Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 3, December 2005
___________________________________________________________________
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
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).