cyborg eye of vija celmins

The Smithsonian Institution

Its Only a Paper Moon: The Cyborg Eye of Vija CelminsAuthor(s): CcileWhitingSource: American Art, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 36-55Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/599063 .Accessed: 23/03/2015 09:58

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Vija Celmins, Moon Surface (Surveyor 1), 197172. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper, 14 x 18 1/2 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Edward R. Broida 2009 Vija Celmins. Photo, McKee Gallery, New York


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In 1969 the Riko Mizuno Gallery in Los Angeles, on La Cienega Boulevard at the epicenter of the thriving contemporary art scene, opened the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the work of Vija Celmins. The drawings on view, something more than a dozen, were split between images of the ocean and depic-tions of the surface of the moon.1 While Celmins based her mesmerizing drawings of ocean waves (fig. 1) on photographs of the Pacific that she snapped with her own camera while standing on the pier near her studio in Venice, California, her lunar images (frontispiece) reproduced photographs of a distant terrain taken by unmanned spacecraft and disseminated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Proximate and faraway places would coexist in Celminss oeuvre throughout the 1970s. In her one-person show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1973, she exhibited drawings of the desert derived from photographs she took during walks through the deserts in Arizona, California, and New Mexico. That same year Celmins undertook her first drawings of galaxies inspired by a photograph of the Coma Berenices constellation she obtained from NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. All these artworks court the sublime by representing places that

because of their expansiveness are difficult to measure and comprehend in their entirety, much less to contain in a single image.

Simply in resembling photographs so closely, Celminss drawings implicitly refer to her photographic sources as well as to the geographic places they depict. As viewers of her first exhibition in Los Angeles were quick to note, these draw-ings, with their framing white borders and precise, minute graphic marks, look like photographs when seen from a dis-tance and reveal their status as drawings only up close. In contrast to the ocean and desert snapshots that Celmins took herself, however, the moon drawings were based on photographs produced by the most advanced technology of the age. The moon drawings, in fact, foreground the collaboration between body and machine that made details of the alien lunar landscape visible to the human eye. In them Celmins explored how being able to see a faraway and unattainable place entailed both human and technological means, both perceptual proximity and distance. In essence, these remarkable images re-create within their own internal dynamic the same play between near and far that characterized the full set of works on display at the Riko Mizuno Gallery in 1969.

Its Only a Paper MoonThe Cyborg Eye of Vija Celmins

Ccile Whiting

Volume 23, Number 1 2009 Smithsonian Institution


38 Spring 2009

Celminss lunar drawings, all produced between 1969 and 1972, were begun after Neil Armstrongs famous stroll on the moon, yet they document an earlier, key moment in the space race: the unmanned moon landings of the mid-1960s. For some of her drawings Celmins relied on the first close-up photographs of the lunar landscape transmitted by the Soviet space-craft Luna 9 when it made the first soft landing on the moon in February 1966. Others duplicate scenes relayed by the American Surveyor 1 spacecraft, which set down on the moon several months after Luna 9 and sent eleven thousand photo-graphs back to earth, including the first images in color. Using photographs from these unmanned lunar landings, Celmins highlighted the nexus of humans and ma-chines that took a back seat to the tale of the astronauts heroism emphasized during the heady days of the Apollo 11 landing, when one small step for man could rep-resent one giant leap for mankind, with nary a mention of a machine in that pithy

formulation. It is within this triumphal context of the space raceone ideological battle within the larger cold warthat Celminss drawings explore the ways in which American scientists and their high-tech instruments, working together, recast visual experience in the age of space exploration. In this regard, her images differed from the predominant approach of the day for depicting space exploration in art, which tended to humanize men at the Kennedy Space Center and in space. Celmins strived to forge an amalgam of human eye and mechanized vision in the extraterrestrial realm.

NASA and Art

During his term as the second NASA ad-ministrator (196168), James E. Webb not only oversaw the development of an ex-haustive photographic archive document-ing efforts by the United States to put a man on the moon but also established, in

1 Vija Celmins, Untitled (Big Sea #2), 1969. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper, 34 x 45 in. Private collection 2009 Vija Celmins. Photo, McKee Gallery, New York


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consultation with the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., an art program that produced images featuring moments from NASAs history of space exploration. The photographs highlighting rockets, as-tronauts, and the lunar landscape played a key role in fueling the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Providing new scientific information about the moon, the close-up photographs of the lunar surface taken by Luna 9 and Surveyor 1, for instance, prepared the way for the Apollo astronauts by revealing that the moon was not covered with a thick layer of dust into which, some scientists had feared, astronauts would sink and disappear. Circulated in the print media, these stunning views of an alien terrain provoked awe and shored up public support for manned trips to the moon. Coverage of the space race culminated in the live televised broadcast of the moonwalk by the Apollo 11 astronauts in July 1969. Such broadcasts transformed the space race into an audiovisual public event, and in the years following the Apollo 11 landing major milestones as well as serious setbacks would be played and replayed on television as NASA continued its exploration of outer space.2

NASA supplemented its media blitz with commissioned artworks, which, like the photographs, were widely exhibited and reproduced. Hereward Lester Cooke, curator of painting at the National Gallery of Art, and artist James Dean, director of NASAs Educational Media Division, were appointed to direct the NASA Art Program, whose implicit goal was to promote public understanding of and en-thusiasm for the space program. Between 1963 and 1973 Cooke and Dean invited fifty-three painters to observe and repre-sent astronauts and rocket launches. In letters to invited artists and in later exhibi-tion catalogues of their work, Cooke and Dean explained the agencys rationale for supplementing the photographic archive with artworks:

When a major launch takes place at Cape Kennedy, more than two hundred cameras record every split second of the activity. Every nut, bolt, and miniaturized electronic device is photographed from every angle. The artist can add very little to all this in the way of factual record. But, as [French artist Honor] Daumier pointed out about a century ago, the camera sees everything and understands nothing. It is the emo-tional impact, interpretation, and hidden significance of these events which lie within the scope of the artists vision. An artist may depict exactly what he thinks he sees, but the image has still gone through the catalyst of his imagination and has been transformed in the process.

To form an exhaustive photographic record without a thought toward empha-sizing distinctive features was apparently to risk making the space race mundane, even dull. Concerned that the photo-graphic documentation of space was too objective, too cold, Cooke and Dean commissioned the artist to contribute his imagination and his interpretation. A painting or a drawing, they presumed, could single out an astonishing scene and impart deeper human insight into the meaning and significance of space exploration. Thus, even as photography and eventually television generated emo-tional excitement about the race to the moon, fine artists received commissions from NASA on the assumption that their special understanding enabled them to achieve a greater degree of gravitas than the mechanically produced photograph.3

Artists commissioned by NASA, most of whom were realists, depicted the pre-paratory and the triumphal aspects of the space program, tending either to natural-ize the spacecraft within the geographic setting and buzz of human activities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida or to cast the astronauts mission as a cosmic and spiritual journey through outer space. Anne Collins Goodyear, who has written extensively about the NASA Art


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Program, states that despite the freedom promised to artists in terms of subject matter and even style, in the early days of the program it was the work of realists that was solicited. Later, as Goodyear points out, when the program had established itself more securely, Cooke and Dean ventured to invite some well-known modernists such as Morris Graves and Robert Rauschenberg to participate.

Rauschenberg, who had already incorpo-rated numerous references to the explora-tion of space in his prints before being asked to join the NASA Art Program, was one of seven artists who witnessed the blastoff of Apollo 11 in July 1969. Based on both his firsthand experience and his access to NASAs photographic archive, he produced thirty-three lithographs titled the Stoned Moon Series, which included references to the Apollo 11 astronauts, their spacecraft, the Kennedy Space Center, and the NASA control center. Sky Garden (fig. 2), the most ambitious print in the series, is nearly seven and one half feet tall. At the center of the print and reaching its entire height is a labeled diagram of the Saturn rocket with the Apollo spacecraft at its apex. The faces of two men, one a famous scientist and the other unidentified, appear on the right edge of the soaring rocket, and an egret, lake, and palm trees, typical of the landscape around the space center, form a blue arc above the fiery red body of the rocket. Though working in a more abstract mode than most of the artists commissioned by NASA, Rauschenberg joined many of his realist colleagues not only in documenting specific benchmarks in the space race but also in demystifying technology with references to people and nature. Goodyear suggests that even the choice to privilege the graphic artist over the mechanical camera as a tool of public history making humanized the space program.4

In the 1960s many commentators echoed NASAs belief that artists could redeem science and technology with their special, creative insights, interjecting a dose of imagination into the realm of objective theorems. Numerous exhibitions and books document the widespread collaboration that was undertaken in that decade with the assumption that the artist could shed an intuitive light on science or produce an aesthetic experience with technological means. The artist was charged with bridging the chasm between

2 Robert Rauschenberg, Sky Garden (Stoned Moon Series), 1969. Color lithograph and screenprint on paper, 89 1/4 x 42 in. Rauschenberg Estate and Gemini G.E.L. / Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y., pub-lished by Gemini G.E.L.


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what British physicist C. P. Snow first characterized in a famous 1959 lecture (The Two Cultures) as the distinct and separate cultures of the humanities and science.5

Celminss Lunar Drawings

Celmins was never approached by NASA to participate in its art program, nor did she depict astronauts and rocket launches. Rather, in 1969 she acquired some photo-graphic stills from NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and began to reproduce the lunar landscape in the medium of pencil on paper. If anything, her drawings of the moon challenged the founding assumption of NASAs Art Program by mimicking rather than repudiating the mechanical eye. From a distance, Celminss drawings look as if they were themselves mechanical reproductions. In that regard they differ significantly from Rauschenbergs Stoned Moon Series, in which the artist, while incorporating NASA photographs and relying on the reproductive medium of

lithography, foregrounds his aesthetic manipulations: Rauschenberg recombines his photographic sources, shifts their ori-entation, and touches them up with color. In contrast, viewers can uncover evidence of Celminss hand only if they approach her drawings to scrutinize her careful graphite marks on the paper. Celminss drawings, that is, examine how the con-flation of automated and artistic vision reconfigure visual experience in the space age. Yet even as her drawings implicitly take issue with the ambitions of NASAs Art Program, they nonetheless get at the heart of NASAs scientific project, for they highlight the ways in which a scientific exploration of the moon already entailed a pairing of the human and the machine.

Celminss drawings reconstruct the physical features of the lunar landscape with extraordinary, painstaking precision on a larger scale than the original photo-graphs; indeed, reproductions of Celminss drawings in magazines and catalogues fail to convey their typical size, approximately fourteen by eighteen inches. Nor do her drawings include the explanatory text that almost invariably accompanied the lunar photographs as distributed by NASA or published in the popular press. The drawing Moon Surface (Surveyor 1) of 197172 (see frontispiece), for instance, replicates a section of a photograph from the Surveyor 1 mission (fig. 3). The masking tape Celmins placed on the source photograph isolates the area of the terrain that the artist duplicated in her drawing. Taking advantage of the raking perspective of the camera, Celmins rendered with her fine pencil marks the rills, stones, and ridges of the landscape, the hollows of the craters, the shadow cast by the Surveyor landing craft, as well as the glare of light illuminating the harsh lunar landscape.

Yet Moon Surface (Surveyor 1) does more than reproduce the moon as seen from the cameras eye; it also emphasizes the partnership between the scientist and the machine that made the lunar surface visible to the human observer. The footpad

3 Source photograph for Moon Surface (Surveyor 1) with masking tape added Vija Celmins


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of the Surveyor 1 spacecraft that took the photographs is clearly visible in the lower left corner of the drawing. Moreover, Celmins mimics the mosaic effect caused when human hands pieced together the individual photographs transmitted electronically by the camera on the moon to the laboratory on earth. As explained in the caption of the source photograph included on Celminss own copy of it, each two-inch-square chip (the term used to refer to the photographic pieces) represents a 6-degree field of view as seen from the camera. Glued together by handas they had to be in that protodigital agethe photographs offer a panoramic perspective of the lunar land-scape approximately 130 degrees across the horizon (fig. 4). The vertical ridges formed by the overlapping edges of the photographs register the technicians role in reconstructing the lunar panorama here on earth from the many electronic signals relayed by the spacecraft. Rather than effacing these signs, which would have been an easy enough human task during the transcription into drawing, Celmins carefully preserved them. In so doing, she recorded both the lunar landscape and the traces of the human technicians workas if she were herself a machine.

Eye on the Moon

Celminss drawings testify to a scien-tific practice that, in overcoming the quarter-million-mile distance between earth and moon to photograph the lunar surface and to reassemble the images back on earth, allowed uncertainties to arise about the identity of machines and humans. The three-legged Surveyor 1 spacecraft was equipped with a camera placed at the height of an average person (fig. 5), transforming it into a surrogate human presence on the moon. Homer E. Newell Jr., associate adminis-trator at NASA, anthropomorphized the Surveyor spacecraft when he identified it as a monstrous offspring of human and machine, a mechanized cyclops. Newells hint of the monstrous, however, was exceptional. Generally, the Surveyor 1 robot earned acclaim as mans first eye on the moon. The Soviet spacecraft Luna 9 was also conceived as a substitute for a human eye. For instance, in 1966, when Life magazine reproduced photographs from Luna 9, it proclaimed: There it stood in a crater of the moon, not much higher than the height of a man, its camera apparatus covering 360 and sending to earth views of the rock-strewn, pock-marked embankments around itthe first close-up photographs of this bleak ball ever to be seen by the human eye. The Luna and Surveyor spacecrafts prepared the way for manned landings not just by communicating factual data about the lunar surface but also by answering the question of what it would be like for a human to see on the moon. As the article in National Geographic marveled: Surveyor bridges a quarter-million-mile gulf to present earthlings with a view of the moon almost as clear as if man himself stood there.6

In fact, the spacecraft became a prosthetic device, extending human sight as well as the human body across the vast distance separating the earth

4 J. R. Eyerman, Technicians at Work, 1966. Photograph. National Geographic Image Collection

5 Rick Hall, Surveyor 1 space-craft, 1966. Acrylic. National Geographic Image Collection

6 Davis Meltzer, Surveyor blastoff and Surveyor beaming messages to earth, 1966. National Geographic Image Collection


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from the moon. The lunar spacecraft, which reacted to commands issued from earth, behaved as an extension of the scientist in his lab. Responding to human instruction, it moved its camera head and registered what it saw. Newell, for instance, implicitly described the spacecrafts movements as if it shared the movable limbs and comprehend-ing eye of the lab technician: When NASAs deep-space tracking antenna at Goldstone, California, relays an order from JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory], the cameras mirror obediently adjusts elevation, swivels left or right, and . . . the camera reads off the image.7 Electronic transmission enabled the scientist to overcome the confines of the physical human body to occupy a virtual position on the moon and to see the distant landscape up close. The graphic re-creations of the flight path of spacecraft landing on the moon and of the cameras electronic transmission of images back to technicians on earth traced an umbilical cord, illustrating the informational circuit connecting human bodies and minds with humanoid spacecraft (fig. 6). This joint work of people and machines continued on earth because technicians reconstituted the images taken from a variety of camera angles and assembled panoramas of the lunar landscape for analysis as well as for publication in the print media.

In the 1960s scientists and journal-ists consistently referred to the lunar cameras as television cameras even though they produced still images. The substitution of the term television for still camera probably resulted from the similarity between broadcast technol-ogy and the process of transmission by which the lunar cameras relayed photographs back to earth as electronic signals: the photographs arrived in the form of a pulsating signal registering the changes in luminosity as a scan-ning sensor passed repeatedly over the source image in a series of parallel strips.


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Moreover, the word television em-phasized the enormous spatial distance involved in acquiring views of the lunar surface. Literary theorist Samuel Weber, who has analyzed the etymology of the word television, writes: If television thus names seeing at a distance, what it appears to overcome thereby is the body, or more precisely, the spatial limitations placed by the body upon seeing and hearing.8 In a twist on Webers formula-tion, the lunar camera did not so much deny the body as enable it to extend itself, occupy a virtual position in space, and reconfigure human perception. To identify the lunar camera as a television highlighted the cameras promise of the bodys magical proximity to the seem-ingly distant more than the technology of transmission.

The repeated reference to television cameras on the moon also spoke to the social imperative to document the anticipated Apollo 11 landing with live-feed images and sound. NASA devoted considerable thought to making the Apollo 11 landing immediately visible on television. The space race required a televised crossing of the finish line to verify the winner.9 Celmins strengthened the sense of a technological continu-ity in lunar exploration by relying on photographs sent back to earth by the unmanned Surveyor 1 to make her draw-ings during precisely those days when the astronauts were performing their American triumph for television sets around the world.

Cyborgs and the Televisual

If the unmanned mechanical spacecraft of 1966 served as a human surrogate, the astronaut of 1969 arrived on the moon as a highly mechanized being. In a word, he was a cyborg body, equipped to explore outer space. The term cyborgshort-hand for cybernetic organismwas coined in 1960 by scientists Manfred

Clynes and Nathan Kline in a jointly authored article entitled Cyborgs and Space, which was published in Astronautics. Outlining their research, the scientists explained that their goal was to develop exogenous equipment that would permit a living organism to survive in inhospitable spaces, most particularly in outer space. Cyborg experimentation, they believed, would ultimately alter mans bodily functions to meet the require-ments of extraterrestrial environments. Armstrongs historic steps on the moon were possible precisely because he carried a highly mechanized life-support system on his back. Indeed, the extent of the astronauts fusion with machinery and his integration into space technology recently prompted political scientist Jodi Dean to label Armstrong not the first man but the first cyborg on the moon.10

The actual practices of astronautics as exemplified by both the unmanned and manned landings on the moon broaden the conception of the cyborg to encompass any amalgam of human and machine for the sake of extending earthlings grasp of the moon, whether it was a man kept alive by machines on his back or a machine directed by a technician from afar. With this defini-tion in mind, I would argue, pace Dean, that the lunar spacecraft equipped with a camera eye actually amounted to the first cyborg to land successfully on the moon. As prosthetic extensions of sci-entists on earth, these spaceships offered humans a virtual presence on the moon from which the moons surface could be scanned. The photographs transmitted electronically back to earth completed the loop between robot and scientist and enabled the cyborgs view of the moon to be disseminated to others. Live television transmission as the means by which the cyborg made close-up views of the distant moon available to earthlings became a reality with the Apollo 11 mission. In this instance, a slow-scan television camera was placed on the moon to record the first


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steps taken by the second-generation of cyborgs, astronauts Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. In a sense, the mechanized camera needed to be established on the surface of the moon before Armstrong could step out the door; the imperative of public-ity demanded as much. As television viewers watched the astronauts unwieldy movements, moreover, they listened to a jargon-filled and static-altered verbal exchange that sounded like so many machines in dialogue. Exploration of the moon culminated in the sights, sounds, and movements of astronauts mediated by audiovisual equipment, relayed electronically and preserved on magnetic tapes for viewing by an audience on earth.

If humans on earth watched the astronauts on television, the astronauts themselves looked as if they had morphed into walking television sets (fig. 7). The visor on the astronauts helmet, in particular, bore an uncanny resemblance to a television screen. When Armstrong and Aldrin eyed the TV camera, and thus indirectly their viewers on earth, during their moonwalk, the reflective windows of their helmets mirrored back a distorted and min-iaturized view of the lunar landscape, and perhaps the spacecraft or the distant earth floating above the horizon. To the extent that the face divulges personality, the visor thus identified the astronaut with the visual images that he projected back to the audience at home. A human embedded within the communications system of tele-vision, the astronaut qua cyborg actually wore his televisual identity on his visor.

A number of artists explored the confla-tion between the human and the televisual during this period. These works, as much as the art commissioned by NASA to hu-manize technology, provide the context for understanding Celminss drawings. Artists who in the 1960s and 1970s pictured human televisions imagined figures who belonged to the same genus as the

astronaut qua cyborg by virtue of having television screens substituting for faces. For instance, in a series of haunting black-and-white photographs (fig. 8), some of which were published in Harpers Bazaar in 1963, Lee Friedlander made male and female faces and eyes interrupt the flow of television programs and expand to fill the entire screen. In Friedlanders photographs the screen does not depict a prospect to be viewed at home but instead assumes the

capacity to watch its television audience with the same proximate intimacy as a human being occupying the same space. Sporting enormous eyes, Friedlanders televisions stand out from the surround-ing, inanimate furniture because they have become human; they face, monitor, and demand to be seen by a presumed viewer within the room. With their screens that gaze back, Friedlanders televisions gave form to an anxiety, whose dimensions in popular culture of the 1960s have been fully analyzed by television scholar Jeffrey Sconce, that televisions were sentient beings, haunting homes, and even swal-lowing unsuspecting viewers into their electromagnetic field.11 To the extent that Friedlanders televisions assume human agency by looking back at their

7 Astronaut Buzz (Edwin) Aldrin walks on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Photograph taken by Neil A. Armstrong with a 70mm lunar surface camera, July 1969. Photo, NASA


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viewers, they also reiterated a long-stand-ing concern about the consequences of conjoining humans and machines, dating back at least to Mary Shelleys Frankenstein of 1818.

For the work The Human Television, Doug Michels, a member of the Ant Farm artists collective that undertook multiple television projects in the late 1960s and early 1970s, converted a television set into the mythical man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit and granted to this figure, in a manner similar to Friedlander, the ability to peruse its milieu (fig. 9). Sitting in a diner sipping coffee, the human-television observes a miniaturized newscaster on a portable television.12 The news anchor presumably informs his audience about world events while looking through the screen as if addressing his viewers directly. The human-television, in the meantime, presents his screen-face as both a reflective surface and a three-dimensional depth. His screen mirrors his surroundings, including the talking head on the portable television, transforming material objects into rippling abstractions and ghostly

shadows floating without gravity. Like the astronauts visor, the screen of the human-television reflects for its audience a view of what it sees around it.

Whereas Friedlander and Michels granted televisions human form, artist and performer Charlotte Moorman put on her TV Glasses and played her TV Celloboth artifacts designed by Nam June Paikto transform herself into a cyborg for the opening of Paiks exhibition Electronic Art III at the Galeria Bonino in New York City in 1971 (fig. 10).13 Rather than tantalize her audience with the sounds of her cello, Moorman provided a televisual experi-ence that filled the room with ambient electronic sounds. As she moved her bow across the television screens that made up the cello, they, together with the screens on Moormans TV Glasses, projected vid-eotapes of the artist and other musicians (including Janis Joplin) performing, as well as live images of Moorman and her surroundings shot by a nearby camera. Appearing on screens of different sizes, the faces of the performers were distorted

8 Lee Friedlander, Washington, D.C., 1962. Gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in. Lee Friedlander. Photo, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

9 The Human Television, a charac-ter created by artist Doug Michels ca. 1976. Image reproduced from Illuminating Video: An Essen-tial Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (Aperture, 2005)


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as much by scale as by graininess, while the white light of the television projec-tion made them as visually illegible as the stringless cello that produced nothing that could be heard. As a cyborg, Moorman invited viewers to confuse the protocols of television viewing, looking at art in galleries, listening to classical music in concert halls, and eyeing a female. At the same time viewers were necessarily aware that she was always looking back at them through the lenses of her TV Glasses. Like Friedlanders television sets, Moorman-as-cyborg returned the viewers gaze to invite a multisensorial, inter-personal, and intermachinic exchange between her and the viewers standing before her in the art gallery.

This generation of cyborg put tele-visual seeing itself on view. Screens doubling as faces enabled Friedlanders televisions, Michelss Human Television, Moorman, and the astronaut to see their surroundings and, in turn, to be seen by their television audiencesseen, in fact, as televisions. The astronauts visor pro-vided proximity to a far-off and strange lunar landscape, while the Human Television projected a radically distorted

view of its immediate surroundings and, much like Friedlanders televisions and Moormans eyeglasses, challenged con-ventional expectations about nearby and familiar spaces and the cultural rituals of viewing here on earth. Whether or not the scenes these cyborgs projected ultimately proved unsettling for their human audiences, they maintained the fiction that the human was close at hand, watching them, being watched.

Distance and Intimacy

Rather than depicting cyborgs, Celmins and a few other artistsNancy Graves comes to mindinstead entered the cyborgs body to assume its visual per-spective of the moon and to reproduce what it saw when it observed the lunar landscape.14 Like the cyborgs camera, Celminss drawings pull the far-away in, near to us, while highlighting how electronic transmission made possible the human direction of machines over a vast distance. In transcribing with pencil on paper what and how the cyborg saw on the moon, Celmins did more than mimic; she also examined the ways in which cyborg vision might accommodate an affective bond through the sense of touch. Her lunar drawings explore the ways in which an alliance between cyborg and artist blurs distinctions between the automated and the handcrafted, near and remote, seeing and making, and even masculinity and femininity, to reconfig-ure visual experience in an era of space exploration.

Celmins carefully duplicated her source photographs bit by bit with pencil marks so fine that, at least when viewed from a distance, they disappear into the craters and mountain peaks they delineate. The marks copy the amount and precision of detail supplied by the lunar camera as well as the gray tonalities and shadows determined by the illumination of the sun. The drawings

10 Jud Yalkut and Nam June Paik, TV Cello Premiere, 1971. Photo, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York


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also mimic the format of a photographic print, by including a thin white border along all four sides of the paper. In Moon Surface (Luna 9) #1 (fig. 11) the uneven white borders along three edges of the detail superimposed at the center distinguish the detail from the sur-rounding fieldwhich is in fact a larger version of the same imagein addition to casting the central image as a photo-graphic print. Duplicating photographs of the moon with machinelike fidelity, Celmins ensured that her lunar drawings themselves assumed the appearance of photographs.

As they mimic the form and format of the photograph, Celminss drawings also retain evidence of the electronic

processes by which the camera dis-patched photographs from the moon to technicians in labs on earth. In Moon Surface (Luna 9) #1 Celmins included the white perpendicular lines visible in some of the lunar photographs that testify to the momentary signal dropouts that interrupted the televisual transmission. In this drawing, the juxtaposition of a smaller version of the lunar landscape, seen in sharp detail with its larger, blurry duplicate in the background, evokes the effect of a zoom lens going in and out of focus. Celminss drawings emphasize the technology of cyborg vision, its flow and interruptions, as television camera and lab technician worked together across a vast expanse of space. The inclusion

11 Vija Celmins, Moon Surface (Luna 9) #1, 1969. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper, 13 3/4 x 18 1/2 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Florene M. Schoenborn Fund 2009 Vija Celmins. Digital Image The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York


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of abutments caused by overlapping photographs in Moon Surface (Surveyor 1) (see frontispiece) not only points to the JPL technicians craft in assembling photographs of the moon but also makes it clear that we are not looking at the moon so much as at a collection of smaller transmitted images of the moon. The drawings, by retaining evidence of electronic processes by which the camera dispatched photographs from the moon to technicians who reworked them in labs on earth, became pictures

not simply of the moon itself but of the means of picturing the moon.

Just as the drawings acknowledge the technical means by which the human overcame vast distances to bring views of the moon back to earth, so they provide a perceptual experience that confuses distance and proximity. The photographs in which the lunar terrain filled the visual field because the camera had not tilted up to include the horizonpre-cisely the images Celmins chose to reproducelacked any measure of scale indicating either the size of the topo-graphic features or the interval of space between the moon and the viewer. The print media relied on text and diagrams to make such disorienting lunar views legible to their audience; they included arrows, labels, and captions to identify craters, rocks, and debris from mete-orites. Eventually photos of astronauts walking on the moon and planting the American flag located the horizon and provided a sense of human scale (fig. 12). Celmins, however, never added such orienting devices to make the visible in-telligible. Each individual frame in Moon Surface (Surveyor 1) conveys what is seen up close by the camera, yet the broad sweep of the panorama propels viewers to a position in space from which they scan the expanse. Viewers experience a bewildering simultaneity of perceptual proximity to and distance from the lunar landscape. Other drawings combine two virtual perspectives in space. In Untitled (Moon Surface #1), for instance, the relatively uniform character of the terrain does not provide any clues about scale (fig. 13). Are those mere pockmarks or huge craters? Are we close to or far away from them? Are we looking at the lunar landscape from an approaching spacecraft, in which case the crater could be five miles in diameter, or from a robot standing on the moon, in which case the crater could be just five feet across? Like the ocean waves and desert landscape Celmins also pictured during this period,

12 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin with American flag planted on the moon, July 19, 1969. Photo, NASA

13 Vija Celmins, Untitled (Moon Surface #1), 1969. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper, 14 x 18 3/4 in. Private collection 2009 Vija Celmins. Photo, McKee Gallery, New York


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the lunar drawings evoke vast, unlimited spaces because no horizons and orient-ing figures are set against their endless grounds.

A confusion of spatial distance and proximity occurs both within the thematics of the drawings and with the drawings as material objects themselves, as the artist and subsequent viewers relate to them. In the first instance, the artist nurtures a close, affective bond with her visual materials. We might assume in looking at Celminss lunar drawings that the work required to reproduce a lunar photograph in pencil would entail a physical proximity and a state of emotional detachment in equal measure to achieve the level of detail and reproductive fidelity manifest here. One can only marvel at the obsessive attentiveness combined with technical

skill that enabled Celmins to emulate lunar photographs with such precision in graphite, as if she were a mechanico-human cyborg herself (fig. 14). Yet, as she herself claimed, the small scale of her photographic sources as well as the mindfulness they demanded encouraged in her an emotional bond with the source photographs as much as with her draw-ings. Celmins recollected her working process during this period in her career in a 1991 interview with artist Chuck Close: I would scrutinize these little images in great detail. Their small size allowed for an intimacy with the subject. It allowed me to enter that grey world in a personal way and I would draw my way out of it.15 In this same exchange with Close, the artist construed her constant reexamination of photographs as an indication of her affection for them. The proximity and concentration required as she looked at the photograph, recorded it, and compared it to her drawing ap-parently nourished an intimate relation-ship with her imagery. In the case of her lunar drawings, her knowledge of the photographs in turn permitted her to re-create each fissure, crater, and mountain peak of the landscape with innumerable, meticulous touches of graphite. Working closely with her imagery, Celmins relied on technological detachment and per-sonal fondness to create drawings that appeared to reproduce the cyborgs view of the moon.

Celminss drawings also demand distance and proximity from viewers, in both physical and affective senses. As we have seen, these drawings invite viewers standing at a distance to confuse them with photographs. But when spectators move closerlooking carefully rather than glancing quickly, adopting the type of exacting scrutiny Celmins demanded of herself when she probed her sourcesthey recognize that her images are not camera-made.

In fact, Celminss drawings do not always remain fully faithful to their

14 Leo Holub, Vija Celmins Vija Celmins. Photo, McKee Gallery, New York


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photographic originals. Celmins, producing her work in series, at times inserted variations into the drawings and allowed them as much as her source photographs to generate the next image in the series. For instance, Untitled (Double Moon Surface) of 1969 (fig. 15) essentially reiterates Untitled (Moon Surface #1) of the same year (see fig. 13) but doubles certain distinctive features of the land-scape seen in the first drawing: crater, peaks, and mountains. Moon Surface (Luna 9) #1, also of 1969 (see fig. 11), repeats its source twice at different sizes, laying one image on top of the other: the juxtaposition of the two highlights the ability of reproductions to change scale at will, ensuring that none is the same as the

original. Celmins replicated cyborg vision but never manufactured replicants. Her manipulation of her sources emphasized the creative license of the artist over mind-less mechanical reproduction. And, to the extent that copying yielded an original offspring, Celmins stressed the generative capacity of reproduction.

The drawings are not selfsame with their photographic sources in a second way. The viewers physical intimacy with these images encourages an appreciation of the handiwork necessary to render a crater or a fissure with graphite. Traces of the artists varying pressure of the pencil on paper turn the act of looking at these drawings into a recognition of Celminss touch and inspire admiration of her skill

15 Vija Celmins, Untitled (Double Moon Surface), 1969. Graph-ite and resin on paper, 14 1/16 x 18 5/16 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smith-sonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Museum Purchase Vija Celmins. Photo, Lee Stalsworth


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and her craft (fig. 16). Moreover, the very material surface of the drawing converts matter broadcast electronically across a vast distance of space into a tactile surface that presents its image only from nearby. The drawings transform the cyborgs lunar landscape into something that is understandable as an aesthetic feat, know-able within the terms of the possibilities and limits of drawing, contained by four edges of a piece of paper, reworked into a series, and visible from up close as mate-rial traces of pencil, here in front of us, on earth.

Celminss lunar landscapes encourage a phenomenological experience whereby a viewer moves physically closer to the image, shifts from an optical to a tactile mode of perception, and embraces the image as a drawing rather than as a photo-graph. Moon Surface (Surveyor 1), however, undermines any such bifurcation between mechanical and human vision. Whether seen from afar or close up, the abutments included in Moon Surface (Surveyor 1) ac-knowledge that the human hand as much as the televisual transmission produced the cyborgs vision of the moon. The original photograph, like the drawing of it, combines opticality and tactilityand the drawings overt tactility elicits our recogni-tion of the source photographs tactility as well. This particular image posits a homology between the ridges left by the technician in the JPL lab and the graphite traces of the artist, between the patience of the technician who meticulously re-constructed electronic signals into analog images by piecing chips together into lunar panoramas and the attentiveness and devo-tion of time expended by the artist to copy the photograph in pencil. The mechanical fidelity of Celminss artistic process points to the crafted character of the scientific image, whether the cyborgs photograph or Celminss own apparently mechanical reproduction of it.

If the physical qualities of drawing affirm tactility, Celminss application of graphite marks over the paper to

emphasize surface rather than the optical illusion of depth further conflates looking and touching. In a conversation with art historian Susan Larsen in 1978, Celmins noted that her drawing technique during this period furnished a new layer over the paper: The graphite pencil was a very fine point. It was a matter then of maintain-ing an even tension so that the surface was just lying there. It was a matter of keeping a certain skin, finding a density that felt right. The paper has a skin and I put another skin on it. Skin is a thin, breathing sheath that touches and invites touch, that feels and is felt. In the case of these drawings, the artist did, of course, carefully and meticulously stroke the paper with her pencil, filling the visual field. Moreover, by eliminating the horizon and spatial recession, Celmins brought the relatively uniform lunar terrain up close, flattening it so that it covered the paper like a membrane. Media theorist Laura Marks has borrowed the word haptic from Alois Riegl to privilege those images that combine seeing and tactility without giving precedence to one sense over the other. In Markss analysis, haptic designates a unified visual field, typically abstract or decorative, on a surface ex-emplified as much by Islamic painting as by weaving. All of these visual traditions, according to Marks, involve intimate, de-tailed images that invite a small, caressing gaze.16 Celminss drawings of the lunar terrain exhibit the characteristics identified by Marks in that her landscapes form a continuous surface over the paper that invites the eye to linger on the material traces of her touch.

A number of scholars, including Marks, have strategically associated haptic tradi-tions and intimate observation with the feminine and at times with feminism. Certainly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of second-wave feminist artists, including Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and Faith Ringgold, began to practice crafts such as embroidery and quilting that had traditionally been


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correlated with domestic labor and subordinated to the arts of painting and sculpture. These artists questioned a value system that prioritized large-scale, abstract, geometric oil paintings over personalized and decorative design, and brought atten-tion to the patience, care, and aesthetic skill required by the domestic crafts. While Celmins may not herself have used the word feminist to describe either her working process or her drawings, she too highlighted the creative labor of craft, the demand placed by craft on both the artist and the viewer for their proximity, time, and attentiveness, and the appreciation that close looking at the crafts cultivated for the materiality of surface.17

Where Celmins differed from second-wave feminists artists was in her embrace of cyborg visuality. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the cyborg as envisioned by the practices of astronautics in the 1960s did not capture the feminist imagination. As most photographs from the 1960s documented, the astronaut was a man in space. Indeed, in 1962 NASA decided to ban women astronauts from the space missions, and it was not until 1983 that Sally Ride overcame this gender barrier to become the first American woman in outer space. Even the scientists and technicians involved in the first generation of cyborg exploration of the moon were overwhelmingly male. The cyborgs poten-tial for feminist politics did not emerge until 1985, when feminist scholar Donna Haraway published her famous essay, A Cyborg Manifesto. Among the audiences Haraway meant to address was precisely that strain of radical American feminism that challenged notions of patriarchy by repudiating science and technology in favor of a return to nature and the natural. Rejecting an antagonism between feminism and science, Haraway promoted the cyborg as a figure that broke down boundaries between the human and the animal, between organisms and machines, between the physical and the nonphysical. Haraway, arguing for the pleasures and

advantages of such confusions, embraced the cyborg as the means to imagine a world without gender. She acknowledged that the cyborgs history was tainted by mans effort to conquer outer space, saying, The cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the Wests escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.18 Despite the history of the concept, however, the cyborg, according to Haraway, had utopian implications for a feminist politics that wished to move beyond gender binaries.

Celmins, drawing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, did not voice a feminist per-spective of the sort developed in Haraways manifesto. Nevertheless, she also claimed the cyborg for purposes unintended by its creators when she entered its body and drew the moon through its eyes. In joining with the cyborg she did not simply adopt an implicitly masculine perspective in outer space. Nor did she subscribe to the view promoted by NASA, among other institutions, that the role of the artist was to humanize science. In other words, she did not simply reclaim the cyborg for the human, and specifically the feminine, through the practice of drawing. Rather, through her interaction with the cyborg, she explored and defined a form of embodied vision that avoided binaries, whether between human and machine, or between masculine and feminine.

Celmins secured the compatibility of the artist with the cyborg, and the feminine with the masculine, without granting one priority over the other. To the extent that the material surfaces of her drawings convert matter that is incomprehensible in its distance and scale into something that is close and tactile, Celmins would seem to rehumanize, even feminize, cyborg vision by making it haptic rather than virtual. Nevertheless, the exchange between the cyborg and the artist cut both ways; her meticulous craft was also informed by the cyborg and ac-commodated its viewing position in outer

16 Vija Celmins, Untitled (Double Moon Surface) (detail), 1969


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space. As a consequence, even as viewers move in closer to the drawings, becoming more intimate with the graphite surface as if touching the marks with their eyes, they recognize that the craft entailed in translating cyborg vision with pencil demanded an exactitude worthy of the machine. And, in an added twist, Moon Surface (Surveyor 1) revealed that cyborg vision itself entailed both the televisual and human craft.

The phenomenological experience of viewing the drawings also blurs the differ-ence between the human and machine by exploring the spatial dimensions of vision, simultaneously encompassing the spaces of the embodied and the virtual viewer. On the one hand, the very tactility of the drawings situates viewers in the physical space in front of them, encouraging an intimate encounter. On the other hand, the lack of orienting features in the lunar landscapes opens up an immeasurable chasm of space between the drawings and their viewers. Propelled into outer space, viewers cannot gauge their precise location

and distance from the moons terrain. In the end, viewers flip back and forth between appreciating a flat plane right in front of them and experiencing a recession into depicted deep space. According to these drawings, the act of looking in the age of space exploration entails both a physical body occupying the space before the picture, moving closer to it, touching its surface skin with the eyes, and a virtual body seeing from both near to and far away from the lunar terrain.

Celminss drawings refuse to stabilize the cyborgs vision, to make it legible as either the disorienting view of the machine or the familiar and proximate caress of the human hand. Rather, her drawings redefine the notion of embodied vision, extending the body to encompass the virtual, able to see from multiple posi-tions in space, and with more than one sense. These drawings explore the ways in which the cyborg challenges us to imagine new forms of vision that reconfigure as-sumptions of what it means to be and to see as an embodied human being.

My thanks to Rachael DeLue and Nancy Troy, who invited me to present shortened ver-sions of this essay at, respectively, Princeton University in May 2007 and the College Art Association Annual Conference in Dallas in February 2008. I am particularly grateful for the insights of four anonymous readers for American Art and to the critical yet enthusias-tic comments I received from Jim Herbert and Sarah Whiting.

1 Reviews of the show disagree as to whether fourteen or fifteen drawings were on view. See Peter Plagens, Vija Celmins, Artforum 8 (March 1970): 84, who says fourteen; and Joseph E. Young, Los Angeles, Art International 14 (March 1970): 86, who says fifteen.

2 The Luna 9 and Surveyor 1 missions received focused news coverage in the following two articles: Right Down on the Moon, Life, February 11, 1966, 26

30; and Homer E. Newell, Surveyor: Candid Camera on the Moon, National Geographic, October 1966, 57892. For historical and theoretical analyses of space photography, see Denis Cosgrove, Apollos Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001); Peter Bacon Hales, Shooting the Moon: Icons of Space Photography, in 2001: Building for Space Travel, ed. John Zukowsky (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 96107; and Neil Maher, Neil Maher on Shoot-ing the Moon, Environmental History 9 (July 2004): 52631. David E. Nye argues that public support for the space program in the 1960s was in fact quite tempered, with at least half the public concerned that it took funds away from social services; Nye, Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of Ameri-can Culture (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press, 1997), 153. Other writers document the

political debate surrounding the need for a manned mission to the moon. See esp. Walter McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997).

3 Anne Collins Goodyear reports that the exhibit Eyewitness to Space: Paint-ings and Drawings Done for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1965 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the subsequent exhibit The Artist and Space at the same venue in 1969 attracted record audi-ences while a book by Hereward Lester Cooke and James D. Dean, Eyewit-ness to Space: Paintings and Drawings Related to the Apollo Mission to the Moon; Selected with a Few Exceptions, from the Art Program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (1963 to 1969) (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971),

Notes


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quickly sold out of its first printing; Anne F. Collins [Goodyear], Art, Technology, and the American Space Program, 19621972, Intertexts 3, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 11. For the agencys rationale in mounting the art program, see Cooke and Dean, 11. For the call to artists to use their cre-ativity and imagination, see James D. Dean, The Artist and Space, Interdis-ciplinary Science Reviews 3 (September 1978): 244. For related comments, see Deans website: www.theotherjamesdean .com/spaceart.shtml.

4 On the style of artists invited to join the NASA Art Program, see Collins [Good-year], Art, Technology, and the Amer-ican Space Program, 3; the author discusses the humanizing role of art on page 10 of this same article. See also Goodyear, The Relationship of Art to Science and Technology in the United States, 19571971: Five Case Studies (PhD diss., Univ. of Texas, 2002). I have relied on Robert S. Mattisons thorough account of the Stoned Moon Series in Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2003). See also Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenberg: Art and Life (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004); and Christin Mamiya, We the People: The Art of Robert Rauschenberg and the Construction of American National Identity, American Art 7 (Summer 1993): 4163.

5 Important examples of the collabora-tion between art and science include the Art and Technology Program launched by Maurice Tuchman at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1967; The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechan-ical Age, an exhibition organized by Pontus Hulten at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968; and the Soft-ware exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1970. Books such as Jonathan Benthall, Science and Technology in Art Today (New York: Praeger, 1972), and Stewart Kranz, Science and Technol-ogy in the Arts: A Tour through the Realm of Science/Art (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1974) documented these various collaborations. Pamela Lee use-fully summarizes the debates about art and technology in the 1960s in Chrono-phobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004). See as well C. P. Snow, The Two Cul-tures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1959); and Snow, The Two Cultures: and a Second Look (New York: New American Library, 1964).

6 The quotes from Newell are from Sur-veyor: Candid Camera on the Moon, 578, 582. In this same article, Newell refers to Surveyor 1 as cyclops, robot, and human. The quote from Life is from Right Down on the Moon, 27.

7 Newell, Surveyor: Candid Camera on the Moon, 582.

8 Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Forms, Technics, Media (Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), 115.

9 Jodi Dean explores the importance NASA placed on verifying the Apollo 11 mission with televised images. Demonstrating open access to information was, as Dean points out, a means of distinguishing the United States from the Soviet Union. Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cul-tures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998), 6297.

10 Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, Cyborgs and Space, Astronautics, Sep-tember 1960, 26. On the astronauts as cyborgs, see Dean, Aliens in America, 95.

11 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Elec-tronic Presence from Telegraphy to Televi-sion (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2000).

12 The exact date and whereabouts of the photograph of the Human Television are unknown. Doug Michels died in 2003, but media artist and scholar Chip Lord, who used the Human Television for a poster in 1983, has in his files correspon-dence from Michels dating the image to about 1976. Margaret Morse analyzes the fictions of presence in television viewing and specifically discusses the relation between the television anchor and the viewer in Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1998).

13 On Nam June Paik, see John G. Han-hardts Nam June Paik (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1982); and his The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York: Solomon R. Gug-genheim Museum, 2000); Hanhardt and Caitlin Jones, Global Groove 2004 (New York: Guggenheim Museum Pub-lications, 2004); Wulf Herzogenrath and Sabine Maria Schmidt, Nam June Paik: Fluxus/Video (Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1999); David Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007); and Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellein, eds., Nam June

Paik: Video Time, Video Space (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993).

14 Nancy Graves re-created lunar maps in ten gouaches entitled the Lunar Orbiter Series. Exploring some of the same ten-sions of distance and proximity as Celminss drawings, Gravess images, because of their pointillist dabs and the liberties they took with their sources, more obviously favor the artistic and human over the scientific and mechani-cal. One of the Graves images is repro-duced and discussed in Judith Brodie and Andrew Robison, eds., A Century of Drawing: Works on Paper from Degas to LeWitt (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2001), 26465.

15 Vija Celmins, interview by Chuck Close, ed. William S. Bartman (New York: A.R.T. Press, 1992).

16 Susan Larsen, A Conversation with Vija Celmins, LAICA [Los Angeles Insti-tute of Contemporary Art] Journal 20 (OctoberNovember 1978): 38. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Mul-tisensory Media (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2002), 56. For her definition of the haptic, Marks relies on Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, who use the term haptic rather than tactile to define smooth space because haptic does not establish an opposition between two sense organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill this nonoptical function; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), 492.

17 In 1976 Celmins became friendly with Barbara Kruger and gave a talk at the Womans Building of the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, but did not become actively involved in the feminist movement. Jonas Strovse, Vija Celmins Dessins/Drawings (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006), 158.

18 For the role of women in the space program, see Margaret Weitekamp, Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: Americas First Women in Space Program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004); and Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technol-ogy, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 15051.


cyborg eye of vija celmins

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