Found my Maps paper from my Minimalism class at CCA with Beth Mangini. It’s got some relevance to what I’m working on so I wanted to post it again and read through it.
Alanna Spence
Minimalism
July 2007
Maps and Walking in Land Art
I’ve had a fascination with maps since I was a little kid. My dad was a real estate agent and our house was always well equipped with street maps of local towns. I liked the scale of them. The distances represented were something I could comprehend. To me maps revealed secrets by giving me a clearer understanding of a world that was larger than I could occupy. When I got my driver’s license, I spent hours driving around. I was trying to connect all the roads in my mind. We spend most of our lives living in fragments of worlds. We go from place to place, without paying attention to what’s in between. I was making a big mental web of the south bay. I wanted to know every street.
During the writing and research of this paper, I planned and attempted a 75 mile walk down the El Camino Real from my home in San Francisco to a friend’s home in Morgan Hill. I was interested in the experience of walking in an urban landscape, generally considered inhospitable to walks of any length. With few exceptions, most of the artists I looked into were mainly interested in walking and maps involving more natural settings. Like much of the Earthworks artists between the 1960s to contemporary times, many artists involved in maps and walking, consider it a cathartic experience. Walking compared to any other means of transportation gives you a different perspective on the world. You see things, smell things, experience things with more intensity when you are walking. Street corners, certain trees, parking lots, become pockets of memories. I asked myself the question, what happens when we take the time to walk through more frequently traveled roads? Will we still experience the same catharsis as we would in nature? What happens with our understanding of scale when we look at maps of familiar places, that we are used to navigating by car?
About Maps
What is and what is not a map? Can a distinction be made? Is that what draws artists to them? Maps have been fascinating artists for centuries. With maps, you can construct a variety of realities whose meaning, content, and scale can be shaped to fit an infinite variety of worlds or places. Maps can range from extreme abstraction to absolute representation (1:1 scale). Many Land Artists pushed the application of maps in their artwork to the limits on both sides of the spectrum. Artists such as Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Richard Long, Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer, Philip Leider, and John Perault have all shared a fascination with maps as integral parts of their Land Art projects. George Braziller, in the book Walking in Circles, from Richard Long’s 1945 exhibition says that “Artists are the mapmakers of consciousness and of the spiritual world as well as measurers and describers of the natural world.” Everyone makes maps. As children we drew maps of our houses, our families, how we walked to school, and where we kept our buried treasure.
Maps link language with place. Maps try to make sense of things, but they are always abstractions of something more real, sometimes to the point of being unrecognizable. Maps only offer us parts of the whole, no matter how detailed; they offer us less than reality. In Land art, Giles Tiberghien suggests that maps have always been “dreaming devices.” They construct reality more than represent it. They don’t indicate reality. They cause meanings to circulate.
Maps are also tools for humans to better understand their worlds. They are visual language tools that describe place. The map’s author decides the level of detail being described. The user friendliness of the map is determined by finding a manageable amount of information to present. The reader’s ability to understand scale and discern symbols also play a role. The maps author needs to consider audience. Land Artists play with the concepts of reader’s orientation in order to push the limits of conventional map use.
Time, Human Scale, Phenomenology
Robert Smithson’s talks about his non-sites where he brings in materials from a site, as being deep 3D abstract maps that point to a specific area on the surface of the earth. He takes away rocks and dirt as fragmented representations of the site. Since his first walks in 1969, Hamish Fulton has used photographs and poems in the same way. Each photo or poem becomes a representation of a single point or idea along his journey.
Photos add an element of time. Photos and words are presented in the same order as the walks have taken place. The viewer is presented with more than a two dimensional map. The artist tried to recreate the experience of being at the site. The images, words and materials provide extra sensory experience that a drawn map cannot convey. They become auxiliary maps. Focusing in on details of specific place or time. For Richard Long, Every piece included in a presentation is a detail arranged in an order created by the artist. All the pieces together create a whole and cannot be separated or their meaning and power is diluted. Maps relate to the piece of earthwork art just as a sketch relates to a painting. They are not equal to the work, but they refer to it. Maps are intrinsically narrative. They bring order to chaos.
We relate to maps on a human scale. They can be a description of human senses. This links other forms of minimal art, land art and map use with phenomenology. With each of Richard Long’s walks, he is taking an account of the world. He is part of life, not external to it, he experiences people, traffic, nature, weather. His walks are an accumulation of sensations and experiences and memories. As time passes, the work begins to equal life.
History of Maps in Art
Unlike other forms of Minimalist art, which often tried to break away from tradition, many Land Artists consider their work as a continuation of Art History’s interest in maps. Land Artists are certainly not the first artists to employ the use of maps in their work. Dutch painters in the 17th century seemed to have an obsession with maps. Many Dutch painters in the 17th century shared his fascination of maps and globes or maps are often found in Dutch paintings of this time. Vermeer has been labeled as having a mania for maps (Thoré-Burger). Mondrian too painted and used maps in his work. His earlier works involving trees, such as Grey Tree from 1911 show some of the first signs of his attraction to mapping the world around him. His later works such as Broadway Boogie Woogie, (1942-43) and New York City (1941-42), appear to be inspired by, and resemble aerial street maps.
Walking As Art
In Richard Long’s work: A Line Made By Walking (1967), he draws a direct 1:1 map on the ground marking his path in the grass. He is mapping the world by physically marking the ground with his walking. The path becomes a narrative mark that describes the making of the piece. The map and the piece are self-referential. We relate to maps on a human scale. They can be a description of human senses. With each of Richard Long’s walks, he is taking an account of the world. He is part of life, not external to it. He experiences people, traffic, nature, and weather. His walks are an accumulation of sensations and experiences and memories. As time passes, the work begins to equal life.
In A walk across Ireland (2006) Richard Long places a stone on the road at every mile, physically marking his path with dots like mile markers on a map. He takes pictures of the rocks, but the printed photos aren’t labeled. They represent the system of the walk, more than a particular place or time. Richard Long has a love for footpaths worn by man. Each worn path has a secret history, some as old as the human race itself.
“What we lack is ground. Elementary ground on which to place out feet. Complex and articulated ground to provide a foundation for our thoughts, to provide poetry and philosophy with a new logic. We need to start walking again. To set space in motion, reject immobility, identify rhythms, seek relationships, cross intersections, draw maps, bring out minds to bear on the earth, and repeat the migrations of peoples.”
-Matteo Meschiari, Walkscape
Art Not As A Commodity
The interest in artists of moving away from gallery space in the late 1960’s opened up possibilities for viewing art on a different scale. Aerial art, which can only be seen at great heights, plays with our perception. The world from above seems unreal and a kind of abstracted nature. Our eyes play tricks on us. It’s difficult to understand scale at great heights. Types of maps used in Land Art are often aerial views. From aerial views, the Earth becomes a graphical representation of its own map.
Hamish Fulton believes that art is how you look at life, not the production of goods. Like other artists interested in creating earthworks art, he is not interested in the buying and selling of art for profit. In the late 1960s he began taking short walks and hikes and making artwork interpreting his experiences on these walks. He still exhibits in galleries, showing photographs and poems he created during and after the walks. He doesn’t think of these pieces as the art, he sees the act of walking as the art, the photographs and poems try to communicate his experiences. Walking is sacred in Fulton’s eyes. It binds the mind, body, and land.
What did I learn on my own walk?
Walking along the El Camino was painful! I tried to do too many miles on the first day and was unable to recover enough to make the rest of the trip bearable. I made it through day one and two of my planned four day walk. Day one Stretched from Golden Gate Park to Mission Street, to El Camino Real and down to San Mateo, twenty-two miles in total. Day two covered San Mateo, Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City, Atherton, Menlo Park, and Palo Alto, approximately 15 miles. I’ve done quite a few long hikes of 20 miles or so, but legs accustomed to dirt trails are no match for hot, hard pavement. I haven’t given up on my project, but the urban sidewalk has humbled me. Walking on roads so familiar to me caused me to misjudge the challenges that I faced. The remainder of the project will be done in smaller, 1 day 10 mile walks instead of 4 solid days of 15 to 20 miles each. I found out I’m no Richard Long of Urbana, but I have a taste of the challenges he and other Land Artists like Hamish Fulton face on similar walks.
As long as the scale of the world continues to change, through advances in travel and urban expansion, I think artists will be drawn to the allure of maps and walking. Because it is such a human, phenomenological experience, walking will remain and grow as an outlet of expression for artists trying to understand and express their own worlds. I know now what a challenging road it can be to choose to follow the in the footsteps of artists like Smithson, Long, and Fulton. Their work is not for the faint of heart and I salute them for their efforts.
Bibliography
Casey, Edward S. Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape. University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Fulton, Hamish. Magpie Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 2000
Grande, John K. Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists. State University of New York Press, 2004
Kastner, Jeffrey and Wallis, Brian. Land and Environmental Art. Phaidon Press Limited, 1998
Tiberghien, Giles A. Land Art. Princeton Architectural Press, 1995, pp. 50-55
Braziller, George. Richard Long: Walking in Circles. Hayward Gallery