Reddleman - Cartographic abstraction in contemporary art: seeing with maps

In this book, Claire Reddleman introduces her theoretical innovation cartographic abstractiona material modality of thought and experience that is produced through cartographic techniques of depiction. Reddleman closely engages with selected artworks (by contemporary artists such as Joyce Kozloff, Layla Curtis, and Bill Fontana) and theories in each chapter. Reconfiguring the Foucauldian underpinning of critical cartography towards a materialist theory of abstraction, cartographic viewpoints are theorised as concrete abstractions. This research is positioned at the intersection of art theory, critical cartography and materialist philosophy.

Claire Reddleman received her PhD in cultural studies from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Cartographic visions and the Apollos eye organized, ordered, quantified, and defined the spaces of the modern world. How do we make sense of a contemporary world in which surveillance cameras, drones, and satellites are no longer strange but are our everyday reality? Claire Reddlemans inspired book brings together critical cartographic studies with the work of artists whose creations depend on maps, drones, and related tools. This, the resulting book, generates theoretical tools for grappling with uncertain times.

James Housefield, University of California, Davis

Cover image: Joyce Kozloff, Targets (2000), interior view (detail).

Image credit: The artist & DC Moore Gallery, NY.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

W.J.T. Mitchells Image Theory

Living Pictures

Edited by Kreimir Purgar

The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials

Spectacles of Critique, Theory and Art

Panos Kompatsiaris

Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime

Edited by Temenuga Trifonova

Art, Animals, and Experience

Relationships to Canines and the Natural World

Elizabeth Sutton

What Drawing and Painting Really Mean

The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture

Paul Crowther

The Concept of the Animal and Modern Theories of Art

Roni Grn

The Aesthetics of Scientific Data Representation

More than Pretty Pictures

Edited by Lotte Philipsen and Rikke Schmidt Kjrgaard

Art : Process : Change

Inside a Socially Situated Practice

Loraine Leeson

Visualizing War

Emotions, Technologies, Communities

Edited by Anders Engberg-Pedersen and Kathrin Maurer

Cartographic abstraction in contemporary art

seeing with maps

Claire Reddleman

First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2018 Taylor & Francis

The right of Claire Reddleman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-71257-7
ISBN: 978-1-315-20006-4

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

My thanks go first and foremost to those who supervised me over the course of this project as a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London: Alberto Toscano, Susan Schuppli and John Hutnyk. At Goldsmiths, I also thank Mary Claire Halvorson, John Levett, Anisha Ahmed, Ian Tucknott, Simon Barber, Philipp Jeandree and Aya Hino.

I would like to thank those who have taken part in various reading groups with me, who have challenged and supported me, and shaped my thinking, as well as those who have taught me in various capacities during my time at Goldsmiths.

My thanks go to the artists, designers and galleries who have kindly given me permission to reproduce their images, and all other persons whose labour has made my work possible.

Particular thanks go to Joel Winder, Sophie Fuggle, Lucy Bond, Chris Jude, Ben Mackay, Henry Lane, Angela Smith, John Canfield, Leen Van Broeck, Emma Leach, and, above all, Edward Mackay.

We see with maps. Using maps to create complex visual understandings of the world is an activity that most of us are so used to that we do not tend to consider how the maps we read help us form these understandings. Map use has become a thoroughly commonplace activity, whether we are navigating in a city using a smartphone, planning a journey across the country, or looking at artworks that include images of maps in an art gallery or on an artists website. The specifically cartographic way in which we create spatial and visual understandings of the world is the subject of this book. I offer a new theoretical framework for understanding how we go about the complex process of seeing with maps. I use this idea of seeing with maps to claim two thingsthat maps are deeply concerned with creating a sense that we can see the world by using them and to assert a commitment to further John Bergers important claim that [o]ur vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are (1972/2008, p. 9). Vision is an active process, constituted by a range of means, including map use, and it is the process of how we see with maps that I focus on here. The cartographic image implies and constitutes its viewer using distinctive visual techniques that can usefully be investigated through considering contemporary artworks that take up, explore and disrupt cartographic ways of seeing (Berger, 1972).

This book proposes a theory of cartographic abstraction as a framework for investigating cartographic viewing and does so through exploring a series of contemporary artworks that are engaged with cartographic abstraction in different ways. I bring together close readings of these artworksby Joyce Kozloff, James Bridle, Trevor Paglen, Layla Curtis and Bill Fontanawith materialist approaches to abstraction. This is an interdisciplinary investigation concerned with enlarging the current possibilities for critically understanding viewing and subjectivity in the area of cartographic imagery. I aim to push beyond the highly productive framework of critical cartography to articulate a new approach to understanding cartographys effects in the world. In order to do this, the new theoretical proposal that I put forward and use throughout this book is cartographic abstraction.