ABSTRACT
In December 1968, the Apollo 8 mission capped off the year by becoming the first crewed spacecraft to orbit the Moon. During the fourth orbit, William Anders caught sight of the Earth (now 250,000 miles away) and grabbed the telephoto-equipped Hasselblad to capture the definitive moment. This iconic image—Earthrise—depicts a view of the blue planet “rising” over a lunar horizon, activating an indexical relationship with the traveling astronauts. It offered proof of the mission’s scientific achievements and drew upon established pictorial conventions. Within six months of the publication of Earthrise, John Baldessari conceived of his own epiphanic breakthrough and, in 1970, followed through with the proposal, “Cremation Project.” Taking his body of work—more than 100 abstract expressionist paintings—Baldessari arranged for the bulk of his oeuvre to be destroyed by fire in a crematorium. In 1970, Baldessari accepted a teaching position at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and established his now famous post-studio course. Aiming to devise interactions between his students and himself that would instigate a “class situation” as opposed to “people daubing away at canvases or chipping away at stone,” Baldessari structured class meetings unconventionally. He initiated chance-based cultural field trips determined by throwing a dart at a map hung in the classroom. The purpose, he explained, was “to try to do art where we were.” This chapter considers the indexical layers of Earthrise alongside the artist’s dematerialized turn. The author argues that Baldessari’s pedagogical practice ties in with the ways in which Earthrise came to emblematize a Cartesian re-siting of art production and experience.
