Maps, mapping, modernity: Art and cartography in the twentieth century

Imago Mundi

Volumn 57, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 35-54

  Cosgrove, Denis ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Art; Avant garde; Cartography; Charles H. Owens; Modern art; Modernism; Newspaper maps; Popular culture; Science studies; Southern California

Indexed keywords

ART; HISTORICAL CARTOGRAPHY; MAPPING METHOD; TWENTIETH CENTURY;

EID: 29244489217     PISSN: 03085694     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0308569042000289824     Document Type: Review

References (66)

1. Ulla Ehrensvärd, 'Color in cartography', in Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays, ed. David Woodward (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1987), 123-46.
2. Ronald Rees, 'Historical links between cartography and art', Geographical Review 70 (1980): 60-78;
3. Samuel Y. Bdgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (London, Harper and Row, 1976);
4. Juergen Schulz, 'Jacopo de 'Barbari's view of Venice: map making, city views and moralized geography before the year 1500', Art Bulletin 60 (1978): 425-74;
5. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980).
6. See note 1.
7. See the report by Dennis Reinhartz in Imago Mundi 42 (1990): 119;
8. also Catherine Delano Smith, 'Maps as art and science: maps in sixteenth century Bibles', Imago Mundi 42 (1990): 65-83.
9. David Woodward, 'Introduction', in. Woodward, Art and Cartography (see note 1), 1.
10. Throughout this essay my use of the term 'modern' (and thus early-modern and pre-modern) refers to the historical period between the early 15th and late 18th centuries: early Renaissance to Enlightenment in Europe. In my discussion of the Modern period in art ('Modernism'), I am referring to 20th-century, self-conscious movements in the art world that start with Cubism and end in the 1960s with Conceptual and Postmodern art. Throughout this essay the second use is in upper case to clarify this distinction.
11. Matthew H. Edney, 'Cartography without progress: reinterpreting the nature and historical development of mapmaking', Cartographica 30:2-3 (1993): 54-68.
12. Woodward, Art and Cartography (see note 1), 6. The neurological distinction, which is the reason I call Woodward's argument essentialist, is based on 'brain lateralization studies of so-called right- and left-brain thinking'.
13. Lorraine Dalston and Peter Galison, 'The image of objectivity', Representations 40 (1992): 81-128;
14. Steven Shapin, 'Placing the view from nowhere: historical and sociological problems in the location, of science', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23 (1998): 5-12;
15. David Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003).
16. Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 1999). Latour regards an 'immutable mobile' as a vehicle for transferring through, space scientific information gathered at a specific site in a way that preserves, through the unchanging nature of the vehicle, the validity of that information. The map is a paradigm example.
17. On questions of 'virtual space,' presence and distance, see Carlo Ginzburg; Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, transi. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (New York, Columbia University Press, 2001).
18. 'Virtual space' is a term initially used by Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York, Scribner, 1953),
19. to describe the space created by an art work. Walter Benjamin's concept of 'aura' as something pertaining to an original artwork lacking in even the most perfect reproduction deals with the same phenomenon and has had considerable influence in the theory and practice of site-specific and performative art in recent years. For the use of such ideas in contemporary art, see Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2002).
20. Bruno Latour, 'How to be iconophilic in art, science and religion?' in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (London, Routledge, 1998), 425.
21. Bruno Latour, 'How to be iconophilic in art, science and religion?' in Picturing Science, Producing Art. 1998 Ibid., 423.
22. Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840 (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1984);
23. idem, Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1994);
24. Lorraine Daston, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 (New York, Zone Books, 1998);
25. D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography - A British El Dorado (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000);
26. Luciana Martins, O Rio de Janeiro dos Viajantes: O Olhar Bderitanico (1800-1850) (Rio de Janeiro, Zahar Editor, 2001).
27. Avant garde, a military term referring to the leading group in an attacking formation, was adopted within French revolutionary and Marxist parlance to define the role of intellectuals and artists in framing revolutionary politics. In Modern art it became attached to the various groups beginning with the early 20th century Dadaists and Futurists whose manifestos for artistic practices that broke decisively with previous, corrupt forms sought to position art as an engaged, revolutionary practice.
28. Bruno Mantura, Patrizia Rosazza-Ferraris and Livia Velani, eds, Futurism in Flight: 'Aeropittura' Paintings and Sculptures of Man's Conquest of Space (London, Aeritalia Società Aerospatiale Italiana, 1990).
29. David Atkinson, 'Geopolitics and the geographical imagination in fascist Italy' (unpublished doctoral thesis, Loughborough University of Technology, 1995).
30. James Housefield, 'Marcel Duchamp's art and the geography of modern Paris', Geographical Review 82 (1992): 478.
31. Rosalind Krauss, 'Grids, you say', in Grids: Format and Image in Twentieth-Century Art (New York, Pace Gallery, 1980), n.p.
32. John Yau: The United States of Jasper Johns (Cambridge, MA., Zoland Books, 1996), 34-40.
33. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA., MIT. Press, 1960).
34. Guy Debord, quoted in Peter Wollen, 'Mappings: Situationists and/or Conceptualists', in Rewriting Conceptual Art, ed. Michael Newman and John Bird (London, Reaktion, 1999), 30.
35. Guy Debord, 'Mappings: Situationists and/or Conceptualists', in Rewriting Conceptual Art, 1999 Ibid., 31.
36. Guy Debord, 'Mappings: Situationists and/or Conceptualists', in Rewriting Conceptual Art, 1999 31 Ibid.
37. Guy Debord, 'Mappings: Situationists and/or Conceptualists', in Rewriting Conceptual Art, 1999 31 Ibid.
38. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, transi. S. Rendall (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988).
39. Wollen, 'Mappings' (see note 22), 36;
40. Wystan Curnow, 'Mapping and the expanded field of contemporary art', in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London, Reaktion, 1.999), 253-68;
41. Miwon Kwon, 'One place after another: notes on site specificity', in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erica Suderburg (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 38-63.
42. Jeremy Millar, 'Ground control', Tate Magazine (Summer 1999), 29-33.
43. 'Little' map is the term employed by Catherine Delano-Smith to characterize cheap, generally printed, popular and commercially produced maps of the kind that became an inescapable part of daily life in the 20th century (Catherine Delano-Smith, 'The map as a commodity', in David Woodward, Catherine Delano-Smith and Cordell D. K. Yee, Plantejaments I objectius d'una història universal de la cartografia / Approaches and Challenges in a World-Wide History of Cartography (Barcelona, Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya, 2001), 91-109.
44. Stephen Bann, 'The map as an index of the real: land art and the authentication of travel', Imago Mundi 46 (1994); 9-18.
45. 〈www.Princeton.edu/kurgan/spot/kosovo/htm〉.
46. Catherine Nash, 'Mapping emotion', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (1998): 1-9.
47. John Pickles, 'Texts, hermeneutics and propaganda maps', in Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, ed. T. J. Barnes and J. S. Duncan (London, Routledge, 1992), 193-230.
48. Mark Monmonier, Maps with the News (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1989), 14.
49. Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press. 2001), 214-28.
50. Richard Bdes Harrison, Look at the World: The Fortune World Atlas for World Strategy (New York, Fortune, 1944);
51. Susan Schulten, 'Richard Bdes Harrison and the challenge to American cartography', Imago Mundi 50 (1998): 174-88.
52. Harrison, in his introduction to Look at the World (see note 35), is specific about the significance of his project as a contribution to democratic citizenship.
53. Walter Ristow, 'Journalistic cartography', Surveying and Planning 10 (1957): 369-90. Ristow was a close friend of Richard Edes Harrison and his arguments about newspaper cartography have the effect of enhancing the significance of Harrison's work. Ristow's paper has been a principal source for the more recent reviews of 20th-century popular cartography by Monmonier and Schulten.
54. Charles Owens, who is the principal subject of this study, worked between 1910 and 1912 for the New York Herald and other New York newspapers and after that at the Los Angeles Examiner before joining the Los Angeles Times in 1918, where he stayed until his retirement in 1952. Howard Burke is known only for his work as staff artist at the San Francisco Examiner, where he was active in the same mid-century years as Owens.
55. The full series of maps is not known and does not appear in the microfilm version of Los Angeles Times. An incomplete but substantial collection of 120 of the original maps is held in the Young Research Library at University of California Los Angeles, and a selection of others, in a poor state of preservation, is kept in the Times offices in downtown Los Angeles.
56. Denis Cosgrove, Apollo's Eye (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 243-48.
57. A familiar example is the opening frames of the 1941 film Casablanca.
58. Evidence of the complex interaction between war, cartography and art is found also in. the biography of conceptual artist Douglas Huebler discussed earlier. Huebler worked as an intelligence officer in the Pacific theatre, flying sorties and using maps to plot the success of bombing missions.
59. Los Angeles Times, 4 March 1958.
60. Owens's capacity to recreate landscapes from memory gave him an early reputation as a young reporter when he illustrated the San Francisco earthquake for a New York newspaper with a pictorial map of the city based on wire reports and his personal knowledge alone.
61. John Ott, 'Landscapes of consumption; auto tourism and visual culture in California, 1920-1940', in Reading California. Art, Image, Identity, ed. Stephanie Barron et al. (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000), 51-67, ref. on 52. For ten months in 1923 and again in 1927, Owens's California landscapes and desert scenes were reproduced in full colour on the front cover of Touring Topics, the monthly magazine of the Automobile Club of Southern California.
62. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993), is the originator of this phrase which suggests the close connection between ways of seeing and representing space and broader cultural shifts.
63. Ott, 'Landscapes of consumption' (see note 45), notes 35 and 56.
64. Los Angeles Times, 20 May 1934.
65. The photograph and map were published in the Los Angeles Times on 1 January 1929. The Spence archive of aerial photographs is currently housed at the Geography Department of UCLA. It consists of some 100,000 photographic negatives and printed images.
66. Ladies' Home Journal, July 1930: 51-53.