Invisible Cities: The Arts and Renewable Community

Contempary artists as urban geographers

Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts. ⁴⁵

Cultural and personal geographies are a popular theme in the world of contemporary art where artists use maps and map-making as a metaphor for both location and dislocation in urban society. The utilitarian purposes of maps showing routes into and out of places by way of conventions of cartographic representation have given way to appropriations by artists who explore new terrains of lived experience. Artists use maps to respond to social, economic and political change and to orient themselves in a world of volatile cultural influences. Maps are selective about what they represent and for the contemporary artist the mapping of the products of knowledge is a selective process differentiating between collective and individual experience. ⁴⁶

In her book The Map as Art, Katharine Harmon offers a stunning presentation of the myriad variations on the theme of urban geography. Postmodern media explorations in this genre are without restraint. Some artists include maps in their work adapting cartographic systems for their own purposes while others utilize the map's vocabulary of line and shape. Urban cartographers manipulate a wide variety of materials and techniques mirroring the diversity of contemporary artistic practice. They rip, shred, splice and dissect maps; they fold, pleat, weave and crumple them; they carve, burn, soak, twist, tear apart and sew together every imaginable material, even food, in breaking the rules of cartographic convention. Artists utilize maps to express memories, psychological states and futuristic visions. ⁴⁷

In her article The Artist as Urban Geographer, Kathryn Brown provides an enlightening review of the work of urban cartographic artists Mark Bradford and Julie Mehretu. Both artists work with processes that reinvent the conventional grid structures of modern Western mapping. However, I was particularly drawn to the work of Bradford, a Los Angeles based artist. In his rugged surfaces on huge canvases Mark Bradford layers collage and painting juxtaposing text and image suggesting ways in which individuals attend to printed information when traversing a city. ⁴⁸ This ties in eloquently with this unit's theme of the travel story. In teaching this unit presenting this artist will help students to make connections to the ways present day urban artists explore ideas and artistic processes to express relationships between individuals, communities and the city. Mark Bradford is featured in an episode of the award winning PBS program Art 21 that can be viewed through YouTube. Students should be offered the opportunity to view this episode either as assigned viewing at home or as a ten-minute class presentation utilizing small and large group discussions. In the video students will hear the artist speak and see him at work in his vigorous process of manipulating materials and collaborating with his assistants.

Bradford's "maps" are mixed media collages that incorporate actual urban textual ephemera such as scraps of signs and posters, discarded advertising, and other materials peeled off billboards gathered while walking the city. ⁴⁹ Bradford's process offers an analogy in practice of "the pedestrian speech act" described by Michel de Certeau in Walking in the City. As a spatial acting out of a place, Bradford's walk through the city streets looking for pieces of urban text is akin to what de Certeau describes as movements through an "ensemble of possibilities". The walker actualizes some of these possibilities as he or she goes this way and that through the improvisations of walking, crossing, drifting away, creating shortcuts, detours and allowing himself or herself to take paths generally considered forbidden. He or she thus makes selections in the footsteps of his or her journey. "The user of a city picks out certain fragments of the statement in order to actualize them in secret". ⁵⁰

Brown's article mentions comments by cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove about the overwhelming amount of written language in contemporary cities and the tension that this generates between textual and pictorial legibility of urban spaces. Cosgrove describes the experience of individuals on the street as confrontational as the volume and rapid turnover and replacement of written information in modern cities contributes to the illegibility of metropolitan spaces as a whole. Bradford's work exploits the tensions that exist between word and image in both the representation and the experience of the city. Yet, his multiple layers of different forms of written language and advertising that inform individuals' experiences of the streets produce a new legibility and imagining of urban space. ⁵¹ Bradford's work brings about a new visibility of the city's invisible.

Bradford's collages call into question the type of knowledge traditionally conveyed by maps and the organization and communication of knowledge about the spaces they represent. In Bradford's Los Moscos, the title is not a place name but a slang reference to migrant workers in Los Angeles who were mostly of Hispanic origin. In this work Bradford creates an aerial viewpoint of the city through found materials while creating a sense of place through the inclusion of trace references of a particular community. Instead of the traditional cartographic function of labeling and demarcation, language provides evidence of the existence of communities whose presence is not necessarily brought to light on traditional maps of the city. In the context of Calvino's Invisible Cities, Bradford's work suggests the potential of the map to permit a new way of conveying information about places and the people who inhabit them. ⁵²