Drawing maps (Part two)

Rebecca Solnit has developed a series of overlapping maps of San Francisco; she defines places as ‘stable locations with unstable converging forces.’ In particular she works on the premise that maps are about different interests. In her publication Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, she presents a series of maps of the same place, which can be laid one over the other, building up a complexity that reflects the way that cities themselves evolve around different sub-group preoccupations and interests. Her work is comparable to that of Mehretu, her recent ‘Mogamma’ paintings consisting of overlaid information taken from 31 different squares which became centers of revolt during the Arab Spring. Mehretu states; “I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency. The characters in my maps plotted, journeyed, evolved, and built civilizations. I charted, analyzed, and mapped their experience and development: their cities, their suburbs, their conflicts, and their wars. The paintings occurred in an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space. As I continued to work I needed a context for the marks, the characters. By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings I tried to create a metaphoric, tectonic view of structural history. I wanted to bring my drawing into time and place”*. Mehretu says of her paintings that they are, ‘story maps of no location’.

Julie Mehretu: Mogamma Paintings (All 4 parts)

 Mehretu’s painted maps partly derive their conviction from the exact plotting of plans and tracings of particular geographical areas onto perspectival grids. You can get all sorts of gridded papers and print them off to whatever size you want from here. Once you have a gridded background, you just need sheets of tracing paper to develop the layers of information needed to make a dense, convincing series of images. Some curved perspective grids in particular can make really dynamic spaces when used as the sub-strata for plotting out flat plans onto spatial planes. Of course Mehretu’s work is more complex than just tracing off selected plans and relocating them on perspective grids, she is also very aware of other images, mark quality and colour adjustment, as well as information density and how to leave areas open so that images can breathe and have spaces for readings to begin.

Perspective grids come in a variety of formats.

This Smith chart is normally used by electrical engineers, but of course you can trace off any flat plan onto its curved spaces.

Curved perspetives are more dynamic than one or two point perspectives.

Mehretu’s images of course never include a ‘legend’, they are free floating signifiers that allude to their origins elliptically, not everyone will be aware of the process that lies behind the ‘Mogamma’ images, but even so, because her working process is itself robust, the final images are very convincing. This leads me to the deeper point that I need to make in relation to these posts on mapping as drawing. In ‘Art as Experience’ John Dewey stated that the task of aesthetics was “to restore the continuity between…works of art and everyday events”, the difficulty however is to create an aesthetic process, one that can carry information taken from experience, focus it, clarify it and re-present it in such a way that what you have at the end of the process is something ‘convincing’, something that allows the initial experience to come through in such a way that other human beings can also get something from that experience. This is the old Aristotelean issue surrounding ‘mimesis’ which I have looked at before. See older posts here: here and here.

Therefore the challenge I’m setting is for you as artists to develop processes of working that allow you to communicate your experiences. Be these emotional, experimental, perceptual or derived directly from the inner mind, there will be some ways of channeling information that make more sense than others. Don’t just look at finished images, think about the processes that bring them into being.

*Julie Mehretu, as quoted by Laurie Firstenberg, “Painting Platform in NY,” Flash Art Vol. XXXV No. 227, November/December 2002, p. 70.


Patrick Ford (an ex LCA student) has been making some really interesting map work in response to walking around the city of Saigon. You can find an article on his work in the Interdisciplinary journal of critical cartography. Find the full text here.

See also:

Drawing maps

Mapping as thinking

Emma McNally

Nearmap Computer software that helps you map out buildings

Why do we draw?

So what do you make drawings about? In the posts I’ve put up so far I’ve tried to make you all aware of drawing as a broad church, a wide area of investigation. But that’s very similar to putting up posts that demonstrate that writing covers many styles and formats. It is very obvious and shouldn’t really need stating, but you have to start somewhere and one of the things that I was very aware of was that people had a quite narrow view of what could constitute fine art practice within the drawing strand.

I believe that we all have experiences and that what artists do is reshape those experiences and process them through a medium, such as a book or play or a drawing.  They use this process to communicate to others something that has been understood or felt about whatever the experience was. I am a strong believer that life is full of an infinite series of possibilities and that in order to make sense of these you need to focus and sift through them and only by constructing frameworks of meaning can we negotiate our way through the infinite number of possible choices that life throws our way.

My personal issues are centred on how media news affects me and how my everyday experiences of Leeds shape my day-to-day life. For instance this weekend I went foraging for mushrooms, I spent time walking through woodland corridors on the very edge of suburbia and found food to eat in the middle of January. Mushrooms and green leafed plants are thriving due to the warmer climate and as I walk and pick and draw, my mind drifts towards how I can make images of this experience and what these might mean. I get home and turn on the radio and I’m saturated with news and views surrounding the shootings in Paris. Both these experiences begin to fuse together and I’m aware that everyone else listening to the news will be forced to make decisions about how to think about fundamentalism and terrorism. I’m also still a lecturer in fine art. I spend a vast amount of my time thinking about drawing as a fine art practice and this too is part of my experience, this too will be part of what I’m trying to communicate, which is why I’m often looking at visual language and asking questions as to how and why it works as it does.

The hard thing for me as an artist is to shape and fuse together various experiences. When I was younger I used to privilege certain experiences over others, some I tended to use within my practice and others I kept separate because I felt they weren’t the stuff of artworks. As I get older I realise that all of life is open to being thought about and communicated about in an art-form of one sort or another. But some things are better communicated as a novel or a play and others as images or songs. Some things work best within a combination art form such as film or performance art. My mistake has often being to try and use one form when another one would have been better, this is why I would always recommend working in several ways at once so that even though you may be better at one form than another, you get a feeling for how the different possibilities for communication might work.

Perhaps the hardest question you can be asked is, “What is your work about?” but at some point you will need to become obsessed with something. When I was young I realised that I was obsessed with art and art and its processes became for several years the subject of my work. As I got older things changed but I would suggest that that is natural, the toys of youth are not the same as the things of old age.

So going back to my present dilemma. What do I draw, how do I make images relevant to today? My interest in plant and fungus life perhaps being something I can deal with using botanical illustrative forms, perhaps maps might help me identify where these things occur. But how to deal with the sense of impending doom I get when I turn on the news? This will take a lot more work.

I’ve mentioned before that drawing has many languages and I think that is its great richness and fascination. How these can be combined to create a unique voice or signature is something that only comes through in the making. But as you make, as you draw and work through its ranges of possibilities, perhaps it helps if you can accept the fact that it’s OK to include all and any of your experiences of life. So many students I have spoken to in the past have reserved certain areas of their lives as non-art territories and in reality it is often in those very territories that the richest materials for art making will be found.

Some of my recent walks have taken me past tower blocks, the drawings I did of them are now being processed and are going through an editing stage, whereby I assess how well or badly they communicate my feelings. I have to make work to find out what I am doing, but this isn’t enough, I also have to edit and make choices about directions to take the work into, and these responsibilities are of course common to everyone who wants to make fine art images.

The next stage will be to build these images into larger more complex visual narratives, ones that have an allegorical message that I want them to have. But that is my business and not necessarily yours, your job is to identify somewhere to start and this is often by focusing on something that you have noticed or come across already but just hadn't thought it worthwhile as an 'art' subject. My last word on this is to beware of art, looking at other artist's work has a way of taking you down certain paths that are pretty well worn, life is nearly always more interesting. 

See also:

What use is art?

Why it matters

Drawing Maps

The Saint-Bélec Slab, a map of a French river territory, dates back to the early Bronze Age (2150-1600 B.C.) 

Some of our earliest drawings are maps. Knowing where we are is vital to our understanding of place and action. Because maps are so powerful it’s no surprise that the military are usually involved in their making. A typical contemporary example being the 'Hebrides Range', a weapons testing zone in UK airspace operated by Qinetiq for the Ministry of Defence.

The 'Hebrides Range' weapons testing zone

Our existing OS maps derive from conventions for drawing topographical details that were imported by the British military from France during the 18^th century.

A page (above) from 'The Book of Practical Geometry' by Henry Fombelle, sets out the symbols necessary for drawing Topography. You can of course develop your own symbolic forms for whatever it is you want to map. You might also consider whether or not the process ends in drawing or in performance. Boris Nieslony and Gerhard Dirmoser brought these two areas together by making a map of performance art and its various emanations. 

Boris Nieslony & Gerhard Dirmoser, Performance Art Context

Using a folded sheet of paper to help determine height

Basic geometry can be done by using your body sticks and string and an angle measure, such as a protractor or even a folded sheet of paper and this can be a way for you as an artist to begin constructing your own measurements and eventually making maps from them. 

Looking along the diagonal of a right angled triangle

To get an idea of height, which is normally put on a map using contour lines, you make a right angled triangle with two 45 degree angles, which is easy to do by folding a sheet of A4 paper as further above. The horizontal length is then equal to the vertical length. You will need a plumb line to judge a vertical, again see the man holding one from his fingers as he also holds the paper taut. Then walk backwards and forwards from the point you wish to measure as a height looking along the diagonal until it is clearly sighted. Mark where you are and then you can measure the distance from your marked feet position to the base of the thing measured, such as the bottom of a wall or base of a tree. You then need to finally subtract your own eye level height from the horizontal distance and that will be the height of the vertical as well, as all you are doing is making a large version of your triangle and the bottom horizontal line will always be the same length as the vertical one. You can also use this method on its side to begin gridding up a flat area of land.  

The process may of course become the subject of a video piece, gradually the act of the map construction, overtaking the map itself, life re-emerging from its diagram, in a similar way to the idea Lewis Carroll had in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.

"What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I remarked.
"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"
"About six inches to the mile."
"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all ! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"
"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight ! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well." Lewis Carroll from Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.

Borges takes on Carroll's idea in his short story, 'On exactitude in Science', whereby he imagines an empire where the science of cartography becomes so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself is good enough for the emperor. Stephen Walter in a related fashion creates landscapes where objects are slowly taken over by their symbolic representations. He is also obsessed by detail.



Stephen Walter: Detail of one of his maps of London

Artists have had a variety of approaches to map making, Stephen Walter's of London are very subjective, and full of details, whilst the Fluxus artist Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Music for Electric Metronome from 1960 is a sort of map for a choreographer. 

Toshi Ichiyanagi Music for Electric Metronome

Dance diagrams

Dance diagrams are essentially maps of the dancefloor, this time incorporating directions for movement. Think of a standard map with actions added in.

In fact maps can be very like musical scores. Yasunao Tone’s  Anagram for Strings, 1961 has the familiar grid of measurement we usually find around the edges of a map. The measurement of time in music perhaps could be seen as similar to distance when walking through a landscape.

Yasunao Tone  Anagram for Strings

John Cage obviously saw the connection between musical scores and landscapes, his scores for imaginary landscapes illustrate that exact point. 

John Cage: Score for imaginary landscape number 5

Gwen MacGregor and Sandra Rechico’s 'Maps in Doubt' series track journeys they have had to make in order to develop careers in the now global art world. They calculated the total distance that each of them traveled whilst in Kassel in 2007. These distances were drawn on sheets of paper, one of them making curved and the other straight lines.

Gwen MacGregor and Sandra Rechico

They also produced more 'conventional' linear maps, this time making 3 dimensional constructions that worked across walls and floors. 

Gwen MacGregor and Sandra Rechico

The important issue here is that maps reflect a point of view. As has been pointed out earlier maps are often made because of strategic military importance, this view of Annan (below) from a topographical and military account of the state of the Marches, 1569, was made because the town commanded an important defensive position on the estuary of the River Annan, and it was therefore important for the military to map its position. It fuses flat symbolic imagery with attempts at representation in a fascinating way. 

Similarly in this plan of Dover Castle from 1752, the positions of batteries of cannon are detailed as well as individual big guns. The 'legend" on the left is another typical feature of map design and it can be used by an artist to add textual information into an already complex visual mix of languages. 

Drawing was a skill taught to many people of all ranks and professions, once again though it is a drawing done by a serving officer which helps us to understand how information was brought back home pre camera. This image (below) by Lieutenant Archibald Campbell of Fort Royal on Guadeloupe in the West Indies drawn during the 1760s was engraved on his return to England and prints kept in the War Office records. 

Precision measurement of a baseline would be of little use in a trigonmetrical survey without an instrument capable of measuring the angles between it and distant points with comparable accuracy. The instrument designed to do this, a theodolite, is essentially a rotating telescope mounted on a circular scale.

The 'Great Theoldite' was eventually delivered to the Board of Ordnance in July of 1787. Three feet in diameter, it weighed 200 pounds and was transported in its own four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage. The magnificent brass and wood instrument is seen here in an illustration drawn by Lieutenant Thomas Vincent Reynolds for a presentation to the Royal Society by William Roy in 1790.

Drawing was a key tool often used as it still is today very technically. That technical precision was what Duchamp called 'dry' drawing. Compare his technical ideas for artworks with the image above and a more contemporary engineering drawing below. 

Duchamp drawings for the large glass

A technical drawing printed off using a 'blueprint' process

Duchamp: Network of Stoppages 

Network of Stoppages contrasts three representational systems: traditional figuration, chance operations, and the diagram, mapping the world without picturing it. Duchamp pointed to what he called the casting of "Pataphysical doubt" on the viewer. Duchamp introduces the idea of working conceptually, and all maps are conceptual representations, which is why he is so interested in them, as well as other more scientific means of representation, such as technical drawing. 

Royal support for the advancement of science was vital during the 17th and 18th century, these three views below of the Royal Observatory in Paris, 1705 demonstrating how important scientific measurement was becoming at the time. Of course as images they are very interesting too and they remind me of the contemporary work of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin the paper architects. 

Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin

Brodsky and Utkin had an exhibition at Tate Modern recently and their large scale etchings use many of the conventions of scientific illustration from the 18th century. By looking backwards at older traditions artists can re-ignite a fresh engagement with the world. In this case Brodsky and Utkin are able to give conviction to a contemporary fantasy by using a language that used to be used for scientific purposes. (See)

The precision and control that early map makers used to embed within their development process is demonstrated in this image below of the 4 stages of development of an OS map. 

Ordnance Survey maps were produced in four stages. From their field notebooks, surveyors made a rough or 'foul' plan. This first draft was followed by an intermediate or 'proof' plan, which was carefully checked for accuracy.

 A 'fair plan was then made at the reduced scale of one inch to the mile, sometimes with colouring. From this fair plan, a copper plate was engraved printing the finished map.

I'm fascinated myself with the relationship between maps, direct observation and memory, some of my own drawings (below) being an attempt to fuse together these very different ways of seeing. 

Marking territory is of course something all animals do and one way to begin thinking about mapping an area is to simply begin by making marks that sign that you are here. The images below are the marks of bears doing the same thing. This takes us back to a much earlier post on traces and marks of passage. This is perhaps where all drawing languages begin, making a sign that 'I was here'.  See post on mimesis, and how drawing languages evolve.

Is this so different to a bear marking out territory? 

On Kawara used to mark out on a map where he went everyday, in a similar way to how he dealt with recording time. These simple ink on photocopy drawings began to have more gravitas the more he did. This sequence was of nearly 4,000 drawings.

On Kawara: New York from 1968 to 79

Ink on photocopy

Useful links

Map art exhibition (including one of my own pieces)

Artist combining various mapping type ideas

Map of Leeds public Art

Handmaps 

Tate Art Maps project 

An exhibition of maps

RIP Cabu, Charb, Tignous and Wolinski

RIP Cabu, Charb, Tignous and Wolinski 

The drawing community is that much poorer today. In case you have never seen their work the images below are the work of four artists killed today by a terrorist attack.

Cabu

Tignous

Wolinski

Charb

The drawing community has also answered back.

Steve Bell also comments on making a response here

"I want to be cremated. I said to my wife, you throw the ashes in the toilet so I see your ass every day."  Wolinski

These cartoonists were often offensive, racist and sexist, but satire can be like that and it has to be understood as a particular type of voice, that operates within a clearly understood framework. If you buy Private Eye you know you are going to read and look at a publication that operates with a sharply critical lens. If it offends you don't buy it. Charlie Hebdo although extreme in many of its views, operates under the umbrella of freedom of speech, and although we all have a responsibility to think about how our words and images might affect others, however difficult to digest a voice might be, murder is wrong. The worst thing is silence. We have to raise our voice in protest or we become complicit.
Joe Sacco points towards the complexity and difficulty that the situation raises below, but what is most important is that he addresses the issue, he has his say and in saying it he reaffirms our right to free speech.

Perhaps the four panels below are the most threatening to those who believe.

Cartoonists also live outside the Western hegemony.

Sudanese artist Khalid Albaih, from Aljazeera.com

Mr Fish perhaps has his eye on the bigger picture.

Yates summed up the dilemma we face with his poem 'The Second Coming'. As the world moves towards self-destruction, those who should stand up against the coming tide are too full of common sense and small decency to make a committed stand and those who are easily swayed by fanatic ideals become passionate killers.  

Yates: The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

A line has been drawn.

Drawings are sometimes far more articulate than words.

Jean Jullien has given us this.

See: http://www.jeanjullien.com