A Cartographic Essay

A Cartographic Essay

Jessica Barrett Sattell

In the early 1990s, Peter Plagens, the longtime art critic formerly of Newsweek, suggested that members of his profession fall into three categories: “goalies,” “evangelists,” and “cartographers.” “Goalies,” as he revisited in a 2005 Artforum editorial, are art critics who act as gatekeepers to manage the flood of art that is produced; by practicing “defensive” criticism, they encourage artists to raise their standards and present polished work. “Evangelists,” on the opposite end, practice criticism on the offense; they act as advocates or cheerleaders for the artists whom they feel are deserving of publicity and praise.

The “cartographer” art critic is somewhere between the two: she aims to neither subvert nor herald, but instead practices an approach akin to mapmaking. She presents art as a series of decisions, and strives to outline them in the form of a landscape that can be rendered transparent with a set of good directions. When asked to describe the quintessential cartographic critic, Plagens names Rosalind Krauss for her paradigm-shifting 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.”

While a three-part classification system across the wide scope of art writing—not to mention art, itself—can quickly become an oversimplification of an immensely complex network of relationships, Plagens’ choice of the word “cartographer” to explain the type of art critic who seeks to level the field, so to speak, is curious. If cartography is inherently about the act of making maps, then the artist, the writer, and the curator each participate in that practice in that they share a common goal of building situations and presenting tools that can communicate humanity’s place in the universe. All aim to negotiate space—be that in the gallery, the museum, on the written page, or beyond—to describe the lay of the land of particular themes or issues.

While maps are often thought of as tangible, be-all-end-all guides to territories, be they real or imaginary, they can also forge new landscapes and new ways of looking at the world. A text is a map, just as is a painting, a data set, or a scientific experiment; each is a tool that houses a set of directions with multiple interpretations, all of which lead to new stories. This, then, leads to fresh ways of thinking, being, and making. By extension, an art exhibition, and its accompanying texts and programming, combine to form a constellation of ideas that can provoke new maps, be they in the forms of thought clouds, notes, or inspirational sketches.

However, an art exhibition is also inherently the result of a series of decisions, and, like maps, decisions are never neutral. The Terra/Form curatorial team’s conscious choices of the themes of conceptual mapping and gardening are crafted to orient visitors towards an agenda that encourages them to consider the act of walking as a statement of reclaiming public space. The results, thanks to the intensely intimate viewing experience of Clutch Gallery, are as individualized as our own internal topographies.

This essay, then, can hopefully act as a cartographic guideline for the show, or a wayfinding device for some kind of context behind an intensely collaborative effort. As the result of an expansive exercise in mapmaking as reimagined for the space of the gallery, we hope that Terra/Form brings at least some small glimpse across a new kind of landscape.