Our generation, according to Professor John R. Stilgoe, has a great deal of faith in our maps. But is our trust misplaced? With the extensive resources of the nation’s oldest map collection at their free disposal, Harvard students and faculty alike have begun to study maps as inherently subjective visual representations of space and as objets d’art in their own right.

“The more beautiful the map, the more you should distrust it,” Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) Professor John R. Stilgoe warns the room at large. It is 9:25 a.m., and already the room is slowly filling for a 10 o’clock class. The digital generation listens in rapt attention as they are told they are timid and gullible; corporations, and maybe even the government, are taking advantage of their insecurities; and their faith in cartographical honesty is just the tip of the iceberg.

Only the naive, then, would see maps as pure realism, unadulterated representations of the world as it really is, rare opportunities for total objectivity. However, beneath the geographical shapes and boundary lines that constitute our image of the map lies an unseen, intricate web of decisions. These decisions—rather than the straightforward ‘content’ of maps—inform the studies and artwork of a small but vibrant cartographical community on campus. Harvard houses a world-renowned collection of antique and modern maps; many of its most compelling and original pieces have recently gone on display in an exhibition entitled “Rev. Badger’s Misfits: Deviations and Diversions” in Pusey Library.

The burgeoning activity of this community at Harvard has demonstrated that maps are not studied simply for their informational value. Rather, they are seen as vital cultural artifacts, conceptual art objects, or as purely theoretical representations. In design conceits and the inclusion of content that extends beyond mere land formation, mapmakers express more than geographical relations. Rather, they make subtle arguments about the way we conceptualize our built and natural environments.

DYSTOPIAN TOPOGRAPHY

Maps can depict more than simple geography, and yet for us to recognize a map as such we must see color patterns, borders, topography, place names, and natural features. “Schlarraffenlandes,” a piece in the “Rev. Badger” exhibit, plays with this dual reality. Its imaginary continent, which resembles a misshapen homemade pizza or denatured plant cell, could easily be mistaken for a distorted view of the Middle East. Made by Peter Schenk, a famous cartographer of the late seventeenth century, the map is modeled on a satirical poem by Sans Sachs more than a century earlier. It boasts countries with Latinate names like “Bibonia” (Land of Drunkards). Bibonia in turn features towns with idiomatic German toponyms like “Schlampen” (Guzzle) and “Schickihnheim” (Send Him Home).

“It’s a dystopia,” says Joseph Garver, the librarian in charge of map research and acquisitions. Garver, who sits at the main desk in Pusey’s map room and sports a fittingly distinguished and scraggly white beard, is the curator of the “Rev. Badger” exhibit. The exhibit displays a selection of the works that eluded categorization under the scrutiny of the map collection curator from 1889 to 1892, Rev. Henry Clay Badger. Badger was the first to impose a rigid classification system on the collection, though it dates back to the historic donation of Israel Thorndike in 1818. The university now owns more than 400,000 sheet maps, 6,000 atlases, and several thousand antiquarian maps, making its collection the oldest and one of the largest in the country.

“The collection is adequately used by faculty and graduate students, but I wish that more undergraduates would come in,” says Garver. In his experience, undergraduates tend to find the map room only during the two or three weeks before they graduate or just in order to print out a map for dorm room decoration.

STORIES OF SPACE

While students may not know about the esoteric underground beige box that is Harvard’s world-class map collection, there has been a recent outcropping of theses and other projects that relate to maps as art. Ben C. Cosgrove ’10, a former music concentrator, made an auditory map of Massachusetts as his senior thesis. After traveling the state and conducting a series of interviews, Cosgrove composed a 20-minute piece and wrote an accompanying essay. “The central argument of the thesis was about showing the changing relationship between people and land as you travel from the western part of the state to the eastern one. It’s a balance that shifts pretty steadily,” says Cosgrove. “It worked as a pretty cool narrative arc: you start out in the mountains and work your way into the city.” The product is an auditory collage of instrumentals, interviews, and field recordings of ambient noise.

In its aesthetic conception, Cosgrove’s piece seems diametrically opposed to the traditional notion of maps as means to ends, objects only as valuable as they are useful. Cosgrove admits that “understanding a place and how you feel about a place is obviously such a subjective thing,” but argues nonetheless that “trying to represent that seems like just as noble a venture as trying to represent roads or mountains.” In fact, Cosgrove’s sonic map may be seen as no less subjective in its viewpoint than those very same road and mountain maps. “Any map is a distillation of something, of whatever the cartographer deems the relevant points of something are. It’s way of conveying points about a place, idea, or system,” he says.

The project that Rebecca A. Cooper ’11, an inactive Crimson arts writer, worked on over the summer bears more material similarity to conventional maps. Still, it is an equally significant departure from their characteristic use. Cooper walked around Manhattan handing out blank maps of the borough and asking each person she met to fill in whatever was significant to them about the city. “In order to get a complete picture of a city you need to refract it and see it from a million different views,” says Cooper. For her, pure representation of the city’s geographic and built features does not accurately depict the city as it is. “By the time I was a senior [in high school],” she says, “every street corner was loaded with emotion. To map the street just in order to get there in the future didn’t manage to capture anything that was meaningful.” Though the different mappings of New York that constitute Cooper’s piece are disparate in form and content—one map is covered in graffiti, one shows simply a workplace and home, another a series of sexual misadventures—she believes that the collection provides a holistic representation of the city’s most salient features.

Tags

Visual Arts, Libraries, VES