In the summer of 1969, at the invitation of NASA, Rauschenberg witnessed the Apollo 11 space launch, the first manned mission to the moon. Stoned Moon Drawing contains Rauschenberg’s account of the event, “The bird’s nest bloomed with fire and clouds. Softly largely slowly silently Apollo 11 started to move up. Then it rose being lifted on light. In its own joy wanting the earth to know it was going. Saturated, super-saturated, and solidified air with a sound that became your body. For that while everything was the same material. Power over power joy pain ecstasy there was no inside, no out. Then bodily transcending a state of energy. Apollo 11 was airborne, lifting pulling everyone’s spirits with it.”

Rauschenberg dedicated the upper-right corner of Stoned Moon Drawing to his observations on the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in Cape Canaveral, Florida. He marveled at the enormity of the monolith, built for the express purpose of assembling the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo 11 launch. Looming 525 feet tall by 518 feet wide and covering 8 acres, the VAB remains the world’s tallest single-story structure. According to Rauschenberg, “Only possible to think how big it is. Can’t feel it. Enter. Inside larger than all outsides. Level after level men of trade uniformed clanning [sic] climbing. Being washed in an [sic] out of view by a common ocean of work.”

Rauschenberg’s interest in space program photography is also evident in Stop Gap (1963). The upper portion of the silkscreen painting is dominated by an image of the Sigma 7 splashdown from Life magazine (October 26, 1962). The spacecraft housed astronaut Walter H. Schirra Jr., who safely returned from a six-orbit mission around earth on October 3, 1962. The screenprint recurs in a number of contemporaneous paintings, including Die Hard (1963), Harbor, Whale (both 1964), and Untitled (1964–65; RRF 64.027). Rauschenberg’s engagement with the silkscreen process coincided with his initiation into lithography in 1962.

The format of Stoned Moon Drawing, combining image and text, is reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s contribution to the inaugural issue of the short-lived art journal Location, edited by Thomas B. Hess and Harold Rosenberg. In Random Order, he collaged his own aphoristic writings with original photographs. Imparting insight, observation, rune, and enigma, the texts include the commentary, “With sound and scale and insistency trucks mobilize words, and broadside our culture by a combination of law and local motivation on which produces an extremly [sic] complex random order that can not be described as accidental.” The eponymous concept informs Rauschenberg’s approach to collage and illuminates the manner in which he registered events throughout the Stoned Moon works. From Random Order to Stoned Moon Drawing, there is a shift from handwritten to typed text, and the artist’s own photographs to images taken by others or drawn from mass-media sources. This development may signal his romance with technology in the latter half of the decade.

In fall 1966, Rauschenberg was preparing Open Score, a work that hybridized his waxing interest in theater and technology. (This intersection was perhaps epitomized by NASA, as he expressed in Stoned Moon Drawing, “a theatre where performance is all.”) In the New York Times Magazine portrait, Rauschenberg sits in front of his painting, Axle (1964). The parachuting astronaut in the upper left corner is another NASA image that recurs in several silkscreen paintings (see “Art in Context: Retroactive I”). The artist holds an electronically rigged tennis racket, a prop for Open Score, conceived for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering (October 1966). Now considered an art-historical landmark, 9 Evenings was plagued by technical difficulties and malfunctions. Rauschenberg embraced the idea of failing well. Unfavorable, even undesirable, results could still be creatively valuable. New York Times critic Clive Barnes scoffed, “If the American engineers and technologists participating in this performance were typical of their profession, the Russians are sure to be first on the moon” (October 15, 1966). By the end of the decade, the artist would witness the launch of Apollo 11, the first manned lunar mission, and his artwork may have been sent to the moon by Apollo 12. It was the peculiar alchemy of art and technology after all that NASA sought in inviting artists to observe, interpret, and represent its endeavors.