Introduction: Some Vignettes
In concluding his 1983 guest lecture to the Royal Geographical Society Annual General Meeting, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, Donald Meinig issued geographers a rallying call to creativity.4 This is not, he summarised, âa call for geographers to become novelists ⊠it is a call only for greater openness, a clearing away of the pedantic barriers, for a toleration of geographical creativity wherever it may lead.â5 While he steps back from the brink of asking geographers to become creative practitioners, Meinig desired that the relationship between geography and the humanities become one that was more complex than that he was witnessing. In place of what he, and others in this era, saw to be a supplemental relationship wherein humanities offered the âspiceâ or âflavouringâ for a geographical science, Meinig desired a more wholesome relationship. He saw in a disciplinary alignment with the arts ways for geography to grow, shape, and extend itself, until it could stand as much as one of the arts as one of the sciences. But, he noted for this to be the case, it was crucial that the discipline move beyond the arts âas a resource, something we borrow from rather than contribute to, something we use rather than something we create as part of the vocation of geography.â6
Opening this discussion of the place and possibilities of artistic practice in making and transforming geographical knowledge, will be a series of further short vignettes that between them start to explore the relationship between geography and the arts. Drawn from a number of presidential addresses and plenaries of the Association of American Geographers and the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers), these brief sketches serve to illustrate moments in what is a much longer, and often overlooked, history of relations between geography and the arts. To review this history in any depth is far beyond the scope of this text, but these selected moments serve to indicate some of the critical disciplinary work that these relations can be understood to do. Not least because, if nothing else, the place of the arts within these disciplinary addresses indicates the place and value that pondering geography-art relations has had at points of disciplinary self-reflection. As such, and whilst cognoscent of the dangers of reading too much into the place these addresses give to the arts, when set alongside contemporaneous examples of broader empirical work and thinking, they become a useful barometer of shifts within the discipline.7
In concluding his presidential address to the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (30 December 1946), John Kirt-land Wright proposed a new subfield of geographical inquiry: geosophy.8 Geosophy was âthe study of geographical knowledge from any or all points of view,â what âhistoriography is to history,â its focus was an attention to âthe nature and expression of geographical knowledge both past and present.â9 Two features of J.K. Wrightâs study stand out in the context of discussions of creative geographies. Firstly, in outlining who he counted as the producers of geographical knowledge Wright offers us an expanded field of geographers, moving beyond the âcoreâ producers and concerns of âscientific geographical knowledge, or of geographical knowledge as it is otherwise systemized by geographers.â10 Indeed, Wright included artists amongst those who created geographical knowledge, arguing we should take into account âthe whole peripheral realm,â covering:
Geographical ideas, both true and false, of all manner of peopleânot only geographers, but farmers and fishermen, businesses executives and poets, novelists and painters, Bedouins and Hottentots.11
Secondly, accompanying this broadening of the base of geographical praxis, Wright was also adamant that study should be made of what he termed âaesthetic geosophy,â in other words, âthe study of the expression of geographical conceptualizations in literature and in art.â12 For Wright, the place of literature and arts within geography was, he considered, and as Keighren demonstrates, not a repudiation of the logical positivism of a scientistic geography; rather, he sought to enroll artists and others on the âperipheryâ into the core of geographyâs scientific endeavor only if their work was to the advancement of the latter.13 Thus, Wright divides the arts three ways: into work he deems legitimateâwork that is of no threat to scientific geographyâwork that he deems desirable, in other words art work that will contribute to the progression of scientific geography, and illegitimate work, which, by contrast, is seen to do damage, to undermine the coordinates of scientific knowledge and the discipline.
Moving forward forty odd years to Meinig and others of his era, we find a rather different set of relations cast between the arts and a scientistic geography. Meinigâs rallying cry for the arts was far from a lone call, for, as the quantitative revolution was waning, a (re)turn to the arts by geographers, and a recognition of the need to query and develop geographyâs own artfulness was in the air. During his presidential address at the same 1983 RGS conference as that Meinig spoke at, John Wreford-Watson extolled the need to get in touch with the âsoulâ of geography.14 Taking the fifty-year anniversary of the founding of the Institute of British Geographers as an occasion to look back, he asserted the value of the arts against the systematic studies that had come, over the course of his career, to replace geographyâs topographic tradition. His attention was a little different to Meinigâs, noting his interest less in âgeography as literature, but to the value of literature for geography.â15 This was a value that, as his writings demonstrate, he âfound in virtually every field, physical, human and regional,â and its source lay in how the arts âsupplanted mere descriptionâ and, how in the face of an ever more rational discipline, âliterature stresses those empirical traits geographers wanted most vehemently to escape ⊠it was based in personal experience, whereas geography was marching forward to categorize abstractions.â16 Far from âmereâ description for Wreford-Watson, the âimages of Americaâ created in literature, and âheld in the American mind, were transforming the American Landscape,â artists and writers were thus âfashionersâ and âperpetratorsâ of a form of geographical knowledge that reached far beyond the academy.17
Less than a year earlier, and 5,000-odd miles away in Los Angeles, John Fraser Hart had, in his presidential address to the 77th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, also deployed the arts to hit back against the forces of positivist science.18 He read the exclusionary scientism that the quantitative revolution had installed at the heart of the discipline as a damaging expression of disciplinary insecurities. Providing us with that well-known phrase âthe highest form of the geographerâs art is the production of good regional geographyâevocative descriptions that facilitate an understanding and appreciation of places, areas and regions,â Hart positioned the arts to enable an appreciation of regions as âsubjective artistic devices,â in whose study a solely âscientificâ approach would fall short.19 For Hart, at least, the arts as both a source, but also as representative of a particular epistemology, offered the âproperâ means to assert a regional geography and to counter the ascension of disciplinary scientism.
Nearly thirty years later, Stephen Daniels, writing in a forum on the futures of cultural geography, tellingly detours the title of Peter Jacksonâs careful interpretations of ideologies in Maps of Meaning, to explore the growing interest in âMaps of Making.â20 Danielsâ discussion, together with other contributions to the forum, point towards a (re)newed form of geography and arts engagement.21 Together these discussions would suggest that studies and practices of creative making have come to sit alongside the interpretative registers that had, in the intervening three decades, come to dominate geographical studies of the arts. This focus on making takes many forms: ranging from studies of processes of inspiration, and the spaces and sites of creative practice, to a growing interest in conducting creative practice-based research.22 For Daniels, the materiality of these making processes develops interesting parallels with older traditions of cultural geography concerned with the material making and shaping of landscapes and environments.23 For others, this contemporary proximity between geography and creative practice is celebrated for its enmeshing of different critical practices, and the coalescence of these practices around, a series of conceptual themes (e.g. place) or around critiques of knowledge, or by providing âbeyond academyâ impact. All of these different valuations of the arts of geography, are, as this section will develop, eminently traceable from longer histories of these interdisciplinary relations.24
Beginning this discussion with some very brief vignettes of the much longer history of geography-art relations has a number of benefits, primary amongst these being to situate this textâs study of creative geographies. For, despite the increasing popularity of geographers working with a range of forms of the arts, whether as interpreter and/or practitioner, very little attention has been paid to the historical underpinnings of these relationships. While the Introduction began the work of situating the creative geographies in this text in relation to the history of geography-art relations it did so through a relatively recent history. In the remainder of this introduction to Part 1 I want to offer, albeit in necessarily a curtailed manner, selected periods from a history of geography-arts engagements.
Offering even selected moments from the history of creative geographies aids in the exploration of the form and nature of contemporary geography-art intersections. While I am primarily interested here in geography-visual art relations, thinking historically also helps bring into view the more expansive field of the âgeohumanities,â folding visual arts together with the arts more generally.25 Some commentators made a feature of parsing the singularities and differences between forms of arts practices (e.g., the value of written word versus the sketched/painted scene), while for others these differences are covered over and turned away from in more general âstatementingâ on the arts.26 These issues are further complicated by the need to remain aware of the changing nature of both art and geography. In other words, to reflect on these forms of practice and bodies of knowledge, and their sorting and grouping into disciplinary categories, as an ongoing, evolving process. Thus, as this discussion unfolds, it does so not only against the backdrop of the making of modern-day geography, but also the institutionalisation of a European academic arts scene and evolution of forms of artistic practice.
Clearly, it is beyond the scope of this text to develop a comprehensive aesthetic geosophy pace J.K. Wright, further, his particular formulation of geography-arts relations is arguably not necessarily the most helpful register with respect to their current configuration. For, I am less interested in taking preformed geographical conceptualisationsâwhatever these may beand finding them within the arts, as Wright suggests, rather I am concerned here with incidences where arts practices, of various different forms, have influenced the making and shaping of modern geography itself. In short, I am interested in how the arts, and in particular visual or fine art, have been deployed, often strategically, within the progression of geography, and concepts normally defined as geographical, within and without the academy. The discussion will focus on three particular issues wherein the critical potential of the arts with respect to epistemological questions and issues ideas of research practice and methods can be most clearly seen. Firstly, the arts as a form of geographical âdata,â secondly, the arts as enabling ways to think about, but also to reconfigure the politics and relations of working with audiences and stakeholders beyond the academy. And, thirdly, the final section of this discussion will explore explicit instances where art has been deployed by geographers as the means to question disciplinary habits and posit new values in the face of normative methods and approaches. The two empirical chapters that follow this discussion take up these sets of ideas through their exploration of the politics and possibilities of exhibitions and installations with respect to the histories of geographical knowledge and our contemporary modes of knowledge production.