| Mapping is everywhere in the arts these days and
for good reason: maps organize information and illustrate relationships,
and we have access to an extraordinary amount of information. Moreover,
technological advances are shifting the way we see-and thus map-our
universe. Probes send home pictures of newly discovered star clusters;
satellites can zoom in on individual houses from space. Satellite
photographs, like drawn maps, are now considered authoritative depictions
of place but to map every bit of information about an area is impossible.
Altitudes, terrains and latitudes may be inarguable, but what about
other kinds of information attached to place? What about subjective
associations, memories or the way we experience a place? Here, satellites
and precise, color-coded diagrams are useless.
Maps are representations, not reality. In Universal History
of Infamy (1935), Jorge Luis Borges wrote of a fictional people
who attempted to create a map with a 1:1 ratio--a map that would
replicate, not just represent, their land.
The project became so enormous and unmanageable it had to be abandoned.
With landscape, there are facts one can attempt to replicate. However,
one's personal experience of landscape is quite different. No such
parameters exist, even though experience is itself a mapping in
our mind--a record of our interactions with the world.
Mental Maps, an exhibition of seven artists at Dorsky Gallery,
is an elegant, fascinating group of works that consider the poetics,
politics, codes and subjectivities of mapping. Curated by Kate Green,
Assistant Curator at Artpace San Antonio, these compelling works--all
made since 2003--investigate alternative kinds of mapping. Green
was inspired by Guy Debord's concept of "psychogeography,"
a method of mapping that privileges subjective orientations of place,
such as memory and attachment, over factual graphs.
Psychogeography plots the landscape we physically traverse while
simultaneously charting our mutable, unpredictable mental states.
Such complex layerings make for fascinating images. In the 1950s,
Debord mapped Paris, depicting his personal thoughts and meanderings
amongst its streets. The artists in Mental Maps also use
the visual conventions of mapmaking-borders, arrows, graphs and
symbols-to expose the intangible, sometimes invisible degrees of
personal or social experience.
On the first wall, three meticulous pencil drawings by Augusto Di
Stefano-sparse images isolated on white paper--Untitled, Corresponding
and Untitled respectively. A delicate fence cuts across
the first. A wall with a courtyard comprised of hundreds of tiny
circles snakes across Corresponding; on the third drawing
looms a sharp, modernist skyscraper. Each piece is sewn down the
center in a long white stitch. These seams, which allude to the
spine of a nonexistent book, are a further meditation on boundaries
and borders. This series is a subtle but resonant entry point for
the exhibition, presenting different ways we divide and organize
space to form both obstructions and allegiances.
Adjacent is This Sour Desire, a striking,
thirteen-foot-long work of delicately embroidered organdy by Jessica
Rankin. Unframed and pinned to the wall, the sheer, off-white fabric
layered with images and text undulates slightly. Pale yellow thread
depicts constellations; bright orange outlines huge jellyfish. Green
fir trees and golden ovals--perhaps protozoa--are interspersed with
flowing currents. Text sewn in capital letters--blocky, un-spaced
and sometimes illegible--also appears in deposits of sugary cursive.
Rankin sews stream-of-consciousness passages like WORDSRUNOFFTHEPAGELIKEWATER
and IDEASRUSHMEMORIESRUN--ruminations not unlike the poetic exhilarations
of e. e. cummings.
Rankin's text refers to constant motion: poison runs through; words
disintegrate and are renewed. Language, like water, can flow or
be diverted, become blocked or evaporate altogether. Attaching meaning
to language can be precarious--subject to misinterpretations and
slippage like a piece of ice you can grasp for only a moment. Like
maps, words are signifiers, incapable of expressing the entirety
of a physical or emotional experience. Rankin's intertwining outlines
of the celestial and organic, the grand and microscopic, diagram
a small universe of fluid and fragmented connections.
Janice Caswell's House of Borgia
is a stunning minimal work comprised of a network of small nails
pounded into the wall. Nails also run in wavering lines over several
pale, collaged canvases, which float against the wall like continental
plates on the oceans. As with many of the works in this exhibition,
one is drawn in to marvel at astonishing detail. At certain points
the nails congregate, piercing circles of brightly colored paper.
The paper circles evoke population maps--the kind in which Mexico
City might appear as a huge red circle, while mere specks dot Wyoming.
The protruding metal teeth of the nails create borders that separate
or map a meandering path from place to place-perhaps the artist's
own path. The Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser once remarked
that he was more interested in the lines people create while traveling
to a museum than in what was inside. Such lines--divergent, organic
and unique--map the unpredictable channels we forge in everyday
life.
Matthew Sontheimer's Brief Flight Extensions, a series
of austere ink and "white-out" correction fluid drawings,
points to our habit of harnessing and charting facts as substitutes
for other kinds of knowledge. Hundreds of non-sequential numbers
are written in red ink, their small script precise and crowded.
In nearly every number group, a digit has been scratched out, with
the "correct" digit written above. Imperfection abounds,
even in mathematics.
White-out zigzags tightly across blank squares, charting the vicissitudes
of some mysterious data. In Green's curatorial essay, we learn that
Sontheimer created this code based on his father's signature and
an alphanumerical telephone keypad. These works were translated
from entries in the artist's journal during a period of intense
therapy. Thus, the baffling tiny red numbers secretly refer to a
narrative of concentrated emotion otherwise invisible to the eye.
All we can see without the background story is the focused charting
of information, revealing an obsessive desire to organize and thus
gain some level of understanding.
Maps also serve the desire to control, aiding exploration, surveillance,
colonization and, of course, war. In considering cartography as
a practice, it is difficult to ignore the disastrous political results
of arbitrary land-carving and territorial obsession, as well as
how often an attachment to a particular wobbly outline galvanizes
military action. In this exhibition, focused more on mapping as
a conceptual practice, the most expressive allusion to the political
uses of maps is in the work of Shaun O'Dell. His ink and gouache
diptych The Hunters Burial at the Descent into Maelstrom
and Westward The Corpse of Empire Takes Its Way links weaponry,
galleon ships, skulls, Confederate profiles, bells, trees, geometric
shapes and architectural traces in a composite of flowcharts and
timelines. An atmosphere of high anxiety is created, albeit slightly
relieved by cartoonlike graphics. Hunters, a black and
white drawing, links myths of America's founding to a disquieting
timeline of the arms race. In Westward, text is absent.
O'Dell adds primary colors in ballpoint pen, mapping a pictorial
atmosphere of history, landscape and dread.
Considering the proliferation of artists working with mapping in
recent years-from Mark Lombardi's foreboding flowcharts to Laura
Kurgan's enlarged and abstracted satellite photographs-it is impressive
that <i>Mental Maps</i> retains a sense of intimacy
and cohesion despite the baffling abundance of places, times and
experiences we all chart in each day that passes.
|
