Art Maps and Cities: Contemporary Artists Explore Urban Spaces

Description

This book presents an original study on how contemporary artists are exploring urban spaces through mapping. Despite a long history of representations of cities in maps, and the relationships that can be envisaged between art maps and cities in the contemporary world, little research is dedicated to investigating how artists intervene in the realm of urban cartography. The research examines a century-old history of art maps and draws on academic debates challenging traditional notions of maps as scientific artefacts produced through accurate measurement and surveying. The potential of art maps to construct personal narratives, through contestation, embodiment and play, is analysed in the city context, where spaces are shaped by urban planning and design, political ideologies and socio-economic forces. Adopting an exploratory and interpretative research approach that investigates the confluence of theories originated in different domains, this book conducts the reader to discover what artistic practices can bring into a more creative, while inquisitive, understanding of cities. A series of semi-structured interviews with visual artists, enquiring how they apprehend, process and re-create urban spaces in artworks, explores cartographic process and methods in visual art practices in the twenty first century, which incorporates digital technologies and critical thinking. Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Urban Art Maps in Cultural Context Understanding Maps as Translations The Urban Space Rendered in Maps Contemporary Art and Mapping Chapter 3: Seeing, Representing, Performing The View from Above, the View from the Ground The Dialectics of the Lived Space Theories of Perception, Ways of Seeing Cartography, Knowledge and Reality Representation and the Crisis of Representation Contesting Traditional Cartographies Performance, Agency and Deep Maps Chapter 4: A History of Art Maps and Mappings Walking and Mapping: From Drifting to Dissecting (1910s–1970s) The Situationist International: Dérives, Psychogeography and Unitary Urbanism After the SI: Fluxus, Conceptual Art and Land Art Mapping, Counter-mapping and the Art Map Age (1970s–2000s) Chapter 5: Contemporary Artists Mapping Cities Four Conversations with Artists Layla Curtis Ruth Levene Christian Nold Matthew Picton Accuracy and Authority on Maps Embodied Knowledge and the Politics of Space Agency and Transformative Mapping Exploring the Urban Pattern Chapter 6: Liverpool: A City in Maps Contemporary Art Maps of Liverpool Portraying the Cityscape Narrating the City Mapping in Layers Epilogue: Viewing the Maps of Liverpool Chapter 7: Placing/Performing the Map Bibliography Index