LoveEast.46

East life
Even when the buildings remain, the sites of our
daily engagements and our cherished urban nooks
and crannies are constantly being refashioned and
repurposed until they disappear. The layout of our
streets are dug up, rationalised and reordered.
Consequently, our cities get transformed beyond
recognition. Yet even when they are razed to the
ground, all the places where we walk are essentially
constant. In the widest and most profound sense, they
part of a cosmic cartography
that is eternal, infinite and
immutable. As long as we live,
they live in whatever form we
care to imagine them .
Do you have a favourite
cartographer?
John Ogilby, the seventeenth
century Scottish cartographer,
designed his road maps as
trompe l'oeil scrolls, depicting
solely what the traveller needed
to know, cartographically
speaking, in order to get from
one place to another. The
exclusive nature of such maps
embodies the familiar notion
that what the artist leaves out
is as important as what they
include. In creating my maps,
subdivision and organisation
of the source material takes
place in a manner comparable
to an artist laying out colours
on a palette in preparation for
a painting. This categorisation
inevitably ends up as lists,
which means that - unlike a
painter - a cartographer always
knows the moment when the
work is finished, once the last item on the list has been
ticked off.
Of course, there will always be something missing
even from the best maps ,otherwise there would be no
need for explorers. In 2002, during the World Cup in
Japan, I produced a map which could be folded up and
hidden in the heel of a shoe. In the style of John Ogilby,
it showed the most direct route from London to Japan,
identified borders, features of topography and the
major cities. I provided useful phrases in the languages
of all the countries traversed and suggested items
which might be collected and used for barter en-route,
as well as predicting climate and weather conditions to
be anticipated along the way, and even offering panels
6 LOVEEAST
London Enraged
Image Courtesy of Adam Dant / TAG Fine Arts
Map of Spitalfields Life
Image Courtesy of Adam Dant / TAG Fine Arts
where fans could record the progress of their teams
towards the final when they arrived.
How is it possible to draw more than one map of the
same place?
Many of my maps depict the immediate locale of my
home and studio. Although my original intention in
making a different map of Shoreditch every year was
to familiarise myself with the area where I had chosen
to live and work, I soon realised these maps were also
a means of establishing my
presence and identity in this
place.
Just as different artists will
each the see same scene
from their own perspectives,
similarly one person can
recreate the topography of
a place in diverse ways on
diverse occasions. There are
so many contingencies when
we look at a map, and we can
chose to interpret these or we
can choose to take it at face
value. An obvious example of
this is my invention of the art
historical orthodoxy known as
Underneathism, depicting the
world as viewed from beneath.
When the familiar ‘God's eye’
view of the earth is inverted, the
resultant perspective appears
strangely malevolent. Yet
Underneathism also exposes
the familiar reality of isometric
views -utilised by Google street
mapping and video games - as
equally artificial. Their use of
this perspective only appears
to us to be the natural order
because of our exposure to it through years of constant
use.
After a day spent in my studio creating Underneathean
views, I found that stepping out into the street was
as disorientating for me as it must have been for a
Londoner of the eighteenth century to have been
lifted up from the beer garden of a Hackney pub in a
hot air balloon.
What is the future for maps?
In the past, a globe in your pocket, fashioned from
intricately-engraved and hand-painted gores pasted to
a lacquered plaster sphere and housed in a handsome
leather pouch, might represent the apogee of