MFA Thought Paper
April 2008
“The map, and map-derived art, is in itself fundamentally an overlay – simultaneously a place, a journey, and a mental concept; abstract and figurative; remote and intimate. Maps are like ‘stills’ of voyages, stasis laid on motion. Our current fascination with them may have something to do with our need for a meaningful overview, for a way to oversee and understand our location.”1
My interest in maps reaches far back to my childhood. As an adolescent I would spend hours poring over road and trail maps, creating detailed plans for trips that would more often than not never become realities. I can remember planning elaborate daily schedules for vacations to places like Glacier National Park in Montana and Baxter State Park in Maine, studying the maps and guidebooks closely and writing out timetables so that we could squeeze as much exploration as possible out of every day. I would use the contour lines of a map to attempt to determine the steepness and overall difficulty of a trail and would adapt the timetables accordingly. The destination for most of these hikes and trips was a prominent view or scenic overlook; these, to me, would make the trip worthwhile. These “trips on paper” were idealized vacations, plans not affected by forces such as weather, delays, or fatigue. The only factors that mattered were distance, time, and destination.
I still use maps to plan hikes and trips today, but hopefully I am now a bit more realistic about the expectations. However I often continue to want to idealize the landscape, which has led to years of emulating photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Not only did they photograph in the beautiful, exotic locales I had always hoped (and in some cases, planned) to visit, but their images of Yosemite and the Western U.S. amplified the romantic qualities of these landscapes and turned them into the sublime. I have never been to the West, but I have spent a great deal of time in places where the spiritual precursors to these photographers, the Hudson River School of artists, painted their sublime landscapes. I photograph in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Catskill Mountains of New York, and I often find myself drawn to vistas that share this romantic quality.
If contemporary art has taught us anything, however, it is that this style of landscape photography, or any photography for that matter, is inherently a lie. Even when a landscape photographer intentionally strays from the conventions of composition and form, as in the case of someone like Lee Friedlander, the rectangular frame of the photographic format automatically forces the artist to make choices about what is to be included in the image. What is behind the photographer? What is directly above and below? What time, and on what date, was the photograph taken? All of these potential unknowns add a crucial layer of uncertainty that makes the photograph a compelling image to look at.
Similarly, a map attempts to show the absolute truth but falls short no matter how hard it may try. Denis Wood states, “No map can show everything. Could it, it would no more than reproduce the world, which, without the map, we already have. It is only its selection from the world’s overwhelming richness that justifies the map.”2 However, Wood’s statement is only a part of the paradox. While a map shows less than what actually exists for practical reasons – the absence of trees, stoplights, and telephone poles on a road map, for example – it also shows more than a person living on earth can see at any one time. The overhead, birds-eye view of a typical map is not affected by walls, trees, hills, or the myriad of other obstacles that block our standard, gravity-enforced view of the world. One can see the topography of an area as a whole, which creates a new relationship to that area. This information helps us to imagine what exists around that hillside, behind that tree, or even underneath our feet.
I am exploring the issue of truth in the representation, and knowledge, of the landscape as it is recorded in photography and maps, through a series of artwork. Poring through my negatives of photographs taken in the White Mountains, I have begun to search for images where 1) I can locate on a map with near exactitude where I was standing when the photograph was taken, and 2) a great expanse of the landscape is visible. I am studying these photographs closely to determine with as much accuracy as possible what sections of the appropriate US Geological Survey topographical map can be seen in the image. Using this information, I then block out all areas on the map in black paint that are not visible in the photograph. When the photograph and the altered map are juxtaposed, the respective difficulties that each medium has with the notion of truth are revealed.
“To ask for a map is to say, ‘Tell me a story.’”3
Not all mapmakers create what they may consider art, but many artists make maps. Peter Turchi, an author and teacher, argues in his book, Maps of the Imagination, that writing is a form of mapmaking because writers need to know how to lead a reader from Point A to Point B. There are many visual artists who have used maps directly in their work, or have taken scientific elements from them. Jasper Johns incorporated maps of the United States in some of his paintings. Architect and artist Maya Lin explored maps and topography in great detail for her recent Systematic Landscapes exhibition. Lin utilized computer mapmaking technology to create sculptures in a gallery setting that spoke both to the landscape and the systems humans use to understand it. Other artists use maps to understand the story of their own lives or to create new realities. Katherine Harmon compiled many examples of these kinds of maps made by artists such as William Wegman and Claes Oldenberg in her book, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. By appropriating the symbols and techniques of mapmakers, all of the artists listed here create new meanings and stories that relate to traditional maps but add a conceptual layer to them.
The recent event that sparked my new interest in maps and mapping was my October trip to Gettysburg, where I lived as a child. There I was reintroduced to a style of map that is familiar to any school student in a social studies class: the battlefield map. One of the key methods used by people to understand the movements of troops and the strategies used during battle are maps that reduce the soldiers, sometimes hundreds or thousands of troops, to simple colored rectangles and/or arrows. These abstract symbols quickly come to be understood by the viewer, or reader, as people and events within the story of the map. The rectangles (often colored red and blue, especially in Civil War maps), become the people participating in the battle, and the arrows not only depict the direction traveled by the troops but are also understood as representing a particular span of time. Once the symbols are deciphered, a viewer can quickly begin to see which group is attacking, which group is defending, and perhaps most importantly, who is winning. Therefore, these battlefield maps are quite effective in telling stories, as they give us setting, important characters, conflict, and a sense of the passing of time.
The conquering and defense of territory has a long history in the Western world that I need not detail here. It is sufficed to say that this conflict comes in both grand and small scales, from the invasion of entire countries to a homeowner’s battle with a neighbor’s curious dog. During my lifetime I have lived in many different places, rarely attaining a true sense of home in any of them. Some of these places I lived in for ten years or more; others, only a few months. Regardless of the length of time, there was a lingering sense in all of these places that my existence there would be temporary, that I would be moving on at a moment’s notice. Part of this feeling was due to a natural bit of wanderlust on my part, but I also felt a sense of various outside forces threatening to push me away from my recent “claim.” I have begun to play with this phenomenon in a series of artwork called Personal Conquests. “Play” is a carefully chosen word here, because children play War from an early age. Forts are constructed from snow or wooden boards and are fiercely defended by the kids who claim them. What begins as a game can sometimes turn ugly and bring out as much raw anger and emotion that a real war, waged by adults, can generate. The artworks I am creating, from a conceptual standpoint, are barely more sophisticated than one of these childhood battles. I am making a series of maps in which I “attack” and “defend” the places I have lived during my lifetime. I first traced on mulberry paper the contour lines from USGS topographical maps that correspond to the regions where my homes were, including Littlestown, PA, Augusta, ME, and Crawford Notch, NH. Then, using the lay of the land as a guide, I laid out battle strategies for my imaginary troops on a separate sheet of paper. Troops in red attack and attempt to conquer; troops in blue defend their home. I plan to attach these two sheets together using a thin layer of encaustic wax, creating a translucent effect. Because these fictional stories of battles are depicted through maps (and because they will be sealed in wax), they will have an air of authenticity to them despite their complete absurdity.
The two projects of mine that I have discussed in this paper have something in common other than the use of maps. They are both grounded in, and taken from, the places that have been important to me over the years. Places that I have called home, and the places where I actually feel at home (there is a difference) are the subjects of these artworks. I am combining the nostalgic and the scientific, the fictional and the real, in my work. Both are valid ways of perceiving and by combining them a rich – if complicated – method of understanding place can be achieved.
1. Lucy Lippard, Overlay (New York: The New Press, 1983), 122.
2. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York: Guildord 1992), quoted in Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (Texas: Trinity University Press, 2004), 40.
3.Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (Texas: Trinity University Press 2004), 11.
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