1st Place: Graduate Level
The Lyceum of Cartography
By William Gallin
Inspired by: #233 Drawing (Tracings up to the L.A. River placed in the Clark Telescope Dome, Flagstaff, AZ), Ingrid Calame
The lyceum of cartography is a school with two wings. In one wing reside the chambers of scientific cartography. Drafting halls of geologists, geographers, and geomorphologists produce empirically analytical representations of the world based on scientific data and methods. The second wing of the school consists of studios of emotion and abstraction replete with carrels of metaphysics and transcendentalism. The cartographers of the second wing draw representations of the conscious and unconscious world based on subjective observations without strictly rational methods. The rotunda unifying the lyceum provides gallery space for both wings’ cartographic creations.
The artisans of the first wing substitute symbols for physical objects and plot these symbols on rational grids. The geographer marks the position and symbol of a scattering of trees on the map. The geomorphologist notes the river’s sinuousity and duly transcribes it. The geologist carves the slicing image of a fault line. On their map, clouds condense above; a bed of sandstone deposits below. There is a used car lot, and there is a factory, and there is a network of irrigation ditches. Off to the side is an appropriately hatched and bordered gypsum mine or tailings pit or park or conservatory.
The scientists may draw maps in four dimensions as concepts and objects change shape in space and evolve over time. They show that right on this very spot, there was a low, thick, and damp forest. And right on this very same spot, there was a high, howling desert. This same spot once drowned under an ocean with hosts of writhing tentacles and scuttling claws. Perhaps on this spot a fold of mountains will rise furiously, and further into the future the palimpsest map shows erosion, dissolution, decompaction.
The peripatetic lyceum deans do not only glide the echoing, polished halls of science but also peruse the extraordinary and uncanny second wing of the lyceum of cartography. In the second wing, the air hangs heavier, the walls are soft and moist to touch, like sponges, and the window glass, fluid over time, either distorts or enhances the view of the world into vague gestures or gleaming phantasms. The maps made in the wing of feeling are no less valid and no less necessary representations of the world than those of the scientific cartographers.
In the second wing, cartographers of emotion thrive on the omissions of the scientists. Where the geologist is at a loss to plot pain, artisans of the second wing survey and chart it dutifully. In this wing, the Mercator is a mesh of need, pinnacles of desire stand erect, and deep leaden strata are vast deposits of regret. Braided channels of joy course across the map, and glittering stars of faith shine and orbit.
The maps of the second wing attribute the fourth dimension to memory and foresight. Erased, faded, or smudged space delimits the swaying motion of the womb, forgotten whispers, and lullaby. There are crags of unrequited love, and there are smooth lineations of tenderness. The whole lower quadrant of one map is steeped in misgiving. Staccato punctuations of barbarity rove across another map, and uncharted swaths of dream-filled sleep and lost seas of senility bind continents of humor or spread disconcertingly from the interiors of dignity.
In the lyceum, each wing is constantly tasked with cartographic challenges. The geologists, geographers, and geomorphologists map an objective physical region from Bayonne, New Jersey to the beach at Sandy Hook. The scientists mark symbols of ocean contraction and ocean expansion. There are the knolls left by glaciers, the kaolinite pits, the swaths of swamp, the shallow beach profile, the sites of galleons run aground, the metastasizing landfill, the wrought iron bridges, the highway, the interchanges, the mobster mansions, the house of a dentist, his neighbors’ homes, and his route to the ferry terminal. An inset shows a boardwalk in different stages of glory and disrepair. Overlay patterns trace the landing paths of Newark-bound passenger planes, carefully tacked corridors of Shanghai-bound container ships, and the wispy spirals and spreading arcs of motorboat wakes.
In the second wing a different cartographic task is at hand. An abstractionist maps a subjectively arranged existential region from L.A. to Flagstaff. She drafts red scissor-like curves, green contours like the jagged forms of chipped wall paint, and blue marks of some thought, some feeling, or some memory that others may hardly hope to comprehend exactly as route directions or mile markers of the cartographer’s mind. She maps canals of negative space and vivid patches of boiling business.
Formed in the cartographic wing of creative impulse, Ingrid Calame’s #233 Drawing is still an accurate map. As her subtitle suggests, her work is a cartographic representation of the world from “tracings up to the L.A. River Placed in the Clark Telescope Dome, Flagstaff, AZ.” Yet, we may not hope to navigate the concrete channels of the urban river with Ingrid Calame’s map as an orienteering guide. We may never mark the azimuths to distant constellations with her map’s instructions. Calame’s work is, however, a visceral example of how one wing of the lyceum views and translates the world into map form. In #233 Drawing the representation of subjective reality and imagination can be as true and honest as the representation of objective physical form in Geological, Topographical, Historical, and Demographic Map of Part of the Northern New Jersey Coast. The wealth of information buried or evident in each of these two maps is congruent.
Both representations are honored in the gallery linking the two wings of the cartography lyceum. The rotunda at the juncture between the wings is a hall of art. It is at art that empiricism and emotion intersect. It is at art that metaphysics intersects with geology, and the sub-conscious intersects with statistical geography. In order to represent the world affectively, regardless of whether the basis of representation is scientific or emotional, both the rationalist and the transcendentalist must gratify an artistic tribute. The representation of any aspect of the world is a cartographic exercise, and whether that exercise is fulfilled by scientific pursuit or the inspection of feeling is irrelevant to the fact of artistic process and experience.
The simile of art as cartography or cartography as art is insufficient. Art is cartography. Cartography is art. Understanding the artistic intersection between the empirical and the emotional is crucial to fuller appreciation of the work of the mapmaking geologist, sculptor, lithographer, geographer, painter, geomorphologist, photographer, or sketch artist. Understanding this intersection is crucial to appreciating the human urge to represent the world and attempt to make that representation known and affecting to others if not ordinarily or precisely comprehensible. The lyceum of cartography comprises a wing of empirical intellect and a wing of subjective feeling, and at the intersection of these wings, at the heart of these forms of human expression and consciousness, is art.
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#233 Drawing (Tracings up to the L.A. River placed in the Clark Telescope Dome, Flagstaff, AZ) by Ingrid Calame is on view in the Art Since 1960: Selections from the Permanent Collection exhibition.
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