ART

THE AESTHETICS OF MOON ART

Ebtekar, St. Exupery, Takahata

By Nathaniel Wisdom

Beautiful and Distant

The moon has captured my attention since I was nine years old. During long car rides with my mother I would stare at it from the backseat window, watching as it floated along, following us from store to store. I would even stare at it from my living room window at random moments of the night, admiring how large it was and how it glowed. Although, it appeared small and I could seemingly squish it between my thumb and index finger, it possessed an overwhelming presence that was absolutely alluring. That same closeness adds to its mystique and the way depictions of the moon are always split between the imagination and reality. You see the craters and imagine yourself, like Saint-Exupery, a little prince and fox on the moon. And so as pale and flat as it is in nature, it is alive in sparking the imagination.

Moon art is a strange phrase to use. At first it seems nothing more than replicating an image from nature. But when you look at various moon art pieces you realize that there is something more interesting going on. It’s not just realism or looking at the moon in different genres, it is a comment about how we think and, specifically, our relationship to outer space and everything that exists past earth.

The Moon is a  fragment of our imagination

The moon certainly has sparked Ala Ebtekar’s imagination. In his Thirty-six Views of the Moon, he quickly changes your mind about some of the most common place notions of the moon. Ebtekar is a 41-year-old artist from Berkley, California who specializes in art that connects history and myth. His piece on the moon is one of hundreds in his planetary project. Thirty-six Views of the Moon emphasize the moon’s magical hypnotism in one compelling section after another.

Ebtekar’s divides the moon into individual picture frames. Each frame is colored white and borders a section of the moon. The moon is colored in a blue tint and is in bold contrast to the extreme white of its rocky terrain. Because of this juxtaposition, you can identify specific spots on the moon’s surface: craters such as Kepler and Plato and even geological markings of old rivers and oceans. The frames come together to bring together one complex flat image of the moon against a white wall.

And with such ease and beauty, those images are more than just scientific depictions of our closest neighbor. Ebtekar reveals the creative and exhilarating potential of the objects that surround us and their ever-changing qualities. Forcing us to engage with the moon’s omnipresence and constant motion, Ebtekar makes us more acutely aware of everything around us.

Beautiful and Ridiculous

Looking at the moon right now, you might instantly think of the first United States moon landing in 1969. It is funny to believe that the first human step off the Earth’s surface was by a man in a ridiculous white, bulbous nylon suit, which was manufactured by Playtex, the women’s lingerie company. Well, this strange garment was an incredible technological advance. It meant that both actually and symbolically we could survive outside of our own planet and ecosystem. It is the greatest example of human beings going places we had only previously imagined. It is moments like these that inspire artists like Ebtekar and provide inspiration for next generation of future artists.

Antoine Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince is one of the most famous children’s stories in the world. Saint-Exupery is deeply fascinated with the moon. In fact, he uses the moon as a way of getting at the complex psychology of children’s imaginations. When a mystery is too overbearing, the imagination tries to express what we don’t understand. What compels many artists is to express what can’t be put into words. And perhaps this is the reason we see the moon as something more than just a rock; it is an expression of our unarticulated desires.

The book begins with the main character’s attempt to draw a boa constrictor and become an artist. Discouraged by his unimpressed parents he settles on becoming a pilot. It is this change in occupation that lands him in an uninhabited region governed by a mysterious prince. As the prince travels from asteroid to asteroid, the prince learns that there is a stark difference between the lives of children and adults. The lives of adults are monotonous and ultimately boring, whereas the lives of children are fun and unpredictable.

The Prince and the Moon

Exupery’s book conveys a battle between the minds of adults and children and highlights the struggle of people to battle creativity, expectation, and responsibility. Very reminiscent of the real world, Exupery’s depiction of life offers us insight into what a world lacking imagination really is: rigid, monotonous, and boring. Fortunately, some adult artists rediscover their youthful imaginations, reigniting the creative spark they abandoned when they started to mature. From Exupery’s piece we understand that children look to the moon for romance and beauty, as I did from the backseat of my mother’s car. When adults look at the moon, we start to admire it less and ask instead how far it is rather than how beautiful it is.

Another great example of this moon obsession is in Isao Takahata’s Princess Kaguya. A mysterious baby is found in a bamboo sprout by a bamboo cutter and is adopted by his family and raised in a rural village. We quickly discover that this is no ordinary child, as she grows and matures faster than a normal person.

The Princess makes many friends there. The landscape is beautiful: the foliage is a vibrant green and dense with active wildlife. Everything is going well as the little girl, named Princess, adapts to her new world. It is then that her adoptive parents decide that her gifts are more suitable to the wealthy residents who live in the capital. And that is when everything goes wrong.

Sometimes things go wrong

The capital is a collection of castles and fortresses. In Takahata’s vision, we mostly see it within the closed walls of the Princess’s new home. In the house Princess Kaguya and every other character are the only ones’ wearing color. The house is painted in many muted grays and the lack of sun makes the atmosphere overwhelmingly cold and empty.

As the story progresses, we see the white smile of a contented and happy girl turn into a depressing, black one. Pressured and seemingly pressed into ruin by her adoptive father’s greediness, the Princess Kaguya searches for the lost warmth and adventure of the small village she grew up in. However, at the end of the film she is forcefully taken back to her original home on the moon and wiped of her memories of Earth.

The Princess Kaguya recognizes a juxtaposition that is crucial to The Little Prince and all moon art and that is the gap between the minds of adults and children. In Ebtekar’s piece he realizes that gap in the individual picture frames, the way we’re always reframing our experience, but in The Princess Kaguya, it is between the rich and the poor. What makes this film unique is the vibrant foliage and vegetation of the poor countryside compared to the icy grays of the capital city and moon. The collision of these different color palettes highlights the restrictive nature of the moon. It is beautiful and barren, but also a place of great imagination, the limit case of what we can achieve in the world.

It keeps coming back

The moon is more than a rock, but a collection of systematic beliefs that allow us to make art. It is about the paleness of the moon people from The Princess Kaguya, which is a clear expression of the collective belief that we see the moon as an out of bounds experience. It is a symbol of order and dissonance that separates us from the chaos of our lives on Earth. Like Ebtekar and Exupery there is an illusion of order, but also a great deal of hope.

All these works of art show that we are too accustomed to the moon being a territory of the sky rather than its own space. We need to change the story, change how we define the rock in the sky that has captivated us for thousands of years. Without this opposition or inquiry to do something different, there are no works of art like Ebtekar's, Exupery's, and Takahata's and that would be a tragedy, an incomprehensible loss.

©Nathaniel Wisdom and the CCA Arts Review