Deleuze and the Map-Image

Aesthetics, Information, Code, and Digital Art

Jakub Zdebik

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501346798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The map, as it appears in Gilles Deleuze's writings, is a concept guiding the exploration of new territories, no matter how abstract. With the advent of new media and digital technologies, contemporary artists have imagined a panoply of new spaces that put Deleuze's concept to the test. Deleuze's concept of the map bridges the gap between the analog and the digital, information and representation, virtual and actual, canvas and screen and is therefore best suited for the contemporary artistic landscape. Deleuze and the Map-Image explores cartography from philosophical and aesthetic perspectives and argues that the concept of the map is a critical touchstone for contemporary multidisciplinary art. This book is an overview of Deleuze's cartographic thought read through the theories of Sloterdijk, Heidegger, and Virilio and the art criticism of Laura U. Marks, Carolyn L. Kane, and Alexander Galloway, shaping it into a critical tool through which to view the works of cutting edge artists such as Janice Kerbel and Hajra Waheed, who work with digital and analog art. After all, Deleuze did write that a map can be conceived as a work of art, and so herein art is critiqued through cartographic strategies.

1

Deleuze’s Vermeer: Maps, Art, and Information

In this book, I want to train my focus on the aesthetics of Deleuze’s amorphous map and how it can be applied to digital art. But how to get from one point to the other—from cartography to digital art? Or, more precisely, is there even a link between the two? To begin, we would say that the map is the emblem of art that deals with information. It seems retrograde to look to Vermeer, a baroque painter, to explore notions of information, digital representation and new media, but Deleuze’s approach to Vermeer opens virtual dimensions in selected details of his paintings, such as the wall-mounted maps, the screen-like blank walls, and the use of light. His reading of Vermeer yields a rich constellation of concepts that clarify contemporary aesthetic problems. Most important, through Vermeer, Deleuze discusses the shift from representation to information that occurs in art and leans heavily on Leo Steinberg’s notion of the flatbed picture plane to expound on this art historical occurrence in various contexts in his writings. Steinberg immediately elucidates the relationship of the flatbed to the map, and Deleuze, in turn, makes use of this notion to explore the relationship between painting, cartography, and philosophy, especially in his analysis of Spinoza, as we will see. Deleuze’s intermediation stemming from Vermeer’s maps can be applied to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), where the seventeenth-century painter’s imagery appears in the depth of a monitor screen image. Furthermore, Tom Conley’s reading of another of Scott’s films, Thelma and Louise (1991), reveals the baroque imagery of maps that fold films into paintings into a screen.

Flatbed picture plane

Deleuze often circles back to a shift in art that Steinberg pinpointed in his 1972 essay “Other Criteria” (as we have already broached with Resnais). In a decidedly analog medium, the map stands at the crossroads between the window and the screen, between nature and information. Deleuze uses Steinberg’s discovery to situate traditional aesthetics in a postmodernist context and, at the same time, charges the concept of the map with a complex aesthetic function. Deleuze writes about Steinberg in The Fold (The dyad of the city-information table is opposed to the system of the window-countryside.¹), Cinema 2 (“And the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by convention, no longer seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a painting, but rather constitutes a table of information,”² so that “the brain-information, brain-city couple which replaces that of eye-Nature.”³), and What Is Philosophy? (In this case, Deleuze and Guattari bring together Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science” and Steinberg’s notion of the flatbed picture plane: “The ground covered by its own map, disused spaces without architecture and the ‘flatbed’ plane.”⁴). Although the window/screen duality has been firmly established as belonging to Steinberg,⁵ in “What Children Say” Deleuze attributes the duality between movement away from painting as window and its conceptualization as a flatbed of information (“an arrangement … on the surface”) not to Steinberg but rather to Svetlana Alpers.

In fact, the specific passage Deleuze quotes from Alpers reads as follows:

Mapmakers or publishers were referred to as “world describers” and their maps or atlases as the world described. Though the term was never, as far as I know, applied to a painting, there is good reason to do so. The aim of Dutch painters was to capture on a surface a great range of knowledge and information about the world. They too employed words with their images. Like the mappers, they made additive works that could not be taken in from a single viewing point. Theirs was not a window on the Italian model of art but rather, like a map, a surface on which is laid out an assemblage of the world.⁶

Alpers bestows on painters the duties involved in the capture of knowledge and information. She points out that the many discreet sources of visual information have to be added together on a single surface in order to create a work that, even if it gives an impression of illusion, is obviously constructed. And even though Steinberg is not directly cited in this passage, the dualities between illusion and information, window and surface, are clearly there.

It is in another passage of her book that Alpers refers to Steinberg. First, she establishes Johannes Kepler’s role in the objective definition of a picture based on his early seventeenth-century research in optics: “It was Kepler who for the first time turned away from the world to a representation of it, to a picture of it on the retina. In structural terms, Kepler not only defines the picture on the retina as a representation but turns away from the actual world to the world ‘painted’ there.”⁷ The issue then becomes about two ways of making pictures of the world: “On the one hand the picture considered as an object in the world, framed window to which we bring our eyes, on the other hand the picture taking the place of the eye with the frame and our location thus left undefined.”⁸ It is this question of the body’s location in relation to the frame of the painting that brings Steinberg’s flatbed concept into the conversation. The position of the viewer’s body in front of the frame is the springboard from which to consider how the surface of the picture is to be understood and why Vermeer is such a compelling artist in the division of painting versus mapping. Steinberg’s notion is operative in the window/screen analogy that Deleuze borrowed from Alpers.

The bed and the window are the horizontal and vertical axes determining the orientation of the surface of the painting transposed in Steinberg’s “Other Criteria,” a response to Clement Greenberg’s formalism. The painting, hanging on a wall vertically, like a window opened onto nature, will be given horizontal qualities, like the ones printed on a broadsheet with the help of a flatbed printing press. Or rather, Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955), a once horizontal object made to accommodate human horizontal activities, is modified (splashed and slathered with thick paint) and hoisted vertically on the wall: “There, in the vertical posture of ‘art,’ it continues to work in the imagination as the eternal companion of our other resource, our horizontality, the flat bedding in which we do our begetting, conceiving, and dreaming.”⁹ This horizontal to vertical reorientation is crucial to look at art not as an engine of illusions, but as a repository for information. Steinberg indicates the changeover from a regime of seeing that has been a constant (marked by the vertical orientation of painting starting with the Renaissance and perspective as window onto the world) to a regime of producing and reproducing (as suggested by the three aforementioned activities safely undertaken horizontally). The flatbed picture plane comes from the term “flatbed printing press,” which is “a horizontal bed on which a horizontal printing surface rests.”¹⁰ Or, as specified by Rosalind Krauss, “a flatbed being the horizontal metal tray onto which lead strips of linotype are gathered, before entering the downward pressure of the press.”¹¹ This is a reorientation of how we approach painting, both physically and conceptually.

If we follow Steinberg’s timeline, nothing much changed in the span starting with the Renaissance and ending with Abstract Expressionism. Even if the figurative content dissolves into abstraction over the centuries, what stays the same is the way the picture plane in its vertical orientation is parallel to human posture. The vertical human posture grounds the spatial orientation of the picture plane: “A picture that harks back to the natural world evokes sense data which are experienced in the normal erect posture.”¹² Consequently, for Steinberg, abstract painters such as Morris Louis—whose veils are suffused in paint dripping downward under the influence of a gravitational force that also naturally affects our bodies—and Jackson Pollock—whose paintings “cannot escape being read as thickets”—are essentially “nature painters.”¹³

Deleuze agrees with this reading by blurring the limits of abstraction and figuration in his own assessment of Pollock’s abstract paintings, where “chaos is deployed to the maximum. Somewhat like a map that is as large as the country, the diagram merges with the totality of the painting, the entire painting is diagrammatic. Optical geometry disappears in favor of a manual line, exclusively manual.”¹⁴ The drip paintings are a manual, physical, part of nature. We are also circling back to Borges: but obviously, here, the map is far from the informative tool of cartography since it is an exact replica of the terrain it is supposed to represent.¹⁵ This particular map does not provide information. It is the abstract machine that has not been concretized into something articulable. Just as Steinberg sees the Abstract Expressionists as nature painters, Deleuze follows the same train of thought by associating them with a pre-modernist, traditional style: “From this point of view, we can see how abstract painting remained figurative, since its line still delimited an outline.”¹⁶ Both for Steinberg and Deleuze, Pollock’s drip lines are figurative, natural.

For Greenberg, by contrast, the line leads abstraction into the modern era. This notion of the line as tracing an outline is precisely one of the symptoms of the self-reflexive “Kantian” modern painting that Greenberg describes: “Line, which is one of the most abstract elements in painting since it is never found in nature as the definition of contour, returns to oil painting as the third color between two other color areas.”¹⁷ Since the line belongs to art and is not found in nature, it self-reflexively signifies the medium to which it belongs. And self-reflexivity within the domain of art is something that Greenberg associates directly with Kant’s philosophy. Greenberg’s staunch formalism argues for a self-definition of painting based on Kant’s critical philosophy, according to which he sees an incremental flattening of the picture plane from Realism to abstraction. For Greenberg, abstraction is the expression of self-definition of painting, progressing from the Old Masters’ illusion-producing perspectival figurations: Arte est artem celare becomes Ars est artem demonstrare.¹⁸ According to Greenberg, pre-modern painters used their mastery to hide the artistry and create illusory space, whereas modernist painters make their art more obvious and show the materiality of their work. The former create illusory space, whereas the latter focus on concrete space within the limits of the canvas.

The reason Greenberg’s logic falls apart, Steinberg concludes, is that he does not acknowledge the content of modern art nor the self-reflexive gesture of the Old Masters. This reorientation away from eighteenth-century spatial definition leads Steinberg to the concept of the flatbed picture plane. He describes why this shift needs to happen. If the vertical picture plane is associated with figuration, human posture, and nature in the works of Renaissance and Abstract Expressionist artists alike, then the flatbed picture plane, introduced by Rauschenberg, brings forth a new era of representation with its horizontal orientation. The flatbed picture plane is equated with surfaces like “tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed—whether coherently or in confusion.”¹⁹ A map is another one of these images—it can be tacked onto a wall but it remains a device defined by its horizontal function.²⁰ Steinberg explains that a radical and new orientation takes place with Rauschenberg: the picture plane does not refer to a visual experience in nature—a visual experience that is part of the realm of the senses—but rather to a conceptual interaction with “operational processes.”²¹

The spatial arrangement of the picture plane brings attention to how...