On July 16, 1969, at 2:32 p.m. CET, the Saturn V rocket lifted off from Cape Kennedy, carrying Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon. The Apollo 11 launch was watched by a million people on-site and was the number one news story in all media. But this was only the beginning of the countdown to the greatest television spectacle of all time, which four days later, over 500 million people worldwide watched in rapt attention. Among them: eight-year-old Markus Döhne.

I imagine him taking up his observation post on the living room sofa at 5 p.m. on July 20, his eyes feverish, and not only from his measles infection. That afternoon, the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 expedition begins on West German television, a mission that is to last 28 hours. When Neil A. Armstrong sets foot on the moon at 3:54 a.m. CET on the night of July 21, it is not only a giant leap for humanity, as the astronaut himself proclaimed to the world from the moon. The moon landing is also a veritable initiatory event in media history: the first extra-long live broadcast that clearly demonstrated the possibilities and potential of television. By that time, television had established itself as a global mass medium and a leading medium for a long time. Television’s moving images are what have strongly shaped the visual memory and memories of the generations who grew up with the medium. Markus Döhne’s work explores the nature of such memory images, which are part of our society’s reservoir of experience. He works with images wide spread in our media, not just on television. Döhne finds his material in newspapers and magazines, libraries, and digital archives. His collection also includes a thoroughly scientifically sound album from the 1970s with colorful images from space travel and technical drawings for pasting. Comics such as Hergé’s Les aventures de Tintin and Zdenek Miler’s The Mole and the Rocket are also part of the artist’s collection.

During his childhood, however, television was his guiding medium in a special way: During frequent hospital stays, the best distraction came from the monitor, which was, so to speak, his navel to the world. The constant flow of images trained Markus Döhne’s eye. It’s important to remember, though: Although the name flicker box, as the living room furniture was affectionately yet contemptuously called back then, suggests a constant stream of images, at the end of the 1960s this box only offered three channels and the so-called test pattern for more than half the day. On July 20 and 21, 1969, it was actually flickering around the clock, even delivering images of real events in real time. But back then, the medium still had a kind of built-in alienation effect: While color televisions already existed, most living rooms still showed black-and-white sets. And the images of the moon landing were extremely grainy, shadowy, and distorted. Markus Döhne even thinks here members that the recordings on television during their live transmission from the Earth’s satellite occasionally failed and in between repeatedly switched from positive to negative, which fascinated the eight-year-old immensely.

The aesthetics of these television images appear to have influenced Markus Döhne’s rocket production. This series consists of over 30 panels in more or less coarse-grained black and white rasterization, with the raster varying in size. The different rocket types are clearly recognizable, yet they all possess a degree of graphic abstraction that lends them a certain silhouette-like quality. This involuntarily leads one to look back and forth, comparing them, trying to identify a typology of the silvery, glittering rockets. In doing so, one is amazed to discover that the images are constantly changing, depending on the angle from which they are viewed. If one looks at the surface of the image from the side, the silver takes on a slightly reddish hue, then turns golden. Depending on the incidence of light, a silver arrow suddenly stands out against a black night sky, then again a black rocket cuts through the silvery, glowing firmament. Other panels shimmer in a variety of shades of gray, from stone gray to pale pink and ochre to graphite. At times the surface of the painting appears matte, at others it shines. At the same time, the rockets take on an incredible three-dimensionality; they seem to detach themselves from the two-dimensional background and literally float into space.

To allow all of these effects to be shown to their full potential, Markus Döhne had the windows of the exhibition space freed of light protection devices. His rockets are intended to enter into a dialogue with daylight. Walking around the room, the interplay of light reflections on the silver leaf applied to the wooden panels is incredibly enchanting. Silver and gold on wood: Markus Döhne uses the classic materials of icon painting and harnesses the light to create a scene similar to that found in churches. In this way, he gives his rockets a kind of halo. They become icons of the technological age, revered like the gods of Olympus once were: In Greek mythology, Atlas is the name of the Titan, on whose shoulders rest the pillars that—as Homer puts it—hold heaven and earth apart. The Americans called a series of their space launch vehicles Atlas. Look, is the message of Atlas, Saturn, or Mercury: once the gods ruled the heavens, now we humans are conquering space with our machines. Markus Döhne not only ironically captures this message in the titles of his works. His typology of space rockets includes both US and Soviet models, whose names are not based on ancient religious mythology, but rather, like Soyuz, Vostok and Energija, emphasize the superiority of the new social model in the countries of the Soviet sphere of influence: Union, East, andEnergy. Markus Döhne’s work titles illustrate how both world powers used positively charged vocabulary in a propagandistic manner to mythologically charge their respective systems. After all, this exhibition is, of course, about the struggle between the superpowers for supremacy in space, which culminated in the race to the moon in the 1960s.

The exhibition also features the name Pershing, which in the collective memory is inextricably linked with the nuclear arms race during the Cold War. Space travel reflects the geopolitical power struggle between the USSR and the USA, which extended into the extraterrestrial world. The Soviet Union initially held the lead in space travel: on October 4,1957, its satellite Sputnik I reached Earth’s orbit, and on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth. Shortly thereafter, John F. Kennedy announced in a famous speech to Congress that the United States would put a man on the moon before the end of that decade. And then the 1960s became a decade of brutal confrontation. The race to the moon can be seen as the civilian side of the proxy war that the USSR and the USA fought outside their national territory in Vietnam. For Markus Döhne, the Vietnam War was one of the first political world news and visual information that he consciously perceived in his childhood.

It is not the first time that Markus Döhne has addressed the division of the world into two hostile power blocs, with their competing ideologies, their utopias and promises, as well as their power struggles, as subject of his artistic work. His exploration of the political constellation that shaped his generation, however, does not begin with the Cold War, but also examines its prehistory. The European left in the first half of the 20th century is a subject that runs through his work. He always uses historical photographic material, which he then heavily distorts and deconstructs. Ultimately, Döhne generates new images from the found imagery through copying, cutting out, and enlarging, as well as printing techniques on various supports such as wax, gauze, metal, or wood—as in the works in the project room of the Museum Wiesbaden—which often border on abstraction. Contexts of meaning are not always apparent at first glance, especially since Döhne generally does not explicitly refer to political events. In his series of paraffin blocks from the 1980s, for example, there are many works that explore the biographies of Russian avant-garde artists. Here, for example, he incorporates photographic excerpts from Kazimir Malevich’s burial into wax.

His series of works entitled Arbeitsspeicher (RAM), created between 2000 and 2003, is a homage to the writer, painter, and filmmaker Peter Weiss and is based on a photograph of his archive cabinet in his Stockholm studio. But in none of the aforementioned cases is the motif of origin recognizable in Döhne’s works. Rather, they are poetic compositions of graphic structures that allow for a free play of associations. This clearly demonstrates how, as a viewer, the artist constantly strives to decipher meanings and find explanations.

Since 2005, Markus Döhne has primarily worked with media images from his childhood in the 1960s. These include, for example, works dealing with the 1963 Buddhist uprising in South Vietnam, as well as all works related to space travel. What is astonishing is that although Markus Döhne always uses historical material, his series of works usually take on a strange topicality shortly after completion, Narcotic Nirvana Nightmare is the name of the series created in 2005/06 based on press photos from Vietnam that circulated around the world in 1963, as early as 2007, this series could be interpreted as an artistic-political commentary on the monks’ demonstrations in Myanmar. And despite the long-established international cooperation in space travel, Markus Döhne’s rockets are by no means currently viewed as relics of a by gone era. With the resurgence of the East-West conflict following the Ukraine conflict, the series of works created since 2011 has gained new, contemporary relevance.

However, it would not do justice to Markus Döhne’s recent series of works on the subject of space travel to reduce them to the political connotations of the Cold War. The conquest of the universe has always preoccupied artists, writers, filmmakers, scientists, and philosophers. And it was not uncommon for imaginary journeys to trigger the overturning of worldviews. In 1609, for example, the mathematician and theologian, philosopher, and poet Johannes Kepler, as if in a frenzy, wrote the mysterious dream account of a journey to the moon, which he later annotated with astronomical and mathematical notes. This work was far more than a courageous defense of the Copernican worldview. Fearing the Inquisition, he couched his new theory of planetary motion in a fairy-tale-like, humorous presentation, but here, for the first time in the history of astronomy, he developed a general theory of planetary orbits that was physically based.

The history of science, as well as the art history—in all its variations, from fantasy to theory, thought experimentation to genuine experimentation—is a constant fascination in Markus Döhne’s series of works. It is not for nothing that one is so easily captivated by the silvery gleam of his rockets and dreams of extraterrestrial beings when contemplating the green Apollo Poems in the black space. But nothing in Markus Döhne’s work is without an ironic distance; he always works with a subtle ambiguity, almost insidiously. Thus, one can delight in an object found in a stable in the Westerwald region that has also found its way into the museum: a limestone sphere whose grain resembles the real moon with its craters and rubble. A genuine object trouvé, one might imagine having fallen from the sky. But the title of this work is: La Lluna és la consciència del món—[The Moon is the Conscience of the Earth]. There is much more to it than childlike playfulness and thirst for discovery. Even with this seemingly harmless find, Markus Döhne addresses the Janus-faced nature of space travel history. This find also has a counterpart in Döhne’s archive, which, although not on display in the exhibition, is illustrated in the catalog: a fist-sized piece of slag from the grounds of the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial points to the murderous beginnings of space technology. In the summer of 1943, the Nazis relocated their rocket production to a tunnel in Mittelbau-Dora, a branch of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Here, approximately 20.000 prisoners lost their lives building the V2, the 'vengeance weapon'. This was the world’s first large rocket, which technologically paved the way for the flight to the moon.

In his exhibition in the project room of the Museum Wiesbaden, Markus Döhne deliberately avoided any explicit references. Yet one repeatedly glances in shock at the monkey that the artist has transported into his museum space and nailed to the front of the exhibition space: a black shadow with outstretched arms, seemingly torn apart on a split fiery red background. It remains unclear which rocket it flew on—or if it flew at all.