, which experts date to 28,000 years ago.

There is no need to go that far or that far back. Even today, we continue to see images defaced with spray paint on the facades and shutters of our cities. It probably comes with taking a walk around your neighborhood and finding something on a park bench or on the hood of a dusty car.

Therefore, it is not surprising that when Andy Warhol was asked to create a work to send to the Moon with the Apollo 12 mission in the 1960s, he chose to wink at art and humanity by making doodles… —Absolutely!— a phallusIt’s small and schematic but all parts are well differentiated. Of course, Warhol and some other museums claim that what the drawing actually shows are the artist’s initials (AW) and even a rocket.

Space race… and art

To understand this, we need to go back a few decades, to the height of the 20th century space race, when months after the historic Apollo 11 mission, the United States was preparing for another achievement: Apollo 12. One exception to such a great success was Californian sculptor Forrest ‘Frosty’ Myers. He decided to contact NASA to propose a strange project: creating a Moon Museum (Moon Museum).

Thus, the “Moon Museum” perhaps invites us to think about a containment area dedicated to our moon here on Earth. But what Myers had in mind was much more ambitious: He wanted to leave a small selection of works by some of the great American artists of the time on the surface of the Moon.

We don’t know how the proposal was received by the space agency, but everything indicates that it did not cause much excitement. They did not deny it. They did not accept this either. Simply put, Myers would later explain that they had remained silent in response to him.

“They never said no, I just couldn’t get them to tell me anything.” For anyone else, NASA’s silence might have meant the end. But the Californian sculptor an ace up his sleeve. That and enough determination (and courage) to seek a shortcut behind Washington’s back.

His “lunar museum” officially couldn’t travel on the Apollo 12 mission, okay; But… What was stopping him from doing it secretly? To get out of trouble, Myers contacted Fred Waldhauer, co-founder of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), a nonprofit organization founded in the 1960s to encourage collaboration between artists and technical personnel. Waldahuer was an engineer and a man with connections, so he was able to help Myers.

To start, he worked as an electrical engineer at Bells Labs, a laboratory that engraved drawings that Myers compiled for the Lunar Museum onto tiny iridium-coated ceramic plates. The pieces were less than two centimeters long, about the size of a stamp, and were produced using techniques used in circuits.

Some versions say that 16 of them were created small wafer. Others mention 20. The fact is that the parts were distributed: one part was given to the artists collaborating on the project, the other part was reserved for casting. smuggling on the Apollo 12 mission, thus fulfilling Myers’ dream. What if NASA doesn’t seem willing to approve the project? Waldhauer’s invaluable cooperation once again played a decisive role.

The EAT co-founder knew one of the Grumman Corporation technicians who worked on Apollo 12 and (crucially) agreed to help Myers with the lunar museum. The task he was given was relatively simple, if risky: to sneak the small plate among the mission equipment in a place where it could not be traced, would not pose any risk to the crew, and would allow the artistic piece to remain in place. surface after the moon landing. There are those who say that the legs of the Intrepid module were considered for this reason.

All this, of course, in its most absolute form secrets.

And without NASA knowing.

The Moon Musen story states that Myers’ unnamed collaborator pulled it off, and just two days before Apollo 12 launched from Kennedy Space Center, the sculptor received a mysterious telegram from Cape Canaveral confirming that everything had gone as planned: “ALL SYSTEMS WILL WORK”.

The message was signed by: “JOHN F”. There is nothing else.

Had Myers done this? Was Apollo 12 the inadvertent expansion of 1960s American art into space? We had to wait forty years to at least get some more clues from the museum, even if we couldn’t confirm it completely.

Richard Kupczyk, who was in charge of Apollo 12’s Grumman launch pad in the 1960s, gave some clues about what was happening during the Americans’ preparations in a 2010 interview for the PBS documentary series ‘History Detectives.’ mission.

His testimony is valuable because the workers who worked with him were responsible for the final assembly and testing of Apollo 12, making Kupczyk a privileged witness to what took place on the eve of launch. What did he tell PBS? Among the company’s technicians were some who bypassed NASA’s inspection and placed their personal belongings among the module’s thermal blankets.

In Kupczyk’s words, “small personal items” He said workers sneaked onto the ship. There were photographs of family members… and who knows, maybe one of the twenty tiny wafers that Myers had ordered, bearing drawings by some of the great American artists of the ’60s.

“Apollo 12 has some stuff on the lunar surface right now. Nothing has been done to the ship that could create a safety issue,” he recalls. Forty years later, the technician admitted that perhaps it was not right that objects were stored among mission machines without permission, but insisted that Apollo 12’s safety had never been compromised and that its purpose was innocent. They just wanted to “leave their mark”.

—So, is it possible to have such a chip on the Moon? —historian Gwen Wright asks him during the documentary, referring to the famous “Museum of the Moon.”

— Not only is it possible, but I can say right now that my instincts are telling me there —Replies to Kupzyk.

As to the identity of the mysterious JOHN F., Myers’ collaborator and author of the telegram that supposedly confirmed the operation, Kupzyk claims to have no leads. He admits that the first thing that came to his mind when reading this was JFK’s name, JF Kennedy. “Maybe as a pseudonym,” he thinks.

Whether it is so or not, Moon Museum It didn’t remain a secret for long. On November 22, 1960, days before the return of the Apollo 12 crew, one of the nation’s largest newspapers wrote, New York TimesHe published an article reflecting on Myers’s so-called space art achievement: “A New York sculptor says Cesur’s put art on the moon“.

While we at NASA somewhat like this news, the truth is that if the mysterious JOHN F. had actually done his part, there was little the agency could have done.

So what is Warhol doing drawing penises in this strange tale of 20th-century intrigue, exploration, and space art?

Simply put, Warhol is one of the artists Myers considered for the moon museum. To be more precise, the Californian sculptor brought in five other great American creators: Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain and Warhol. Each of them added their own little grain of sand to the Moon Museum; schematic, simple drawings were made with just a few lines (or even just one); This facilitated the engineering work that brought their five works and Myers’s together. a wafer no larger than a stamp.

Next question… What did they draw?

Myers, Novros, and Chamberlain resorted to geographical designs.

Rauschenberg drew a straight and curved line.

Oldenburg preferred a schematic drawing of Mickey Mouse.

And Warhol… Warhol paid homage to humanity’s ancient obsession with phalluses, dating back to cave art and doodles of penises; but there are also interpretations that go further, such as those collected by the MET or MOMA museums. What Warhol actually drew are his initials AW. Of course, with very oddly arranged letters. Others just see a rocket ship.

Whether or not this was the case, in November 1969 New York Times They published their article about Myers’ project, in the photo accompanying the article they managed to show all the images etched into the ceramic plate except Warhol’s. strategically hidden with the finger of the person holding it in front of the camera.

The fact that an entire museum had snuck into Apollo 12 was shocking in itself, so… Also, why reveal that one of his works of art bears a suspicious resemblance to a phallus?

Just as the shadows and lights swirl around the history of the Lunar Museum, different interpretations of the history persist. What is undeniable is that both Warhol and Myers achieved this. something unique: More than half a century after the Apollo 12 mission, people still talk about the famous carved wafer, both in the press and in some of the most important art museums in the United States, including the MOMA or the Metropolitan.

Pictures | Wikipedia 1, 2 and 3 and NASA

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