Robert Gober

Since we'll be discussing the role that appropriation plays in the construction of the map and in the history of New York City, it's important to consider work that entertains competing concepts of the appropriated source.  While Mark Bradford uses found material directly in his work, the sculptor Robert Gober fabricates his work differently.  His notes on this piece, Half Stone House, 1979-80, are below:

I moved to New York in 1976, the day after I graduated from college.  I came to New York to find out what being an artist was and what art was and what in the world that meant to me.  I made a living doing all sorts of jobs, from a busboy to carpentry.  One day I decided that I was sick of working for other people, doing work that I really didn't care about and I asked myself a question.  What would I find interesting and entertaining to make, that I could sell, to support myself?  And without in any way belaboring the question, I decided that I would like to make dollhouses.  I was also, during this time, struggling in a self-conscious way to both paint and make objects.  I remember being adamant at the time that the idea of making dollhouses was not about making art.  So I was, in a sense, giving myself a gift by unconsciously choosing my path and came to making art through a back door.  I made a handful of dollhouses and never managed to make any money doing it.  But each house became more complex and more interesting to conceive and construct until I realized that it wasn't dollhouses I was interested in.  What I was drawn to was the house as a symbol.

-From Robert Gober: Sculptures and Installations 1979-2007, ed. by Theodora Vischer.

Radical Cartography

Bill Rankin's site Radical Cartography presents some interesting bridges between the formal resolution of a mapped space and some of its social traits and tendencies.  He also provides some basic vocabulary for the non-geographer to use/appropriate for other practices.  Since we will be engaging projection in the class, this is a useful site to review.  Specific cities are also listed (including New York.)

Radical Cartography

Stillspotting NYC at the Guggenheim

In the tradition of Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates project (see the link below for more information), the Guggenheim Museum is sponsoring a project called Stillspotting NYC, a series of site-specific works that directly engage the city as a living map.  Particularly interesting is their emphasis on non-visual ways of mapping the environmental experience.

Here is a link to the Guggenheim site:

Stillspotting NYC

Here is a link to the microsite:

Micro Stillspotting

Here is a link to a Cabinet Magazine article Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates project:

Fake Estates

Two Shows at MoMA

We will be visiting the Museum of Modern Art and there are two exhibitions in particular that you should all keep in mind.  Both are connected in different ways to central premise of the class.  The first, Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration, collects a group of exquisite corpse drawings ranging from the Surrealist movement to the present.  Unfortunately, it ends on July 9th, so if you want to see it, you'll have to go soon after you arrive in town.  Here's a link:

Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration

The second is entitled Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language and focuses on the role that language and its material and conceptual histories bring to the work shown.  For those of you interested in writing as a component of your studio practice, this is an intriguing show.  It lasts through our stay - ending on August 27th.  The image above the text is a piece from that show by the artist Tauba Auerbach.  Here's a link:

Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language

For those of you interested in film, it's also worth exploring the MoMA film series calendar - they have an excellent repertory and experimental film series that goes on all year.

Printed Matter

Printed Matter was founded by artists to celebrate, publish and sell artists' books.  This is an excellent resource - they also have several artist publications, periodicals and zines in the front of the store.  Since it's located in Chelsea, it's a short walk from many of the galleries we'll visit.  Here's a link:

Printed Matter

Land Art and New York City

The relationship between the landscape, the map and the practice of drawing were explored at length in the 1960s and 1970s in the work of the earthworks artists.  This image shows Walter De Maria's Mile Long Drawing, with him in the frame for scale.

These ideas have been revisited in contemporary contexts by several groups - The Center for Land Use Interpretation and the Land Arts of the American West department at Texas Tech University, among others.  I've included both links below.  Both Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark - members of the original generation of earthworks/conceptual artists from that time - also worked in New York City, providing an interesting collision of separate landscapes.  The Dia Art Foundation, now based in both New York and Beacon, NY, underwrote many of the original projects realized in the American west (and is only a short train ride from the city.)

The Center for Land Use Interpretation

Land Arts of the American West

Dia Art Foundation

Derive and Psychogeography

Guy Debord and the Situationists were writers, artists and political activists that helped pioneer new ideas in avant-garde artistic practice, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Through their interests in mapping, they introduced the concept of derive - an experiential encounter with the landscape based on a kind of real-time response.  The walk you take, for instance, could determine how you respond to it creatively.  Simon Sadler, author of The Situationist City, writes that:

"Maps had traditionally been made by those wishing to impose order upon the city... In their maps, by stark contrast, Debord and Jorn attempted to put the spectator at ease with a city of apparent disorder, exposing the strange logic that lay beneath its surface... the situationist maps described an urban navigational system that operated independently of Paris's dominant patterns of circulation."

It was common for the Situationists to advocate walking through one city using the map of another (similar in some ways to Surrealist games and devices used to reveal unconscious motivations).  The Wikipedia page on derive provides some good background:

Wikipedia - Derive

It's interesting to consider this in the context of Mappr or Wayfaring - how can a map promote an active condition that changes the way we use a space (and doesn't just reflect it?)  Is this something that must happen in the studio, for instance, and not in the real-time mapping process itself?

(Thanks to, and credit for, putting the site comparisons together and for pulling that quote from Simon Sadler must go to the Systeme D blog).