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COSGROVE Cultural Cartography Maps and Mapping in Cultural
COSGROVE Cultural Cartography Maps and Mapping in Cultural
GEOGRAPHY
Denis Cosgrove
2008/2 - n° 660-661
pages 159 à 178
ISSN 0003-4010
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Cultural cartography: maps and mapping
in cultural geography
Les cartes et la cartographie en géographie culturelle
Denis Cosgrove
UCLA
Abstract Over the past three decades, significant shifts in both the theory and practice of
cartography and indeed in the definition of the map itself have transformed the
role of mapping within geography, while maps and map making have become
a focus for important contemporary connections between cultural geography
and various art practices. This essay reviews these developments, paying special
attention to Anglophone examples. The critique of cartography’s claims to sci-
ence and revisionist art historical scholarship are first discussed, followed by
comments on the changing relations between geography and cartography and
the impacts of new technology on map making and use as these have been
democratised through virtual cartographies. Growing artistic interest in
researching and documenting spatial and environmental questions that involve
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use of many of these mapping practices is set in its historical context and related
Résumé Au cours des trois dernières décennies, des tournants importants se sont produits
tant dans la pratique cartographique que dans les théories qui la concernent, et qui
ont transformé le rôle de la cartographie en géographie, alors même que la fabri-
cation des cartes faisait l’objet d’études qui font ressortir les liens actuels existant
entre la géographie culturelle et différentes pratiques artistiques. Le présent essai se
penche sur ces développements en portant une attention particulière au cas anglo-
phone. La critique de la prétention scientifique de la cartographique et l’approche
historique révisionniste de l’art seront d’abord discutées, suivront des remarques
sur les relations changeantes entre la géographie et la cartographie, ainsi que sur
l’impact des nouvelles technologies sur la fabrication et l’usage des cartes comme
on peut s’en rendre compte par la généralisation des cartographies virtuelles. La
dimension artistique de la recherche et de la documentation sur les questions spa-
tiales et environnementales qui ont recours à ces nouvelles cartographies, est
replacée dans son contexte historique et est mise en relation avec les changements
survenus récemment dans les pratiques géographiques.
Key-words Cultural geography, cartography, map, mapping, map art, site specific art, Land
Art, history of cartography.
Mots-clés Géographie culturelle, cartographie, carte, art et cartes, site d’art, art naturel,
histoire de la cartographie.
a material object and an active agent in social relations. In this she shares
a burgeoning interest in the map-object and in the practices of mapping
not only with a large number of artists, but with many cultural geographers.
The two groups have found common concern in cartography as a cultural
practice and they draw increasingly on each other’s work and insights 3.
In what follows I review this shared body of theory, criticism and prac-
tice around maps and mapping with the intention of clarifying the chan-
ging relations between cartography, science cultural theory and artistic acti-
vity within geography. I explore the historical evolution of these relations
and connect them to broader developments in cultural study, principally
within the Anglophone world (although the developments I discuss are not
by any means confined to that sphere). I assess their implications in the
context of a digitized world in which the map as a tangible, finished object
and mapping as a specialised scientific activity seem to be giving way to a
virtual cartography in which the map image is avowedly provisional and
ephemeral, and mapping a creative, participatory activity no longer the pre-
serve of professional cartographers and geographers. Lastly, I explore the
recent convergence of interest between cultural geographers and artists in
questions of map making and cartography.
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3 Denis Cosgrove, “Maps, Mapping, Modernity: Art and cartography in the twentieth century”,
Imago Mundi, 57 (1), 2005, p. 35-54.
4 The term “iconotext” refers to representations that incorporate both text and graphic images (for
example comic books, cartoons and many virtual hypertexts). The map is one of the oldest
examples of the form.
5 See the discussion in Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora, “Mapping global warfare: Los
Angeles, the Pacific, and Charles Owens’s pictorial cartography”, Annals, Association of Ame-
rican Geographers, 95(2), 2005, p. 373-390; and John Pickles, “Texts, hermeneutics and propa-
ganda maps”, in T.J. Barnes and J.S. Duncan (eds.), Writing worlds: discourse, text and metaphor
in the representation of landscape, London and New York, Routledge, 1992.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 163
6 D. Wood, “Cartography is dead”, 4; see also John Pickles, A history of spaces: cartographic
reason, mapping and the geocoded world, London, Routledge, 2004.
7 J. Brian Harley, The new nature of maps, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2001, quotation on 35.
The most comprehensive discussion of Harley’s ideas, their origin and evolution is Matthew H.
Edney, “The origins and development of J.B. Harley’s cartographic theories”, Cartographica,
Monograph 54, 2005; Edney’s comments on Harley’s theoretical confusions are on 107. A
detailed critique of Harley’s use of French theorists is to be found in Barbara Belyea, “Images of
Power: Derrida, Foucault, Harley”, Cartographica, 29, 2 1992, p. 1-9.
8 The essays are collected in The new nature of maps. Harley’s work for the American bi-centennial
exhibition of cartography and discovery revealed to him the extent of pre-Columbian indigenous
geographical knowledge present but silenced in the maps produced by European “discoverers”.
9 I discuss this evolution of thought in Anglophone human geography in “Epistemology, geography
and cartography: Matthew Edney on Brian Harley’s cartographic theories”, Annals, Association
of American Geographers, 97 (1), 2007, p. 202-209.
10 Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier, “An introduction to critical cartography”, ACME An Interna-
tional E-Journal for critical geographies, 4(1), 2006, p. 11-33 [http://www.acme-journal.org/vol4/
JWCJK]; David Koch, Cartographies of disease: maps, mapping and medicine, Redlands CA., Esri
Press, 2005; John Cloud, “American cartographic transformations during the Cold War”, Cartography
and Geographical Information Science, 29, 2002, p. 261-282; Mark Denil, “Cartographic design: rhe-
toric and persuasion”, Cartographic Perspectives, 45, 2003, p. 8-67.
164 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008
Within art history a parallel focus on the map as an object of critical study
emerged in the 1980s as part of a revisionist interest in the cultural specificities
and historical contexts of Renaissance perspective and the late medieval science
of optics more generally. In a detailed examination of the technical and ico-
nographic complexities of Jacopo de’Barbari’s celebrated panoramic map of
VENETIA 1500, Juergen Schulz demonstrated the priority of its emblematic
and iconic significance over any role as a scientific instrument or practical
guide to the city 11. Close examination of the work of later 16th century Vene-
tian cartographers such as Giacomo Gastaldo and Cristoforo Sorte has dee-
pened our understanding of the close connections between optical science,
practical mathematical arts such as survey and engineering, and fine art 12.
These relations have been ably summarised by Martin Kemp 13. More theore-
tically, Svetlana Alpers’ examination of the inscriptive qualities of Dutch and
Flemish genre painting and map making connected them to a broader descrip-
tive imperative in Netherlandish culture that gives a scientific and technical
foundation to the long-noted art historical distinctions between Italian idea-
lism and Northern empiricism in early modern painting, and even perhaps to
the Italian distinction between disegno (the emphasis on concept) and colore
(a focus on technique) in art 14. Also in the 1980s, Samuel Edgerton sought
to establish a direct connection between 15th century Florentine studies of the
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11 Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized
Geography Before the Year 1500”, Art Bulletin, 60, 1978, p. 425-474.
12 Juergen Schulz, La cartografia tra scienza e arte: carte e cartografia nei Rinascimento Italiana,
Modena, Panini, 1990; Denis Cosgrove, The palladian landscape: Geographical change and its
cultural representations in sixteenth-century Italy, State College, Penn State University Press, 1993.
13 Martin Kemp, The Science of Art, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990.
14 Svetlana Alpers, The art of describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century, Chicago, Chicago
University Press, 1983.
15 Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective, New york, basic books,
1975. Edgerton’s claims about the theoretical and cultural correspondence between perspective
and Ptolemeic mapping have not held up to subsequent scrutiny.
16 Franco Farinelli, I segni del mondo. Immagine cartografica e discorso geografico in età moderna,
la Nuova Italia, 1992.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 165
17 David Woodward (ed), Art and cartography: six historical essays, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1987.
18 J.B. Harley and David Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography, vol. I “Cartography in pre-
historic, ancient and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean”, Chicago and London, The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1987; vol. II, Bk.1 “Cartography in the traditional Islamic and South
Asian societies”, 1994; vol. II. Bk.2 “Cartography in the traditional east and southeast Asian
societies”, 1994; vol. II, Bk. 3 (David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis eds), “Cartography in the
traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific societies”, 1998.
19 Denil, “Cartographic design”, 8.
20 The term “immutable mobile” comes from the writings of Bruno Latour and refers to those mate-
rial scientific objects (such as printed books and treatises) that allow ideas and information to
move physically over space. The printed map as a graphic representation of spatial information is
a classic example of the kind of instrument Latour is referring to. Bruno Latour, Science in Action,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
166 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008
and thus fall within the remit of both the cultural history of representation
and of things. They cannot be understood or interpreted outside the
cultural context in which they are produced, circulate and are used. The
influence of this cultural turn in the approach to mapping is apparent in
many fields of study and, along with geography’s intensive re-conceptuali-
sation of space, accounts for much of the current cross-disciplinary interest
in geographical scholarship. Historians for example, long sceptical of non-
textual sources, are paying increasing attention to the role of survey and
mapping as active practices in the overseas expansion of early-modern
Europe, re-examining the way that maps acted as a medium through which
knowledge of unknown places was constructed in a dialogue between
(often fantastic) European expectations and imaginings on the one hand,
and autochthonous experience on the other 21. They have begun to reco-
gnise the early-modern map as much more than a way-finding device or a
record of discovery, but a representational machine for archiving and clas-
sifying a wide range of geographic and ethnographic material and a rheto-
rical medium for establishing various claims to truth and authority. 16th
century painted map cycles in Florence and Rome were attached to cabinets
of curiosity; the great 17th-century Dutch and French cosmographic wall
maps acted as Gemankunstwerken, collecting, collating, classifying and dis-
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21 Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A history of state fixations and fugitive landscapes,
Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2004; Laura Hostettler, Quing colonia enterprise: Eth-
nography and cartography in early modern China, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001.
22 Francesca Fiorani, The marvel of maps: Art. Cartography and politics in Renaissance Italy, New
Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2005; Bronwen Wilson, The world in Venice: Print, the
City, and Early Modern Identity, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2005; Anne Godlewska,
Geography unbound: French geographical science from Cassini to Humboldt, Chicago, Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1999; D. Graham Burnett, Masters of all they Surveyed: Exploration, Geo-
graphy — a British El Dorado, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000; Luciana de Lima
Martins, “Mapping tropical waters: British views and visions of Rio de Janeiro”, in Denis Cos-
grove (ed.) Mappings, London, Reaktion Books, 1999, p. 148-168.
23 Burnett, Masters; Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British
India, 1765_1843, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997.
24 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, Honolulu, Univer-
sity of Hawai’I Press, 1994.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 167
25 Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism,
Cambridge, Verso, 1983.
26 Martins, “Mapping tropical waters”.
27 Paul Carter, The road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, London, Faber, 1987.
28 Quoted on p. 4 of Denis Cosgrove, “Introduction”, Mappings, p. 1-23. Christian Jacob, L’empire
des cartes, Paris, Albin Michel, 1993.
168 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008
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heart-shaped world maps (with the south cardinal point at the top of the
map) as installations, using diverse media such as salt, red-beaded glass pins
and growing/dying grass to exploit the nuances of relating the world map
to the human heart 31.
The significance of the map and the globe in emblemata, and in early-
modern European literature, poetry, painting and engraving reveals a close
connection between cartography as a scientific and technical discourse and
as a subject of artistic reflection and practice that anticipates in some
respects the contemporary relationships I discuss below. In his most recent
writing Giorgio Mangani has pressed his argument for the moral rhetorics
of maps across a broad historical span of Western cartography. His
argument serves to dissolve the distinctions not only between “modern”
and pre-modern mapping in the West (for example between the medieval
mappa mundi with their explicit mapping of the terrestrial paradise, and
Abraham Ortelius’ Typus orbis terrarum, 1570), but between European and
non-Western mapping such as Chinese, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Islamic
traditions in which the religious and moral dimensions of mapping and
maps has long been acknowledged, and finally between the roles of art and
science in cartography 32.
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2 Contemporary mapping
31 Ruth E. Watson, “The Decorated Hearts of Orance Fine: The 1531 Double Cordiform Map of the
World”, The Portolan, 65, 2006.
32 Giorgio Mangani, Cartografia morale; Scafi, Mapping Paradise; Woodward, History of carto-
graphy; Cosgrove, Mappings.
170 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008
33 Erwin Raisz, General cartography, New York & London, McGraw-Hill, 1938; Arthur H.
Robinson, Elements of cartography, New York & London, 1953.
34 Cosgrove, “Epistemology, geography and cartography”.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 171
35 John Noble Wilford, The mapmakers, New York, Vintage Books, 2001, p. 417.
36 Peter Jackson’s Maps of meaning (London, Hutchinson, 1989) one of the seminal texts of the
“new” cultural geography, uses the term “map” entirely metaphorically; cartography is of little
significance in the work.
172 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008
“map artists”, that is artists active over the past half century whose work
has significantly engaged with one or more aspects of cartography 37. Many
of these artists have attracted the attention of geographers and numerous
examples of mutual interest between geographers and artists have emerged
as art practices themselves have moved away from a focus on aesthetic mat-
ters and towards the documentary and research roles of art practices 38.
Early “cartographic” artists, such as Italian Alighiero e Boetti, a member
of the influential Arte Povera movement, whose world map composed of
national flags has been widely reproduced, or the American Jasper Johns
who reproduced the map of the United States in encaustic and collage
(1963) reworked familiar cartographic icons for the purposes of alerting
their audience to the politics of the national map. Others such as the
conceptual artists Sol de Witt who made systematic incisions into aerial
photographs of New York, or Douglas Huebler who mailed letters to and
from locations along the 42nd parallel, have used the idea of mapping as
the springboard for artistic interventions, engaging more with the concepts
and practices of map making than the map itself. It is not possible to survey
this large and growing artistic corpus, nor meaningful to classify it syste-
matically. But in many cases the concerns of artists parallel those of con-
temporary cultural geographers and in recent years there has been an iden-
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37 Denis Wood, “Catalogue of map artists”, Cartographic Perspectives, 52, 2006, p. 61-67.
38 This development was clearly visible in the themes and presentations of the Association of Ame-
rican Geographers sponsored Geography and the Humanities Symposium held at the University
of Virginia, June, 2007 [www.aag.org/humanities/index.cfm].
39 Kunstgeographie was an early 20th century German sub-discipline of art history that attempted to
relate the artistic achievements of a cultural group to their regional geography. Its intellectual
connections with cultural geography of the same period were close, the institutional ones less so.
See Thomas da Costa Kaufmann, Towards a geography of art, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 2004.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 173
focus had given way to a positivist paradigm that largely ignored cultural
questions. Only in the 1980s when geographers such as Gunnar Olsson,
David Harvey and Alan Pred began to examine the cultural geographies of
Modernism through the concept of relative space did the geographical
significance of early modern movements such as Cubism and Futurism (in
understanding the early 20th century city for example) become apparent.
It is important to acknowledge the influence of Henri Lefebvre’s La pro-
duction de l’espace on these Anglophone geographers’ writings about space.
Lefebvre was himself closely tied to the French artistic avant-garde and
especially Surrealism, whose Situationist strand, discussed below, made
extensive, if subversive use of maps and mapping practices. The Surrealist
Map of the World (1929) does not today appear a revolutionary image
(fig. 3). Yet in its sketchy outline, erasures and distortions of geographic
areas and territories, and arbitrary labeling, it challenged the stabilities of
the early-20th century European geographical imagination and its self-satis-
fied image of a wholly discovered world. Surrealists were among the groups
most engaged with geographical representation, in large measure because
of their concerns with everyday life. Thus Marcel Duchamp’s readymades
reference various Parisian landmarks and, according to Housefield, mapped
out the French capital when collected and displayed in Duchamp’s New
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40 James Housefield, “Marcel Duchamp’s art and the geography of modern Paris”, The Geogra-
phical Review, 4 1992, p. 478.
174 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008
41 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1960.
42 David Pinder, Visions of the city: Utopianism, power and politics in twentieth-century Uurba-
nism, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, and New York, Routledge, 2005; David Pinder,
“Subverting cartography: the situationists and maps of the city”, Environment and Planning A, 28,
1996, p. 405-427.
43 Peter Wollen, “Mappings. Situationists and/or conceptualists”, in Michael Newman and John
Bird (eds.), Rewriting Conceptual Art, London, Reaktion, 1999; Denis Wood, “Map art”, Carto-
graphic Perspectives, 53, Winter 2006, p. 5-14.
44 Guy Debord, quoted in Wollen, “Mappings. Situationists and/or conceptualists”, p. 30.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 175
45 Ibid., p. 30.
46 Ibid., p. 32.
47 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. S. Rendall, Berkeley, University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1988.
176 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008
related art is the fact that London’s principal modern art collection, Tate
Modern at Bankside, devotes a major gallery to the theme “environment
and place” that displays the work of these artists.
48 See Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge
Mass., MIT Press, 2002.
49 http://www.ikatun.com/evacuateboston/about.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 177
Laura Kurgan’s 9/11 map with which I opened this discussion is thus not
an aberrant incursion of the artist into the field of geography and carto-
graphy, but an example of a much broader and significant outcome of the
“cultural turn” in geographic, cartographic, artistic and spatial practice. As
the geographic discipline has become more self-critical about its traditional
claims to document at determined scales and with scientific objectivity pat-
terns and processes on the earth’s surface, especially for the social world, a
significant opening towards the roles of creativity and imagination in
making and communicating geographical knowledge has developed. At the
same time a greatly expanded number of practicing artists have moved away
from the conventional confines of aesthetic production, visual media and
gallery display to engage directly with the world, with the intention of
researching, documenting and representing in challenging ways its environ-
mental and social conditions. Advances in information technology that have
democratized the gathering, storage, manipulation and display of spatially
referenced data have afforded innovative opportunities for artists to fulfil
50 The project and its various artistic productions are documented in Nick Barley (ed.), Leaving
Tracks: Artranspennine 98 — An international contemporary visual art exhibition recorded, Man-
chester, August Media, 1999.
51 A number of research projects evaluating the goals and achievements of site specific and local or
community art projects are currently being undertaken in British university geography depart-
ments (eg Open University, Exeter University).
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