Mapping Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art

Poetic Cartography

Simonetta Moro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429513534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Mapping Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art defines a new cartographic aesthetic, or what Simonetta Moro calls carto-aesthetics, as a key to interpreting specific phenomena in modern and contemporary art, through the concept of poetic cartography.

The problem of mapping, although indebted to the "spatial turn" of poststructuralist philosophy, is reconstructed as hermeneutics, while exposing the nexus between topology, space-time, and memory. The book posits that the emergence of "mapping" as a ubiquitous theme in contemporary art can be attributed to the power of the cartographic model to constitute multiple worldviews that can be seen as paradigmatic of the post-modern and contemporary condition.

This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, art theory, aesthetics, and cartography.

PART I

Archaeologies

1 Travelers Without Maps

Introduction: Place and Subjectivity

In the history of ideas as well as the aesthetic discourse, we could place another anthropological type next to the homo faber, homo ludens, and homo economicus: the homo viator. Homo viator indicates humankind on the move, on a path to somewhere. The task of philosophy as well as art, then, is to show this mankind the path or a possible path among many. Homo viator shares something in common with homo geographicus, defined by Emanuela Casti in terms of “human groups of which we grasp the territorial agency.”¹

Mapping is a concept that contains this movement; it contains the possibility of the journey. Does the map come before the journey or after? Or does it come during the journey, “cammin facendo,” as it is common to say in Italian—that is, “in the process of walking”?² As Casti notes, the relationship that human beings establish with the world is shaped by their representations of it. In fact, it is “through them [that] the world is created.”³ Representations of the world “have as the main objective, not really and not only, to describe the world objectively but rather to modify the world through the images that they provide of it.”⁴

Following this reasoning, we identify three modes of mapping—one indicating a visualization of the imagination, a projection; another constituting a narration of an event already concluded but whose effects are still at work; and the other stemming from a phenomenological rapport with the territory, a practice of experiential knowledge “on the ground” or in the first person. We could summarize these modes as mythical, documentary, and relational.⁵ Examples of these modes abound in the history of art and cartographic representation (although in different ways and with different emphases at different historical moments). Contemporary art is rich with mapping metaphors, although not necessarily framed in these terms. The three modes mentioned above will be unpacked throughout this book but not in a neat order; they are oftentimes tangled with or nested within one another to the point where it is hard to distinguish between the imaginary and the real, the artifact and the historical reconstruction. The mythical, the documentary, and the relational indicate three modes that are very current in artistic discourses today, each not excluding the other. They are present in the concept of language tied to a geographic place, in which mapping indicates movements across borders, migration, and displacement. “Language or hunger—a kind of border,” as Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan puts it. The dispossession of land often parallels the dispossession of language, as indigenous people know too well: “What happens to people and what happens to the land is the same thing.”⁶

The question of topology, discussed in depth in Chapter 3, is germane to the idea of mapping we are putting forward: it refers to the idea of place and time experienced in conjunction through the layering of ideas onto certain places and historical moments. It also refers to the mutual intersection of space and intersubjectivity which can be traced back to the “spatial turn” of poststructuralist philosophy,⁷ combined with a hermeneutic reading of the phenomenon of “mapping” and the cartographic sensibility manifested in recent developments in contemporary art. The aim is to bring to the fore the differing spatial and subjective configurations that constitute modes of subjectivity (and intersubjectivity) that are grounded in the “geographical imagination”⁸ and, more specifically, the cartographical imagination of mapping practices grounded in locality. “These imaginations”—as Pile points out—“are ‘territories and boundaries,’ ‘subject positions,’ ‘spatial practices,’ ‘between me and you,’ and ‘outside in/inside out.’ Each of these has something to offer any analysis of subjectivity.”⁹ To this list, we add the following key terms which will be addressed in the course of this chapter: de/re-territorialization, becoming, and nomadic existence (Deleuze and Guattari). We shall try to answer those questions still current today as they were in the time of their publication: “What kind of practices do we create when we use the concept of subjectivity? Where do we locate ourselves when we use the concept of subjectivity as a critical tool for analyzing the contemporary social and political situation?”¹⁰

In this search, we partly follow the concept of subjectivity articulated by Isabelle Stengers, who claims, “We can understand the efficacy of a concept as part of a milieu. … In this sense subjectivity could never be understood for itself, rather it is always part of an assemblage in which it is used and in which it gains its craft to forge efficacious propositions.”¹¹ An assemblage could be a mapping practice, understood as a constellation of cartographical operations grounded in topology, in order to arrive at a “different topological understanding of the subject.”¹² If one is to engage with an analysis of what it is to be a subject in a post-Cartesian and pluralistic world, the “situatedness of subjectivity” cannot be ignored. As the editors of the journal Subjectivity noted in its inaugural issue, “Subjectivity, despite its fruitfulness for critical research, possesses no trans-historical validity and cannot lie beyond historical specificity.”¹³

I would argue that subjectivity not only cannot exist beyond historical specificity but also, similarly, cannot lie beyond geographical specificity. As Edward Said aptly puts it, “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”¹⁴

A similar argument can be made about the cartographic documents that shape our geographical imagination: maps. As objects that have the capacity to disrupt symbolic horizons and contradict them in powerful ways, maps are not only about political borders, geographical boundaries, and the stories of the “winners” of conflicts over land and property, but maps also deal with the formation of the imaginary, with the movement of individuals and boundaries, and with lines of flight and trajectories that in themselves are constituents of subjectivities. These aspects of cartography have not yet been analyzed sufficiently, and the cartographic image has suffered from a similar prejudice that space has been subjected to—namely, the idea that any discourse around place and space is inherently reactionary.¹⁵ With respect to mapping and cartography, only a hermeneutic reorientation can rescue them from their association with space as a static entity in favor of space as a living place, as “place or topos as both bounded and open, as both singular and plural.”¹⁶

Hermeneutics is an apt methodology for this study, understood—as Gianni Vattimo puts it—as “fundamentally the philosophy of the irreducible alterity of the other.”¹⁷ It is an alliance, a non-neutral point of view, or a “mode of practicing philosophy in a non-objective way,” where “truth is not reflectivity, the position of the subject is not that of the screen onto which realities draw themselves, and being is not the ‘given’ but the event.”¹⁸ This “ontological turn” is of import to a reconsideration of mapping and the cartographic image since the “weakening of subjectivity” that accompanies it (which Heidegger already identified in Dasein and Lacan locates in the subject reconceived from its alterity)¹⁹ can be found in the idea of mapping as a means to alterity. But whereas the “other” in traditional Western cartography was located outside the subject (in the form of “other” worlds to be explored and conquered), in contemporary mapping aesthetic practices, the “other” is not just located in the disembodied eye that views the world from above but also, and most significantly, in the eye that inhabits the body and the world that such a body occupies historically and critically. The genealogical method developed by Foucault will structure the identification of specific epistemic moments in the unfolding of the narrative of “travelers without maps” which, paradoxically, constitute the origins of mapping. These beginnings will be examined in the following sections: (1) Map, Territory, and Myth; (2) Itiner(r)ancies; (3) Duration versus Extension; and (4) Between West and East.

Section 1 starts with a view to the common origins of art and territorialization as well as how those origins intersect with the origins of the map.²⁰ The lines between etymology, archaeology, and mythology are further blurred in a reading of two of the first-known maps of the ancient world: Anaximander's map and, prior to his, Homer's. The visible echoes of the latter are examined in a recent contemporary art project by Gal Weinstein. In his works, the artist relies on the power of ancient territorial myths to tell us an alternative story dealing with the place of the “other” within a community.

Section 2 looks at the period of map-making following the Greek era with particular emphasis on the concept of itinerrance, developed by Paul Ricoeur, and the concept of duration, which we find in Bergson, as the key aspects that define such maps (as opposed to spatiality). Section 3 highlights the narrative element of ancient maps (particularly through the example of pilgrim routes) while acknowledging that symbolic and abstract motifs were also present. Map-makers were closer to artists at this time; the role of the imagination was never far from the documentary attitude, and a reflection of cosmology and philosophical ideas is evident in the remaining artifacts. Even the materiality of maps was similar to drawings and paintings in ways that will be significant when discussing contemporary art with a cartographic quality. The time element of map-making favored slowness versus speed.

Finally, Section 4 examines shifts in cartographical representations occurring in the early Renaissance in coincidence with the rediscovery of ancient maps and manuscripts (such as Ptolemy's Geography) and the publication of travelogues, such as Marco Polo's Milione, through the emblematic figure of Fra Mauro's Mappamondo. The idea of space begins to change as well—from being an expression of duration to an abstract extension, as we shall see in Chapter 2. However, up until then, different models of the world image coexisted and completed each other. Similarly, the idea of the globe was not global. Our brief analysis of Fra Mauro's world map, which closes the chapter, points in the direction of a hybrid model that will have long-lasting repercussions in cartographic aesthetics for centuries to come. Not in the official work of the cartographers, who will become technicians, but rather in the work of the artists, or the poetic cartographers.

Map, Territory, Myth

In Chapter 4 of What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari theorize a “geophilosophy,” according to which thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth: “Thinking consists in stretching out a plane of immanence that absorbs the earth (or rather ‘adsorbs’ it). Deterritorialization of such a plane does not preclude reterritorialization but posits it as the creation of a future new earth.”²¹ The relationship earth/territory can be traced through cartographic representations of various epistemic moments that correspond to particular philosophical worldviews. According to Christian Jacob, a map is an interface; it is both a symbolic object that generates a sense of recognition, belonging among those who master its codes, as well as a screen upon which visions of society are projected.²² It is genera...