Mapping Beyond Measure

Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity

Simon Ferdinand

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781496212115
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496217882
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last century a growing number of visual artists have been captivated by the entwinements of beauty and power, truth and artifice, and the fantasy and functionality they perceive in geographical mapmaking. This field of “map art” has moved into increasing prominence in recent years yet critical writing on the topic has been largely confined to general overviews of the field.

In Mapping Beyond Measure Simon Ferdinand analyzes diverse map-based works of painting, collage, film, walking performance, and digital drawing made in Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, arguing that together they challenge the dominant modern view of the world as a measurable and malleable geometrical space. This challenge has strong political ramifications, for it is on the basis of modernity’s geometrical worldview that states have legislated over social space; that capital has coordinated global markets and exploited distant environments; and that powerful cartographic institutions have claimed exclusive authority in mapmaking.

Mapping Beyond Measure breaks fresh ground in undertaking a series of close readings of significant map artworks in sustained dialogue with spatial theorists, including Peter Sloterdijk, Zygmunt Bauman, and Michel de Certeau. In so doing Ferdinand reveals how map art calls into question some of the central myths and narratives of rupture through which modern space has traditionally been imagined and establishes map art’s distinct value amid broader contemporary shifts toward digital mapping.
 

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: I Map Therefore I Am Modern
• 1. The Shock of the Whole: Phenomenologies of Global Mapping in Solomon Nikritin’s The Old and the New
• 2. Combined and Uneven Cartography: Maps and Time in Alison Hildreth’s Forthrights and Meanders
• 3. Drawing Like a State: Maps, Modernity, and Warfare in Gert Jan Kocken’s Depictions
• 4. Insular Imaginations: Statehood, Islands, and Globalization in Satomi Matoba’s Utopia
• 5. Cartography at Ground Level: Spectrality and Streets in Jeremy Wood’s My Ghost and Meridians
• 6. Another Chorein: Alternative Ontologies in Peter Greenaway’s A Walk Through H
• Envoi: Artists Astride Shifting Mapping Paradigms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index