This book considers phenomena of urban mapping in the discourses and strategies of a variety of postwar artists and practitioners of space up to today. It focuses on a constellation of postwar artists whose work shows a fascination with maps and urban mapping in artistic forms that privilege walking, surveying and close exploration. I am interested in how these forms of urban mapping ramify and expand to include texts and visual representations as part of a larger system of apprehending, experiencing and imagining the city. In a classic book, The Intellectual versus the City. From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (1962), Morton and Lucia White discuss the unwavering distrust of the city voiced by American intellectuals over time and the unfavorable comparison it has generated with the pastoral countryside. Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities tells a different story, one in which the city still coheres negatively, but is embraced as an artistic possibility, as a space of creation and experiment, with experiment defined as a testing of artistic limits and a redrawing of artistic boundaries.
The originality of the book is twofold. First of all, the book posits maps and mapping as a critical nexus around which some the major actors of the artistic engagements with urban space in postwar America can be reconfigured and analyzed. Few overarching studies of the artistic interest in the postwar American city exist, and even fewer studies of the creative engagements with the postwar American city that combine a larger literary, artistic and architectural corpus. 1 This book is by no means comprehensive or panoramic, but it sets out to lay the foundations of what might subsequently become an ampler perspective on literary and artistic urban figurations in the USA in the postwar period.
Secondly, the distinctive approach of the book is meant to highlight the interplay between discourses and site-oriented practices. My analysis lies at the intersection of the literary and the art historical study of the metropolis, and it results from a literary scholarâs perspective on art history and cartography. My take on the subject combines two strands: one that brings to the fore the textual and intertextual dimension in the work of a number of postwar artists, and another that examines their engagement with site as artistic practice. The dialogue between discourses and other artistic forms provides the foundational bifocal perspective of the book. The âliteratureâ in the subtitle Art, Literature and Urban Spaces refers to the interdisciplinary dialogue and circulation that results from bringing art historical examples into the field of literature. It also refers to the focus on literary texts like Poe âs âMan of the Crowdâ and to the rhetorical mediation employed in art and architecture in the postwar era, commonly designated as being decisive in the âlinguistic turn.â Studies of site-specific art have paid scant attention to the implications of its linguistic and discursive component. 2 Several of the artists I discuss are also writers whose texts are inextricably linked to the rest of their artistic expressions: Acconci started out as a poet, Matta-Clark wrote âart cards,â Smithson was also a poet in his early career and a prolific writer of essays, Kaprow is the author of an extensive corpus of essays and scripted performances.
From the first chapter that reads E. A. Poe âs short story âThe Man of the Crowd â alongside contemporary artistic experiments that revisit it to the last chapter that examines Rebecca Solnitâs recent atlas of San Francisco ( Infinite City , 2010) as a crossbreed of cartography, literature and visual art, the book bridges the gap that separates different disciplinary traditions and tries to do justice to the highly composite nature of a number of postwar artistic practices grounded in New York and other postwar American cities. I explore spatial investigations that rely on cartographic procedures and the language of mapping in order to engage with the urban and suburban and elaborate a literary and artistic reflection on what it means to inhabit them creatively and often subversively. A significant gesture that inaugurates these spatial investigations consists in the transgression of spatial margins that lead literary characters like Poe âs protagonist and artists like Vito Acconci (also a character in a performance) to move away from confined spaces out in the open where they embrace a posture of interpretation and interrogation that is fundamentally mobile and involves a combination of trajectories and texts, itineraries and discourses.
The selection and organization of the corpus does not follow the logic of artistic schools or currents, but rather privileges the dialogue of texts and experiments that cut across areas of study, media and conceptions of art, literature and cartography. It is the city itself as space of artistic exploration that provides the patterns of coherence that articulate the unity of the book. While the term âcityâ encompasses the characteristic qualities of urbanism (density, population size, heterogeneity), its widespread and non-reflexive use calls for an analytically driven investigation into what these artists and writers mean by âcityâ or âmetropolisâ (another inflationary term). 3 The meaning of the âcityâ is derived from the complexity of the individual writings and practices that will be examined. Thus, Passaic, for instance, occupies an ambiguous place as a lethargic New York suburb in Smithsonâs essay, but at the same time is presented by Smithson in ironic comparison with Rome, which destabilizes both Passaic and Rome. In a meditation on historical and industrial ruins, on the continuity of the built environment, and a reworking of the international theme, Passaic as suburban center is ambiguously posited between the ruinous Other of New York and the pale transatlantic mirroring of Rome.
The corpus includes a major nineteenth-century text of fiction and two contemporary artistic rereadings it has generated (one of which involves social media communication and geolocation), experimental poetry, urban performances, Happenings, conceptual works and a hybrid contemporary atlas. The unifying element is provided by a reflection on mapping and cities (New York, Passaic, San Francisco). I examine the interaction between the map as representation and forms of dynamic mapping that involve itineraries, trajectories, tours, acts of surveying that result in hybrid artefacts with visual, performative and discursive components. I bring together visual forms of mapping that revisit or reinvent the conventions of cartography and literary forms of mapping (poems, narratives, essays, âword worksâ as Matta-Clark called them, verbal âinstallationsâ in the case of Acconci ) that are rarely discussed together. The book builds on the older observation about the geographical map being a central matrix for reflection and experiment in the visual arts starting with the historical avant-gardes but considers the textual dimension in mapping practices alongside site orientation.
One of the main aims of the book is to examine the ways in which literary and mapping tactics work together to invest New York, its suburbs and other American cities as material environments to be investigated, as cultural and historical constructs and as spaces of social interaction. James Donald âs understanding of cities as âimagined environmentsâ is particularly illuminating (Donald 1992, 422). But the various strands of the process of âimaginingâ the city (the textual and the site-oriented) have often been treated separately. The interdisciplinary scope of the book is actually even broader: Given the hybrid nature of the artistic production of the artists I examine, who combined text, photography, maps, actual movement, fragments of the built environment, the book stands at the intersection of art history, urban studies, architectural discourse, cartography and literary analysis. The city itself as an âimagined environmentâ and mediated space invites a far-reaching disciplinary and cultural view due to its privileged position, since Baudelaire , as the benchmark space of modernity, which provides insight into the broader mechanisms of culture and ideology.
The book reflects on the deep concern with the urban condition shared by a variety of twentieth-century American artists across the artistic spectrum, including artists belonging to currents not usually associated with the city, like Land Art. The collusion of art and the city is embedded in the larger reconfiguration of the institutionalized spaces of art and art-making starting in the late 1950s that led to the emergence of new artistic venues and new idioms, anchored in the materiality of site and in previous literary and artistic discourses on the modern city (although parodic and ironic distance is often present). These new artistic idioms use the language and gestures of mapping and surveying to encode a meditation on urban growth and decline, ruins, the monumental and the anti-monumental, property and ownership, the limits between private and public, social protest and the possibility of change, surveillance, Cold War tensions, as well as individual and communal modes of living. The artist in the city displays varying degrees of involvement and opposition, from the exploratory and observational stance to acts of manifest contestation and intervention. The spatial focus of this study is New York in specific works by Kaprow , Oldenburg , Acconci , Smithson , Matta-Clark and the neo-Situationist group Glowlab , but the choice of including âother postwar American citiesâ in the title suggests at least two things: the instability of New York as a construct always pointing elsewhere through allusion and cultural dialogue, and the transferability of certain mapping procedures, for instance in the case of Solnitâs Infinite City . A San Francisco Atlas (2010), which is part of a trilogy of atlases based on similar methodologies that also includes Unfathomable City. A New Orleans Atlas (2013) and Nonstop Metropolis. A New York City Atlas (2016).
The theoretical and critical lens adopted throughout the book is provided by âcartographiesâ in the plural, a term voluntarily chosen both for its rigorous scientific and disciplinary anchorage and for its metaphorical potential. The way I use it, the term refers to the map as a dynamic critical tool that constructs reality without reproducing it, to cartography as a discipline that has undergone tremendous changes in the past decades thanks to the rise of critical cartography and to the creative embrace of mapping processes that testify to a preference given not to maps as conventional representations but rather to itineraries, trajectories, displacements, mobility an...