The Audience

We went, my son and I, to see a performance by Zenon Dance Company, our premier local modern company. My wife and son went last spring, and thought it was fantastic. This time... it was mixed. The single piece in the second half, Danny Buraczeski's Ezekiel's Wheel, was really superb. it had flow, it had depth, it connected with the audience. The other dances... well, they had some lovely phrases, memorable pieces, but it didn't feel lilke they were paying much attention to the audience. 

I was interested to read in a 2003 review of Buraczeski's work:

Ezekiel's Wheel, which he completed in 1999, seems to have been a pivotal work: interviewed shortly after the piece premiered, Buraczeski said, "[That] concert was my most personal yet, my most vulnerable. I don't make dances for audiences any more, I make them to explore my feelings....But I leave the door open so people can bring their own lives in." 

Which is odd given my experience of alienation from the other pieces in the program tonight. Or it seems odd at first. But I think it points to a false way we think of audience, and that audiences think of performance.

In the pub sings I've been involved in the last few years, audience and performer are much closer together than most people are used to, I think. The setting helps: people just get up and lead a song, often from where they are sitting in the bar. There's ambient noise, sometimes annoyingly if there are clueless patrons talking loudly just outside the circle of song (or even, incredibly, right next to the singer). But that noise also serves to ground us: we are not in a temple of perfect sound: we are in the middle of our lives. Our audience are our friends around us. We are all part of the same group, and we are sharing those functions of audience and performer in a way that feels like a deep conversation. 

What Buraczeski I think is talking about, is that he is not saying what he thinks the audience wants. He is not trying to fill their appetite. And because his work is interesting, because the ideas and shapes he presents in "leaving the door open," it's like that part of a conversation. It's something we care about.

Where I think Zenon did a poor job in the first half, is in talking about things the audience just didn't especially care about—at least not the section I was in. It was technically excellent, but it just wasn't interesting.

Artists of all kinds like to guard against "pandering." We don'r want to just spoon-feed the audience. My yearbook quote from college sums it up (it's by Duane Preble): "Aesthetic is the opposite of anaesthetic." Good art in this model has the urgency of gospel: Listen! it says, This is important! We don't have forever to learn this!

Sometimes, though, the desire to not pander means we turn our back as performers on the audience. 

Good evening. Welcome to Difficult Listening Hour. The spot on your dial for that relentless and impenetrable sound of Difficult Music. So sit bolt upright in that straight-backed chair, button that top button, and get set for some difficult music.-Laurie Anderson

Well, OK, if you have a consensual relationship with a particular audience, where they know they are in for a hard grind. Fine. But me, I want art that reaches out not to pluck my heartstrings, but to grab me by the hand, to meet me halfway between the stage and the audience.

Why decoration is important

There's a piece of Dalia Varanka's paper on the rise of the "Plain Style" in mapping around 1700 that has been gnawing at me. I referred to it in my recent essay on cartography and aesthetics in Cartographic Perspectives, but I think it deserves some deeper pulling-out.

[FYI, Varanka's paper is not available online: it's “The manly map: the English construction of gender in early modern cartography.” in Gender and Landscape: Renegotiating the Moral Landscape, edited by J. Carubia, L. Dowler, and B. Szczygiel. New York/London: Routledge.]

The piece that's bugging me is this: why is decoration trivial? I take it as a given, something that doesn't need further explanation: form follows function, and decoration is an add-on. Flourishes, trills, scrollwork and so on, are less "honest," in this view, than plain, unadorned, prose. Manly prose—you know, like Hemingway.

See what I mean? This thread of appearance being false, of truth being deep, runs to the bone in our culture. And it isn't true everywhere: saving "face" is seen crucial in many cultures. Even in our culture, there is a long and deep divide which has not been entirely settled, between those who think God cares about what we do and those who think what we are is essential: in Christian terms, works and faith.

Outwardness and inwardness were a part of my formative pop-psych thinking: I remember M&M's being a popular metaphor in high school: the hard exterior and the soft, delicate inside. The astrological notions of sun-sign (true inner self) and ascendant (what you feel the need to appear like) also made an appearance.

That latter, though I do not believe in the functional idea (that when you were born determines who you are) does I think provide a way to think of decoration as essential. Because it says that how you want (or even need) to be seen is itself an essential part of who you are. It's not a "fake" thing you can change at will. Some seemings will fit you better than others, just as your true inner self is what it is.

Adolph Loos' Ornament and Crime posited that ornament was a waste of time, because fashion changes. And we have come to see outward presentation as synonymous with fashion. Being changeable, fashion is not trusted. We want our truths to remain on a single, unwavering course. That's what faith is: sticking with your allegiance to a person or an idea no matter what. Even if, as with Mother Teresa, you never actually achieve that numinous moment, you still get counted as saintly if you stick with a strict goodness.

But some ornament is not especially prone to fashion. Traditions include ornament, whether it be in religious decoration, folk dances and music, or traditional costume. Even when radical technological change steps in (as with aniline dyes and many fiber traditions), there is seen to be a deep well of sameness and conformity that is valued, even as it is all about "unnecessary" patterning on functional objects.

So why is ornament important? I think of patterns of tile, or of geometric grillwork, that I see when passing time. I especially notice it in bathrooms. These provide a place for the mind to work and rest simultaneously. A field of play, perhaps. They are certainly better for the mind than an utterly blank slate (or tile). We like to play off of patterns. I do anyway. And so decoration, on surfaces and tools we use every day, give us something to work with.

It's the idea of play that I think is the stickler here. The arguments against ornament are mostly serious. Ornament is seen as silly, a distraction perhaps. And I suppose in places where total concentration is necessary, it is. The question is, should our lives be spent in that kind of concentration? I don't think that's very healthy-sounding. We need to build in play, just to keep ourselves sane. Our lives can't be built so thoroughly on importance and concentration; there's a reason U.S. Presidents seem to age so quickly.

Decoration, then, keeps us young. Perhaps. Or at least keeps us from getting too old, too fast.

What I see as a deeper problem, then, is not that we need decoration, but that we need to build our lives where decoration and underlying form come together inseparably. Again, the astrological model is one I hold up: that the healthiest approach to decoration is that form and function are in fact one, that the object and the patterns we see in it are the same, not a core and an add-on. That the M&M is one candy, not two parts adhered together.

And this doesn't mean (in maps for example) that every pixel must carry inward meaning. Some marks do not mean anything about the core structure of a place. Sometimes, they are texture. But that texture is part of what the place is about. That paisley print is not coded with instructions; it's an abstract design. But that design, if it fits, becomes part of what you are when you are wearing it. And that texture, that added noise, as it were, even though it is not consciously spoken by you or even understood by you, is part of what you are.

I think this is the root of our modernist discomfort with decoration: we want to be in control. Just like the English Empiricists who promulgated the Plain Style, we want to exercise our conscious power over as much as we can, and to eliminate that which we do not consciously control. This obsession with maintaining an order we can understand is arrogant in the extreme. And in the end it will kill what we love, which is not entirely under our command. That decoration, that patterning we make, turns out to be an imitation of the vast, intricate, impossible to entirely comprehend web of processes that keeps us and this world alive.

Function and Beauty (In Defense of Useless Maps) - new essay

In a new essay for Cartographic Perspectives, the journal of the North American Cartographic Information Society, called "Function and Beauty (In Defense of Useless Maps)", I discuss some potential pitfalls and opportunities in discussing maps in terms of aesthetics. It ends up dipping heavily into some wider issues. I hope you all enjoy! All comments welcome.

Thank you, Diana Wynne Jones

Once upon a time, I was given a book. It was called The Ogre Downstairs, and it was about ordinary kids with the sort of problem a ordinary author would have given an earnest, well-intentioned plot to: they were a newly mixed family, and the two groups of kids hated each other on sight. It was more complicated that that of course, like life is: they liked each other in odd combinations that in real life might or might not be overtaken by their stories about how they hated each other. But in this story, there was a magical chemistry set, which made toys come alive, gave them the ability to fly, made you invisible, and all sorts of other things. And it caused misadventure after misadventure, like a fever-dream that keeps waking up into real life. Bathroom floods, strandings on rooftops, great heaps of toffee that threw themselves onto radiators to melt, a gang of ancient Greek toughs in motorcycle helmets who threatened to beat them up. Over and over, their dreams of Marvelous Things happening went bad.

It was a marvelous book, and the start of almost forty years so far reading Diana Wynne Jones' books.

Once upon a time, I met Diana Wynne Jones. Well, first I sent a letter to her, then bolluxed that up sending a second letter. Then I met her at two science fiction conventions, and I think I was the scary fan who might be mildly schizophrenic or otherwise just a little too much. Someone with the last name Kase, a Dutch SF fan who is a little overenthusiastic, showed up in one of her novels, and I know she put people she encountered into her books, not always in the most complimentary life. I have suspicions. She had a strange relationship with her stories: they kept coming around and coming true in one way or another, and biting her in the rear. She returned the compliment. In one of the pieces in her book of essays, which I'm reading now, she talks about how she drew on her life, but had to tone it back because "no one would be live it." Her life was too full of bizzarities to make a coherent plot (even a coherent fantasy).

Once upon a time, I read another book. It was the Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula Le Guin, and it was about a man, George Orr, whose dreams keep turning, upon his waking, into the way the universe always has been. His dreams change the world, and not in the metaphorical way we expect from Dr Martin Luther King Jr's speech. His unconscious does the most horrible things when he tries to make them stop, and trusts a psychiatrist to work on stopping his dreams. With Dr Haber's Augmentor (an enhanced EEG/biofeedback device), his dreams solve racism by making everybody gray, solve world war by creating invading aliens, solve overpopulation by killing off six out of seven people in a plague. Then one of the aliens his dreams created—a strange, sea-turtle-like Taoist alien who in his changed-upon-changed world is his boss—advises him how to regain balance by handing him a record of the Beatles' "A Little Help From My Friends."

Once upon a time, quite recently, I had a vivid dream where dreams (not mine specifically) came to life. It was enormous, like George Orr's dilemma. Lots and lots of people had died. There was magic elsewhere in the dream, and it was also scary: things catching on fire, and big books in sinister libraries. I don't remember how now, but I was working as a short-order cook and dishwasher, and there wasn't much left to do, because the world was suddenly so empty. So I got off work early and went for walk out in the hills, which somehow looked like an enormous diorama of hills, with little houses with electric lights flickering inside them. It was peaceful, and I felt greatly relieved by the thought of all those people in all those houses, just dealing with their lives.

Once upon a time, about an hour ago, I had a dream that Diana Wynne Jones had come back, in her full self, to visit from the dead. She said she didn't know why. I didn't know why. I realized I was supposed to ask her a question. We went round an round, chatting about other things than what we were there for, and then I half-woke in my real bed, and thought about her books, where dreams and ordinary life twine and twist around themselves, but (usually) all work out in the end. I thought to ask her, half awake, "should we live so that our life is as wonderful as dreams, and dream so our dreams are as vivid as life?" and she answered something like, "well, that would be a neat package, now wouldn't it?" And I remembered George Orr, and how trying to make his dreams follow orders turned out so poorly. That kind of balanced statement is like a bad reflection of the Tao.

No, you can write stories that make things come out in neat packages, but life is not like that. You fall in love and raise a family, but also get into horrible car-crashes and get cancer and die in real life, like Diana Wynne Jones did. And maybe you can make a neat, balanced package even out of that. Maybe your dreams will help you make sense, forget what you need to forget just to stay sane, create a narrative that lets you get on with what you need to. But if we're honest, the kinds of stories that deal with dreams don't end neatly in life itself: the neatness is window-dressing.

Life in and of itself doesn't make sense. Once upon a time I dreamed it did. It's not a coherent plot, and improbable things keep happening at inappropriate times. It's too much, and so we tell stories, to make it make sense. Those come out of us, a part of us that wants life to be fair, that wants to believe in karma and justice and balance. And there is balance in the universe, but not the balance of a judge weighing souls with certified scales. It's the balance of: here's where all the chaotic whirl of the universe has settled for now, every atom doing what it does because that's what atoms do. Plants creating out oxygen, animals breathing out carbon dioxide. Cold breathing out of the arctic, heat breathing out of the tropics. People waking up in the morning and seeing sense and nonsense whirling around them, then going to sleep at night and dreaming dreams.

Thank you, Diana Wynne Jones, for all the marvelous, maddening chaos in your books. Thank you for being alive. And thank you for the visit last night. It didn't end with a neat answer, like your books often went to convoluted ends to achieve. And that's OK. I think maybe that's what you came back to tell me.

I get by with a little help from my friends.

On Critique

This is a paper I gave (am giving?) at NACIS's annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. I hope you will find it of use.

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Critique is basically looking at something someone has made, usually in the presence of the maker, and talking about why it does and doesn’t work. Critique is a core methodology for teaching fine arts, which was my college major. Critiques have become a core part of NACIS, including the Cartotalk gallery, the Map-off, and roundtable map talks. Whether it’s with colleagues or with clients, we all engage in feedback. We all need the outside point of view that allows us to see our maps freshly.

However, I want to start by reading from a 1997 interview with Stephen Sondheim, from the TV series Inside the Actors Studio. For those unfamiliar with Sondheim, he is probably the greatest living writer of Broadway musicals, with his heyday in the 1970s and 1980s.

INTERVIEWER

When you were ten and your parents divorced, your mother moved to Pennsylvania and it was there at the age of eleven that you encountered Jimmy Hammerstein and were welcomed into the family of Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein. I understand you’ve said that if Hammerstein had been a geologist, you would have become a geologist.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Yes. He was a surrogate father and a mentor to me up until his death. When I was fifteen, I wrote a show for George School, the Friends school I went to. It was called “By George” and was about the students and the faculty. I was convinced that Rodgers and Hammerstein couldn’t wait to produce it, so I gave it to Oscar and asked him to read it as if he didn’t know me. I went to bed dreaming of my name in lights on Broadway, and when I was summoned to his house the next day he asked, Do you really want me to treat this as if I didn’t know you? Oh yes, I said, to which he replied, In that case, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever read. He saw me blanch and continued, I didn’t say it was untalented, but let’s look at it. He proceeded to discuss it as if it were a serious piece. He started right from the first stage direction; and I’ve often said, at the risk of hyperbole, that I probably learned more about writing songs that afternoon than I learned the rest of my life. He taught me how to structure a song, what a character was, what a scene was; he taught me how to tell a story, how not to tell a story, how to make stage directions practical.

Of course when you’re fifteen you’re a sponge. I soaked it all up and I still practice the principles he taught me that afternoon. From then on, until the day he died, I showed him everything I wrote, and eventually had the Oedipal thrill of being able to criticize his lyrics, which was a generous thing for him to let me do.

This is a different kind of critique than most of us will ever get. I'm not going to suggest that the Oscar Hammerstein of maps— I don’t know who that would that be anyway—is going to offer you the secrets of his or her trade. But I want to hold up this example for clues how we can position ourselves best to receive and give critique. Specifically, I think there are social barriers that often keep our critiques from being what they could be.

The first thing I want to call your attention to, is that Sondheim and Hammerstein were crystal clear about the field in which they were playing. Hammerstein wrote Broadway musicals, and Sondheim wanted to win at that very specific game. If he had wanted to write a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, or an art-song cycle, or radio jingles, Hammerstein might have been supportive, but would not have been able to offer such specific advice, grounded in experience. Same if Sondheim had wanted to write something new and revolutionary, to jump tracks. Sondheim wanted to perform within a specific, evolving but established tradition.

Too often in cartography, we act as if “knowing how to make maps” is a singular tradition. And there isa basic unity to modern cartography. But I make urban navigational maps as my primary specialty, with a secondary specialty making regional thematic point maps, in both cases within the context of a for-profit map publishing company. Pretty much everything else I do is a kind of experiment. I shouldn’t really be trying to pass myself off as an expert on choropleth maps, or mountain hiking maps, or geological maps, or any other of a hundred other map types.

That phrase “map type” sounds like it’s all about definitional categories, but it’s also about context—how do you sell the map, or otherwise get it out to the audience. Broadway musicals were defined at least as much by the business structure of producing a show as by artistic theory. I can tell you this kind of issue is central to commercial map publishing, that actual cartography is only the most obvious part of the job. Whatever branch of the map world we’re in, we know this, but somehow in discussing cartography, it’s harder to bring that element of our work—call it the business end, maybe—into our critiques. Maybe it feels like some kind of sell-out, the tainting of pure mappage by the finger of mammon, or pandering to the public, or maybe it’s because we really don’t understand who we’re making maps for—we just keep making maps and dang it, the public keeps using them. But that public is who we’re making maps for, so if we pay as close attention as we can to how that public are being reached, it should help us make maps that do a better job.

Our audience—who we’re making the map for—is not just the end user. Hammerstein’s critique, if it was anything like his 1949 essay Notes on Lyrics, was focused not just on lyrics as text, or on the experience of the audience, but also on the work of the singer. His critique of Sondheim was broadly structural: how to compose a scene, how to structure a song. Your map is probably part of a presentation your client or organization will be making to someone. It’s in no way shameful to factor that wider performance into your critique. It’s not a sell-out unless you personally cannot stomach the client or organization’s message.

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I was a studio art student in college as I mentioned earlier, and critique remains a crucial part of studio education. For me, the frame for critique was as much collegial as professorial, about getting students to talk critically about each others’ work. I want to mention an interesting book from 2001, Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students, by James Elkins. It’s actually just about the only literature on modern post-secondary art teaching. It makes the point that because fine art is no longer about following specific technical traditions—learning to paint like your master—the idea that art teachers can critique from a position of stylistic authority breaks down: we expect art students to find an original voice, rather than be measured on how they can speak in the copied voice of the teacher, or of canonic Old Masters. And so while art teachers are still teachers, and often lead a discussion, they focus in part on students learning from each other. This is an oversimplification of course, but that to me is the nut of the situation. And thus the title of Elkins book, Why Art Cannot Be Taught

We don’t really have the problem of lack of technical traditions in cartography—there is still a clearly defined broad visual language in our field, and the ideal of self-expression doesn’t loom large. Cartographers largely share the same tools and tricks. And yet in our critiques, in forums like NACIS and CartoTalk, we maintain a strong collegial quality: even when there are clearly newbies in the room, asking for basic feedback, we feel like we need to respect their work. And we do, but too often, we also feel the need to be nice. We don’t want to hurt feelings by putting ourselves in the position of Hammerstein, telling people that their map is garbage.

This is not as much of a problem with clients. Clients are usually willing to tell you when a map you made for them is not what they had planned on paying you for. The trouble is, they often have a hard time telling you what they want done differently. They probably believe they don’t know map design, and so they don’t know what is possible. Often they have no design background: “This map is too, you know, blah-ish, or too, kind of, hard to read, or just not PUNCHy enough.... You figure it out. You’re the cartographer.”

And so we find ourselves in this weird position: we are the authority on making maps—the stand-in for Hammerstein—this is why they hired us after all; and they are the ones with the authority of the checkbook who aren’t happy with what we are producing for them. And that can be really awkward.

More than ten years ago, I was at a party at my brother's house, and a friend of his, really insistently, came to talk with me. I'd never met him before, but he was happy to tell me at length why my map stunk. It was Professor Pathfinder’s Downtown Denver, and although my brother still cringes at the memory, it was a really useful critique, because it centered not around how I was violating some preconceived standards, but on how he had a lousy experience trying to use my map.

You cannot deny any user their experience. You can try to cast it as illegitimate or ill-informed—an outlier experience—but you can’t say they didn’t have it. And to me, that’s the best way out of the incoherent client critique trap: focus on their experience and how that isn’t working. You’re then essentially doing what I said earlier: working within a shared audience-centered environment.

But what about the niceness trap? Most people I’ve dealt with are not as clear and direct as my brother’s friend. They simultaneously want to be friendly, and think your map has serious issues. Critiques often come from positions of power—teachers, bosses or clients—and despite stereotyping, most people aren’t interested in playing the heavy with people they have a continuing relationship with. I think it’s the fear of being seen as mean that inspires a lot of forced collegiality.

Hammerstein was in his late 40s, a very successful lyricist. Sondheim was 15, clearly ambitious, but also clearly in awe of Hammerstein. But Sondheim was a family friend. He taught the elder Hammerstein to play chess. He spent the weekend there a lot. Hammerstein was “Uncle Ocky” to him, a surrogate father.

There was a moment at the beginning of the critique, and it almost seems like a formality, but I think it’s actually central. Hammerstein says, “Do you really want me to treat this as if I didn’t know you?” and Sondheim replies, “Oh yes.” What they’re doing is agreeing to play-act. By agreeing that Hammerstein will treat this script by his young friend as if he wasn’t a friend, they’ve set up a privileged space, an afternoon-long social parenthesis, where Hammerstein can impart some really important information. Without that parenthesis, with Sondheim being the crushed teenager and Hammerstein the rejecting parent-figure, would that exchange of information have been possible? I don’t think so.

And this is the weird crux of hearing critique: You have to be able to pretend the critiquer really knows what he or she is talking about—and you have to be able to trust them. And this is where that social parenthesis is so useful. It’s a kind of suspension of belief, from which both participants are released at the end of the discussion.

When you’re in a position of direct power—employer and employee, teacher and student—that parenthesis is really hard to come by, which I think is actually a great case for seeking outside critique. It’s hard to pretend that the person giving you the grade is coming at you as a total stranger, or that you aren’t judging your employee on their performance when you are in fact... judging their performance.

This is where that most common comment I got from fellow cartographers on critique comes from: “focus on the work, not the person.” I want to suggest two approaches here. The first is the focus on user experience. Then your judgments aren’t about you, the judge, it’s about an amorphous “them”. The second, which I like even better, partly because it seems more honest, is to focus on the Work, with a capital W. How do we get better maps to exist, in general? This makes the critique a joint exercise. It also takes performance pressure off that pathetic excuse for a map you have sitting between you. You still don’t want it to fail, but it’s failure is part of a process, not the failed summit of Everest.

If you put these two things together—the social parenthesis, and a focus on user experience—you come up with an interesting model that’s not too different from any good performance: the audience enters the performance space not knowing the performer, but being mostly willing to trust that the performer will reveal something important or at least interesting. The performer’s job is simultaneously to connect—to reward the audience trust with a sense that they are in fact on our side—and to tell us something new. We then leave the performance changed.

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And then there’s the critique we all desire, deep-down.

Folks who have learned the lesson of positive reinforcement will start off by telling you how great your map is, and then say “BUT”... And then you’ll get to the real point of the critique— what isn’t working and how to make it work. Other times, you’ll get thumbs-up for doing something which you’ve been promoting you do well. Call these “affirmations”, perhaps. They’re great, they boost the ego, but they aren’t news. They don’t change you.

And every so often, you’ll get a comment that’s like a little moment of grace. You’ll be praised for something that you weren’t really paying attention to.

I had this great moment on CartoTalk, a couple years ago, where Derek Tonn made some really lovely comment about my hand at label placement. Totally out of nowhere, and I had certainly never thought, “well, if all else fails, I can always go into label placement, because I’m good at it.” What that little unexpected bit of praise did was to make me pay attention to something I was doing and taking for granted. There’s a singing and dancing friend of mine who is great about this: when I first knew him, he just seemed a little overexcited about stuff, but now I can see that what he’s doing is pointing out moments we might just take for granted, things like, “Wasn’t that just a perfect night and it was so cool to see four sets of parents and kids each leading songs.”

Like I said, it’s like grace, in that you can’t force it. Having to find nice things to say doesn’t work when you just don’t see them.

And the key to seeing them is to give yourself time. This is one of the biggest problems with most critiques: they’re scheduled, and you’re in busy, get-it-done-on-budget mode. A really good critique requires a kind of mental state that allows the critiquer to wander over the work, and allow observations, both positive and negative, to develop. And it’s in that time and space that you can find surprises, and find structures and qualities the map-maker wasn’t looking for, and then suss those out a little bit internally before you blurt them out.

To conclude:

Some of you may be familiar with the TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. The frame story doesn’t matter here: the central premise is that a bad movie is shown to a human and his robot friends (they’re puppets). We see them in silhouette, and they wisecrack their way through the show, taking it down a usually well-deserved notch or three.

So we have a performance—the bad movie—that fails. Then we have another performance on top of that, a commentary on failure and how we can still enjoy a work that is bad. The wisecrackers enter the performance ready to mock, and we are happy to mock with them—it’s a comedy, as most bearable works about failure are. Most of us do not want to be that bad movie, and if the movie is our friend’s work, we don’t want to be the wisecrackers. We really don’t want to be in a comedy when it comes to work with people we care about.

But we are in a comedy. We all make bad maps, one way or another—or, to speak more gently, deeply imperfect maps. We all have to look at imperfect maps other people make. We don’t have to be wise-cracking jerks about it, but if we aren’t able to admit this basic fact, we’ll get nowhere: that we are all at least partly Stephen Sondheim, aged 15—full of potential, not necessarily knowing what we’re doing, wanting desperately to please and to be successful, wanting people to think we’re more than competent, and always in need of some good critique.

The Mystic Lamb

Stealing the Mystic Lamb, by Noah Charney

I wanted to like this book. It's about the life of the Ghent Altarpiece, and especially about two significant thefts of the piece, during the first half of the 20th century. The altarpiece was a hugely important work in my life as an art student—probably the most important single piece. My final comps project was built in triptych form, and used the idea of literal symbolism that is so central to Northern Renaissance art, and of which the Ghent Altarpiece is a prime example.

I wanted to like it, but in the end it just isn't a great book. Partly it's just clunkily written; it needed a development editor to really make it shine. But partly, also... well...



The thing I love about Northern Renaissance painting is how it is filled with specific, almost textual meaning. Every object in the painting is there not just because it looks good or happened to be in the studio when the artist was painting, but because it is an element in a specific argument:

The angel Gabriel carries lilies, a symbol of purity. He speaks so we can read his words, but Mary's words are backwards so they can be read by Gabriel. The water jug and basin refer to a common argument of the time as to how Mary could be both Virgin and a mother. And my favorite: through the window we see a Flemish town, but given where the altarpiece was placed in the church, the light falling on that city comes from the north: it is the light of the extraordinary, not of our everyday sun.

Every panel of the altarpiece, and of Northern Renaissance art in general, is filled with this heightened sense that the world itself—which the paintings mirror in finest detail—is pregnant with meaning. No object is "merely" an object. Every part of the world has this added glow of importance and meaning beyond its physical self.

What's sad about the final theft of the painting, by the Nazis, is how the painting itself was important to them not for its content as a meaning-filled mini-world, but as a totem: it was thought to hold keys to the location of relics of Christ's passion, and was important as a symbol of Belgian national pride, because it was so important in the history of painting as the first major oil painting in Europe. Also, the Treaty of Versailles had specifically called for the wing panels, stolen in 1816 and eventually housed in Berlin, to be returned to Ghent, and this rankled Hitler.

And unfortunately, the author falls into the trap of focusing on the Indiana Jones-esque adventures around the paintings, losing track of why they painting is so powerful even now, almost 600 years after it was painted. In essence, the author does the opposite of what the altarpiece does: it takes an document of extraordinary meaning-full-ness and makes us see it as an object.


I don't really blame the author, Mr Cherney. His heart is in the right place, and you can see just how obsessed with the whole sweeping adventure the painting has been involved in: a theft followed by mysterious messages one year, sinister Nazi agents who take it to a remote cave in the Alps the next... it really is the stuff of movie plotting.

But...

When does a fascination with a document become a fetish? What happens to a powerful argument when the references it draws on become obscure? When does the fact of richly layered meaning become a web that draws us towards the madness of Dan Brown-style conspiracy theory? How can we best look at a document so rich in meanings and symbols, which in their specifics carry little weight with us?

And for those of us who deal in meaning-filled arts, what does looking at such a piece tell us today about how to make our objects meaningful, instead of the other way around?

Sings

I love singing. I didn't really know how much I love to sing until I started hanging around morris dancers, who sing around campfires and really anytime they get the chance. Pub songs, sea shanties, labor hymns, grange songs... all kinds of stuff gets thrown into the repertoire of a certain kind of sing. That's what it gets called mostly, a "sing." No books, usually, an mostly no instruments. Harmony at the best of times, generally worked up to as the song progresses through several rounds of the chorus and the singers can fell out where to go. Or worked out over multiple singings over the course of years.

There are other kinds of sings too. Rise Up Singing is a very popular basis for sings: everyone gets a copy, and people go around picking out songs. The great advantage of book-based singing is that the selection of songs is based on preference: everyone gets to choose one, and they don't have to be good at memorizing to lead it. It is a much more democratic process than a non-book sing.

But I like the non-book sings best. It's been great seeing sings start to emerge as a regular, public, sustained thing here in the Minneapolis-St Paul area. Phil Platt of the Eddies started one in the fall of 2009, and I started another one this fall... so far so good. And Betty Tisel has been organizing others. I hope this thing continues to spread

I've tried, in sings I've been responsible for, a "pick, pass or lead" formula, where we go around the circle, and people have the option to lead a song themselves, pick a song, or pass. Everyone gets a turn. I've also learned from watching Phil a way of essentially emceeing things, which is useful balancing a set with experienced and inesperienced singers.

I've been reflecting lately on the shape of the sings I really love. The impromptu gatherings at morris ales (there was one at the 2009 Midwest Ale in a passageway outside the dining room that absolutely knocked my socks off), the after-hours sings at Old Songs Festival or Mystic Sea Music Festival, or some of the gatherings of morris folk at parties here and in Massachusetts.

Here's my theory: a really good sing needs spines, muscles and body mass. Metaphorically.

It needs spines: people who can really hold a song up as they lead it. Strong voice, consistent enough sense of notes so people can tell the key and follow along on the melody, and a good memory.

It needs muscles: people who can push and pull harmonies out of the melody. Interestingly, though I tend to try and do harmonies, I think there's another kind of dynamic that's in play here too, providing the song with dynamics. One of the weakness of many of the book-based sings I've been to, is that you lose the rich texture of call and response, solo verse and group chorus (or often, solo first line of a familiar verse, small group on the remainder of the verse, and whole group on the chorus). Instead, everyone sings everything. It feels flat to me by comparison when this happens.

Finally, you need body mass. It really makes a difference to have 30 people in the room instead of 10. For one thing, it's more forgiving of experiments. For another, the dynamics I talked about above are even more in play.

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The thing I've noticed is that running a sing is a lot like clerking at Friends meeting: it's not about ordering people around and getting them in shape to sing on key. That's a choir, not a sing. No, it's about creating a structured space within which people feel free to take up their roles as spine, muscles and body. And then, mostly, getting out of the way. It's a lot like being an emcee in general: you can't just give over all responsibility, because people get bored by the utter chaos that ensues. But on the other hand, your job is take the spot light for just as long as it takes for the next "act" to get it together, and then make the audience forget it was ever looking at you. And in the case of a sing, it's about paying attention to the song first, then the singer. People will let themselves be swept along by a song where they would be suspicious of being swept along by a singer.

I grew up in Pete Seeger. He's someone who's spent his professional life getting people to sing. It's easy to make fun of his "lining out" style, but he took what had become a nation of passive audiences and got them—a lot of them anyway—to find their voices again. That's why he tops my list of "people I admire."

Un-personed

I had a good exchange with John Krygier recently—thought-provoking as usual. It got me thinking more seriously about the experience of maps as performance. I know very little about performance theory, and much that I have seen I find frankly impenetrable. But I know a little about performance itself from having performed. So what I'm going to outline here is a framework that may well overlap what more experienced theorists have outlined. In any case, it's getting my thoughts down in a more thought-out form. Any recommendations of relevant and not-too-thickly-jargony performance literature is welcomed.

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The aspect of performance I've been reflecting on is the centrality of the performer. Humans pay more attention to (and have more cognitive tools to explore) other humans than any other subject. So it makes sense that looking at another person is qualitatively different from looking at something that a person has made. An actor is different from a stage setting, no matter how elaborate that set.

I've made the analogy before of cartography being fundamentally about the "stage setting" for a performance about space, that perforance not necessarily being performed within the map. Well, any serious performer will tell you setting is an integral part of performance (for that matter, so is the audience). The whole thing, the entire constructed experience, is the performance.

And yet, there is something different about the designated "performer." It's a person, and so we instinctively pay more attention to that person. I think it may be that simple.

To me, this puts a new spin on the whole idea of attempts at "objectivity," in which the biases and idiosyncrasies of individuals are intentionally de-emphasized. The idea is, while maintaining a clearly human-made voice, to partly "un-person" that voice. It's not exactly the same as what I'm describing, but it is a useful device in a number of ways.

First, it allows the user to put her or himself directly into the performer role. Thus a "base map" is like a karaoke track. It fuctions a lot like the "voice" of a recipe. I had an interesting discussion with my wife Ingrid about this the other night. She reads a lot of food writing, and she confirms that it is common practice, even when the prose style is very fluid and personal, to then drop out of that personal voice into the "recipe voice", in which instructions are neutral. The goal is to de-emphasize the personal viewpoint of the author and to put the reader directly into the driver seat.

Second, it allows for the creation of the idea of a "common truth." This drives many contemporary carto-critics crazy, because they believe the common truths modern cartography has been emphasizing are fundamentally false, leading us straight to the destruction of our ecosystem and so ourselves. But on a smaller scale, it is often useful to have available a "referee voice." It's why we've always had a role in our societies for judges of one sort or another. And by putting off the personal voice and adopting an un-personed voice, we make that more possible.

I'll admit that second one is a loaded bomb. Before you all pile on, let me just ask you to consider, not whether it is right and good for us to do this, but whether it is a basic human reaction to seek someone speaking in an "neutral" voice.

I'm not sure exactly how the idea of anonymous monastic performances done for the glory of God (the Book of Kells, for example) fit into this, but I think they do.

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Ther other thing that's been on my mind is the priveleged place of performance. Larry Shiner (whom I've discussed earlier) talks about the creation of contemplative frames for the fine arts (the concert hall, the gallery wall, the silent library) as being a big part of those fine arts distinction from "craft" or "artisan" work. Something analagous happens whenever we recognize a performance is taking place. It is different from ordinary social space: we do not expect performers to have the same relationship to those around them as they would when they are not performing. Some of it is a matter of allowing for concentration, but some of it is also that performances are specifically about "setting aside space" to allow for a different experience.

It feels very like the suspension of disbelief that is essential to fiction.

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And that's all the ideas I have energy for tonight. I'm going to call it good.

Over to you

There's something enormously powerful about a performer turning "it" back to the audience. I remember being deeply impressed with Peter Gabriel's closing of the Amnesty tour in 1986, when he essentially turned the closing cries of "Biko" over to the audience, and then left the stage. Here's a video from that tour:



My brother saw the Philadelphia leg of the tour, and reports that the chanting went on for several minutes after everyone had left the stage. Somehow that image gives me chills.

I'm thinking of two other memorable theatrical instances of this. One was a performance of Shakespeare's The Tempest with Patrick Stewart. The play ends with Prospero alone on stage, addressing the audience:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,

Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;

But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

What I remember is how Stewart's emphasis of "you" really did transfer the power of the magical play over to us, the audience.

The other theatrical event I'm thinking of is the finale of Nicholas Nickleby, the mammoth Royal Shakespeare Company production that came to the Broadway in 1982 (?). Smike has died, and the boys who escaped from Squeers' "school" are wandering the countryside in the cold. As the cast sings a gorgeous version of "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen," with soaring counterpont of "and it's tidings of comfort and joy," Nicholas (played by Roger Rees), who is rushing across the stage, sees a shivering boy huddled at the front of the stage, dressed in rags, perhaps already dead. Nicholas stops, walks over, tenderly picks up the boy, and holds it up to the audience, looking straight at them with a look that says, "And what are you going to do?"

Blackout.

I still get shivers from that one, 27 years later.

And this kind of theater is what I love about Pete Seeger. Regardless of his politics (and it doesn't hurt that his politics are pretty close to mine), what I like most about him is his insistence on "over to you" as part of his performance and all of his public work. It's like what we call "empowerment" nowadays, but it's not just about power. It's also about responsibility. And when we say "power," it's a specificaly democratic sense of power: the performance consciously gathers force and focus on the stage, and then finds a way to hand that force and focus back to the audience for them to carry it out into the world. I really like that. I wish more performers and makers of things knew how to do that.

John Bachmann

I've mentioned John Bachmann before, but I should note my new article, in the current issue of Imprint. It's been a pet project of mine since 1999 (here's an older version of the paper I did for the New England American Studies Association, from 2001), and it's gratifying to see it looking so nice. Here's a summary:

John Bachmann was born in Switzerland around 1814 and died in Jersey City, New Jersey around 1894. John Reps writes "No finer artist of city views worked in America," and indeed Bachmann's bird's eye views are unique in the history of American views for their combination of artistic technique inherited from European landscape drawing, in which he was trained and worked in Paris, and the experimental sensibility he had in constructing his views from viewpoints he had never seen. His career saw the transition from one-color stone lithography through multiple-tint-stone techniques into zinc chromolithography, and from printed views as decoration and commemration to views as promotional and speculative documents. His views reflect not only the changing landscape of New York City and the other cities he drew, but the changing landscape of the American print world.

If you want to see more of his work, a good start is the Library of Congress collection, which is split between the Geography and Maps Division (bird's eye city views and Civil War panoramic maps) and the Prints and Photographs Division. Other significant collections on-line include the New York Public Library. Non-online collections with significant holdings include the New-York Historical Society, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and the Museum of the City of New York.

Anyway, it's nice to finally see this bit of work done...

Bad Reviews

Something I've been doing more recently is seeking out negative reviews of stuff I love. Positive reviews all sound alike ("such a wonderful piece of work, it moved me deeply in ways I am only beginning to explain"), but negative reviews can help you suss out what's really going in the experience of viewing a movie or reading a book.

I loved The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The last few minutes left me bawling, sobbing uncontrollably. So I was really interested to hear from a friend that a friends of hers had hated it, had felt she was being manipulated, and that finding out it was the same director as Forrest Gump suddenly made it all make sense.

The point I take away is that any work of fiction has that manipulative quality to it: the author sets you up, the author puts the puck neatly between your legs. The question is, can you see the system of pulleys by which the puck actually travels into the net? And in the end, it's the willingness to be taken in we bring to the experience. What visible strings are we willing to ignore, and which ones just leave us stranded outside the movie, looking at how it was constructed.

Ingrid and I are working our way through Mary Rose O'Reilley's books. We've both finished The Barn at the End of the World, and loved it, and now she's mostly through The Love of Impermanent Things, and likes it too. I'm waiting my turn.

I doubt I would have read it without knowing Mary Rose from Meeting, without our friend Kit saying she was one of her favorite writers. And I fell for the book, fell into it, fell over it. So I went hunting for the negative reviews.

They were remarkably like the negative reviews for War is the Force That Gives Us Meaning: not enough structure, non-rigorous use of quoted literary material, and a general lack of direction. Which is absolutely right in both cases. Hedges and Mary Rose do not build rigorous arguments. In Hedges' case, his argument just builds in momentum until it's kind of overwhelming. For Mary Rose, there isn't an argument really, except perhaps an argument for sprituality as experiential, and the argument proceed not by any unifying rhetorical device but by the accumulation of 99 little chapters. Many of them feel like spoken ministry in Friends Meeting.

Something I value in what I read is a writer's approaching things from an experiential rather than a formal point of view, which is so totally opposite of what I do in my cartographic life. I enjoy the experience of formalizing and structuring the information (or more properly, coming to understand the underlying formal structure of the data), and of making that structure clearly visible and understood. But what I love to consume as a user of information is this purely experiential plunge-over-your-head-and-paddle-around stuff.

Interesting.

45°NE

OK, I'm plunging ahead with a new long-term project this month. I figure if I announce it, it may actually happen, so I've started a project blog (45°NE), and put in the following introduction:

I'm embarking on an experiment.

I've been ruminating for a long time about how to express sense of place in maps (I'm a cartographer).

For a few years I've been thinking about how to channel experience of place into a form true both to the objectivity-seeking values of cartography and the personal-expression values of the fine arts (I was a studio arts major in college).

And I've been trying to think of a way to use the 45° N latitude line that runs a block and a half south of my office, right across the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District.

After a thought provoking time at NACIS, I reached the conclusion that the way to open up that 45°N line to experience was through some combination of exploration (more mundanely, "fieldwork") and pilgrimage. In one, there is a specific subset of information one looks to gather; in the other, one is looking for an opening to (in religious terms) grace, the miraculous, the other... the unexpected.

So.

I'm going to start regular monthly traverses of the line, beginning at Central Avenue, walking to the river. I'm going to record the results here. I hope to do the traverses with a variety of people, and in between to contact property owners to discuss with them how the line traverses their property.

Here's a crude GoogleMaps base of the traverse (the blue line shows the approximate actual line; the red shows my estimate of a walkable line on public right of way).

Anyone who wants to join me, drop me a line! Probably the easiest way is via my work email form. Or my cell phone (612-702-1333).

Any and all advice or commentary is welcome.

The Tattoo-Rumba Man

This post has nothing whatsoever to do with maps.

I was a Studio Art major at Carleton College. I had a fascination with northern Renaissance painting, especially folks like Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, whose paintings are essentially visual texts: they are composed of symbolic elements posed to make a theological statement, within an illusionistic "window" into a sacred world.

My senior comps project was designed around this idea of art as text, based on texts and functioning as adjuncts to text. My problem: I didn't have a religious text I believed in as deeply as the painters of 500 years ago.

So I decided to write one. I had some examples of student-written stream-of-consciousness stuff I really liked, and some bits of text I was thinking of as kind of central to me, but it was my friend Adam sending me a scrap of text about the Tattoo-Rumba Man that got me going. I took it and ran (with his permission).

I still like the character, twenty years on, and I recently pulled out the text I wrote (it was edited somewhat over the following three years and then it lay fallow on various hard drives after 1991). It needed some tweaking, but I kinda like it, so I put it up on the web. Enjoy!

home.mindspring.com/~nat.case/id12.html

[After the fact, there was a scene in Strictly Ballroom that to me is the Tattoo-Rumba Man. See here and go to 8:20 on the timer]

Dance the map

So the concept of a modern performative cartography has been much on my mind. Mulling over analogies, I am thinking about:

Gaming: my favorite example of maps functioning fully as fiction. Just as we use cartographic maps as a framework on which to find our way around the real world, gaming maps form a structure for fictional play. But the cartography itself tends to be pretty conventional. The idea is to provide a setting within which gamers can comfortably play.

Theater: Theater actually works pretty well as an analogy for how cartography functions today. There is an artificial representation of setting, which is as detailed as the performance needs to support it. But the problem here is that in the conventional theater setting, performance is distinctly separate from setting. A stage set can be said to “overwhelm” a performance if it dominates, which it should not. This means that voice as an element of setting (or by analogy, of the map) is just not part of the basic conventions.

Performance: In terms of formal structure, the art world has a lot of potential. I and a group of NACIS folk spent a day with Steven Holloway out on Clark Fork in Missoula, and then back in the U of MT printmaking studio pulling monoprints (which was absolutely wonderful; made me want to get back into the print studio. more later on the workshop). Here’s my problem with the artworld as a whole: it feels quite disconnected with how most of the world lives. It’s a little like quietist tendencies in anabaptist circles: if the world won’t be with us, then we will be our own world. What art cartographies I’ve seen have been like dada commentary: pointing to the inherent absurdities of our relationship to earth and place. An important role, yes, but I am interested in insider as well as outsider perspectives. I want to see performative cartography as integral to a place.

Dance: There isn’t a lot of place-dance, which seems weird to me. Formal performance dance (modern, ballet, etc) are relentlessly placeless, formed instead around choreographers and performers who could dance their specific dance in any theater.

There are some extremely place-related ritual dance traditions in older cultures. I think of the 'Obby ‘Oss of Padstow, Cornwall, or the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. I’ve danced in American renditions of the dance form, and in one case (dancing Abbots Bromley at the Renaissance Festival in Minnesota) it really takes on the feeling of “blessing the place,” as I’ve heard that particular dance called. But the funny thing is, while a pattern has been set of regular performance (annually in all three examples above), there is nothing inherent in the dance that says it must be performed in that specific place. It may be more special or meaningful, but formally, ritual dance is as transferable as modern and ballet dance.

But again, it feels like dance ought to be a good place to start. Dance is so inherently spatial. It is fundamentally about attention paid and patterning formed in space.

Processionals: Parades ought to be place-based. They are in the same place every year, they are often organized for and of the community. But at least the ones I’ve been in are resiliently not about place. In Minnesota, the “royalty” of every little town goes and drives down main street of every other little town on the back of a float. Bands from all over come and march through, various Shriners groups do their thing... it’s fun, but it all ends up kind of generic. And it is certainly never about the space it passes through.

On the other hand, Catholic processions in Mediterranean and Latin American cultures are very specific, as they are tied to specific relics. There are formally similar processions in India (Ratha Yatra with its Jagganath carts, for example), and in Japan. And then there’s the Hajj.

Pilgrimage: The Hajj. Yep, I think we have at least one winner as a model for a performative cartography. Pilgrimages take place over long distances, and their routes are repeated so often and by so many, they become marks on the earth themselves.

Pilgrimage is not a modern idea, and while most of us make pilgrimages of one sort or another, They are rarely approached as such. The annual trip to grandma’s, with stops at that specific scenic overlook or that gas station. Some other momentous trip to a place of reverence (I’m visualizing a trip to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington). And there are individual traverses: the Appalachian Trail, biking across America...

Interestingly, the most compelling way of talking about pilgrimage in modern culture is not cartography but text, or film. It is through a voiced narrative that we understand this specific narrative. I remember a riveting slide presentation by someone going on the Camino de Santiago in Spain. The setting clearly was important, but it was the total experience, personal social and environmental, that made it compelling.

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Cartography separates space from experience, the same way theater separates stage set from performance. I think maybe we need to invent some sort of hybrid form that gives up the conventions of cartography, or anyway a lot of them, to allow for a real performative cartography.

One mode of thinking about this may be to turn the map inside out. Instead of attempting to dance a performance on a published map, make cartographic thinking part of a performance in the real world. The phrase “dance the map” comes to mind. Like processions to mark the parish bounds, perform out the lines we draw.

Over and out for now.

Painless maps and map opera

Phew.

NACIS is usually my big idea overload binge of the year, and this year was no exception.

Margaret Pearce and Mike Hermann did a really fascinating map of Champlain's travels in Canada, incorporating various kinds of text and map elements in a narrative shape that to me looked a lot like a cartographic attempt at Chris Ware's comic book experiments. But the really funny thing to me is how the whole thing felt like a script (Mike replied he was thinking storyboard, but same basic idea). It's like an outline for some sort of new performative cartography.

What on earth would a post-scientific performative cartography look like? I have no idea. I really am drawing a blank. But I think it is worth considering, and I willl try to suss it out here. I welcome ideas.

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One of Margaret's students at Ohio U, Karla Sanders, made a fascinating attempt at melding cartography with personal poetic experience of space, a poster titled "When a Mountain Falls to Coal." It looks at the mountains of Appalachia as victims of a destruction created from outside the region, as a sacred space desecrated out of greed. The fundamental problem I have with both the Pearce/Hermann and the Sanders pieces is that they haven't really gotten over the constrictions that cartographic style places on personal expression. The intent is clear, and the text is evocative, but cartography as a mode of communication fights tooth and nail against expressions of personal emotional or spiritual experience. It denies the role of performer as an identifiable part of its performance.

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A bunch of us went up to the Missoula Art Museum at lunch today to look at a display of Steven Holloway's artwork. Very nice stuff. Neat to see the observation notebook samples in some detail. I don't know how much of the change is NACIS's getting used to Steven, and how much is Steven's mellowing, but the detente between his art and the whole mappy thing seems to be getting closer. Like it's less weird. Anyway, enjoyed the show.

I was feeling a claustrophobic, and so went upstairs to look at parts of this very well put-together little art museum. I was especially struck by the exhibit of contemporary Persian photography. Lots of really powerful stuff. What really struck me looking at it after a few days of looking at maps was the element of pain. We don't show pain in our maps. Steven shows alienation from the land, but not (to my mind) real expressions of pain as such. A cartographic depiction, even of a great wounding of the earth like Sanders' poster, denies pain. It just isn't admissable as a mode of expression.

I think of erin o'Hara slavick's work on bombing we looked at at NACIS last year. Whole lot of pain channeled there, and in her presentation much of us was directed back at us mapmakers. But I want to see a cartography that permits expressions of pain, instead of accusing cartography of inflicting pain. I feel like we're aren't there yet, and beyond everyone's inherent desire (myself included) not to feel pain, I can't see why.

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Tomorrow morning at 8am a few us are off on an adventure with Steven to make a map from direct experience. I believe it involves wet and cold. More tomorrow.

identity grid

I was walking around our building's First Thursday open studio, and in the back of my mind, as I chatted with artists of all stripes, was the question, "How and why do they call themselves artists?" Not in an insulting way, but honestly what makes them different? And the best answer I could come up with, is marketing. People generally buy art from artists, so if you want to make your living drrawing, painting, sculpting, ceramicizing, etc., then you need to call yourself an artist.

I think it's interesting how in the world of people who make things for money, you can divide their self-definitions two ways: definition by what sort of subject-matter they choose, and definition by what sort of medium they work in. In the arts, this means you're a portraitist or a painter; in graphic design it means you're a cartographer or a book designer; in writing it means you're a financial writer or a journalist.

In any of these examples, there are conventions, there is a sense of commonality of language and understanding when two or more people of like self-identity meet. The narrower the common self-definition (financial ceramicisists working in terracotta mergers and acquisitions), the more they will share a network of shared experience and understanding. And the closer they get to having the same experiences in their work, the better the chance that their conversation will move from "isn't that interesting what you're doing over there" to "don't poach my turf." When two people interested in the same things realize they're fighting for work the same clients. Or the same tenure committee. When one or both of them decide the town ain't big enough for both of them.

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I'm trying out the thesis developed in the discussion over the Grid (in cartographic terms), that the problem isn't in the gridding per se, its in the reimposition of that grid back on the subject. Does that apply to identity? I'm thinking of ongoing discussions in meeting about Quaker identity, but I think it applies to all identity groups: Is the problem less with the identity group and more with when the code which binds us is then reimposed back on us?

We human beings come up with structures, codes, grids, networks, any numbers of systems we lay our understandings of the world over the top of. Saying we shouldn't do that because systems end up dividing us is like saying we should stop using language because we'll be misunderstood.

We also like to form community (or better yet find community, because its easier) around identity, to be able to say "these are my people." And it seems sensible then to put these two together, and to codify what it is that brings us together. Maybe it's a hierarchy (I'm with you because of a feudal system, or because we're part of this family tree). Maybe it's a creed (I agree with enough of the planks in your platform, I'm in). Maybe it's just cultural clues (You like chicken? I like chicken!). Maybe it's a bunch of people who all know the same songs (I know I'm not the only one who had a near-religious experience at a Pete Seeger concert).

But...

The problem arises (I would submit) when we then look at the "official" set of common-identity markers, and judge ourselves (or worse, allow others in the group to judge us) based on our adherence to those markers. To make the Grid the marker of value, not the thing itself.

Steig said it all

I was reflecting on the way home last night on the differences between a scientific and a subjective perspective last night, and how a picture of the world from the latter necessarily makes where we are (or where the author/artist/audience is) the center of the universe. And then this morning I was reading the Caldecott Award acceptance speech by William Steig, who was given the award in 1970 for Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. The book has been reissued with a fresh set of the illustrations based on the original watercolors, and has a copy of the speech at the back.

Art, including juvenile literature, has the power to make any spot on earth the living center of the universe; and unlike science, which often gives us the illusion of understanding things we really do not understand, it helps us to know life in a way that still keeps before us the mystery of things. It enhances the sense of wonder. And wonder is respect for life. Art also stimulates the adventurousness and the playfulness that keep us moving in a lively way and that lead to useful discovery.

So there you are.

What I was reflecting last night again is how cartographic maps and other scientific communication intentionally leave out any of the content that is personal, including point of view. As I've discussed earlier, the idea is to create a pidgin point of view that bridges the subjective points of view and personal biases. But in doing so by leaving out the personal and subjective, we also leave out of the discussion the "mystery of things." We depend on that discussion happening elsewhere.

It has been suggested that this lack of the subjective, of the "mystery of things," in cartography
is a fault. But I want to suggest that the problem is the separating of cartography into its own little ontological niche. Cartography is a part of a wider discussion, and it performs a valuable role. But is a role, and not the entirety of the play.

Exemplary cartography

A few months ago, I talked about "Experiential and Formal Models of Geographic Space," by David M. Mark and Andrew U. Frank, mostly in terms of its discussion of experienced vs measured space. But the piece that keeps coming back to me is the distinction between two ways of defining something:

Rosch and her co-workers discovered that, in many cases, all members of a category are not 'equal'. For example, when asked to give an example of a bird, subjects tend to name robins and sparrows as examples far more often than they mention turkeys or penguins or ducks. [...] Lakoff (1987) later discussed this in terms of a radial structure for some categories. He noted that peripheral members of different arms of a radially-organized categories may have nothing in common, except different chains of resemblance to some common prototype.

The ideas turned up recently in a discussion at Meeting about Quaker identity... we don't have a catechism, but neither is it an "anybody can call themselves a Quaker" sort of thing. I realized mid-discussion that exemplar-based definitions actually work quite well for Quakers: what we have in common is no one aspect of belief or habit, but a "direction" towards a common ideal. We come towards that ideal (in specific, it was suggested that the Friends Testimonies are the common center) from a lot of directions, meaning there is very little we identifiably have in common throughout the Friends community, but what we share is that common set of ideals we all one way or another strive for.

On the walk home today, it occurred me that the same sort of exemplar-based commonality is true of the art world. I was walking through our building, which is filled with artists studios, and has an open studio every first Thursday of the month, and as usual I was struck by the utter variety of presentations. What on earth do they have in common?

What they have in common is reaction/reference to a common body of visual creations. Some choose to imitate the physical form (paint, pastel, frame, canvas), others the subject matter (landscape, portrait, etc), still others the philosphical emphasis (beauty, truth, ineffability, effability) of some portion of the corpus of western art or of non-western traditions that are generally accepted into that corpus.

But as a whole, there is little or nothing one can say about everything done in the arts world. What makes it art is that it follows one or more traditions of that arts world.

What drives cartographers crazy is when artists dbehave the same way about maps: an artist makes something that follows some aspect of the corpus of the cartographic tradition, and calls it a map. But it doesn't share all or a majority of the aspects, or an aspect the cartographer in question feels is crucial, and so the artis calling it a map feels like presumption, or false advertising.

What's interesting to me personally is that I came to maps out of a desire to make something that looked like a map, not out of a passion for geography specifically. I was playing at maps, really, when I made my first maps back in junior high school—play subsidized by school time, but play nonetheless. I did a lot of making things that looked like "real" things as a kid: a friend and I set up a pretend company that published magazines and travel brochures, flags, and made models. It was a lot of fun.

So like artists who are trying to make something that follows the spirit and/or form of the arts traditions, I started out with a goal of making things that "looked like maps." No ontology, just imitation. But perhaps because maps are such an ontology-grounded field, I've wound up on the other side, grimacing at some piece of art that in no way functions as a practical tool, but which the creator claims is a map.

And they called me an studio art major. Harumph.

Maps and Violence

I'm still working on Steven's comment a few days ago. The thing I found so hard to digest was the violence implied directly to "the grid." I respect Steven's work a lot (sorry, part of my initial confusion was also not knowing who you were, Steven), and actually knowing he was the one making the response makes it clearer where he is coming from.

I had a similar reaction to elin o'Hara slavick's Bomb after Bomb: A Violent Cartography, which she presented a selection of at NACIS last year. Her art is a deeply-felt indictment of bombing as an anonymous evil: bombs kill without the killer having to directly face the consequences. Her maps with stains and wounds painted over them were really powerful stuff. The problem I had was her equation of cartography with the violence it enabled: she spoke of hegemonic mapping, of mapping as the anonymous-making of space. Maps as implicit in murders and bombings.

So here's my question: when, in general, are whole abstract systems responsible for the evil that people do while using them? There's a lot of powerful arguments for language (for example) being responsible for violence and for other perversions of humanity (think Orwell's Newspeak in his 1984). But Orwell himself was writing in language to make this point, and was not indicting language per se, but the control and manipulation of language from above.

Much cartocriticism works from the vantage point of cartography as the exercise of such power: modern cartography arose out of military and political power-struggles, out of desire to control. But one of the peculiar things about it is that while power has been the sponsor of cartography, the resulting maps themselves were in a sense a democratic, decentralizing visual expression.

One of the huge cultural shifts over the last umpteen hundred years, but especially over the last 500, has been that of lord-and-vassal relationships to citizen-and-citizen relationships. Of course power still exists and is exercised, but in the West only the mad kings and their followers these days seriously believe that God gives rights of power to kings, and that it flows down from them like mana. I find it hard to imagine a world in which my basic legitimacy as a person was based in my relationship to my lord and master rather than in the assumption that "I am a person and so I count."

Modern cartography—including the grid—reflects this humanist point of view, in that space is not privileged. We don't just make New York City bigger because it's more important; a mile is a mile is a mile. Kind of spatial one citizen one vote. Classed information are made larger and smaller not out of ordainment, but out of quantitative measurement.

So. Maps and violence. Maps, the grid and violence I should say.

I feel the grid. I am frustrated by the inability of my pidgin graphic tongue to speak poetry. But, that isn't what cartography was built for, and almost no-one speaks pidgin as their first language. But pidgin evolved to deal with places like New Guinea with hundreds and hundreds of languages: sure it would be great to sit and take the time with everyone we meet and learn the nuances of their mother tongue, but we are here to trade our goods for a goat.

It is easy to work backwards from the horrors that have resulted from some uses of cartography (and yes it is true, bombing would not be possible in a modern sense without cartography). But I would suggest the opposite is also true. In my better moments making maps, I feel like a native guide to a new place. I don't speak my charge's native graphic tongue, but in my pidgin, I can get him or her to a warm place to eat and rest. At cartography's best, this is true in general: it is a plain language, reduced to the smallest vocabulary you can get away with, which lets strangers meet and be cordial and hospitable, and smooths whatever business they need to do.

26 Hours at the Festival of Maps (part 3)

"HereThereEverywhere" is an art show. You can see elsewhere on here what I have to say about maps and art, and about the art world in general. But I should say by way of talking like a politician trying to eat only 30% of his/her words: the problems of the art world in general don't make it any less possible to create really great works of art. I think I've quoted elsewhere my college yearbook quote: "the opposite of aesthetic is anaesthetic" (Duane Preble). Well, there are a number of really effective cartography or map-based an-anaesthetics here.

Artist in the show are:
Jennifer Bartlett, Christopher Cozier, Danica Dakic, Brian Dettmer, Josh Dorman, Gisela Insuaste, Joyce Kozloff, Karen Lebergott, Mark Lombardi, Shona Macdonald, Adelheid Mers, Vik Muniz, David Opdyke, Ellen Rothenberg, Michael x. Ryan, Paula Sher, Draga Susanj, Frances Whitehead + ARTetal, and Ben Whitehouse.

Josh Dorman paints with a collage technique. A 2005 project involved illustrating the lives and selves of five Alzheimer's patients, which he did by collaging disparate images including maps into what are essentially portraits. You can see a short clip about the the project here.
The clip doesn't really do justice to the way he deals with maps and how they communicate. There was one in particular that drew over topographic maps, changing place names to those of places in the subject's childhood in Eastern Europe, which I found especially telling of the ways dementia rearranges internal senses of space and meaning. Neat stuff.

Paula Scher is well known as a map artist. Her typographic map paintings are represented by a Map of the United States (see this image from a 2006 show of her work in New York). It's an interesting exercise to me as a cartographer; her style echoes "outsider art" to me in its obsessive qualities. Didn't do a lot for me as an an-anaesthetic, but interesting as a map style.

Brian Dettmer does dissected books, and other media constructions. He had two pieces in this show: M.I.A. is a map of the Middle East with all the place-names removed. As a conjunct between image and title I actually found it kind of moving. Kind of a cartographic elegy. The other was a dissected atlas, all the mapping cut away to reveal an orderly three-dimensional puzzle of place-names. Not moving, but fun and cool. See more of his art here, including road maps with all but the highways removed.

I also enjoyed Vik Muniz's photographs, from his Earthworks series, enormous images of common objects (scissors, for example) carved into the floors of open-pit mines. The one that spoke to me most about maps and mapping was an enormous ruler. Apprently you can see it using a KMZ file available on his website (click on "Gallery" and then uder "2002" click "Earthworks"). A giant ruler large enough to show up on a map, where the scale may or may not be accurate for the ruler "portrayed". Pretty cool.

The show's iconic piece (the piece you see when you come in, the piece on the cover of the show's promotional material) is by Joyce Kozloff, and entitled "Targets." It is a walk-into sphere, covered neatly on the inside with bombed locations, mapped in anonymous style but in garish colors. As with any sphere, the sound inside is disturbing and disorienting. I don't easily get claustrophobia, but I felt "targeted" and was made very uneasy. It bears spending a little time inside, letting it get to you...

There were as many again exhibitors as I've mentioned; these were the ones that really caught my eye. I could have easily spent another half-hour there. Great show, and it's up until April.

One more stop, the show at the Encyclopedia Britannica offices. Nice work, a lot of contemporary thematic maps and a handful of examples of early Britannica mapping. But a bit of a sideshow.

I was sorry not to make it up to the Newberry Library, and sorry not to have made it down in the fall for some of the other art-map shows. Many of them looked interesting. But the trip was definitely worth it, and again I strongly encourage mapfolk to make the trip down to Baltimore to see the show there this spring.