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Mapping
Mapping approaches the problem of representation. The map is symbolic. It indicates another existence outside itself and presents the world through a system of corresponding signifiers. This re-presentation manifests in the physical body of the map itself, which then coexists with the place or event it symbolizes. This dichotomy between the real and the symbolic mapping of the real is a theme that many artists have taken up in their work, exploring the means and implications of charting our perceptions of the physical and temporal world.
Fields such as documentary photography and figurative painting may be considered among the most rudimentary forms of mapping, in that they exist as literal representation of the visual world. In Peter Spaans's series The Real Line of New York, for example, a set of low-resolution photographs, grouped by location, denote the city's physical makeup. Similarly, David Faithfull's accordion book East Looking West / West Looking East sketches the geography of a specific location by portraying it in paintings from multiple vantage points. Ayala and Furgason's project Carfire applies this same technique to events, documenting burned cars and placing them in space and time. Though this type of representation is mapping at its most simple, there is no lack of content. Even the most faithful literal representation carries a wealth of associative content, just as our primary experience of the world does. These associative possibilities are demonstrated in Kurt Johannssen's Fyrste Natt Pa Manen and Jon Kessler's The Freckles on My Back. Johannssen's close-up images of gray plaster look exactly like the cratered surface of the moon, and in Kessler's work, close-up black and white photographic negatives of the artist's skin bear uncanny resemblance to images of stars and galaxies in space as seen through a super-telescope.
In an attempt to avoid this leeway for interpretation, scientific cartographers incorporate mathematics into an objective modeling system designed to preclude perceptive variations. Ricorsi by Lucretia Moroni responds to this scientific quest for objectivity from an artistic perspective, exploring how numeric systems represent the natural world. Some artists delve into this field and create works actually based on meticulous scientific calculation. Ken Leslie is one such artist; his book Round World consists of a series of photographs taken every two weeks over the course of one year, each from the same point in the artist's garden, facing a different angle. "In so far as Magellan had already travelled around the world," the artist writes, "I sat in one spot, and let the world travel around me." The structure of this book also corresponds to the material: the pages unfold into a circle, in which both the seasons and the location form a complete cycle. Other books, such as Lizzie Finn's Grid Sewing and Andrew A. McLaren's The Atlas of Nowhere take a more critical approach to objective mapping, grappling with the consequences of imposing an arbitrary geometric order on an organic world. Rosa Lachenmeier's On Life's Terrain provides a synthesizing view, as it roots out the essential contradiction of objective cartography, directly addressing the disparity between firsthand perception and artificial representation that makes no attempt at recreating sense of place.
Many artists skip over the question of objectivity altogether, and focus instead on the rich and varied methods of individual perception and cognition. One such artist is Kerry Tribe, who created the book North is West / South is East: 32 Maps of Los Angeles by asking thirty-two strangers in the Los Angeles airport to sketch maps of the city, revealing the diverse possibilities for conceptualization of place. Paul Zelevansky's The Jericho Map similarly renders psychological and historical connotations rather than literal topographic representation, and Lisa Asagi's Twelve Scenes from 12 a.m. provides an entirely subjective timeline of events. In their collaborative book Die Neuaufteilung Der Welt, Olaf and Carsten Nicolai present a map of the world concerned only with the symbols and images of an imaginary politic based on personal associations. Maps reflecting real-world politics also generally place a heavier emphasis on abstract connotation than on physical geography, with intangible political boundaries dividing the landscape. Jean-Marie Karuth's work Le Monde comments on the dissociation of political states from their physical location, by listing every country in alphabetical order on perforated pages. Not only are the geographic relationships of the nations nullified by this format, but the pages may also be torn out and rearranged by the reader to create a new order.
Through all these methods of exploration, the problem of accurately re-presenting the world (places, events, and our perceptions of both) through symbolic systems remains. The definition of accuracy itself comes into question: what does it mean for a map to successfully represent? What constitutes this success? Its very nature as a symbolic function prevents the map from ever being equal to that which it portrays, but even the most removed or arbitrary signifier still corresponds to its signified. The gap between the map and reality is wide, but as an artistic venue, mapping provides a wealth of possibilities for exploring how we perceive, conceptualize, and relate to the world around us.
Curated by Molly Quammen. |
Twelve Scenes From 12 a.m.
Gaye Chan and Lisa Asagi
Honalulu, HI: Tinfish Press. 2001
With text by Lisa Asagi and design by Grace Chan, this book takes the form of a fold-out map enclosed between the covers of a book. When unfolded, the page measures 45 x 64 cm. and is bordered with a coordinate-like grid. Asagi's text consists of prose-poems composed at midnight on twelve successive days of a visit to her family and childhood home. The twelve "scenes" are arranged in a grid corresponding to the grid of a stylized rural roadmap printed in puce green and black. The map includes a detailed but useless key and scale.
Category: Book
$14.00
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The Grey
Alan Dunning
Calgary, Canada: Alan Dunning. 1990
Small circular maps of the globe from various angles are accompanied by blocks of poetic text tangled in filamentine computer-drawn hairs resembling topographical markings. This is the terrain of psycho-geography, a convergence of typography and topography, concerned with the revelation of the invisible narratives embedded in our material world.
Category: Book
$30.00
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West Looking East/ East Looking West
David Faithfull
Edinberg, Germany: Semper Fidelis. 1999
When removed from its slip-case, this exquisite accordian-fold depicts two views of the scenery at Traigh A' Mill or the Ross of Mull in Scotland. Illustration for both sides of the heavy, slightly-rough paper is executed in painterly renderings of the landscape, using a pallete of of bright blues, pinks, silvers, and oranges. One side shows the view from the west, facing east over rocky cliffs and the sea, and includes a key with grid measurements, latitude and longitude, and notes about landform, vegetation, and tide. The reverse depicts the west-facing view of the cliffs from the east, and contains a short prose-poem about the bees that inhabit the beach.
Category: Book
$150.00
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Carfire
John Ayala and John Furgason
New York, NY: Field Office Research. 2003
A handbook of twenty-nine burned cars, documented with color photographs, indexed with location, make/model, color and year (when identifiable), and situated on bird’s eye photo maps, Carfire is a deadpan pan across the gnarled and ransacked remains of New York City car fires. Comes with the Tom Sachs Seal of Approval for the Printed Matter 2003 Holiday exhibition and Catalogue.
Category: Book
$40.00
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Fyrste Natt Pa Manen
First Night on the Moon
Kurt Johannessen
Bergen, Norway: Kurt Johannessen. 1992
This book consists of a series of twenty enigmatic photographs printed in monochromatic grey. The images strikingly resemble the cratered surface of the moon, but are actually extreme close-up views of plaster. The delicate and attentive documentation turns the same precision of mapping so often associated with celestial bodies to a surface that would usually be overlooked, bringing into question the standards by which we consider a location to be of significance.
Category: Book
$23.00
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The Freckles on My Back
Jon Kessler
Paris, France: Onestar Press. 2002
From the artist: "I had taken pictures of my freckled back and flipped the blacks to whites and visa-versa. The resulting images appear to be clusters of stars and galaxies as seen through powerful telescopes. Illusion, play and the body are continuing concerns in my work."
Bleed-printed on the front and back of eage page.
Category: Book
$55.00
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Round World
Ken Leslie
Hardwick, Vermont: K. Leslie. 1997
"From a single point in the garden I measured the perimeter of my world and marked off 26 equally spaced points. Then, I shot a photo every two weeks, facing each successive point. At the end of one year, I would be back to where I had begun. In so far as Magellan had already travelled around the world, I sat in one spot, and let the world travel around me."
'Round World' is a doughnut-shaped, accordian folded photocopy edition of 100 signed copies which can be read page by page or fully unfolded to be seen all at once.
Category: Book
$85.00
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Magnetic Map : a Treasure Hunt Based on the Mingling of the Improbable and the Mundane
Lenore Malen
New York, NY: Warm Gun Press. 1999
For her exhibit at Art in General in the spring of 1999, Malen offered viewers the chance to win a real 14-carat prize. To win, one had to find ten magnets scattered around the city and, by arranging them in a certain order, decipher the incantation they spelled out. This book includes a map of the magnet sites as well as photographs of these specific places. The magnets, Malen suggests in her introduction, came from a celestial shower of thousands of magnet on October 6, 1996.
Category: Book
$10.00
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Ricorsi
Lucretia Moroni
Torino, Italy: Stamperia Nazionale. 1995
Moroni explores the mathematical and scientific representations of nature in this series of colorful paintings and transparent overlays. The images include fractals, Pangea, molecular structure, microorganisms, landscapes, musical notation, color wheels, maps of the urban grid, globes, and computer circuitry. The work comments not only on the diversity and richness of the structural patterns of our world, but also on the methods and tools with which we map our representations of the universe.
Category: Book
$70.00
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Journeys
Louise Neaderland
Brooklyn, NY: Bone Hollow Arts. 1996
Unfold this page to find a photogrpah of politicians and soldiers in Nuremberg in 1945, superimposed by a map grid. This fusion of site and event aligns physical destination with historic destination, emphasizing the significance of both place and occurance. Neaderland's text reads, "Sometimes the end of a journey is not a place on the map."
Category: Small Book
$10.00
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Open Roads Empty Nests
Louise Neaderland
New York, NY: Bone Hollow Arts. 1988
Neaderland created this collage book when her daughter Zoe moved out. A series of photographs of a young woman ascending an outdoor staircase are juxtaposed with topographical maps of the North Pole, Asia, Africa, South America, the Pacific Ocean, and the western edge of the Canadian/American border. A photocopied dictionary entry provides the definition of "nest."
Category: Book
$10.00
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