Off the Map
Antonia Hirsch helps challenge the politics of cartography
BY Alex Aylett
When something you take for granted changes, you notice. In the reflection of your face, or a map of the world, just a little difference can make you look twice. Antonia Hirsch is a master at provoking that second glance. A Vancouver-based multimedia artist and cartographer, her maps have been exhibited around the globe—a globe she often turns on its head, by stretching, inverting or erasing countries to suit new visions of what determines our place in the world.
Maps can tell us as much about politics and ideology as they do about space. As with any representation, you can’t put it all in; you only include what’s important to you (assuming you’re in a position where your opinion counts). Nations and empires trace borders. The navigation needs of European merchants and explorers determined the shape of Mercator’s familiar world map, which also dramatically minimized the size of Africa and the Tropics. But today, the argument goes, social and economic forces are shrinking the globe and physical location is losing its importance. So if we’re beyond space, what will our new maps look like?
Hirsch playfully proposes versions of our world that reflect a new set of priorities. Her maps modify the shapes and sizes of continents and countries to reflect factors like gross domestic product (GDP), total rainfall or the adoption of the metric system. Looking at them, you can’t help but wonder if they could possibly be real. To Hirsch, that’s a question you can ask of any map. “My maps are real in the sense that any map could be real,” she says. “This idea that you can come very close to the factual or to experience—that’s an illusion. The ‘reality’ of a map is a question of: a) degrees, and b) how many people you can find that agree that this is a useful model.”
And not everyone agrees with Hirsch’s work. For a show in Shanghai, she produced a map that used age—instead of more common considerations like economics or population—to look at China’s relationship to the rest of the world. Because of its comparatively young population, China was considerably smaller than most parts of Europe and North America. The board of censors was not pleased and held up the piece prior to exhibition. Hirsch took it as a compliment. “The fact that it was important enough to make a complaint about was really nice,” she says.
Hirsch isn’t alone in recognizing that messing with maps has a way of engaging people. She is one of a number of contemporary artists, including Ingo Günther (work shown at right) and Kerry Tribe, who are turning to cartography as a way of re-envisioning the world and using art to raise political and social questions. Like Hirsch, they’re rethinking what a map is, what it should depict and what the priorities that guide its creation are and could be.
For Hirsch, map art is a catalyst for thought. “We are all being fed ideologies all day…. I think people work through the issue of ‘can that be real?’ once you start distorting maps. They’re challenged to go ‘What is this? This looks so different from what I know.’”
A trickster, Hirsch chooses materials and locations to surprise and tease her audience. She enjoys watching people try to make sense of what she does. Blot (pictured at top), where country size reflects GDP, was stencilled onto the panels that boarded up a closed kiosk in a Vancouver mall. Another work, ArtNews Top200, based on the American art magazine’s tally of the top international art collectors, was made out of 23-carat gold leaf specifically for an art auction. As a final jest—to highlight the magazine’s narcissistic, US-centred view—she flipped the image as if it was being seen in a mirror.
But where does this leave us? If all maps—and, really, all representations of anything—reflect only the priorities of their makers, what next? It seems like we’re trapped in the classic dead end, where all things are equally random and meaningless, a clichéd place that people often use to knock down much postmodern art and philosophy. For Hirsch, who even in conversation hesitates to use the pronoun “we,” the answer is much more personal. If what you take for granted in popular representations of the world is a reflection of someone else’s understanding, realizing this helps each of us reach an understanding of our own. The arbitrary isn’t a place to stop; it’s a place to start.
“Systems of representation,” Hirsch says, “are always man- or woman-made. And as soon as you discover the arbitrariness of that, it means that there’s room for other possibilities. That is ultimately what is interesting to me.”
