Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 6 Number 3, December 2005

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Casey, Edward S. Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape. Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2005: 256pp Illustrated in color/black and white; $27.95, ISBN: 0816643334

 

Reviewed by

 

Amy Ione

The Diatrope Institute

 

 Cartography, the word we generally associate with mapmaking, is the art and science of graphically representing a geographical area. This representation is usually on a flat surface and typically includes the superimposition of political, cultural, or other non-geographical divisions onto the representation of a geographical area. On the other hand, many see maps in rather mundane terms. Putting aside their power to chart complex information, we associate them with the tools we use to navigate in our cars and move about when we travel to unknown places. The complexity of a cartographic representation as well as the difficulties we find when using a map to help us navigate locally remind us that “the map is not the territory” and that cognitive coding is involved in translating from one domain to another. Opening Edward S. Casey’s Earth Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape, his fourth book of a series of works examining the importance of place in human life, these thoughts came to mind. They were joined with my sense of artists as mapmakers who go beyond traditional definitions as they map their minds, their sensitivities, the world in which they work, and their emotional landscape. I wondered how he would navigate this territory as he mapped it in the book.

Overall, Casey, too, sees artist representations in an active sense. Earth Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape grounds his argument in the work of nine artists (Robert Smithson, Margot McLean, Sandy Gellis, Michelle Stuart, Eve Ingalls, Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, William de Kooning, and Dan Rice). Casey turns to them to explain his primary concern: that there are “certain contemporary artists who have displayed a special sensitivity to novel forms of marriage between mapping and landscape painting (and other assembled or constructed works)—a marriage made possible by considerations of the sort that [he] is bringing forth in these preliminary remarks.” (p. xix). He also writes that it is not his intention to examine all forms of art but to rather look at four ways of mapping (discussed below). As a result, he puts aside work he feels is either driven by narrative themes or aims for pictorial realism. This is not to say that narration is absent from the discussion. In characterizing the nine artists he uses to advance our understanding of what it means to map the land, he tells many stories about their lives and how their painterly goals are translated into the work we see, and the real or imagined landscapes their work includes.

Schematically Casey draws his analysis around fours forms of mapping, expanding the terminology beyond the pairing of cartographic maps and utilitarian maps discussed earlier. He calls the first category mapping of, defining it as a mapping form that captures an exact geography. This is traditional cartography and it often includes implicit political and cultural allusions that frequently remain unexamined. The second category, mapping for, is the kind of utilitarian schematic we use to get around. It is a simple and functional tool, to a large degree. The motif is chosen to depict a particular task, like walking from the Underground to a nearby museum. Mapping with/in concerns the way one experiences certain parts of the known world and thus offers a re-presentation of what a place is like in a bodily sense. The idea is that “I” am the landscape itself instead of being an objective cartographer of it. With Mapping out, on the other hand, the artistic practice blends the boundaries between the mapper and the landscape. Rather than simply being the landscape in a bodily sense, the boundaries are porous. As such, rather than attempting to depict the landscape in a corporal sense, the artist must find a way out of it if he/she is to re-present the experience of deep immersion the place brings about. The depiction, in turn, makes the space accessible to others.

In order to clarify the four categories Casey divides the book into two parts that often seem to overlap. This results in a study that itself seems quite porous, perhaps an effort to map out his experience with the artists he chose. Part I explores ”various efforts to merge maps with the earth, to meld their descriptive power with the earth’s elemental matrix” (p. 4). Here the discussions of earth work per se is elevated through sensitive case studies of Robert Smithson, Margot McLean, Sandy Gellis, and Michelle Stuart. Part II then turns to the role of the lived body in the works of painters who find their path to mapping in more subtle and complex ways. Their dynamics are harder to fit together schematically: Willem de Kooning maps through abstract expressionism. Jasper Johns is a pop artist who often includes maps in his work. Richard Diebenkorn’s mapping is equated with a quasi-geometrical style. Finally, there is the abstract impressionism of Dan Rice and the work of Eve Inglass, which seems to defy a single label. Surveys of each of these nine artists are enhanced by the 32 well-reproduced color plates and 31 halftones that allow the visual resonance of the artwork to speak for itself to some degree.

Casey’s compelling writing style is easy to read and, as a result, it took some time for me to realize that his points seemed to circle around what seemed to be a shifting center. Distinctions between mapping, charting, and tracing, the various ways in which artists incorporate grids, and the impulses artists translated into their re-presentations offer a plethora of distinctions that are clearly related to mapping. Yet as I read it seemed the effusive distinctions clouded out the art practices as they endeavored to illuminate them. This came about in a number of ways. While not focused on narrative themes, much of the analysis seemed based on the stories behind the works. The author’s knowledge of philosophical sources, which elevated the analysis immensely, also seemed to point to a lack of familiarity of the history of painting as an activity. To the plus side, with so many writers today reducing philosophical ideas to trite boilerplate assertions, it was refreshing to find substantive distinctions inserted into a study. Still, I was not quite able to mesh the threads of the argument into a cohesive conclusion. I found myself debating whether his goals were too broad or the sources too narrow. Ultimately I was left with some concern that the research seemed to leave out salient aspects of the subject and was thus incomplete in relation to its own goals. [In the introduction, to be sure, Casey says this research represents preliminary remarks, so perhaps some of these details are a part of future projects.]

Specific examples better convey the missing details that came to mind as I read. For instance, Casey repeatedly speaks of the painters in the book bringing the earth into their work directly (e.g. soil, sees, ashes, etc). When discussing “Earth, Air and Water Studies” by Gellis, which is a series of views painted from an airplane, Casey writes that powdered pigment is applied to wax on wood panels, the work is mostly monochromatic and it comes forward in its very materiality into our immediate vision. Thus it is not just landscape viewed (as through transparent glass) but landscape seen—at a glance in a single brilliant and condensed image. His point is that these works are paintings “in which we encounter not the earth painted (i.e., the earth as pigment, or else the earth painted upon directly) but the earth as painted, seen in a painterly modulation, re-presented in paint” (p. 43, all italics are Casey’s]. When he mentions that we do not encounter the earth painted, i.e., as pigment, I found myself thinking that he was talking about representational art and how a representational artist would “paint the earth” rather than incorporating the process of making the painting into the artwork. Now, it may well be that he was making a reference to artistic pigment being earth, and that paint was developed from the earth, even before representational work was elevated in the art canon. If this were the case, it would have been useful to add more detail explaining that artists were actively experimenting with the earth from the earliest times. It is a detail directly related to his arguments even if the pigment was used for representational themes.

Similarly, when presenting Michelle Stuart’s evolving oeuvre the author points out that she:

“[T}ransmutes ordinary matter into material for art: whether the matter be soil or shells, seeds or ashes, beeswax or bone, she incorporates the equivalent of paint into the work in which she is engaged, so deeply and effectively that it becomes the equivalent of paint or crayon or pencil.” (p.78).

Here, too, Casey does not say that before the development of manufactured paints the artist needed to have some knowledge of his pigments and chemical interactions to create the materials (the matter) used to paint the art. Again, it seemed like an unfortunate oversight that he didn’t recognize the importance of transmutation in art practice historically. Indeed, developing a sense of how earth could become paint and of how binder and pigments worked together was a variable that infused the process with an ongoing need for active experimentation. I’m not sure if Casey does not see the process of making pigment in an artist’s studio as imbued with the same sensitivity we find in contemporary earth works or if he failed to mention it because the transformation of earth into paint did not bring about a something he would call a landscape. My point is that if he finds the relationships similar in terms of how artists practice, some mention of this would have added to the book since the active process of making art is emphasized throughout.

My sense that elements were missing was more pronounced when I got to the second part of the book. Although I am a painter, and although Jasper Johns and Richard Diebenkorn are among my favorite painters, I think the author’s choice of painters worked against his stated goal of bringing a contemporary vantage point to the artist’s relationship to mapping. More to the point: so much of what I would consider current in the scheme of things was not mentioned. In particular, I was surprised to find no discussion of any of the new media artists who use grids/the earth/immersive experience/mapmaking motifs, etc. The omission of state-of-the-art examples, even to explain why he did not include them, was a puzzle for a few reasons.

Without a doubt, artists like Smithson, Diebenkorn and de Kooning have influenced many contemporary artists. Still, they are no longer alive and thus offer a somewhat limited vantage point when we think of our contemporary environment. More noticeable was the omission of the new technologies. Projects in this area have revised our view of art. Moreover, many of these artists show a concern for the earth and our relationship to it.  The succulent work of Char Davies, for example, is directly related to several of the modalities Casey highlights. An ex-painter who turned to virtual reality projects, Davies endeavors to create immersive environments that might be fit into both the mapping in and mapping out categories. Complete with nature, grids, a desire to work collaboratively with her audience, and the desire to convey the sense of an immersion with nature, Davies aims to imbue her audience with a sense of the earth through technology. This paradox seems at odds with Casey’s thrust, and I wondered where he would place it in a specific sense and why he failed to comment on the relationship of new media to art and mapping in general.

In summary, Earth Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape is an intriguing study that opens the reader’s mind to a number of relationships between art, mapmaking, nature, and artistic process. Substantial, abundantly illustrated, and sensitive to the artists he highlights, it is a book I would recommend to all who are interested in these areas. The downside, to my mind, is that areas excluded from the study would have provided more balance and aided Casey in building a stronger case for his views on earth mapping as well as how artists reshape the landscape of the earth and the mind.

 

References:

Monmonier, Mark. Drawing the Line: Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy. (Henry Holt & Co, 1996).

Thrower, Norman J. W. Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1999).