commenter Adrian Murphy left a link to his website which has some cool projects on it. (See, folks, this is why you always leave a URL when you commment!)
Murphy, who has a geography degree, spent the past year collecting drawings of the world (not maps specifically) by people he meets for his project My World. Here's his description of his projects:
Each of us will draw a map differently, due to different skills and different perceptions. 2 projects on this site explore this: globe and my world. Both projects ask people to draw maps / pictures. My interest lies in the experimental, collaborative nature of these projects. I enjoy asking people to draw, as this creates a symbiosis between me, as a geographer/graphicist, and the person drawing.The drawings and maps are fascinating, as they encompass notions of perception, centricity, naive geography and national, cultural geography.
He's still collecting.
These maps really remind me of a completely different and unrelated project by artist Kip Fulbeck called The Hapa Project. Fulbeck is "hapa" (the term for mixed race folks who are part Asian or Pacific Islander) and has spent his career addressing multiracial issues, especially as they intersect with gender, in video, writing and performances.
For about five years, Fulbeck went around the country and photographed people who self-identified as "hapa", taking a "bust" (head and shoulders) portrait with no clothing or jewelry, and then asking them to do two things: 1) categorize themselves ethnically and 2) write a note answering the question "what are you?" He combined these three elements into a single image like the one at left, with the photo above, the answer to "what are you" recreated in the center, and the self-categorization at the bottom. He then collected some of these images into a book, and is showing exhibitions of them on the west coast right now (currently at the Japanese American National Museum.)
(Note: yes, I participated in the project, but my image didn't make it into the book or exhibitions. I don't know if this is the reason, but Fulbeck was displeased when I refused to break down my identity into its component ethnic parts. I put, for ethnicity, "Asian and white", I think. I did this because I think breaking down "white" identities into ethnicities equates European American ethnicities with other American ethnicities, like Asian or Latino. But "white" in America is a monolithic identity that no longer recognizes ethnic differences within it. With the exception of recent immigrants, especially from southern or Eastern Europe, no European Americans are really experiencing racism as a result of their ethnicity. And the majority of "white" Americans are ethnically mixed, making mixed ethnicity the norm.
This is my only quibble with this project: requiring participants to identify themselves according to someone else's idea of categorization. It's cool that Fulbeck includes a self-identification, but I think it would have been cooler to leave the answer to the question "what's your race?" out of it. It would have been more challenging, and would not have reified both the categories themselves, and mainstream America's desperate need to have everything categorized.)
These projects, a variety of individuals drawing and writing descriptions and definitions of themselves and their worlds, are most pleasing (to me) because of two things: 1) hand or handwriting, and 2) attitude towards the subject. Both hand and attitude are how the individual personality are expressed in such projects. Provide a structure for people to express themselves in, and then watch how differently they do it. The more rigid the structure, the more pleasing the diversity of responses.
These projects play directly on the tension between the rigidity of ideological structures and categorical systems, and the infinite multiplicity of individual identities and ideas. Of the two, the Hapa Project has the more rigid structure, and also appears to be the most conscious of this tension. Fulbeck's intention is to directly contrast the categorical description he demands of the individuals' ethnicities, with their own descriptions of themselves. Trumping both and drawing the eye first and last, is the final answer to all identity issues in human interaction: the face. My World is simpler and more open, not as interested in challenging the categorical schema of a map---or any other schema for that matter. With some loose interpretation, any image could appear on the page of a My World drawing. So it's interesting that the participants restricted themselves mostly to maps and outer space views.
Fulbeck doesn't allow for personal body interpretations; he preempts this by handling the body representation himself, through the photographs. Although the participant is allowed to select the photo he will use, the rigidity of the photo format (bust, no adornment, head on, set lighting and backdrop, etc.) leaves the participant with little room to express themselves, except through choice of moue. This also seems deliberate: he doesn't want the body to become a chart, to become a site of categorical division. I find it more interesting that no bodies show up in Murphy's world drawings. The relation between cartography/topography and figures isn't far to seek, but it's apparently not one that springs immediately to mind.
Leave it, then, for a project that directly connects mapping to identity. Artist John Leaños's Mapping Myself project with middle school children was part of the "atlas(t)" exhibition in 2001, and the results were also installed in bus shelters. Three artists, including Leaños, worked with a group of schoolchildren, digitally manipulating found maps, the children's photographs of "their family members, friends, natural and social environments, shelter and school environment", and writings, to create maps of themselves.
This project has the most rigid structure of all, necessitated, of course, by the limited skills of the children and the project's limited time frame. However, the project was also limited by the artists' aesthetic, and their desire to draw a particular connection out of material the children were then to provide. The project was the artists'---not the children's---exigesis out of the material of the children's lives, and provided the least opportunity for the children to express themselves. The theoretical frame of the piece was a more sophisticated one than the children---presumably---were able to grasp fully. So in this project, the children's individuality was another material with which the artists painted.
This is not a criticism. As Murphy pointed out above, these projects necessarily create symbiosis between the creator and the participant. Murphy is the most hands off; his fingerprints aren't to be seen anywhere on the world drawings, but they would never have been created without him. He's not merely a collector; his will initiated the creation, so he is a co-creator. Each of these projects is progressively more driven and controlled by its creator, but all contain this element of symbiosis, this tension between a rigid, categorical structure, and the fluidity of individual interpretation.
This recalls for me the nature of the map itself: heavily controlled and regularized so that the reader finds familiar elements in every map, yet each containing a wild collection of individual features which always defy expectation. This is what fascinates me about odonymy: how much is revealed of the individual nature of a street through its name, while it appears on a map as merely a line. Perhaps this is what is so fascinating to all of us about maps: that of all the ways we've developed to chart information, the map is the one that most honors this categorical/individual tension. Maps, more than charts or graphs, or timelines, are a dialogue made manifest, useful and delightful all at once.
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