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COPENHAGEN – Outside Denmark's Louisiana Museum of Modern Art on a recent late-summer morning, a few sunstruck visitors were sprawling on the turf of the sculpture garden, between monumental outdoor works by Alexander Calder and Richard Serra. Beyond them, facing east towards Sweden, the waters of the Oresund strait were serene blue, lightly scalloped with wind. The scent of freshly cut grass was in the air.
Inside, however, it was another world. Under chilly artificial light, art handlers were hoisting large prints onto white gallery walls. One was an abstract, a composition of fuzzy shadows and white splotches, like a Jackson Pollock viewed under a microscope: in fact, a recent NASA image of the moon's surface. Nearby, another work was already up – a reproduction of a child by the English artist William Blake. It depicts a tiny figure climbing to reach the moon. Blake's caption beneath the picture reads, "I want! I want! "
As the Louisiana's new exhibition, "The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space," reveals, humans have wanted to understand the moon, land on it, own it. The show, which runs through Jan. 20, is notionally inspired by the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, yet its focus is not just on science or spacecraft, but on art and literature, too. Indeed, the suggestion is that we can not hope to understand the moon if we try to pin it down to one thing. Every time we look up, it's different.
"The moon has always been an object of fascination," the show's lead curator, Marie Laurberg, said, picking her way to the floor. "We'll never be done with it."
She conceded that this is an unusual territory for the Louisiana, a museum more accustomed to showing work by contemporary and modern artists – but that was very much the point. "We wanted to make a dialogue between art and science," she said, adding: "We have been imaginatively long before we have been able to.
That duality dominates the show, which contains over 200 objects. After strolling past a piano player performing a version of Beethoven 's "Moonlight Sonata," "Katie Paterson' s" "A Katie Paterson 's.
One artist who has been especially fascinated by the conversation between real-life exploration of the cosmos and journeys of the imagination is Laurie Anderson; a new work commissioned from her is one of the show's big selling points. Ms. Anderson Became NASA's first artist in residence in 2004, and has frequently resided in her music and performance.
Working with the Taiwanese new-media artist Hsin-Chien Huang, Ms. Anderson has a virtual reality piece that allows participants to go to moonscape of her devising. Astronaut, Eugene A. Cernan, during the Apollo 17 mission, still in the air, and some modish designs for 1960s Soviet spacecraft.
Ms. Anderson said in a telephone interview that she wanted to preserve the piece's surprises, but hinted that participants would be able to explore a version of the moon has been turned into a nuclear waste dump, a plan floated by NASA. Another section will be offered as an "out-of-body" experience.
"It's not meant to be like moonwalking or realistic or one-sixth gravity or anything," she said. "It's a lot wackier than that."
But then, responses to the moon have a touch of fantasy. For ancient civilizations, it appeared as if it were a fertility goddess married to the sun (an Inca origin myth) to something that drove women mad, or transformed men into werewolves (European folklore).
Nineteenth-century Romantic artists such as the English painter Joseph Wright of the Derby and the German Caspar David Friedrich by moonlight: Lakes look like pools of mercury, ruins are cast in eerie shadow. Darren Almond, British artist Darren Almond, whose recent "Fullmoon" photographs, involved long exposures in remote locations.
Anthony F. Aveni, who teaches astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University, said in an interview. "It's so close, but it's so alien, so other."
"Just as it reflects the sun's light, so it reflects what we on earth want," said Ms. Laurberg. "And every age wants a little different thing."
Much moon iconography, especially from the space race, is heroic – men and their rockets, depicted by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Hamilton. In the show, though, this sense of boyish adventure is nicely undercut by the German sculptor Isa Genzken, one of whose "Wind" sculptures from 2009 resembles an American flag featuring an image of astronauts, but is made out of torn scraps of fabric decorated, surreally, with strips of bacon.
Ms. Anderson pointed out that the 12 astronauts who landed during the Apollo program were pilots and scientists, and hardly trained to respond to the philosophical or creative terms. "They just said, 'Gee, the Earth's so far away.' They left the rest of us thinking how incredibly awe-struck they must have been; they could not even define it. "
Artists are better at imagining the unimaginable, she added. "Every time I look at the moon, I see the beauty of something that is rather than general."
In an upstairs gallery, a technician was carefully unwrapping an exhibit by the University of Copenhagen: A chunk of lunar meteorite, not much larger than a baseball, which one of the moon's orbit and fell to earth some million years ago.
Jagged and black, scarred and strangely sinister, it was a reminder that the moon is barren, lifeless and brutally inhospitable. We have spent thousands of years in the world of mythology and the mythology of the mythology of the world. .
Strikingly, too, the meteorite had an intensity that made the art works elsewhere in the room seem wan and pallid. An alien and unsettling object, literally otherworldly, it captured something that many human representations fail to. Even in an art gallery, the real moon somehow stole the show.
The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space
Through Jan. 20 at the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark; lousiana.dk.
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