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.

Theological diversity

I started another blog a little while ago, to talk about Quaker issues, but I'm finding this discussion and that one are coming together and interweaving in my thinking and my life to a distracting degree. So I'm giving it up and just bringing that discussion over here. There's only a handful of posts over there if you're interested. And if this stuff is utterly uninteresting to you, well, sorry but there it is.

I was reading Joe's excellent comment tonight while gearing up for a session on "theological diversity" at Meeting tomorrow. In our meeting (and among FGC Friends in general) there's been a resurgence over the last decade or so in Jesus-centered worship and ministry. For those of us for whom Jesus is not the central exemplar and teacher, and who may have signed on with the Quakers to get away from dogmatic Christians, it's been a little weird. But that resurgence has in my experience been gentle, not prosletyzing, not hegemonistic. It has all been about individuals being open about the center of their universe.

To me it feels like the shoe is now on our foot (those of us who have held a more universalist point of view), to come clean about our centers, instead of using old hegemonizing, power-grabby, churchy attitudes as straw-men. The Bible doesn't especially speak to you as scripture? OK, then what does speak to you as scripture? Outward religious ritual isn't your thing? What formal, regular recognition of the universe and where we fit in it does, then?

Where this fits into the discussion of maps and architecture, is that I think it presents a model for how to carry that balancing act forward. The argument shouldn't be between objectivists and subjectivists. It shouldn't even really be an argument at all. The work as I'm coming to see it, is to theoretically explore how those two ways of dealing with the universe interact, and build practices that respect each. And that involves (as a cartographer) simultaneously respecting the traditions and knowledge we've built up over the centuries, and recognizing that cartography is (and when used properly only can be) a structure, upon which centers can be constructed. Instead of isolating ourselves from that center-building, we need to really look at how we can be part of the subjective, center-building, all-too-human process of Making the World.

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.

World Flag clichés

So I have a backlog. I've been on vacation. Sue me.

Adbusters has a contest on for a new One Flag:

The time has come for a radical shift in priorities. We are now faced with some of the most daunting global challenges in human history. These are real targets, worthy of our problem-solving skills, ripe for our intervention. Yet those who have the vision to rise above national and political boundaries still have no symbol to rally under. We invite you to create a flag – free from language and well-worn clichés – that embodies the idea of global citizenship. A symbol that triggers pride and cohesion, whether worn on a backpack, displayed on a door, or flown on a flagpole. A symbol for anyone to declare membership in a growing and vital human cooperative. We invite you to prove that design has a real role to play in the fate of our world.

Free from language and well-worn clichés. I like that. I'm afraid I really don't like flags, so the whole idea seems problematic. What is a flag but an instant cliché? And why are clichés such a problem? They are yet another tool for social cohesion: again I argue it's the imposition of that cohesion that's the problem, not the voluntary cohesion itself.

I am reminded of the annual Barbara Petchenik Children's Map Competition, which is all cliché.
Holding hands around a globe. Two hands cupping a globe. A globe itself: globes are clichés! The "blue marble" image of Earth is a cliché! So what?

Sunday in the Park with Joe

We had a lovely visit in New Haven with Joe and family. Well, New Haven was pretty muggy, but their apartment was pleasantly air-conditioned and it was great to have time to catch up with everyone.

Joe and I like to talk when we visit, and we managed to sneak a few longer conversations into the visit. Basically rehashing previous discussions, and I think (Joe can argue with me) realizing we were saying the same thing more or less, but in a different dialect. I think. Maybe. Ten days later and my memory grows dimmer... And those little kids are distracting.

Our main sticking point had to do with the idea of neutrality/arbitrariness. I like the former because to me it evokes Switzerland: there's nothing inherent in that patch of land that makes it "neutral," it's just agreed that it is, and so it functions usefully as a place intentionally outside of international alliances and conflicts. Joe likes arbitrary in part because of its root in "arbitration": an arbitrary decision is originally one reached through arbitration. But I think we realized we basically agree, that utter objectivity/neutrality is impossible, but that finding pidgins and setting arbitrary benchmarks allows people to work with one another.

Where the conversation really got interesting I think is where it veered into religion. It feels to me like a lot of the background to this blog is at root religious: the conflict between objectivists and subjectivists looks a lot like the conflicts between universalists and "specifists" in my Quaker meeting and in the world as a whole. To me, the point is not which one is right; the point is that both are necessary, and finding a Grand Theory of Everything should be the goal. That might look like nestling one inside the other, or explaining one as a social function and the other as a personal function, or one as temporally long term and the other as momentary.

Who can say...

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For jollies, I also attach a link Joe sent me from Archinect, trying to rethink the architectural plan, another orthographic representational school. A map really, of planned space. Anyway, some intriguing suggestions of how to turn the Plan on its head and bring it out of the camphor-filled cubbyhole it's been relegated to.

My only question as a cartographer is, where's the ground?

When usefulness has passed

I always come away from Steven's pages feeling simultaneously held to a higher standard and frustrated by something unnamed. This morning glancing through it, I got thinking about "usefulness" and how Steven would think about it. Thinking back to an earlier post about eugenics, and how a big part of where it went wrong was in thinking of people's "usefulness."

I ran Google on "usefulness has passed," and came up with an archive article from the NY Times, 1917. Mayor Mitchel of New York, speaking at the cornerstone laying for a new institution for the feeble-minded on Randall Island in NY City:

"True, eleven of the buildings on this island dated back to before the year 1869, so the institution, by the life of in the City of New York, was old. Those buildings, Commissioner Kingsbury said, had not been built as the buildings of the cities bf old, to endue a hundred or a thousand years, but it looked from the way they were used, from the tenacity with which the city clung to their use after they had become useless, that the city regarded them as built to last a thousand years, no matter what their condition. That was the trouble with the institutions on Randall's Island; though the buildings were constructed to last but a few years and had outlived. their usefulness, they were treated as if they were there to remain forever.

"In an institution such as this the buildings should last no longer than their usefulness, and these buildings which are being erected today, under this appropriation of $1,600,000, ought to endure no longer than their usefulness, and when the day of that usefulness has passed, because better methods have been found for the treatment of the who may occupy them, because better methods of construction have been devised and more scientific of treatment, then these buildings must come down and new buildings take their places that will meet the higher standards of a later date. That is progress, and nothing short of it is progress.

Not sure why I find this such an interesting piece of random retrieval, but I do. The backside of usefulness is uselessness and disposal. When a thing or a person is valued for function, than when the function ceases, it needs to be gotten rid of. Like the "feeble-minded" in the eugenics way of thinking.

Like outdated maps.

I have a bunch of outdated maps in my library. I like how many of them look (I have a particular predilection for John Bartholomew's mapping from the first part of the twentieth century, and for oil-company maps of the immediate post-WWII period), and so I find them useful as a reference, and I hang on to them. But they are not useful in the same sense that I rely on an up-to-date map of the world; the old maps tell me about ways of communication that have been passed over, and ways people thought the world could be looked at "usefully" 100 years ago.

Big American cities have a history of tearing down old buildings that are no longer deemed "useful." Minneapolis tore down large parts of its downtown fringe in the post-WWII era (notably the Gateway District). More recently, we've seen a movement to gut the buildings and refit them for modern use (like the building my office is in, a former seed company headquarters and warehouse).

But can you do that for information that has gone stale? What use is a bus schedule from 1954? A TV schedule from 1970? A street map from 1890? They have become relics, clues to help us figure things out about the past. They themselves are not renovated for present use, but preserved like house museums.

What about weeds, plants we do not deem useful?

When we have a task at hand, having useful tools for the task makes sense. When we have tools at hand, do those then make tasks? At what point do those tools them impose themselves back on us?

Thanks, Steven.

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.