- Museum number
- 2015,7027.1
- Title
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Object: Sky Garden
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Series: Stoned Moon
- Description
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Semi-abstract composition of a montage of images around a diagram of a Saturn V rocket. 1969
Colour lithograph and screenprint on special Arjomari paper
- Production date
- 1969
- Dimensions
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Height: 2300 millimetres (Framed)
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Height: 2140 millimetres (image)
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Height: 2255 millimetres (sheet)
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Width: 1112 millimetres (Framed)
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Width: 1067 millimetres
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Width: 965 millimetres
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Depth: 61 millimetres (Framed)
- $Inscriptions
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- Curator's comments
- Printed from one stone in red and four aluminium plates in yellow, magenta, blue, vermilion, and one screenprint in white. 'Sky Garden' was printed by Kenneth Tyler and Charles Ritt at Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles in an edition of 35 plus 6 artist's proofs. There were in addition some 19 trial proofs, including variant colour trials.
Text from Coppel, Daunt and Tallman, 'The American Dream: pop to the present', London: Thames and Hudson in association with the British Museum, 2017, cat. no. 26:
‘POWER OVER POWER JOY PAIN ECSTASY. THERE WAS NO INSIDE, NO OUT. THEN BODILY TRANSCENDING A STATE OF ENERGY. APOLLO 11 WAS AIRBORNE.’ (Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Notes on Stoned Moon’, 'Studio International', 178:917 (December 1969), pp. 246–47 (p. 247). Thus Robert Rauschenberg described the 16 July 1969 lift-off of the rocket that put men on the moon four days later. Always fascinated by technology, Rauschenberg had been invited by NASA to Cape Kennedy (now called Cape Canaveral), Florida, to witness history in the making. (Though most artists involved in the NASA Art Program were of a more realist bent, the organizers specifically sought ‘the emotional impact, interpretation and hidden significance of these events’ that artists could provide. See Hereward Lester Cooke and James D. Dean, 'Eyewitness to Space', New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971, pp. 11–13.) His 'Stoned Moon' series was the appropriately ambitious, awestruck and cacophonous result – thirty-three lithographs, including the two largest hand-pulled lithographs yet made, 'Sky Garden' and 'Waves', whose production had printers at Gemini working around the clock. Given broad access by NASA to facilities and personnel, Rauschenberg met astronauts and engineers, took in the vast Vertical Assembly Building (now the Vehicle Assembly Building), and observed the wildlife that thrived in the surrounding area.
All these things enter into the prints, so, while the 'Stoned Moon' series departs from his earlier work in being overtly about a specific event, it places that event within a kaleidoscopic, heterogeneous world. Pictures of birds meet pictures of astronauts, charts of precise scientific data coincide with clouds of scribbles and faint transfers. In Sky Garden a bright white diagram of the Saturn V rocket is screenprinted over an explosive red blast of human faces, machine parts and brushwork; in 'White Walk' (cat. 30), blue and grey astronauts float amid control panels and puddles of ink enhanced by the embossing of the paper from a pock-marked lithographic stone; in 'Sky Rite' (cat. 31), arcs of drawing give dynamic energy to the mission control room, while a pointing, spectacled figure assumes the heroic stature of Washington crossing the Delaware.
The violent late 1960s dented Rauschenberg’s ebullient optimism, but in the collective – indeed collaborative – technological achievement of Apollo, he found redemptive beauty. (The title 'Stoned Moon' is meant to evoke delirium.) Describing the night scene of the rocket being fuelled with liquid nitrogen, he wrote: ‘the moon coming up, seeing the rocket turn into pure ice, its stripes and U.S.A. markings disappearing – and all you could hear were frogs and alligators… The whole project seemed one of the only things at that time that was not concerned with war and destruction.’ (Rauschenberg, in Calvin Tomkins, 'Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time', New York: Penguin Books, 1980, p. 288.)
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
2017 9 Mar-18 Jun, London, BM, G30, The American Dream
2018 2 Jun-2 Sept, Paris, Fondation Custodia, The American Dream: pop to the present
2020-21 8 Oct-31 Jan, Madrid, La Caixa Forum, The American Dream: pop to the present
2021 2 Mar-13 Jun, Barcelona, La Caixa Forum, The American Dream: pop to the present
2021 13 Jul-14 Nov, Zaragoza, La Caixa Forum, The American Dream: pop to the present
- Acquisition date
- 2015
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 2015,7027.1
