Earth-Mapping

Artists Reshaping Landscape

2005
Author:

Edward S. Casey

Re-envisions the earth in innovative painterly, sculptural, and architectural forms

Edward Casey describes the ways in which artists of the past half century have incorporated ingenious mapping techniques into their artworks. Casey follows Robert Smithson's legacy in the works of Sandy Gellis, Margot McLean, and Michelle Stuart. He also explores the visions of the earth found in the abstract paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Eve Ingalls, and Dan Rice.

Edward Casey combines philosophical sophistication, a discerning knowledge of cartography, a sensitive eye, and a fine understanding of the history of art to break new and illuminating ground.

Gary Shapiro, author of Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying

Dutch world maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with their decorative pictures and elaborate typography, stand in sharp contrast to the wholly practical maps of today, which emphasize precise detail and consistent scale. Art, since the Impressionist period, has seemingly moved in the opposite direction, toward a less realistic interpretation of the world.

Edward S. Casey demonstrates that the disciplines of mapping and painting, long thought to have diverged, are again intersecting. Earth-Mapping describes the ways in which artists of the past half century have incorporated ingenious mapping techniques into their artworks. Beginning with a reassessment of the pioneering earth art of Robert Smithson in the 1960s and 1970s, Casey follows Smithson’s legacy in the works of Sandy Gellis, Margot McLean, and Michelle Stuart. He also explores the visions of the earth found in the abstract paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Eve Ingalls, and Dan Rice.

Focusing on forms of mapping that depart radically from conventional cartography—particularly “mapping with/in,” being with or in a place, and “mapping out,” communicating that experience of connection with others—Casey shows how earth art and abstract painting respectively reshape our landscape and our view of it, drawing us in from our bird’s-eye view of the grid of highways and roads.

In these works, we come to see the earth as it is sensed, remembered, and reshaped by artists as they explore the effect of the landscape on humans and the human effect on the landscape, and as they demand a response to the changing world around us.

Edward S. Casey is Distinguished Professor in the philosophy department at SUNY–Stony Brook. He is author of numerous books on the importance of place in human lives, including Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, and Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minnesota, 2002).

Edward Casey combines philosophical sophistication, a discerning knowledge of cartography, a sensitive eye, and a fine understanding of the history of art to break new and illuminating ground.

Gary Shapiro, author of Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying

Describes the ways in which artist of the past half-century have incorporated ingenious mapping techniques into their artworks.

Apade

CONTENTS

Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Prologue: Mapping It Out with/in the Earth

Part I. Earth Works That Map

1. Mapping with Earth Works: Robert Smithson on the Site
2. Memorial Mapping of the Land: Materiality in the Work of Margot McLean
3. Mapping Down in Space and Time: Sandy Gellis Collecting Traces
4. Plotting and Charting the Path: Voyaging to the Ends of the Earth with Michelle Stuart

Concluding Reflections to Part I

Part II. Mapping the Landscape in Paintings

5. Getting Oriented to the Earth: Eve Ingalls Bringing Line and Paint to Bear
6. Maps and Fields: Jasper Johns and Richard Diebenkorn on Icons and the Land
7. Absorptive versus Cartographic Mapping: Willem de Kooning on Bodies Moving in the Landscape
8. Locating the General in the Earth Itself: Dan Rice on Biding Time in Place

Last Thoughts on Part II

Epilogue: Wherefore Earth-Mapping?

Notes
Permissions

Index