Human beings have gazed at the moon in awe and wonder for millennia. We’ve endowed it with magical powers and created fantastic stories about it, fancying its majestic inscrutability and absolute unattainability. All this changed irrevocably 25 years ago when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface and uttered the most contrived bit of dialogue in the history of colonial expansion. Fortunately, the sobering lunar data gathered by the Apollo missions has not dimmed the moon’s special place in our collective consciousness, where it still resides as a place of magic and mystery in all its glorious, delirious mooniness. (A.K.) Films include A Trip to the Moon (1902), Georges Méliès; Rabbit’s Moon (1972), Kenneth Anger; Moona Luna (1990), Emily Breer; Bottlecan (1994), Luther Price; and more.
Sunday, June 19, 1994
How High the Moon
An Evening of Lunar Mystery, Magic & Mayhem
San Francisco Art Institute