Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) art piece presents a chair in three forms: the physical object, a photograph of it, and a dictionary definition of “chair”. This piece belongs to Kosuth’s Protoinvestigations series and is regarded as one of the earliest examples of conceptual art.
Image credit: Wikipedia
One interpretation is that the piece outlines three ways to know an object: encountering it, picturing it, and defining it. None of them is absolute on its own. Depending on the object, some people cannot touch it, sit on it, or handle it. Others have never seen an image of it. Others cannot read the definition that explains it. Or maybe there is not yet a definition for that object.
It might seem that encountering the object, the chair in this case, is the best way of understanding it. Yet knowing what a particular chair feels like is not the same as knowing what makes it a chair.
The definition covers all chairs across time and cultures, but it cannot say how a particular chair feels or what it’s like to sit on.
A photograph makes the chair available to someone who cannot encounter it directly, but only through someone else’s view.
Each form belongs to a different knower. Encountering the chair gives personal knowledge; the definition gives shared knowledge; and the picture gives borrowed knowledge, from someone else’s way of looking.
Perhaps there is a fourth way of knowing an object, the one that comes with living alongside it. An object lived with long enough stops being discovered, pictured, or defined at all. It just is.
The chair is only one possible subject. Kosuth repeated the structure with other objects, and Glass One and Three did the same with a pane of glass. Any ordinary object could take the chair’s place. A lamp. A shovel. A coat. A table. A broom.
A moon. The Moon?
For millennia, people knew the Moon in all three forms: the object visible in the sky, its countless representations (be it songs, epics, pictures, etc.), and the ideas that defined it. But those ideas changed over time and across cultures.
The Moon was Selene to the ancient Greeks, Luna to the Romans. In Chinese mythology, it was the home of Chang’e, who rose to the Moon after drinking an elixir of immortality.
The Moon definitions travelled from goddess to metaphor, from romance to madness (“lunacy” and “lunatic” trace back to luna, the Latin word for moon), from people morphing into werewolves to the rise and fall of tides.
And the Moon was behind unthinkable desire. Not merely the desire to look, but to reach.
The Moon could be seen, pictured, and explained. And yet. And yet…
It took NASA’s engineering force to finally break the Moon’s spell in 1969 (around the same time as Kosuth’s chair art installations). The following quotations come from the Apollo 11 Flight Journal, which contains mission transcripts, recordings, and explanatory commentary. We follow Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins as they approach the Moon, prepare for landing, and return to Earth.
Day 4, Part 1: Approaching the Moon
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071:34:16 Aldrin: It’s quite an eerie sight. There is a very marked three-dimensional aspect of having the Sun’s corona coming from behind the Moon the way it is.
071:52:15 Collins: Houston. Apollo 11. The Earthshine coming through the window is so bright you can read a book by it.
071:59:20 Armstrong: Houston, it’s been a real change for us. Now we’re able to see stars again and recognize constellations for the first time on the trip. It’s — the sky is full of stars. Just like the night side of Earth.
Day 4, Part 2: Entering Lunar Orbit
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075:49:26 Collins (onboard): Yes, the Moon is there, boy — in all its splendor.
075:49:30 Armstrong (onboard): Man, it’s a…
075:49:32 Collins (onboard): Plaster of paris gray to me.
075:49:34 Aldrin (onboard): Man, look at it.
075:49:35 Armstrong (onboard): Don’t look at it. Here we come up…
075:49:36 Collins (onboard): Okay.
075:49:37 Armstrong (onboard): … [garble] to TIG.
Aldrin wants everyone to look at the Moon in all its wonder, but Armstrong brings their attention back to the countdown. They are about to fire the spacecraft’s main engine to slow down enough to enter lunar orbit. “TIG” means “time of ignition”: the moment the engine is scheduled to start.
075:59:15 Collins (onboard): Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!
075:59:17 Aldrin (onboard): What — what’d it say…
075:59:36 Collins (onboard): Hello, Moon. How’s the old back side?
Day 4, Part 3: Television from Orbit
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076:14:23 Collins (onboard): Oh, look at that [garble].
076:14:32 Collins (onboard): Golly damn! A geologist up here would just go crazy.
076:15:13 Aldrin (onboard): There it is, it’s coming up!
076:15:15 Armstrong (onboard): What?
076:15:16 Aldrin (onboard): The Earth.
076:15:16 Armstrong (onboard): See it?
076:15:17 Aldrin (onboard): Yeah. Beautiful.
076:34:34 Armstrong: Apollo 11 is getting its first view of the landing approach. This time we are going over the Taruntius crater, and the pictures and maps brought back by Apollos 8 and 10 have given us a very good preview of what to look at here. It looks very much like the pictures, but like the difference between watching a real football game and one on TV. There’s no substitute for actually being here.
076:35:11 McCandless: Roger. We concur, and we certainly wish we could see it first hand, also.
077:51:03 Armstrong (onboard): Hmmm — here comes the Moon.
077:51:16 Aldrin (onboard): Really beautiful.
077:51:29 Armstrong (onboard): Hey, you…
077:51:30 Collins (onboard): I wonder where we are.
077:51:31 Armstrong (onboard): … we’re going to stop here pretty soon, right?
077:51:33 Collins (onboard): Yes, at 315.
077:51:41 SC (onboard): [Whistling.]
077:51:56 Collins (onboard): Man, that’s really…
077:51:58 Armstrong (onboard): It really looks gray to me now.
Day 4, Part 4: Lunar Orbit Circularisation
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080:20:42 Collins (onboard): Boy, there must be nothing more desolate than to be inside some of these small craters, these conical ones.
080:20:50 Armstrong (onboard): People that live in there probably never get out.
080:20:54 Collins (onboard): Yes, I think you’re right.
Day 4, Part 5: Checking Out Eagle
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084:02:19 Collins (onboard): Amazing how quickly you adapt. Why, it doesn’t seem weird at all to me to look out there and see the Moon going by, you know?
084:02:25 SC (onboard): [Laughter.]
084:02:27 Aldrin (onboard): Oh, that is weird — that crazy Moon out there again, huh? Funny-looking thing.
Day 5, Part 1: Preparations for Landing
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095:17:28 Evans: Roger. Among the large headlines concerning Apollo this morning, is one asking that you watch for a lovely girl with a big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl called Chang-O has been living there for 4,000 years. It seems she was banished to the Moon because she stole the pill of immortality from her husband. You might also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit, who is easy to spot since he is always standing on his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon tree. The name of the rabbit is not reported.
095:18:15 Collins: Okay. We’ll keep a close eye out for the bunny girl.
Day 8, Part 2: More Television and Stowage for Re-entry
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177:38:20 Aldrin: Good evening. I’d like to discuss with you a few of the more symbolic aspects of the flight of our mission, Apollo 11. As we’ve been discussing the events that have taken place in the past 2 or 3 days here on board our spacecraft, we’ve come to the conclusion that this has been far more than three men on a voyage to the Moon. More, still, than the efforts of a government and industry team. More, even, than the efforts of one nation. We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown.
Alongside these declarations of insatiable curiosity, perhaps two stand out a bit.
Armstrong declaring that “there’s no substitute for actually being here.” And only a few hours later, Collins’s observation: “Amazing how quickly you adapt.” Even the Moon could become part of the surroundings. Not because it had been fully understood, or because there was nothing left to discover, but because there is only so much room for awe while keeping a spacecraft intact and its crew alive.
And perish the thought of expanding this into a grand theory of the adaptability that allowed humans to conquer, destroy, and build. No, it is enough to stay with the chair and the Moon. The ordinary chair, made peculiar by Kosuth’s attention. The ever-peculiar Moon becoming just a bit more ordinary after a few hours of familiarity. A Moon seen, a Moon pictured, a Moon defined, a Moon lived with.