Michael Craig-Martin focuses on the space race of the late 1960s, when Cold War politics was at the point of no return for the American and Soviet governments. The burning issue was which super power would be the first to set foot on the moon?
America’s significant technological advances in the film industry provided them with resourceful options. The question remains: Did NASA secretly film a “moon landing” in a Hollywood studio, a Plan B for the event that the astronauts got close but not close enough? After all, most of the world would be watching on low-resolution black-and-white TV, and failure was not an option.
Exploiting NASA’s uncertainty over the project’s success and their possible contingency plans, Craig-Martin produced a series of outer-space-related works satirizing the likely hoax. Of course, it now appears that the Americans did make it to the moon after all. But, to this day, the issue remains cloaked in controversy. To whit, in 2006 the U.S. National Library refused NASA’s internal request to relinquish the original films of the 1969 moon landing.
Α variation of the work was recently used for the display windows of the international clothing company Bershka.