It’s Only A Paper Moon: Spatial Exploration from the Old to the New Frontier

In 1872, California tycoon Leland Stanford wanted to know whether all four legs of a galloping horse ever left the ground at the same time. He hired the landscape photographer Eadweard Muybridge to capture his racehorses mid-run. This drive to produce images of what the naked eye cannot see is the same drive that caused astronaut Neil Armstrong, within minutes of landing on the moon, to take photographs of the alien terrain and give the rest of the world the chance to see the unseen. Likewise, art historian Alex Potts describes how artists working in the 1960s adopted the “phenomenological turn” of casting familiar subject matter in the form of a perceptual problem. Although Potts’s primary interest is our encounter with sculpture, his notion of an embodied viewer moving around a physical object situated in a physical space is equally applicable to how artists such as Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha, and Roy Lichtenstein reconsidered two-dimensional surfaces. It’s Only a Paper Moon: Spatial Exploration from the Old to the New Frontier charts this era in American history to reconsider how advancements in science, industry, and art—from railroads, airplanes, and spacecrafts to stop-motion photography, X-rays, and screen prints—changed the very act of looking at the world.

Erica Cooke
Ph.D. Student, Department of Art & Archaeology
Andrew W. Mellon Research Assistant