This book presents an original study on how contemporary artists are exploring urban spaces through mapping. Despite a long history of representations of cities in maps, and the relationships that can be envisaged between art maps and cities in the contemporary world, little research is dedicated to investigating how artists intervene in the realm of urban cartography. The research examines a century-old history of art maps and draws on academic debates challenging traditional notions of maps as scientific artefacts produced through accurate measurement and surveying. The potential of art maps to construct personal narratives, through contestation, embodiment and play, is analysed in the city context, where spaces are shaped by urban planning and design, political ideologies and socio-economic forces. Adopting an exploratory and interpretative research approach that investigates the confluence of theories originated in different domains, this book conducts the reader to discover what artistic practices can bring into a more creative, while inquisitive, understanding of cities. A series of semi-structured interviews with visual artists, enquiring how they apprehend, process and re-create urban spaces in artworks, explores cartographic process and methods in visual art practices in the twenty first century, which incorporates digital technologies and critical thinking.
Author(s): Gloria Lanci
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 216
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Urban Art Maps in Cultural Context
Understanding Maps as Translations
The Urban Space Rendered in Maps
Contemporary Art and Mapping
Chapter 3: Seeing, Representing, Performing
The View from Above, the View from the Ground
The Dialectics of the Lived Space
Theories of Perception, Ways of Seeing
Cartography, Knowledge and Reality
Representation and the Crisis of Representation
Contesting Traditional Cartographies
Performance, Agency and Deep Maps
Chapter 4: A History of Art Maps and Mappings
Walking and Mapping: From Drifting to Dissecting (1910s–1970s)
The Situationist International: Dérives, Psychogeography and Unitary Urbanism
After the SI: Fluxus, Conceptual Art and Land Art
Mapping, Counter-mapping and the Art Map Age (1970s–2000s)
Chapter 5: Contemporary Artists Mapping Cities
Four Conversations with Artists
Layla Curtis
Ruth Levene
Christian Nold
Matthew Picton
Accuracy and Authority on Maps
Embodied Knowledge and the Politics of Space
Agency and Transformative Mapping
Exploring the Urban Pattern
Chapter 6: Liverpool: A City in Maps
Contemporary Art Maps of Liverpool
Portraying the Cityscape
Narrating the City
Mapping in Layers
Epilogue: Viewing the Maps of Liverpool
Chapter 7: Placing/Performing the Map
Bibliography
Index
