Inspired by Denis Wood’s Everything Sings, this constellation features work that boldly charts the physical world through a cartographic lens. Traditional maps are revised through erasure and addendum, and the invisible materialized. The collection begins with John Cage’s “A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-two Waltzes, and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity,” tracing Chicago through operations of chance, and concludes with photographs of lichen shaped like the maps of various countries. Extrapolation and interpolation infuse place with unexpected meaning, often subverting the viewer’s expectations.
–Anna Gaissert
1.
JOHN CAGE
(Image: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago)
“A Dip in the Lake–Ten Quick Steps, Sixty-one Waltzes and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity” (1978) originates as a request from Chicago Magazine and composer Raymond Wilding-White, in 1976. The graphic score (a map of Chicago superimposed coordinates) assembles a chance-determined list of 427 addresses, grouping them in 10 groups of 2, 61 groups of 3 and 56 groups of 4. Cage intended for these locations to be sites for sound recordings–visited, listened to and performed at.
2.
from New Babylon 1959-1974
Top, left: Holland, 1963 Top, right: Antwerpen, 1963 Bottom, left: Rotterdam, 1963 Bottom, right: Paris, 1963-1964. (Image: The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond, edited by Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley, MIT Press, 2001)
Designed in 1959-74 by the Situationist artist-architect Constant, New Babylon was intended to be a critique of conventional social structure. The project envisions a futuristic society of total automation in which the need to work is replaced by a nomadic life of creative play and traditional architecture has disintegrated along with the social institutions that it propped up.
3.
MIGUEL RIOS
from The Geography of Tweets, 2013
Rios, manager of Twitter’s Visual Insights team, has created a data visualization of every geotagged tweet since 2009. Through large-scale data analysis and computational social science come a vision of how we move, where we live, and where we congregate in the largest numbers.
4.
DENIS WOOD
from Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, 2013
“Signs for Strangers”
“Squirrel Highways”
“Pool of Light”
First stripping away the extraneous “map crap” to trace his Boylan Heights neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, iconoclastic geographer Denis Wood then locates the revelatory in the seemingly insignificant, the overlooked, and the invisible. “Signs for Strangers” shows the flow of traffic of those alien to the neighborhood: they, not the residents themselves, need signs to know what to do and where to go. “Squirrel Highways” maps the various intricacies of lines and wires overhead, and “Pools of Lights” shows where the light falls from the street lamps lit at night.
5.
KATHY PRENDERGAST
from City Drawings, 1997
Prendergast’s City Drawings are based on contemporary maps of the world’s capital cities, but they deliberately bypass systems of orientation and classification.
6.
STEPHEN WALTER
details from THE ISLAND: London Series, 2006-2008
Walter’s map of London is drawn in painstaking detail, his work packed with visual and textual information, building up layers of complexity between the reality of place and the subjectivity of his gaze.
7.
“Los Angeles Freeway Map,” 2004
Kraft systematically replaces the names of all the exists in the LA Freeway system using an idiosyncratic and categorical naming system.
8.
DAHLIA ELSAYED
“Some Heavy Indulgences,” 2009
(Image: Urban Omnibus)
Psychogeographer Dahlia Elsayed captures the emotional resonance of New York City from her own perspective.
9.
detail from “Through 5,” 2008
(Image: Roni Horn aka Roni Horn by Donna De Salvo, Carter E. Foster, Mark Godfrey, and Roni Horn. Essay by Briony Fer. Whitney Museum of American Art and Steidl, 2009)
“Through 5” evokes Icelandic topography and displays distinctively maplike lines. The drawing is part of a series influenced by the country’s geography.
10.
2009
Left: C5 Right: C2
Planes and connections, intersecting squares, circles and dots in McNally’s graphite illustrations form imagined, grid-like networks.
11.
SUZANNE TREISTER
from 20 CIA Black Sites, 2010
Influenced by artist Kazimir Malevich, Treister draws abstracted maps of secret, CIA-run detention centers and research facilities located in Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Afghanistan and Kosovo.
12.
from Lithographs Based on Geologic Maps of Lunar Orbiter and Apollo Landing Sites, 1972
(Image: 4izq)
Graves’s series of pointillist prints are based on her drawings of geologic maps of the moon’s surface, which she ordered from NASA in 1971.
13.
NINA KATCHADOURIAN
from Moss Maps, 1992
Katchadourian affixed rub-on letters directly to the moss with the names of places she recognized, assembling a photo collection of lichens that resemble islands and continents.
FURTHER READING:
The Power of Maps by Denis Wood with John Fels and John Krygier, Guilford Press, 2010
You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon, Princeton Architectural Press, 2003
The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography by Katharine Harmon and Gayle Clemans, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009
An Atlas of Radical Cartography by Alexis Bhagat and Lize Mogel, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2008
Maps are Territories: Science is an Atlas by David Turnbull, University of Chicago Press, 1994
The Exposed City: Mapping the Urban Invisibles by Nadia Amoroso, Routledge, 2010
Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics by Laura Kurgan, Zone Books, 2013