Cartographic abstraction in contemporary art / Картографическая абстракция в современном искусстве

We see with maps. Using maps to create complex visual understandings of the world is an activity that most of us are so used to that we do not tend to consider how the maps we read help us form these understandings. Map use has become a thoroughly commonplace activity, whether we are navigating in a city using a smartphone, planning a journey across the country, or looking at artworks that include images of maps in an art gallery or on an artist’s website. The specifically cartographic way in which we create spatial and visual understandings of the world is the subject of this book. I offer a new theoretical framework for understanding how we go about the complex process of ‘seeing with maps’. I use this idea of seeing with maps to claim two things—that maps are deeply concerned with creating a sense that we cansee the world by using them and to assert a commitment to further John Berger’s important claim that “[o]ur vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are” (1972/2008, p. 9). Vision is an active process, constituted by a range of means, including map use, and it is the process of how we see with maps that I focus on here. The cartographic image implies and constitutes its viewer using distinctive visual techniques that can usefully be investigated through considering contemporary artworks that take up, explore and disrupt cartographic ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger, 1972). <...>