cultural cartography maps and mapping in cultural

CULTURAL CARTOGRAPHY : MAPS AND MAPPING IN CULTURALGEOGRAPHY Denis Cosgrove Armand Colin | Annales de géographie 2008/2 - n° 660-661pages 159 à 178

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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Cosgrove Denis, « Cultural cartography : maps and mapping in cultural geography »,

Annales de géographie, 2008/2 n° 660-661, p. 159-178. DOI : 10.3917/ag.660.0159

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Ann. Géo., n° 660-661, 2008, pages 159-178, © Armand Colin

Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography

Les cartes et la cartographie en géographie culturelle

Denis Cosgrove

UCLA

Abstract

Over the past three decades, significant shifts in both the theory and practice ofcartography and indeed in the definition of the map itself have transformed therole of mapping within geography, while maps and map making have becomea focus for important contemporary connections between cultural geographyand various art practices. This essay reviews these developments, paying specialattention to Anglophone examples. The critique of cartography’s claims to sci-ence and revisionist art historical scholarship are first discussed, followed bycomments on the changing relations between geography and cartography andthe impacts of new technology on map making and use as these have beendemocratised through virtual cartographies. Growing artistic interest inresearching and documenting spatial and environmental questions that involveuse of many of these mapping practices is set in its historical context and relatedto geography’s changing academic practices.

Résumé

Au cours des trois dernières décennies, des tournants importants se sont produitstant dans la pratique cartographique que dans les théories qui la concernent, et quiont transformé le rôle de la cartographie en géographie, alors même que la fabri-cation des cartes faisait l’objet d’études qui font ressortir les liens actuels existantentre la géographie culturelle et différentes pratiques artistiques. Le présent essai sepenche sur ces développements en portant une attention particulière au cas anglo-phone. La critique de la prétention scientifique de la cartographique et l’approchehistorique révisionniste de l’art seront d’abord discutées, suivront des remarquessur les relations changeantes entre la géographie et la cartographie, ainsi que surl’impact des nouvelles technologies sur la fabrication et l’usage des cartes commeon peut s’en rendre compte par la généralisation des cartographies virtuelles. Ladimension artistique de la recherche et de la documentation sur les questions spa-tiales et environnementales qui ont recours à ces nouvelles cartographies, estreplacée dans son contexte historique et est mise en relation avec les changementssurvenus récemment dans les pratiques géographiques.

Key-words

Cultural geography, cartography, map, mapping, map art, site specific art, LandArt, history of cartography.

Mots-clés

Géographie culturelle, cartographie, carte, art et cartes, site d’art, art naturel,histoire de la cartographie.

In November 2001 the American artist Laura Kurgan produced andfreely distributed to visitors at the site of the recently destroyed WorldTrade Center in lower Manhattan a map plotting the events of 9/11, itsimpacts on the surrounding streets and buildings, and the recovery acti-vities then underway (fig. 1). The map was updated and again freely

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distributed in March 2002. Initially produced within two months of thecatastrophe, when the site was still being actively cleared, human remainsbeing recovered and identified, and the city still deeply traumatized, themap responded to a specific, practical need. High fences had been cons-tructed around the destroyed area, leaving only a small number of viewingstands from which it could be observed. Given the scale of the site and thetotality of destruction, most visitors could make little sense of what theywere seeing. Kurgan’s map was designed to help them do so. Color codedto show the footprints of the variously destroyed and damaged buildingsand overlain by pictorial symbols, the maps mediate between the visible andthe absent while introducing a sense of the processes under way in frontof the map user and viewer.

The project was financed by local agencies and businesses, which alsohelped supply the information recorded on the map. The fold-out imageused the vivid colours and design graphics of maps distributed to orientateand guide visitors at tourist attractions such as theme parks or zoos. Whileserving an obvious public need, Kurgan’s map raised a host of ethical andpolitical questions: did it merely service morbid voyeurism or meet theneeds of genuine witness? Did it cheapen and trivialise the significance ofthe place by representing it in the graphic language of tourist cartography?Did it seek to control and direct the ways of seeing and experiencing aplace whose gravity and sacredness (as a mass graveyard) demanded a morepersonal and private response?

I do not intend to answer these questions in this essay, although innoting their salience we are alerted to cartography’s insistent ethical dimen-sion. Rather, Kurgan’s mapping project serves here to introduce a broaderset of questions that bear upon the role and relations of cartography in thecontext of contemporary cultural geography. While accurately documentingand plotting spatial data, the Ground Zero map makes no claim to scientificaccuracy or objectivity; it is not professional cartography. Like a guide-bookor transit map, it was an ephemeral product, intended for immediate prac-tical use, to be readily disposed of or destroyed in the process of use ratherthan archived as documentary evidence of geographical data

1

. It was alsoan artistic project, a site specific and performative work intended as a directintervention into the everyday (if temporarily disrupted and uncanny) life ofthe city, a way of “taking the measure” of the event

2

. In her urban mapping,

1 Catherine Delano-Smith, “The map as a commodity”, in D. Woodward, C. Delano-Smith, CordellD.K. Yee (eds.), Approaches and challenges in a worldwide history of cartography (11è planteja-ments I objectius d’una història universal de la cartografia), Barcelona, Institut Cartogràfic deCatalunya, 2001, p. 91-110.

2 On the professionalization of cartography as a scientific and academic practice and its specifi-cally 20

th

century characteristics, see Denis Wood, “Cartography is dead (thank God)”,

Cartogra-phic Perspectives

, 45, 2003, p. 4-7. On the cultural and historical roles of mensuration in rela-ting to geography and place, see Giorgio Mangani,

Cartografia morale: geografia, persuasions,identità

, Modena, Franco Cosimo Panini, 2006.

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Kurgan could draw theoretically on a long tradition in Modern Art — fromearly Surrealism, through Situationism, Conceptualism and site-specific artpractices — in which cartographies of everyday life have played a significantrole. As her earlier work using SPOT satellite images to map the sites ofmass graves revealing the evidence of ethnic cleansing in the Balkansdemonstrates very clearly, she is also acutely political in her mapping, awareof the post-modern critiques of scientific mapping and of the map’s com-plex relationships with power. She recognises the significance of the map as

Fig. 1 Laura Kurgan, Map of 9/11 site, 2001, detail.Laura Kurgan, Carte du site du 11 septembre 2001, détails.

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a material object and an active agent in social relations. In this she sharesa burgeoning interest in the map-object and in the practices of mappingnot only with a large number of artists, but with many cultural geographers.The two groups have found common concern in cartography as a culturalpractice and they draw increasingly on each other’s work and insights

3

.In what follows I review this shared body of theory, criticism and prac-

tice around maps and mapping with the intention of clarifying the chan-ging relations between cartography, science cultural theory and artistic acti-vity within geography. I explore the historical evolution of these relationsand connect them to broader developments in cultural study, principallywithin the Anglophone world (although the developments I discuss are notby any means confined to that sphere). I assess their implications in thecontext of a digitized world in which the map as a tangible, finished objectand mapping as a specialised scientific activity seem to be giving way to avirtual cartography in which the map image is avowedly provisional andephemeral, and mapping a creative, participatory activity no longer the pre-serve of professional cartographers and geographers. Lastly, I explore therecent convergence of interest between cultural geographers and artists inquestions of map making and cartography.

1 A cultural history of cartography

The so-called “cultural turn” that has revolutionized Anglophone culturalgeography since the 1980s has had a parallel impact on cartography andon the place of the map within geography. In these pages, Paul Claval citesfeminism, subaltern studies and post-colonialism as significant aspects ofthe cultural turn, together with a post-modern scepticism towards the uni-versalist claims of modern science, a rapprochement with the humanitiesand a focus on images. As a sophisticated icono-text

4

, popularly and pro-fessionally regarded as a uniquely geographical research tool and mediumof communication, the map could hardly escape the discipline’s culturalrevolution. Given cartography’s close association with positivist science(that dates to the origins of statistical and thematic mapping in the early19

th

century), the claims for the academic and scientific status of their workmade by American cartographers, especially in response to 1940s Germanpropaganda mapping

5

, and the central role that cartography played in

3 Denis Cosgrove, “Maps, Mapping, Modernity: Art and cartography in the twentieth century”,

Imago Mundi

, 57 (1), 2005, p. 35-54.4 The term “iconotext” refers to representations that incorporate both text and graphic images (for

example comic books, cartoons and many virtual hypertexts). The map is one of the oldestexamples of the form.

5 See the discussion in Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora, “Mapping global warfare: LosAngeles, the Pacific, and Charles Owens’s pictorial cartography”,

Annals, Association of Ame-rican Geographers

, 95(2), 2005, p. 373-390; and John Pickles, “Texts, hermeneutics and propa-ganda maps”, in T.J. Barnes and J.S. Duncan (eds.),

Writing worlds: discourse, text and metaphorin the representation of landscape

, London and New York, Routledge, 1992.

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geographical exploration and colonial survey, settlement and administra-tion, it is little wonder that the map has been among the most consistenttargets for post-modern deconstruction

6

. This has simultaneously reducedand enhanced cartography’s place within geography.

It has become conventional to attribute the beginnings of cartographiccritique within geography to the work of the British geographer J. BrianHarley who, in a series of polemical papers in the 1980s alerted the tradi-tionally conservative fraternity of map scholars (which included a largenumber of his fellow historical geographers) to the inevitable imbricationsof cartography and power. Drawing on what now appears a somewhat inco-herent reading of theorists, among whom Foucault and Derrida held pro-minent places, Harley claimed that “far from holding up a simple mirrorof nature that is true or false, maps redescribe the world… in terms of rela-tions of power and the cultural practices, preferences and priorities”

7

. In aseries of substantive essays he considered the map’s “silences”, its opera-tions within systems of knowledge and power, and the ways that so manyof the canonical maps of European “discovery” had simultaneously usedand erased the local and often non-representational forms of spatialknowledge possessed by disadvantaged and colonised populations in furthe-ring the interests of their oppressors

8

. In fact, the pre-history of “new”cultural geography more generally, especially in its focus on epistemology,had drawn heavily on map history and scepticism towards cartography’sscientific claims, as is apparent in the mid-century writings of J.K. Wrightand David Lowenthal

9

. Within academic cartography itself, the writerDenis Wood launched a polemical critique of “scientific” map-making in

The power of maps

(1990), and his continued attack on the scientific pre-tensions of professional cartographers has been pursued by writers such asDavid Koch, John Cloud and Mark Denil

10

.

6 D. Wood, “Cartography is dead”, 4; see also John Pickles,

A history of spaces: cartographicreason, mapping and the geocoded world

, London, Routledge, 2004.7 J. Brian Harley,

The new nature of maps

, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2001, quotation on 35.The most comprehensive discussion of Harley’s ideas, their origin and evolution is Matthew H.Edney, “The origins and development of J.B. Harley’s cartographic theories”,

Cartographica

,Monograph 54, 2005; Edney’s comments on Harley’s theoretical confusions are on 107. Adetailed critique of Harley’s use of French theorists is to be found in Barbara Belyea, “Images ofPower: Derrida, Foucault, Harley”,

Cartographica

, 29, 2 1992, p. 1-9.8 The essays are collected in

The new nature of maps.

Harley’s work for the American bi-centennialexhibition of cartography and discovery revealed to him the extent of pre-Columbian indigenousgeographical knowledge present but silenced in the maps produced by European “discoverers”.

9 I discuss this evolution of thought in Anglophone human geography in “Epistemology, geographyand cartography: Matthew Edney on Brian Harley’s cartographic theories”,

Annals, Associationof American Geographers

, 97 (1), 2007, p. 202-209.10 Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier, “An introduction to critical cartography”,

ACME An Interna-tional E-Journal for critical geographies

, 4(1), 2006, p. 11-33 [http://www.acme-journal.org/vol4/JWCJK];

David Koch,

Cartographies of disease: maps, mapping and medicine

, Redlands CA., EsriPress, 2005; John Cloud, “American cartographic transformations during the Cold War”,

Cartographyand Geographical Information Science

, 29, 2002, p. 261-282; Mark Denil, “Cartographic design: rhe-toric and persuasion”,

Cartographic Perspectives

, 45, 2003, p. 8-67.

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Within art history a parallel focus on the map as an object of critical studyemerged in the 1980s as part of a revisionist interest in the cultural specificitiesand historical contexts of Renaissance perspective and the late medieval scienceof optics more generally. In a detailed examination of the technical and ico-nographic complexities of Jacopo de’Barbari’s celebrated panoramic map of

VENETIA 1500

, Juergen Schulz demonstrated the priority of its emblematicand iconic significance over any role as a scientific instrument or practicalguide to the city

11

. Close examination of the work of later 16

th

century Vene-tian cartographers such as Giacomo Gastaldo and Cristoforo Sorte has dee-pened our understanding of the close connections between optical science,practical mathematical arts such as survey and engineering, and fine art

12

.These relations have been ably summarised by Martin Kemp

13

. More theore-tically, Svetlana Alpers’ examination of the inscriptive qualities of Dutch andFlemish genre painting and map making connected them to a broader descrip-tive imperative in Netherlandish culture that gives a scientific and technicalfoundation to the long-noted art historical distinctions between Italian idea-lism and Northern empiricism in early modern painting, and even perhaps tothe Italian distinction between

disegno

(the emphasis on concept) and

colore

(a focus on technique) in art

14

. Also in the 1980s, Samuel Edgerton soughtto establish a direct connection between 15

th

century Florentine studies of thenewly translated

Geography

of Claudius Ptolemy on the one hand and Brunel-leschi’s and Alberti’s demonstrations of linear perspective on the other

15

.Within geography itself Harley’s influence was (and continues to be)

seminal, although his work was by no means unique in the late 20

th

centuryre-theorizing of cartography: for example the Italian geographer Franco Fari-nelli, drawing upon semiotics and empirical studies of Renaissance urbanmapping (notably of Ferrara) made similar claims about the cultural com-plexities of cartography’s relations to vision while avoiding Harley’s exclusiveconcentration on power relations

16

. Not only did Harley’s writings attractthe attention of scholars throughout the humanities, social sciences and spa-tial disciplines such as planning and architecture, they have appealed also toconceptual artists such as Ruth Watson and Kathy Prendergast whose workI refer to below. Harley’s participation with the late David Woodward in the

11 Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and MoralizedGeography Before the Year 1500”,

Art Bulletin

,

60, 1978, p. 425-474.12 Juergen Schulz,

La cartografia tra scienza e arte: carte e cartografia nei Rinascimento Italiana

,Modena, Panini, 1990; Denis Cosgrove,

The palladian landscape: Geographical change and itscultural representations in sixteenth-century Italy

, State College, Penn State University Press, 1993.13 Martin Kemp,

The Science of Art

, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990.14 Svetlana Alpers,

The art of describing:

Dutch art in the seventeenth century

, Chicago, ChicagoUniversity Press, 1983.

15 Samuel Y. Edgerton,

The Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective

, New york, basic books,1975. Edgerton’s claims about the theoretical and cultural correspondence between perspectiveand Ptolemeic mapping have not held up to subsequent scrutiny.

16 Franco Farinelli,

I segni del mondo. Immagine cartografica e discorso geografico in età moderna

,la Nuova Italia, 1992.

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1980s in the still unfinished multi-volume

History of Cartography

publishedby the University of Chicago transformed the way that maps and the evolu-tion of map making are understood. Both of the editors were trained geo-graphers: Harley with a detailed archival knowledge of British topographicalmapping, Woodward with specialised understanding of the paper-making,engraving and printing techniques that lay behind early-modern map making.Woodward himself edited an influential collection of essays

Art and carto-graphy

in 1987 that brought together Alpers, Edgerton and other art histo-rians then revising their own discipline’s approach to mapping and progres-sive cartographic historians with the goal of revising the then prevailinghistoriography that map-making had passed from art to science over thecourse of the 17

th

and 18

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centuries

17

. The subsequent five volumes of the

History

challenged the conventionally Euro-centric narrative of cartographicprogress from “primitive” and mythically informed representations to sophis-ticated and objective presentations of empirical spatial information. It paidclose attention to non-European and non-literate traditions of spatial repre-sentation and extended the definition of what constituted a map to anyrepresentation, in whatever material medium, of spatial information, regar-dless of the empirical warranty of that information. Although three of the

History

’s volumes have yet to appear in print, those devoted to Classical andmedieval European cartography, mapping among indigenous and traditionalsocieties, and Asian cartography have completely transformed scholarshipwithin the history of cartography, shifting it strongly away from a traditionalfocus on matters of technique, provenance and connoisseurship towards anemphasis on the cultural processes, context and criticism of mapping andmap making, and the social and performative roles of the map as an object

18

.Today maps are viewed as “signs and collections of signs, laying out in

graphical form indications of spatial relationships or placing into spatialother information with a locational attribute”

19

. They also attract interestas material objects, acting as “immutable mobiles” that play a significantrole in the spatial transfer of knowledge and thus deploy various rhetoricsin order to command trust

20

. Maps take a wide variety of material forms

17 David Woodward (ed),

Art and cartography: six historical essays

, Chicago, University of ChicagoPress, 1987.

18 J.B. Harley and David Woodward (eds),

The History of Cartography, vol. I “Cartography in pre-historic, ancient and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean”, Chicago and London, The Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1987; vol. II, Bk.1 “Cartography in the traditional Islamic and SouthAsian societies”, 1994; vol. II. Bk.2 “Cartography in the traditional east and southeast Asiansocieties”, 1994; vol. II, Bk. 3 (David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis eds), “Cartography in thetraditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific societies”, 1998.

19 Denil, “Cartographic design”, 8.20 The term “immutable mobile” comes from the writings of Bruno Latour and refers to those mate-

rial scientific objects (such as printed books and treatises) that allow ideas and information tomove physically over space. The printed map as a graphic representation of spatial information isa classic example of the kind of instrument Latour is referring to. Bruno Latour, Science in Action,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

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166 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008

and thus fall within the remit of both the cultural history of representationand of things. They cannot be understood or interpreted outside thecultural context in which they are produced, circulate and are used. Theinfluence of this cultural turn in the approach to mapping is apparent inmany fields of study and, along with geography’s intensive re-conceptuali-sation of space, accounts for much of the current cross-disciplinary interestin geographical scholarship. Historians for example, long sceptical of non-textual sources, are paying increasing attention to the role of survey andmapping as active practices in the overseas expansion of early-modernEurope, re-examining the way that maps acted as a medium through whichknowledge of unknown places was constructed in a dialogue between(often fantastic) European expectations and imaginings on the one hand,and autochthonous experience on the other 21. They have begun to reco-gnise the early-modern map as much more than a way-finding device or arecord of discovery, but a representational machine for archiving and clas-sifying a wide range of geographic and ethnographic material and a rheto-rical medium for establishing various claims to truth and authority. 16th

century painted map cycles in Florence and Rome were attached to cabinetsof curiosity; the great 17th-century Dutch and French cosmographic wallmaps acted as Gemankunstwerken, collecting, collating, classifying and dis-playing the marvels of creation; 18th and 19th-century “plain-style” mapsarchived Enlightenment sciences such as geology, meteorology and botanyas well as exploration of the Pacific Ocean and the continental interiors 22.

Other studies have revealed the intimacy of cartographic activity withcolonial dispossession of native territory: the US Rectangular Survey systemfor example, or the great colonial surveys conducted by British, French,Dutch and other European powers during the imperial era 23. Early works,which regarded the map as a unidirectional exercise of colonial authorityhave given way to more nuanced and dialogic understanding, as in Siam’suse of European topographical survey to delimit the kingdom’s territoriesand thus defend them against the Western imperial predation 24. BenedictAnderson has argued that the map played a key role in shaping decolonised

21 Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A history of state fixations and fugitive landscapes,Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2004; Laura Hostettler, Quing colonia enterprise: Eth-nography and cartography in early modern China, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001.

22 Francesca Fiorani, The marvel of maps: Art. Cartography and politics in Renaissance Italy, NewHaven & London, Yale University Press, 2005; Bronwen Wilson, The world in Venice: Print, theCity, and Early Modern Identity, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2005; Anne Godlewska,Geography unbound: French geographical science from Cassini to Humboldt, Chicago, Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1999; D. Graham Burnett, Masters of all they Surveyed: Exploration, Geo-graphy — a British El Dorado, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000; Luciana de LimaMartins, “Mapping tropical waters: British views and visions of Rio de Janeiro”, in Denis Cos-grove (ed.) Mappings, London, Reaktion Books, 1999, p. 148-168.

23 Burnett, Masters; Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of BritishIndia, 1765_1843, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997.

24 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, Honolulu, Univer-sity of Hawai’I Press, 1994.

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Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 167

territories into the “imagined communities” of nation states, and in recentyears Australian and Canadian first peoples have used cartography to chal-lenge colonial-era claims to their lands and to reassert native territorialclaims 25. Others have related the uncertainties of actual practices of seeingand recoding spatial data in the colonial and exploration period 26. Respon-ding to these insights, the Irish artist, Kathy Prendergast has producedworks in her Atlas of Emotions series that include cartographic images ofNorth America that appear at first glance to be standard topographicalmaps but which on closer examination exclude all place names but thosecontaining the word “lost” (fig. 2). She counters the conventional post-colonial reading that the European explorer/colonizer was “master of all Isurvey”, suggesting rather an uncertain and anxious encounter in which thelines of power/knowledge are fractured and unpredictable, a themeexplored in Paul Carter’s studies of British colonial exploration andmapping 27.

While the nexus of knowledge and power represented by the map hasbeen the principal focus of the new cultural history of cartography, it hasnot been the only concern. Literary and art-historical scholarship hasconcentrated more on cartographic semiotics. Among the most influentialwriters in this respect has been the French Classical philologist ChristianJacob whose L’empire des cartes applied to the long sweep of Europeanmapping. Jacob’s belief that cartographic interpretation should shift from a“transparent” view of the map as a neutral, informative transfer of externalinformation into the simplified classificatory frame of the map sheet,conducted with the intention of achieving “an ideal correspondence of theworld and its image”, to an “opaque” view of the map which takes accountof the selections, omissions, additions and inescapable contextual influenceswhich shape the outcome of such transfers 28. Mapping is a process whichinvolves both a “complex architecture of signs”: graphic elements withinternal forms and logics capable of theoretical disconnection from anygeographical reference, and a “visual architecture” through which theworlds they construct are selected, translated, organised and shaped.Jacob’s somewhat analytical semiotics has been extended into broader ico-nographic studies of specific maps and cartographic practices. The Italianscholar Giorgio Mangani’s studies have focused on the moral and emble-matic significance of maps, with a detailed historical investigation of howthe cordiform (heart-shaped) projection first popularized by Oronce Finein the 1520s became entangled in the religious struggles and practices of

25 Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism,Cambridge, Verso, 1983.

26 Martins, “Mapping tropical waters”.27 Paul Carter, The road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, London, Faber, 1987.28 Quoted on p. 4 of Denis Cosgrove, “Introduction”, Mappings, p. 1-23. Christian Jacob, L’empire

des cartes, Paris, Albin Michel, 1993.

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Reformation Europe 29. The theological significance of maps and mappingin medieval and early modern theological discourse is also emphasized bystudies of Renaissance cosmography by Frank Lestringant and Jean-MarcBesse in which the moral ambiguities of the god-like perspective assumedin global mapping are explored and by Alessandro Scafi’s brilliantly detailedhistory of the theology and cartography of the terrestrial paradise 30.Mangani’s study of the cordiform projection has attracted the attention ofthe New Zealand artist Ruth Watson who has produced a wide range of

29 Giorgio Mangani, Il “mondo” di Abramo Ortelio: mysticismo, geografia e collezionismo nelrinascimento dei Paesi Bassi, Modena, Franco Cosimo Panini, 1998.

30 Frank Lestringant, L’Atelier du cosmographe ou l’image du mond a la Renaissance, Paris, AlbinMichel, 1991 ; Jean-Marc Besse, Les grandeurs de la terre essai sur les transformations du savoirgéographique au seizième siècle, Lille, ANRT, Université de Lille III, 2000; Alessandro Scafi,Mapping the terrestrial paradise, London, British Library Publications, 2006.

Fig. 2 Kathy Prendergast: Lost, 2001, detail.Kathy Prendergast: Quelque part, 2001, détails.

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heart-shaped world maps (with the south cardinal point at the top of themap) as installations, using diverse media such as salt, red-beaded glass pinsand growing/dying grass to exploit the nuances of relating the world mapto the human heart 31.

The significance of the map and the globe in emblemata, and in early-modern European literature, poetry, painting and engraving reveals a closeconnection between cartography as a scientific and technical discourse andas a subject of artistic reflection and practice that anticipates in somerespects the contemporary relationships I discuss below. In his most recentwriting Giorgio Mangani has pressed his argument for the moral rhetoricsof maps across a broad historical span of Western cartography. Hisargument serves to dissolve the distinctions not only between “modern”and pre-modern mapping in the West (for example between the medievalmappa mundi with their explicit mapping of the terrestrial paradise, andAbraham Ortelius’ Typus orbis terrarum, 1570), but between European andnon-Western mapping such as Chinese, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Islamictraditions in which the religious and moral dimensions of mapping andmaps has long been acknowledged, and finally between the roles of art andscience in cartography 32.

2 Contemporary mapping

I have focussed so far on the ways that conceptual and historical studies ofmaps and mapping have been affected by the cultural turn. Contemporaryshifts in the nature and techniques of mapping practices and map use havealso served to emphasize cartography’s cultural and artistic dimensions. Ithas been observed that the word “cartography” itself is a fairly recent neo-logism, coined in 1839 by the Portuguese scholar Viscount de Santarem.Its appeal over the more mundane “map-making” is explained by the pro-fessionalization of map production in an era when European states weredeveloping topographical map series for the purposes of defining anddefending the national territory, and using statistical mapping as a bureau-cratic, regulatory and planning device. Collating spatially referenced data,designing and drafting its cartographic presentation, rectifying the distor-tions of map projection and scale and, with aerial photography, developingmethods of photogrammetry, are all specialised skills, initially taught andlearned through apprenticeship, but increasingly given scientific statuswithin the academy, initially as a discipline aligned to geography. Between1920 and 1960, the number of specialised university programs in Americadevoted to cartography rose from two to over one hundred. The first

31 Ruth E. Watson, “The Decorated Hearts of Orance Fine: The 1531 Double Cordiform Map of theWorld”, The Portolan, 65, 2006.

32 Giorgio Mangani, Cartografia morale; Scafi, Mapping Paradise; Woodward, History of carto-graphy; Cosgrove, Mappings.

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academic text on map-making in English appeared in the 1920s. ErwinRaisz, who established cartography in Harvard University’s geography pro-gramme, published General Cartography in 1939, to be superseded byArthur Robinson’s Elements of Cartography in 1952. These two texts havebeen the pillars of cartography as an academic study in America 33. WhileRaisz, whose own physiographic maps corresponded closely to the synopticand synthetic geographical vision of early geographical morphologists suchas W.M. Davis, laid considerable emphasis on the artistic and culturaldimensions of conceptualising and making maps, Robinson’s work stressedcartography’s scientific credentials, reducing its artistic aspects to designquestions alone. Robinson’s book was republished regularly into the 1970s,by which time it was accompanied by a range of cartographic teaching textsas the number of university cartography programs continued to expand 34.

This expansion came to an abrupt end in the 1990’s, since when therehas been a sharp and steep decline in the number of specialised teachingprograms in cartography. That decline has paralleled the unprecedentedexpansion of map-making and map-using that has come with the easyavailability of increasing volumes of remote sensed data, spatially-referencedstatistics, the microprocessor and the Web. Packaged computer programsallow instantaneous interchange of map projections and scales, rapid over-laying of spatial data sets within Geographic Information Systems, a vastrange of design opportunities in Photoshop and other graphic programs, aswell as instantaneous access to diverse data sources. Hand drafting of mapshas virtually ceased, while anyone with medium-level technological skillsand a home computer connected to the Internet can create maps with equi-valent informational content and design qualities to those of professionalcartographers. Further, the availability of maps and related carto-graphicssuch as remote sensed images and aerial photographs through the Webvastly outstrips that of printed cartography, and exceeds in many respectsthe practical value of the latter, for example in avoiding the problems ofcentring information in relation to a predetermined sheet size and borders.

In removing maps and their making from the narrow guild of profes-sional cartographers, and map use from the professional confines of geo-graphers, planners, and bureaucrats, information technologies have demo-cratised mapping: a cultural shift that is still underway and whose broaderconsequences are not yet fully apparent. John Noble Wilford has claimedthat the democratization of Geographic Information Systems has produceda new generation of “user cartographers” who are not formally trained incartography and who work often collectively. The storage capacity ofmodern computers means that data bases are separate from actual mapsthat display the data they hold, allowing the latter to be customised in

33 Erwin Raisz, General cartography, New York & London, McGraw-Hill, 1938; Arthur H.Robinson, Elements of cartography, New York & London, 1953.

34 Cosgrove, “Epistemology, geography and cartography”.

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content and design, so that, “unburdened by archival responsibility, indivi-dual maps can be more pictorial” 35. There is no question that more inclu-sive definitions of the map and map-making, and greater flexibility in suchmatters as scale, legend, north-point etc. are already widely accepted amonggeographers, while the huge success of such programs as Google Earth thatoffer the conceit of flying through virtual space to any location on theplanet and viewing its surface topography at flexible scales and resolutionsby means of digital and photographic images is dramatically affectingpopular geographic culture. It may not be too far-fetched to claim that verysoon all printed cartography will be historical cartography. We live todayin the most cartographically rich culture in history: the map is ubiquitousin daily life, and increasingly comes within the capacity of its user to mani-pulate and transform.

Geography’s traditional role in relation to maps has been less in theirdesign and making than their use and interpretation. Cultural geographytraditionally relied heavily on the map as a research tool and a medium fordisplaying its findings. For Vidal de la Blache and Albert Demangeon’s useof the IGN 1.50,000 and 1:100,000 topographic sheets was critical bothto framing and illustrating their studies of the French pays. British geogra-phers drew heavily on Patrick Geddes’ cartographically focused ideas ofsurvey to develop a university curriculum in their discipline and regardedthe maps of the mid-20th century National Land Use Survey as one of thediscipline’s signal contributions to public policy. Mapping the distributionand diffusion of material culture and cultural practices was central to mid-century Berkeley cultural geography. Distributional maps and mappingpractices are much less common features of contemporary cultural geo-graphy, which is heavily textual 36. But the map reappears as an object ofstudy in itself within cultural geography’s broader focus on images andrepresentations, as we have seen. The growing salience of maps and map-ping activities within social life increases the significance of such geo-graphical studies, and also the importance of geographical education intothe complexities of meaning in maps and into the cultural implications ofmapping.

3 Modernist and post-modernist art, mapping and cultural geography

A striking indication of the map’s contemporary cultural significance andthe democratisation brought about by information technology is its role incontemporary art. Denis Wood has recently compiled a catalogue of 218

35 John Noble Wilford, The mapmakers, New York, Vintage Books, 2001, p. 417.36 Peter Jackson’s Maps of meaning (London, Hutchinson, 1989) one of the seminal texts of the

“new” cultural geography, uses the term “map” entirely metaphorically; cartography is of littlesignificance in the work.

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“map artists”, that is artists active over the past half century whose workhas significantly engaged with one or more aspects of cartography 37. Manyof these artists have attracted the attention of geographers and numerousexamples of mutual interest between geographers and artists have emergedas art practices themselves have moved away from a focus on aesthetic mat-ters and towards the documentary and research roles of art practices 38.Early “cartographic” artists, such as Italian Alighiero e Boetti, a memberof the influential Arte Povera movement, whose world map composed ofnational flags has been widely reproduced, or the American Jasper Johnswho reproduced the map of the United States in encaustic and collage(1963) reworked familiar cartographic icons for the purposes of alertingtheir audience to the politics of the national map. Others such as theconceptual artists Sol de Witt who made systematic incisions into aerialphotographs of New York, or Douglas Huebler who mailed letters to andfrom locations along the 42nd parallel, have used the idea of mapping asthe springboard for artistic interventions, engaging more with the conceptsand practices of map making than the map itself. It is not possible to surveythis large and growing artistic corpus, nor meaningful to classify it syste-matically. But in many cases the concerns of artists parallel those of con-temporary cultural geographers and in recent years there has been an iden-tifiable trend towards both groups to collaborate on common projects thatoften involve maps, so that it is valuable for geographers to be aware ofthe evolution of modern art’s interests in cartography and of the principalstreams within the artistic avant-garde that have engaged with maps andmapping.

Late 19th century cultural geographers shared with landscape artists acommon interest in questions of culture, rootedness and the appearance ofthe land. This continued among traditional painters into the early 20th cen-tury, as 1930s German Kunstgeographie indicates 39. But as the artisticavant-garde moved away from representational concerns to conceptualquestions of space, structure and surface so their conversation with geo-graphy and cartography waned. The grid, which so fascinated modernartists because it expressed “the absolute autonomy of art — anti-natural,anti-mimetic, anti-real”, was abstract rather than topographic, and as suchwould only enter geography’s theoretical scope with the development ofspatial science at mid-century, at a moment when the discipline’s cultural

37 Denis Wood, “Catalogue of map artists”, Cartographic Perspectives, 52, 2006, p. 61-67.38 This development was clearly visible in the themes and presentations of the Association of Ame-

rican Geographers sponsored Geography and the Humanities Symposium held at the Universityof Virginia, June, 2007 [www.aag.org/humanities/index.cfm].

39 Kunstgeographie was an early 20th century German sub-discipline of art history that attempted torelate the artistic achievements of a cultural group to their regional geography. Its intellectualconnections with cultural geography of the same period were close, the institutional ones less so.See Thomas da Costa Kaufmann, Towards a geography of art, Chicago, University of ChicagoPress, 2004.

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focus had given way to a positivist paradigm that largely ignored culturalquestions. Only in the 1980s when geographers such as Gunnar Olsson,David Harvey and Alan Pred began to examine the cultural geographies ofModernism through the concept of relative space did the geographicalsignificance of early modern movements such as Cubism and Futurism (inunderstanding the early 20th century city for example) become apparent.

It is important to acknowledge the influence of Henri Lefebvre’s La pro-duction de l’espace on these Anglophone geographers’ writings about space.Lefebvre was himself closely tied to the French artistic avant-garde andespecially Surrealism, whose Situationist strand, discussed below, madeextensive, if subversive use of maps and mapping practices. The SurrealistMap of the World (1929) does not today appear a revolutionary image(fig. 3). Yet in its sketchy outline, erasures and distortions of geographicareas and territories, and arbitrary labeling, it challenged the stabilities ofthe early-20th century European geographical imagination and its self-satis-fied image of a wholly discovered world. Surrealists were among the groupsmost engaged with geographical representation, in large measure becauseof their concerns with everyday life. Thus Marcel Duchamp’s readymadesreference various Parisian landmarks and, according to Housefield, mappedout the French capital when collected and displayed in Duchamp’s NewYork studio 40.

40 James Housefield, “Marcel Duchamp’s art and the geography of modern Paris”, The Geogra-phical Review, 4 1992, p. 478.

Fig. 3 Surrealist map of the World 1929.Carte surréaliste du monde en 1929.

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Surrealism’s psychological interests in the image paralleled mid-centuryadvances in cognitive psychology in challenging conventional assumptionsabout the transparency of representational images and emphasizing theimportance of individual and social perceptions. Its engagement with eve-ryday life would find echoes in the scientific concept of cognitive mappingthat developed in the late 1950s and would prove an important foundationfor the epistemological concerns of subsequent cultural geographers 41.Ability to recognize and understand map images was found to be learnedand cultural rather than a function of the map’s scientific objectivity anddesign clarity. In the late 1950s too, Situationism, a second-generationSurrealist movement, developed intense interest in the map as a communi-cative device and in the subversive potentials of mapping practices 42. Situa-tionism’s conscious move beyond the art world of studios and galleries intothe spaces of everyday life brought artists into the same “field” of opera-tions as geographers, reinforcing artistic concern with mapping as a meansof engaging graphically with material spaces, a move that was reinforcedfrom the 1960s in by conceptual and site-specific artists 43.

While in the 1960s many members of the Situationist Internationalrejected art altogether in favor of radical activism on city streets, GuyDebord used his filmic interest in spectacle and space to connect art prac-tice directly to the physical and cultural geography of the city. His conceptof psychogeography was part of a radical response to the rationalist and func-tionalist urban planning, heavily reliant on “scientific” mapping practices,that he believed was destroying the social and psychological well being ofurban communities. Psychogeography was “the study of the specific effectsof the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on theemotions and behavior of individuals” 44. The connected practice of theurban dérive or drift, intended to generate chance encounters and provo-cative interactions with other individuals, involved a kind of subversivesurvey of urban space that both stimulated and recorded “transient passagethrough varied ambiances”. Thought of cartographically, the dérive was aconscious challenge to the apparently omniscient, disembodied and totali-zing urban map that had become the principal instrument for urban plan-ning and “comprehensive redevelopment” across the West during the post-war years. The dérive was intimately connected to Debord’s third conceptof unitary urbanism: “the combined use of the arts and techniques for the

41 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1960.42 David Pinder, Visions of the city: Utopianism, power and politics in twentieth-century Uurba-

nism, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, and New York, Routledge, 2005; David Pinder,“Subverting cartography: the situationists and maps of the city”, Environment and Planning A, 28,1996, p. 405-427.

43 Peter Wollen, “Mappings. Situationists and/or conceptualists”, in Michael Newman and JohnBird (eds.), Rewriting Conceptual Art, London, Reaktion, 1999; Denis Wood, “Map art”, Carto-graphic Perspectives, 53, Winter 2006, p. 5-14.

44 Guy Debord, quoted in Wollen, “Mappings. Situationists and/or conceptualists”, p. 30.

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construction — or preservation — of environments in which the dérive andpsychogeographical experiments would prosper” 45.

To illustrate these experiments, between 1955 and 1959, Debord andhis Danish colleague, Asger Jorn, produced various collage works bringingtogether map fragments, images and texts that captured urban space andexperience in Paris and Copenhagen. These “have a strongly cartographicappearance due to the dribbled lines of coloured ink which link the picto-rial fragments, as canals or a river might link landmarks within a city” 46.Like Duchamp, Debord’s psychogeographical street maps of the Paris drewupon popular pictorial maps. Debord explicitly used G. Peltier’s 1956 Vuede Paris à vol d’oiseau and the 1951 Guide Tirade de Paris. Such pictorialmaps perfectly captured the distanciated spatial vision of Modernist plan-ning that Michel de Certeau, heir to the Situationist critique, would dissectin his The practice of everyday life 47. The Situationists’ response to theurban vision represented by such cartography was to cut the map of Parisor Amsterdam into “islands” of urban space joined only by thick red arrowsor blacked ribbons that evoke the emotional and passional connectionsmade within and between such locales by the artist/map-maker himself.

Paralleling Situationism within the 1960s avant-garde in opening of acommon interest with geography were site-specific art and Land Art. Theterms cover a wide range of artists and practices and followed divergentpathways in Europe and the United States, but conceptually both soughtto escape the confines of the gallery, and also of painting, to engagedirectly with site and in the case of Earth or Land Art, the natural envi-ronment. Robert Smithson’s work, starting with studies of Passaic NewJersey and culminating in his now-iconic Spiral Jetty developed the terms“site” and “non-site” to challenge the conventional relationships betweenart and specific spaces — notably the gallery. His 1963 Artforum essay “ASedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” is regarded as the manifestofor Land Art, a practice that Smithson acknowledged has deep affinitieswith the picturesque tradition of landscape and garden design. The desertsof the American West became a favored location for these practices,perhaps best exemplified by Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and morerecent City works (fig. 4), that have sought to transform space and createplaces, often using maps and geographical studies to research anddocument their artworks. In Europe the movement has adopted a softer,more environmentally sensitive approach, for example in the work ofRichard Long in Britain and in Germany Joseph Beuys whose land artworks are smaller in scale and more intimate engagements with places,topography and maps. An indication of the significance of this geographically

45 Ibid., p. 30.46 Ibid., p. 32.47 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. S. Rendall, Berkeley, University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1988.

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related art is the fact that London’s principal modern art collection, TateModern at Bankside, devotes a major gallery to the theme “environmentand place” that displays the work of these artists.

While both Situationism and Land Art were movements of the 1960sand 70s, they have attracted renewed attention among young artists in theearly 2000s. The Situationist dérive has been the stimulus to a wide varietyof informal and non-conventional site specific artistic engagements with thecity, many with activist agendas connected to community development, orexplicitly challenging the politics of new technologies that document,record and regulate urban space such as Closed Circuit Television (CCTV),Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and GIS itself 48. For example, the Ame-rican artist kanarinka’s various engagements with the psychogeography ofBoston include a project entitled It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Bostonin which she documents twenty-six runs following officially recommendedemergency evacuation routes out of the city, monitoring her physiologicalresponses with various instruments attached to her body and documentingthe resulting statistics though maps and charts in order to “traverse newgeographies of insecurity” 49. Site-specific artists today share many of theconceptual concerns of earlier land and environmental artists. Moreconventionally geographic, a 1998 British project titled Artranspenninecommissioned thirty individual artists and artistic groups to undertakeprojects that articulated the idea of a distinctive trans-Pennine region in

48 See Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, CambridgeMass., MIT Press, 2002.

49 http://www.ikatun.com/evacuateboston/about.

Fig. 4 Michael Heizer, City (under construction).Michael Heizer, Cité (en construction).

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Northern England, stretching from the River Mersey to the Humberestuary. The initiative’s declared aim was explicitly cultural and geographic:to explore “the richness of the region through the creativity of contempo-rary art” and help “forge a cultural identity and exemplify and project thequality and diversity of our region to resident communities and visitors”.Thirty projects were exhibited or performed across the region during theyear and documented in a book: Leaving Tracks 50.

While site specific and community art projects may not always incorpo-rate cartography in its conventional sense, they all involve “mapping” inthe expanded sense in which cultural geographers now use it: organizing,documenting and representing spatial knowledge in graphic form. Artisticgoals closely parallel those of many contemporary cultural geographers, asscholar and scientist converge in the aftermath of deconstruction, whichhas been as effective in reshaping what constitutes art as in reshapingscience. One consequence has been a growing number of collaborative pro-jects between artists and cultural geographers, including artists in residencein university geography departments, shared community arts projects inurban areas, collaboration on GIS-based art projects, and curatorial activi-ties among cultural geographers. There is every indication that such colla-boration will increase in the coming years 51.

Conclusion

Laura Kurgan’s 9/11 map with which I opened this discussion is thus notan aberrant incursion of the artist into the field of geography and carto-graphy, but an example of a much broader and significant outcome of the“cultural turn” in geographic, cartographic, artistic and spatial practice. Asthe geographic discipline has become more self-critical about its traditionalclaims to document at determined scales and with scientific objectivity pat-terns and processes on the earth’s surface, especially for the social world, asignificant opening towards the roles of creativity and imagination inmaking and communicating geographical knowledge has developed. At thesame time a greatly expanded number of practicing artists have moved awayfrom the conventional confines of aesthetic production, visual media andgallery display to engage directly with the world, with the intention ofresearching, documenting and representing in challenging ways its environ-mental and social conditions. Advances in information technology that havedemocratized the gathering, storage, manipulation and display of spatiallyreferenced data have afforded innovative opportunities for artists to fulfil

50 The project and its various artistic productions are documented in Nick Barley (ed.), LeavingTracks: Artranspennine 98 — An international contemporary visual art exhibition recorded, Man-chester, August Media, 1999.

51 A number of research projects evaluating the goals and achievements of site specific and local orcommunity art projects are currently being undertaken in British university geography depart-ments (eg Open University, Exeter University).

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these goals. The traditionally separate disciplinary projects of geographyand art thus overlap and converge in exciting ways, and nowhere is thismore directly expressed than in map work. As I have sought to demons-trate, late 20th century theoretical and historical critiques of cartography,and the continuing revolution in cartographic techniques and practices haveprovided the conceptual and technical foundations for these shared prac-tical developments, so that, contrary to a sometimes expressed concernamong geographers that the cultural turn might lead into an epistemolo-gical cul-de-sac, new concepts of cartography and new mapping practicesare generating an active and intensely practical engagement with everydaycultural life.

UCLA, Department of Geography1255 Hilgard AvenueLos Angeles CA 90095-1254, USA

Denis Cosgrove est mort le 21 mars 2008 à l’âge de 59 ans, d’un cancer contre lequel il sebattait depuis deux ans.Né à Liverpool, Denis Cosgrove fit ses études à Oxford et Toronto. Il enseigna d’abord à Lou-ghborough University puis à Royal Holloway College, avant d’accepter en 2000 un poste deProfesseur au département de géographie de l’Université de Californie à Los Angeles(UCLA), dont il était venait d’être nommé directeur. Ses travaux sur le paysage — notammentitalien, l’image — notamment artistique — et la carte ont rencontré un large écho, au-delà dela géographie culturelle et historique dont il était un des spécialistes les plus reconnus. Co-fondateur de la revue Ecume, devenue Cultural Geography, il a participé au renouvellementde la discipline dans son ensemble. Toute son œuvre invite à questionner les liens complexesentre le Monde et les représentations que nous nous en faisons, qu’il a magistralement travailléà dénouer, des paysages palladiens aux photographies de la Mission Apollo.Plusieurs de ses recherches sont en cours de publication. Geography and Vision : Seeing, Ima-gining and Representing the World, qui vient de sortir, offre un brillant panorama de son tra-vail. Les publications posthumes laissent un sentiment ambivalent à ceux qui ontpersonnellement connu l’auteur, notamment ceux qui ont travaillé avec lui à l’occasion de cel-les-ci. Frustration de n’avoir pu mener avec lui le projet à son terme, tristesse de devoir inscrirecette croix après son nom. Bonheur d’avoir encore profité de son intelligence et échangé aveclui ; fierté de présenter aux lecteurs son texte et d’avoir suscité son élaboration. Vanité den’être plus avec lui que par la trace de ses mots.Nous étions reconnaissants à Denis d’avoir répondu à notre invitation à prendre part à ce nu-méro, dont nous savions combien il l’enrichirait. Sa participation atteste de l’attention d’ungéographe généreux de son temps et de ses efforts, très ouvert sur les mondes académiquesqui n’étaient pas les siens ; elle montre aussi le courage et la volonté d’un homme face à lamaladie.Merci à lui.

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