Introduction

The relationship between cartography and art:

• Cartography and (visual) art are both graphic forms that may be employed communicate cultural, social, and political information and messages.
• All maps involve affective design, so have artisitic input.
• Some images are clearly ‘maps’ and others ‘art’, but there are also ‘art maps’ that use cartography as a means of poetic and political expression.
• Maps aesthetic objects in their own right which are displayed and traded as works or art.
• Disciplinarily, cartography is influenced by artistic movements and practice, while artists incorporate maps and cartographic idioms in their works.

The relationship beteen maps and art may be considered from various perspectives, for example Ribeiro and Caquard (2018) identify three three conceptial relationships between art and cartography:

1. The influence of artistic practices on cartographic design.
2. ‘Map art’ as a form of poetic and political expression.
3. Cartography as an interface between art and place, including: (i) the revealing of spatial and temporal structure in narrative; (ii) places as they appear in artworks; and (iii) personal and emotional relationships to place.

In contrast, Katherine Harmon’s Personal Geographies (2004) and The Map as Art (2019) group works by the meaning, narrative, and metaphor, engaging with concepts and experience of displacement, home, places, emotion, memory, corporeal bodies, etc.

Here, maps and art are considered as means of disrupting normative views of the world and of revealing (often hidden) pattern, experience, and meaning.

Disrupting Norms

Maps and art has been employed to disrupt and breakdown normative conceptulisations of space and geography. In Le monde au temps des surréalistes (1929) countries are drawn in proportion to their cultural significance according to the Surrealists. It is anticolonial as it is centered on the Pacific Ocean, emphaises areas with indiginous art (according to them), and ignores most western nations.

Reframing how we look at the world is further explored by Joaquin Torres-Garcia’s Inverted Map of South America (1943) and McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World (McArthur’s 1979) that both invert the north-south axis to subvert the power relationships inherent in the orientation.

How the geography of the world is represented on maps remains an important consideration as revealed in an episode of The West Wing (2010) where the White House staff are introduced to the Gall-Peter’s projection that contradicts their normative understanding imprinted by the ubiqitous Mercator projection.

The Naked City (1957) is a collage of neighbourhoods cut out of a tourist map of Paris connected by arrows that allow the viewer to move by emotional instinct, just as Guy Debord and his fellow psychogeographers on their “drift” or “derive” walks are guided by chance and their emotional reactions to places. The world is both disjoint and connected, and meaning is constructed by the viewer.

In his US map series, Jasper Johns reimagines the familar map US states with blurred boundaries, labels detatched from place, and alternative palletes with the aim of making a familiar object that is “seen” but “not looked at” or “examined”. 

Le monde au temps des surréalistes, América Invertida, and The Naked City disrupt our understanding and perceptions of geography and space by distorting, breaking, repositioning, and newly interconnecting known/experienced space, but maps and art may also enhance our understanding and perceptions of places and narratives by revealing structure, how places are experienced by individuals and communities, and how place is depicted in the media, arts, and sciences.

JezzberryBlue maps divide cities into parcels using streets and paths then arbitarily colours the parcels to present a fractured ambiguious urban fabric. It’s London, but not as we know it.

Revealing the Hidden

The influence of artistic practices on cartography is exemplified by Henry Beck’s 1933 London Underground Map, the design of which was influenced by Modernism (Pike and Gilbert, 2022), as well as electronic circuit diagrams and earlier schematic rail maps (Kent 2021). Other examples are panoramas and shaded relief preceeded by European landscape painting, and the seamless panning and zooming of modern Web maps previously envisioned in cinema including the opening scenes of Casablanca (1942; Ribeiro and Caquard, 2018).

Maps in art and maps can reveal what is ‘hidden’ or ‘de-emphaised’ by normative views of spaces and places for social, political, cultural, aesthetic, or other purpose.

Pattern

Robert Szucs’s river maps reveal the structure of river networks and basins using a bright colour pallette. There is no hidden meaning here, just the revealing of pattern. It is a thematic map that is commerical art.

Power

Maps and art can be combined to both project power (propaganda) and expose and undermine ‘hidden’ power and structural relationships, often through satire.

Experience and Memory

Revealing personal and community experience is aim of both artists and geographers. In geography, ‘counter mapping‘ is the production of maps that record and communicate aspects of the world that are not part of ‘offical’ data but important to often marginalised communities. Counter maps often map intangible things such as historical usage of land by indiginous peoples that reside in community memory. Memory maps are records of individual or community memories and experiences.

Queering the Map is a LGBTQ2IA+ community counter-map that shines a light on experiences that may not be apparent from a hetro-normative perspective.

The Geography of Art

In Plotted: A Literary Atlas (2015), Andrew DeGraff reveals the space-time path as travelled in literary works that would otherwise be hidden.

In Old Father Thames and the Bells of Old London (2017) Stephen Walter‘s maps the chruch bells and lyrics of the nursery rhyme Oranges & Lemons.

Map Metaphors

Replacing the face of explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt with a map is a direct reference to the region he explored and then revealed to the world.

In art, maps are associated with the human body as they share rounded 3D curves, networks, and partioned space.

Maps may be used as ‘material’, for example the works of Fernando Vincente and Mark Powell who use maps as their canvas.

Making your own world

Living in the world

Maps as Aesthetic Objects

Maps are also decorative items that are hung on walls, traded, and used to sell products, such at tee-shirts and mugs.

Maps decorate a myriad of mass produced products.

References

Kent, A. J. (2021). When Topology Trumped Topography: Celebrating 90 Years of Beck’s Underground Map. The Cartographic Journal, 58(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/00087041.2021.1953765

Pike, D.L. and Gilbert, P. (2002). Modernist Space and the Transformation of Underground London. Imagined Londons, p.101.

Ribeiro, D. M, and Caquard, S. (2018). ‘Cartography and Art’. The Geographic Information
Science & Technology Body of Knowledge (1st Quarter 2018 Edition), John P. Wilson (ed).
DOI:10.22224/gistbok/2018.1.4.

Harmon, K. (2004). Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. Princetown Architectural Press: New York.

Harmon, K. (2019). The Map as Art. Princetown Architectural Press: New York.