Comments on “Rethinking the Power of Maps” circa 2011
By: Catherine D'Ignazio
Tags: Maps, Ethics, Data Visualization, Power

Catherine D’Ignazio (kanarinka, me) made these comments at a meeting of the American Association of Geographers in 2011 on Denis Wood’s book Rethinking the Power of Maps. Republished here because I found it laying about…

So Denis says that Map Art is a genre.

I was going to say it wasn’t a genre but then I looked on Wikipedia (the authority) for examples of what is a genre and if Chip Art and Digital Painting and Horse Art can be genres then Map Art is definitely totally at least a genre if not then a whole movement.

But the reason that I was going to say that it wasn’t a genre is that it feels more like a topical cross-section of art history over the past 100 or so years rather than a genre because the reasons that artists use or make maps are widely varying, informed by tons of different reasons and deployed in many different milieus and contexts and geographic locations. So, in that sense maybe map art IS kind of like horse art. When you look at just a few examples of horse art you can see just how different each work truly is. They are made on different continents, in different time periods, with different emotional and political motivations.

This is exactly why it makes looking at history with the lens of map art so challenging and also so interesting. I wish there were more art history that would dispense with movements and instead trace things like maps and horses and try to figure out why they keep showing up, over and over again, in different places at different times. So for this reason, Denis’ work on map art is refreshing and fascinating.

But the chapter on map art tries to do both art history in a somewhat traditional sense — tracing movements — and art history in the more exciting, interesting sense (from my perspective) — which is tracing artists that have worked with maps over the last 100 years. And it’s all in 30 pages which is totally crazy. There’s really not enough room to talk about all the major 20th century art movements and discuss the individual works of art and catalog an exhaustive list of exhibitions and profile some contemporary map artists. What the chapter is wildly successful at is convincing the reader that map art

is and has been everywhere and that its contemporary practitioners are diverse. What it risks by going so quickly is reducing so many works of art to being about — as Denis says — “the falsity of the maps’ presumed objectivity” — which is to say reducing the works to being about maps themselves — rather than about fear in public space, private contractors in Colombia, solitary journeys, measuring the passage of everyday life or critiquing the autonomous art object among hundreds of other things.

Since there is no space created to really explore the works in depth, it is easy to lump them into all being about “stripping the mask off the map”. And I don’t disagree that map art by and large does strip the mask off the map. The first couple chapters of the book do a great job of dissecting the power of the map and presenting us with the anatomy of why the map functions so well to convince us that what it depicts is “real” and “the way things are”. However Hannah Hoch’s Cut with Kitchen Knife collage is radically different from Robert Smithson’s nonsite projects which are radically different from Lilla

LoCurto and Bill Outcault’s project where they scan their bodies into map projections. So yes, they may all strip the mask off the map, but what else? It would be fascinating to explore both the similarities AND the differences for the how the map is deployed, appropriated, asserted, questioned, and so on in these projects. I think there is more to say than stripping the mask off the map, both more parallels to draw and more variation to make apparent.

It’s clear that Denis has done an enormous amount of research so I guess I’m being selfish because I would like to see Denis write a whole book about map art where there is time and space to trace the map through history (what about an exhibition??? Even in the exhaustive history of exhibitions it didn’t look like there was a modern/contemporary one) and also, importantly, expand the “What is this all About?” section.

I comment on “What is this all About” — a section in the map art chapter which is only 4 pages long and explains the explosion of map art & map exhibitions — because I am left wondering where is the Internet, Google, consumer GPS, and mobile phones in the whole “What is this all About” equation. That feels like another huge factor in the explosion of map art and map art exhibitions in the past ten years: the ability to and obsession with locating oneself technologically with relatively affordable consumer devices. Curators and artists are also consumers and I think it’s no coincidence that Confluxes and a revitalized psychogeography scene started happening after mapquest, googlemaps, and consumer GPS devices, were around for a little while. I’m very curious as to Denis’ take on the connections between those two phenomena and whether the widescale corporate deployment of maps to consumers changes any of the power relationships that he discusses, namely the idea of the map in the service of the state. So if “Maps Blossom in the Springtime of the State” what happens to them in the “Springtime of the Corporation”?

Likewise, as I outlined in my article for the Encyclopedia of Human Geography, I see an increasing number of artists and designers using cartographic metaphors while mapping informational territories such as the stock market, the human genome and the Internet itself. While ostensibly disconnected from the earth’s surface these territories are not disconnected from the complicated relationships of authority, representation and power. Indeed their complexity and hyper-organized visual beauty can often act as a seductive device to convince the viewers of the truth or reality of their assertions. While I recognize that this is taking Denis’ project into a different territory, I do feel like these are spaces in desperate need of “power of maps”

critical thinking.

Finally, just a note that the final chapter of the book about “Mapmaking, Counter-mapping and Map Art in the Mapping of Palestine” is extremely powerful. It is fitting to be the last chapter (although I think it also could have been the first) because it is the case study that puts into play all of the ideas discussed in the rest of the book and makes those arguments and ideas apparent in a way that is concise, pragmatic and totally clear. The only thing I’m not sure about is whether teachers will assign it to their students since some of the final words include “It’s the state that’s fucked up” and “Could we dissolve the state?” Now that’s just crazy talk but perfect fodder for an art project.