The Most Important—and Amazing—Map Exhibition, Ever!
/Here is another vignette that I’ve had to cut from the WIP manuscript follows, much reconfigured for this stand-alone essay based on readily available resources. I am indebted to Jean-Marc Besse for sharing some information about the exhibition with me, especially for clarifying for me the respective creative roles of Macchi and Rivière, and for directing me to the Centre’s photographic archive.
Unfortunately, the archives of the Centre Georges Pompidou have restricted access to the images of the installation. I do use below one image that I downloaded from its website a year or so ago, for which I claim fair use.
The most amazing map exhibition ever mounted was Cartes et figures de la terre (Maps and images of the earth). It ran from 24 May through 17 November 1980 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, as a project of its Centre de création industrielle (Center for industrial design). The exhibition took up the entire fifth floor and, on the ground floor, the center’s forum included (although only through 15 September) the two great globes that Cassini had made for Louis XIV in 1681–83 (Edney 2017–25, 7:46–56). It is hard to say just how many items were included in the show, as the accompanying volume (not a catalog per se) did not include a complete list of all exhibits. (Jean-Marc Besse told me that the archivists have assured him that such an enumeration does exist, but he’s still looking for it!)
(For clarity, I refer to the exhibition by its full title, Cartes et figures de la terre, discussed first, and the accompanying volume by the short title, Cartes et figures, discussed second)
The Exhibition
What made the show so important was not only its size but the sheer variety of exhibits. Until the 1960s, most map exhibitions focused on specific themes, such as recently published government maps (at the international geographical congresses) or collections of early coarse-resolution geographical maps showing the progressive unveiling of the world and key regions to European knowledge. But in the 1960s, as the normative map concept informed map history and map studies more generally, then map exhibitions began to assemble all kinds of maps, coarse and fine resolution. This move to exhibit “maps” as a whole gave rise to another remarkable exhibition in 1980, specifically Peter Benes’ New England Prospect, which brought together a diverse array of maps of and from colonial New England in an only partially successful effort to discern and characterize a “folk” cartography among the English colonists (Edney 2017–25, 6:19–38).
Cartes et figures de la terre ranged across a wide array of periods and cultures and a wide array of the many different kinds of “maps and all forms of territorial representation” that “pervade almost all human activities, from the noblest to the most frivolous, from the most quotidian to the most forward-looking.” In juxtaposing early maps with those from the present day, Cartes et figures de la terre sought to “reveal their significance” and “to understand their language and function” (Anon. 1980, [1]; also Rivière 1980b). [n1] In this respect, the exhibition exemplifies how, during the 1970s, the normative map concept—with its claim that all maps are factual and mimetic statements, cartography having been transformed from an ancient art to a modern science—had been widened and softened by attention to art and to cultural history. That is, it highlighted how maps record the world both factually and symbolically:
The map appears first and foremost as a set of representations of the world: writing down the route, surveying the territory, recording knowledge, but also as a symbolic, imaginary, and utopian image. (Anon. 1980, 2) [n2]
An Outsider Celebration of Maps
The curators of Cartes et figures de la terre were not map specialists. The principal curator was Giulio Macchi (1918–2009), an Italian film maker and producer for Italian state television, who was also an experienced curator of art exhibitions. The large accompanying volume, of the same title as the exhibition, was edited by Jean-Loup Rivière (1948–2018), a playwright, director, and theater critic and theorist who was then a research fellow at the Centre Pompidou.
Neither Macchi nor Rivière were committed to established scholarly and professional attitudes towards maps and their history. Entranced by the great variety of scientific and artistic map images, both past and present, they emphasized the aesthetic form of maps rather than map content. In doing so, Macchi and Rivière challenged the seemingly eternal verities of the normative map, even as they remained bound to those verities, not least to the idea that all maps are somehow all the same and a necessarily exceptionalist form of representation. They were especially enamored of the spectacular and of the creative in mapping. Their love for the spectacular was brought home by their installation in the ground-floor forum of Cassini’s globes:
Jean-Claude Planchet, photograph of the spectacle of Vincenzo Coronelli’s great globes, installed in the grand, ground-floor forum of the Centre Georges Pompidou, May–September 1980, for the exhibition Cartes et figures de la terre. Kandinsky Library, Centre Georges Pompidou (CCI 93 570–671); online at bibliothequekandinsky.centrepompidou.fr.
These globes were too large for easy study and examination, even when first made, and came to be derided as having little relevance for the history of geography; they had finally been put in storage in 1901 and plans for their resurrection had all failed. Only now, seeing them as spectacular achievements of human art rather than maps to be interrogated by historians, did it make sense to reassemble and display them.
From their outsider perspective, Macchi and Rivière brought together an array of works that they thought were amazing yet all in line with cartographic normativity presented them as essentially all the same thing: modern maps are as artistic as those from the past, and artists used map motifs, even as early maps were as scientific as those of the present. Cartes et figures de la terre was therefore at the cusp of the shift from the normative to the anthropogenic map concept, responding to the ongoing concerns of politics, culture, and scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s but at the same time bringing forth a new concern for maps as necessarily human works, both as social instruments and cultural documents.
Organization
In many respects, Cartes et figures de la terre was a rather disorganized exhibition, with multiple cross-cutting statements of its themes and ideas. The May 1980 press release began by describing three main sections, or “axes” (Anon. 1980, [1]), each with four or six themes (Anon. 1980, 2–4), and organized as 23 numbered parts arranged across the fifth floor of Centre Pompidou (Anon. 1980, [7]–[23]):
floor plan from the press release (Anon. 1980)
Each main section was focused on a dramatic showstopper, each an artistic-cartographic sculpture, but the exhibition contained two other showstoppers as well. In addition, the ground-floor forum contained the two Coronelli globes. The three main sections and their showstoppers are outlined here; see Appendix 1 for a more detailed table of contents.
1) The map, image of the world (“La carte: Image du monde”)
Mapping humanity’s place within the cosmos and on the earth, contrasting ancient and non-Western maps with modern world maps. Its focal point was the Farnese Atlas, the second-century ce Roman statue of the titan holding the celestial globe on his shoulders that stood 2.1m tall (Anon. 1980, 2; reproduced as Rivière 1980a, 84).
2) The technical and scientific adventure of the map (“L’aventure technique et scientifique de la carte”)
The history of mapping practices, of how people “have solved a number of problems in the elaboration of the world image,” especially triangulation and the determination of longitude that were the key French innovations in the (supposed) foundation of modern scientific cartography in the eighteenth century. Its ostensible focal point was Mario Ceroli’s four-meter tall wooden sculpture from 1967, Squilibro (Imbalance), a visually unstable, three-dimensional reconfiguration of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man within a cube within a sphere (Anon. 1980, 3; reproduced as Rivière 1980a, 87).
However, this section also contained a second showstopper, a two-dimensional work that was given a three-dimensional structure when facsimiles of all the sheets of César-François Cassini [III] de Thury’s great Carte générale et particulière de France from the later eighteenth century were assembled across walls and the floor to form a huge display that “fills an entire stand, spilling from the walls across the floor” (Calvino [1980] 2013, 23). [n3]
3) The map: instrument of management, decision, and power (“La carte: Instrument de gestion, de decision et de pouvoir”)
The functionality of maps and the then-emergent theme of maps as tools of territorial management and of statecraft, and especially the contemporary rise of digital mapping technologies. Its showstopper was a large icosahedral globe by Buckminster Fuller, representing the counter-mapping of a “Utopie cartographique” (cartographic utopia, not reproduced in the accompanying volume) (Anon. 1980, 4).
Curatorial Strategies
Throughout Cartes et figures de la terre, Macchi and his colleagues actively juxtaposed standard, normative maps with a wide variety of non-normative works: maps created as works of art; maps possessing an artistic aesthetic; contemporary artworks deploying map motifs (listed in Anon. 1980, [24]–[26]); and popular or quotidian works otherwise undeserving of normative map status. The curators intermingled maps from different ages and cultures with works from the present day. Above all, they spotlighted spectacular maps whose sheer size and intricacy constituted remarkable human achievement; these works had fired their own imaginations and would be sure to do so for exhibition goers.
The maps were left to speak for themselves. The curators eschewed detailed labels that explained each map at length. They let the exhibition goers draw their own conclusions and make their own interpretations from this assortment of diverse, related, and clashing images. For example, the great Coronelli globes were factually explained in both exhibition press release (Monique Pelletier in Anon. 1980, 5) and in the accompanying volume (Helen Wallis and Monique Pelletier in Rivière 1980a, xii–xiv), without any commentary about their size and iconography, leaving the viewer to be amazed by the spectacle of the globes.
Certainly, P. J. Mode evinced precisely the reaction intended by the curators (personal communication, 7 August 2024, quoted here with his permission). Having stumbled by chance on the exhibition—he and his family had gone to the recently opened Centre Pompidou to admire its astonishing and controversial architecture—and then having no real previous knowledge of maps, the exhibition left him “dumbstruck”: “The [Coronelli] globes certainly were spectacular, but the thing that spoke to me was the vast range of the maps and images on display [and] the apparently limitless variety of ways to see the physical world.”
A further curatorial strategy was to weave sets of similar-but-different works throughout the exhibition. One set focused on the diversity of global imagery, with large globes and globe-like works anchoring each main section, in addition to many more customary world maps mounted on the walls. The size and form of great Coronelli globes installed in the ground-floor forum was echoed in the showstoppers placed strategically throughout the exhibition proper: the Farnese Atlas, Ceroli’s 1967 Squilibro, and Fuller’s icosahedral globe.
In his review of the exhibition, Italo Calvino ([1980] 2013, 18–19) highlighted another thematic set, comprising itinerary and strip maps. Such “linear types of maps,” Calvino wrote, were “the simplest form of geographical map.” He cited three maps from the exhibition: the late medieval Peutinger map, a copy of a late-Roman scroll-map of the Roman empire (reproduced in part as Rivière 1980a, 108–9, 114–15); John Ogilby’s famous strip maps of the main roads across England and Wales from 1675 (not reproduced in Rivière 1980a); and a 19m-long Japanese manuscript scroll map of the Nakasendō, the inland road between Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto, from 1700–20 (reproduced in part in Rivière 1980a, 120–21). Calvino further likened these three maps to a fourth work, not in the exhibition: Mario Rossello’s 1976 painting of selected landscape features along a one-kilometer strip of Italian highway that measured 35m in length. [n4]
For Calvino, these ur-maps occupy “the borderline between cartography and landscape and perspective painting,” and they reflect the importance more generally of “following a road from beginning to end” in literature and in life itself. In short, Calvino argued, their integration of “the dimension of time” (past, present, and future) “with that of space” indicates “the origins of cartography.” Geographical maps might all be “static objects,” but they nonetheless “presuppose an idea of narrative.” Moreover, these principles apply not just to Western maps, but to maps made in pre- and non-Western cultures. Just as the curators intended, Calvino constructed his own interpretations from the intellectual dissonance created by the juxtaposition of multiple unconventional images against standard, conventional, and normative maps.
The Accompanying Volume
Jean-Loup Rivière’s accompanying volume, Cartes et figures, cannot be called a catalog because it does not provide a list of all the items in the show in sequence. Rather, it comprises a complex collection of short essays that reproduced many, but not all, of the works in the exhibition, and many more beside. The volume was organized in four main sections that do not quite match up with the three axes of the exhibition, each with multiple subparts featuring both long essays, short essays, and photo-essays, whose hierarchy is not clear cut (Appendix 2). (To be honest, the layout and errors within the table of contents suggests that Cartes et figures was assembled rather hurriedly.)
The volume accordingly leaned heavily into the spirit of the exhibition and similarly marks the culmination of the long struggle with the supposed scientific normativity of maps and the turn to an anthropogenic understanding of maps and mapping in which art was as or even more important than science. The exhibition’s artist-curators reinterpreted cartography as an inherently ambiguous endeavor standing “at the confluence of exact science and art” that had repeatedly “reintroduced imagination into its theoretical principles.” This counter-normative realization required the arts to “break with” cartography’s “traditional, obligatory, and consecrated practices,” to reject the restrictions usually placed on “areas of expression,” and to discard cartography’s “arbitrary aesthetic hierarchy” (Jean-Claude Groshens inRivière 1980a, iii). [n5]
Rivière explained that his goal for Cartes et figures was to explore “the whole range of cartographic problems” (Anon. 1980, [27]). He reconfigured the exhibition’s three sections as “voyager” (traveling), “relever” (plotting), and “decider” (deciding), and he added a fourth, initial section on “approches” (conceptual approaches) (Rivière 1980a, esp. xv). He solicited essays from a wide array of scholars with the result that “geographers and cartographic specialists rubbed shoulders with literary figures, urban planners, mathematicians, philosophers, and art historians.” The overall result is a remarkable volume that has had a significant impact on scholarship far beyond the circles of map scholars and geographers (Besse and Tiberghien 2017, 9). [n6]
Importantly, some of the volume’s contributors brought their philosophical and artistic sensibilities to bear on their respective subject matters. For example, in his essay on “the grid as will and as representation,” the philosopher and historian of art and architecture Hubert Damisch referenced both Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl on geography’s origins in the geometry expounded by Thales of Miletus and other Ionians in the sixth century bce (in Rivière 1980a, 31). Rivière himself used the paradox identified within clinical observation by Michel Foucault ([1963] 1973, 108)—between the simultaneous seeing of spectacle and hearing of language—to frame the paradox that apparently lies at the heart of cartography, between creating an image “whose elements are correctly placed with the relations and dimensions they have in nature,” and a discourse in which those elements are arranged according to “a certain logical organization” (in Rivière 1980a, 83). [n7]
Moreover, at this moment of conceptual inflection, as many scholars were turning away from normativity to a new appreciation of maps as social instruments and cultural documents, Rivière framed the entire volume with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ([1976] 1987, 12) conceptual statement about the nature of maps. Rivière (1980a, [1]) placed their interpretation prominently on the splash page for the first section on conceptual approaches, the only section splash page to be so favored. [n8] It is obvious why Rivière placed Deleuze and Guattari front and center. Their succinct presentation of the emergent ideas of sociocultural map studies was intellectually liberating, especially their suggestion that maps are constructions of knowledge tuned to specific institutional needs.
In retrospect, this was a moment of immense historiographical importance. For what I think was the first time, certainly in a work intended for a wide audience, Rivière recursively applied to map studies a philosophical model of knowledge and representation that was grounded in an analogy with the normative map. This innovation marks the wide intellectual shift, from posing challenges to normativity to defying it outright and from seeking to soften the necessary character of “the map” as factual and scientific to understanding “the map” as something altogether different, as a thing that is made by humans. Crucial to this turn was the widespread reliance on overtly philosophical and theoretical concepts as the foundation for map studies.
At the same time, Rivière’s volume exemplifies how the emergent sociocultural approach to map studies remained committed to cartographic exceptionalism. Deleuze and Guattari’s “maps” might not have referred solely to factual, normative works, but their “maps” nonetheless formed a coherent category distinct from other kinds of texts. As much as they might have wanted maps to be changeable and malleable (becoming), Deleuze and Guattari nonetheless still treated “the map” as a static and fixed thing (being) that employed a common language distinct from that of other representational strategies. Their maps were far more complex and convoluted than permitted under the normative map concept, but they were still a coherent and exceptional phenomenon.
On the one hand, therefore, Rivière and his contributors successfully liberated map studies from the restrictions of normativity. Each contributor elaborated upon at least one of the several conceptual positions that had developed in reaction to the normative map concept (more on this in the current WIP). Most agreed that throughout history and across cultures,
• maps are necessarily mediated images constructed by human decisions;
• mapping intertwines with art, often with remarkable and even spectacular results;
• mapping, as a knowledge technology, serves humanity but also political and economic interests;
• maps are a form of language, both formal and informal; and
• maps are an essential tool in understanding and managing the world.
Overall, maps have manifestly varied in their form over time and across cultures, revealing their essentially non-normative nature.
Yet, on the other hand, Rivière’s productive and insightful volume was offset by the exceptionalist commitment to “the map” as a single and distinctive category of texts. Rivière’s contributors contradicted each other because they extended the qualities they identified as characteristic of specific mapping contexts to characterize all maps. His authors contradicted each other in significant ways:
• maps appear variously to be works of propaganda, specialized tools, and everyday things;
• maps are both abstractions and specifications;
• maps are at once factual and conceptual, objective and subjective;
• maps are both pictorial and diagrammatic;
• maps are products of the direct engagement by individuals with their environment even as they still normatively deny the human experience of place and space.
Moreover, the broad chronological scope of the exhibition and the accompanying volume expressed how maps have always been human-made things, from prehistory to the present and across cultures, so that there has always existed some essential, distinctive, and timeless quality of mapness. Even so, cartography has manifestly possessed a history. The juxtaposition of maps from different times and cultures in the exhibition halls and in the volume’s pages made it apparent that maps had developed, or evolved, or had at least changed in quality over time. Even as French philosophers led the assault on the “metanarratives” that improperly structured interpretations of history, especially Marxism’s dialectical materialism, the stadial histories of cartography were simply kitted out in new intellectual clothes.
The Anthropogenic Map Concept
Macchi’s exhibition and Rivière’s volume offered multiple viewpoints that all stem from the recognition that maps are all human-made. Regardless of resolution or function, of physical form or spatial conception, and of culture or age, maps are utterly human works. They are variously biased and truthful, insightful and banal, subjective and objective. This is the anthropogenic map concept.
Cartes et figures epitomizes the way that the anthropogenic map concept promotes and is sustained by studies of maps as social instruments and cultural documents. The result of this turn was the emergence of the historiographical mode of sociocultural map history and of sociocultural map studies more generally, including “critical cartography.” The sociocultural approach has been immensely fruitful. The profusion of new map studies by scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences has opened up many new scholarly vineyards. A particular indication of the comprehensiveness of the anthropogenic map concept was the embrace by sociocultural map scholarship even of the modes of celestial and geodetic mapping, both of which had previously been ignored except by dedicated historians of science.
Cartes et figures also encapsulates the key problems with sociocultural map studies. It undoubtedly took a major step towards abandoning the Eurocentrism implicit to the normative map concept and to the established historiographical modes of map history. The persistent exceptionalism, however, has been broadened to understand “maps” as a human universal, even as it has sustained the idea that cartography per se is the creation specifically of early modern and modern Europe (see Edney 2009, 42). European culture continues to possess a history distinct from the timeless exoticism of other cultures.
Paradoxically, the anthropogenic map concept does not establish what maps are. Most other map concepts implicitly encompassed certain mapping modes and simply ignored the rest. The normative map concept explicitly laid claim to all spatial texts that are metrical, including even medieval Christian mappaemundi (Tobler 1966). The anthropogenic map concept drastically expands the variety of works accepted as “maps” but does so without specifying any criteria for “mapness.” The anthropogenic map concept thus rests on the nominal fallacy, decried by Ludwig Wittgenstein ([1953] 2009, §66), that all maps are somehow the same simply because they are all called “maps.” In effect, the anthropogenic map concept has appropriated the normative map’s shell of exclusivity and emptied it of its defining qualities, leaving only an empty shell that sociocultural map scholars are obsessed with filling with a critically relevant yet ever-elusive coherence.
None of this is to say that Macchi and Rivière themselves caused or inaugurated the turn to the anthropogenic map concept, although they certainly popularized it. Other map scholars were led to “theory” by other influences. J. B. Harley, for example, seems never to have cited either Rivière’s volume or Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical interpretation. Instead, it was the example set by the engagement of a younger generation of British historical geographers with structuralism—both Marxist and linguistic/semiotic—that led Harley to turn in the mid-1980s from considerations of “maps as language” to applying Foucauldian discourse and Derridean deconstruction to analyze maps as instruments of power (see Edney 2005, 63–83). Rather, Cartes et figures de la terre was one element, even if a significant one, in a broad front of intellectual enquiry marked but not determined by an engagement with a variety of philosophical positions.
Appendix I: Detailed Outline of the Exhibition
The spatial alignment of the three primary exhibition sections did not match the spatial organization of the floorplan. Nor was the hierarchy of concepts perfect, with the Cassini map offering a fourth “point of view” that otherwise center the three primary sections. Translated from the summary information in Anon. (1980).
Section I. The map, image of the world
Focal “point of View”: The Farnese Atlas, the first known representation of the Titan carrying the celestial vault.
1/ Where am I? on Earth; where is it?
Before maps of the Earth, there are maps of the Earth in space: cosmologies.
2/ Itineraries where, step by step, one must follow the line [fil]
The most basic function of a map: to allow one to go from one point to another. Japanese, Aztec, Roman, and children's itineraries... networks, hopscotch, labyrinths.
3/ Wandering where a few lines make a map and a few fantasies a world
Erroneous or minimal maps, image of the world, image of a world. Traces in the landscape: a map of the territory traveled and inhabited.
4/ Terra incognita where a large white space appears and slowly disappears
How to fill unknown spaces. Maps of the Southern Lands: Journal of Cartographic Adventure.
5/ At the Center where everything is ordered at the heart of the map
Believe yourself at the center of the universe, see yourself at the center of the map: Jerusalem, Mecca, or Beijing offer a perspective on the world.
6/ Between Land and Water where we see maps growing on the lagoon
Venice: the richness of a cartographic tradition.
Section II. The technical and scientific adventure of the map
Focal “point of view”: Leonardo’s Man, by Ceroli.
7–8/ Landmarks where, to follow the course, you must take stock
The sky as a means of guidance on earth: orientation, navigation, instruments, and nautical charts.
9/ Limit and Possession where boundary markers are set, fences erected, and borders drawn
The map as title and delimitation of property. Borders of paper or concrete, images and functions of limits.
10/ The journeys of the map where the map is printed and spread everywhere
Diffusion of maps, atlases, multiplication of images of the world.
11–12/ Measuring where a story of triangles unravels
From elementary surveying techniques to major geodetic projects. Birth of scientific cartography and the Map of France.
Point of view: Cassini’s map.
13/ Capturing where we see the invisible
A new territory appears thanks to new technologies: remote sensing removes the natural limits of the human eye.
14/ Depths where unknown lands emerge on the map
Knowledge of the seabed.
Section III. The map: instrument of management, decision, and power
Focal “point of view”: Cartographic Utopia: Buckminster Fuller's icosahedron.
15/ Surfaces where the earth is peeled back, skin by skin
The variety of themes a map can address: the map is a tool for controlling and managing resources.
16/ Flux where the map dreams of capturing what moves
Paradox: the map, a fixed image, must represent what is mobile: clouds, water, wind…
17–19/ The Model Map where the map paints the world as it should be
In land use planning or urban planning, the map is both a scale model and a model to follow.
20–21/ Images and Codes where we will see maps learning to speak
Problems and the creation of a clear cartographic language. How to make a map? How to use computer resources for this?
22/ In the Quiver where we encounter the weapons and charms of surveillance
The ambiguity of maps, management instruments, but also control tools and weapons of war.
23/ Exit where it nevertheless turns
The earth revolves around the sun, which leaves its mark on it.
Point of view: Charles Ross [I do not know what this is]
Appendix 2: Contents of Cartes et figures
This is a list of the contents of the volume, which differs somewhat from volume’s table of contents, and also from the table of contents provided in the press release (Anon. 1980, [27]–[29]); also, some section subheadings were defined in the table of contents but not provided in the text.
iii / Jean-Claude Groshens, “Forword”
viii / Jacques Mullender, “Knowledge and Surveillance of the Earth”
xi / Giulio Macchi, “The Impossible Image”
xii / Helen Wallis and Monique Pelletier, “The Globes of the Sun King”
xv / Jean-Loup Rivière, “Preamble”
1 / APPROACHES
Geography and Cartographic Technique
2/ Jacques Bertin, “To See or to Read”
9/ Rémi Caron, “The Cartographer’s Choices”
16/ Yves Lacoste, “Geographical Objects”
24 / Eric Dyring, “Civil Space, Military Space”
From the Point of View of Theory
30 / Hubert Damisch, “The Grid as Will and as Representation”
41 / François Wahl, “The Desire for Space”
47 / Louis Marin, “The Ways of the Map”
Extra-European Civilizations
55 / André Miquel, “Arab Cartographers”
61 / Ulrich Freitag, “People without Maps”
64 / TRAVEL
The Traveler, the Map, and the Territory
67 / Jean-Loup Rivière, In the Center
68 / Jean-Loup Rivière, “You Are Here. Where Is Here?”
70 / Jean-Pierre Verdet, “The Place of the Earth (Aid to Memory)”
76 / “Hierarchies” (untitled photo-essays by Numa Broc [76–77], Jean-Claude Macouin [78–79], and Ferjan Ormeling [80–82])
83 / Jean-Loup Rivière, “Map, Body, Memory”
Itineraries, Routes, Lines, and Networks
93 / Jean-Loup Rivière, From One Point to Another
94 / Pierre Rosenstiehl, “Words of the Maze”
104 / Christian Jacob, “Writings of the World” (includes Thomas Bazou, “Unfold the Volume” [111–13])
120 / Jean-François Augoyard, “Traces: Japanese/Aztec, Playful/Problematic/Curly, Reticular/Urban”
Cartography Abhors Blanks
135 / Jean-Loup Rivière, Terra incognita
136 / Numa Broc, “From the Antichthonous to the Antarctic” (includes long captions by Günther Schilder [143, 144–45, 148])
150 / “Land + Where — incognita”
151 / Xavier Le Pichon, “Unknown Depths”
Errors, Wanderings, Scraps of Paper, Graffiti, Stories
163 / Jean-Loup Rivière, To Err Is Human
164/ Error!
164/ Sylvie Denys, “Heuristic Error”
165 / Anne-Marie Bidaud, “Scientific Error”
167 / Minimal Maps
167 / Bruno-Henri Vayssière, “The Maps of Spain”
178 / Jean-Hubert Martin, “On Memory”
179 / Elementary Traces
179 / André Julliard, “Fingerprints, Reconnaissance to Raymonde and François”
182 / François Lupu, “Tin Dama Toponymies”
188 / Marie-Claire Bataille, “Cartographic Fish”
191 / Jacques Defert, “A Transgressive Topography”
194 / Françoise Bonardel, “Wandering Lines”
197 / Jean-Hubert Martin, “Driftings: Surrealist Routes, Drift, and Other Routes”
203 / Maps without Territory
203 / Claude Filteau, “Utopia”
205 / Claude Filteau, “Tendre”
208 / Michel Korinman, “Houyhnhms”
210 / Rose-Marie Godier and Michel Korinman, “Oie”
212 / Rose-Marie Godier and Michel Korinman, “Treasure”
214 / Jean-Loup Rivière, “Yoknapatawpha”
215 / Christian Jacob, “New York”
216 / PLOTTING
Find Yourself, Take Stock, Navigate, Latitudes, Longitudes, and Projections
219 / Jean-Loup Rivière, Locating
220 / Christian Jacob, “Sand, Snow, Water”
222 / Jean Randier, “Small Happiness: The Road to the Arts of Esteem”
231 / Jean-Pierre Siorat, “Between Swells and Islands”
235 / Dominique Muracciole, “The Round and the Flat”
Measuring the Earth, Making a Plan, Making the Map
241 / Jean-Loup Rivière, History of Triangles
242 / Luigi Vagnetti, “Better to See than to Run (1)”
248 / H.-C. Pouls, “Better to See than to Run (2)”
252 / Bruno-Henri Vayssière, “‘The’ Map of France”
Remote Sensing, Photographing, Interpreting, Revealing
267 / Jean-Loup Rivière, Polygraphics
269 / Yvan Chemama and Eric Dyring, “From on High”
281 / Jean-Loup Rivière, “The Hidden”
282 / Roger Agache, “Palimpsest”
284 / Anne-Marie Bidaud, “Surfaces”
286 / Anne-Marie Bidaud, “Subsoil”
288 / Véronique Barthès, “Magnetism”
“Flows”
289 / Véronique Barthès, “Drift”
290 / Anne-Marie Bidaud, “Sliding”
292 / Anne-Marie Bidaud, “Vulnerability”
294 / Jean-Loup Rivière, “Clouds”
Transcribe, Communicate the Map, Signs, Signals, Translate, Represent
303 / Jean-Loup Rivière, Images and Codes
304 / Josef W. Konvitz, “Filling in the Map”
317 / Claude Dubut and Serge Bonin, “Unraveling the Map”
322 / Marie-Thérèse Gambîn, “Automatic Map”
329 / Rémi Caron, “The Legend”
332 / Ferjan Ormeling, “Toponymies”
335 / Anne Eleb-Bailly, “The Third Dimension: Altitude”
346 / René Siestrunck, “Tourism, Patriotism, and Topography”
349 / DECIDE
To Have the Map and the Situation in Hand; the Weapon: a Map
351 / Jean-Loup Rivière, Polemical maps
352 / Frank Lestringent, “The Chief’s [boss’s] Map,” containing “To gain a foothold”; “By finger and eye”; “With finger and water”; “Maps on the table”; “Pieces of maps”; and “The map of Gaulle”
363 / René Siestrunck, “The Military Map”
375 / René Siestrunck, “Plans-Reliefs and Watercolors”
Plan, Draw the Master Map, Draw a Plan, Modify the Territory
379 / Jean-Loup Rivière, The Map and the Decision
380 / Derek Walker, “Mapped Territory, Managed Territory”
382 / Joseph Hatem, “The Intervening Map”
387 / Claude Bassin-Carlier and Anne Eleb-Bailly, “Ecology and Environment”
394 / Pogy O’Brien and Johann Wolfluss, “Cartography and Entomology”
Holes in the Boundary, Closure, and Exchange
399 / Jean-Loup Rivière, Boundaries and Possession
400 / Jean-Loup Rivière and Maria-Francesca Tiepolo, “Lagoons”
402 / Bruno-Henri Vayssière, “Cadasters”
412 / Claude Raffestin, “Frontiers”
Guides, atlases, the map reproduced, and diffusing the multiplied maps
423 / Jean-Loup Rivière, The travels of the map
424 / Frank Lestringant, “Follow the Guide”
436 / Kees Zandvliet, “Maps and Walls”
442 / Mireille Pastoureau, “Atlas Sheets”
455 / Daniel Beaudat and Serge Bonin, “Maps in the Press”
459 / Nicole Houstin and Roberto Gimeno, “Maps in School”
466 / Jean-Loup Rivière, “Good Form”
468 / Claire Bretécher, “The Islands”
470 / Frank Lestringant, “Insularities”
476 / Glossary
479 / Essential Bibliography
479 / Contributors
Notes
n1. “Instruments du voyage et de la découverte, matière à rêver, outils sophistiqués d’analyse et de prévision, éléments souvent plus décoratifs qu’informatifs dans les média, les cartes et toutes les formes de représentation du territoire investissent la quasi-totalité des activités humaines, de la plus noble à la plus frivole, de la plus quotidienne à la plus prospective. / L’originalité de cette exposition, où sont réunis documents anciens prestigieux et représentations du monde aujourd’hui, est d’interroger cet ensemble d’images pour tenter d’en montrer l’enjeu, d’en comprendre le langage et la fonction.”
n2. “La carte apparait d’abord comme un ensemble de représentations du monde: écriture du trajet, relevé du territoire, consignation des connaissances, mais aussi image symbolique, imaginaire, utopique.”
n3. “La carta dei Cassini (in scala d’una «linea» per cento tese, cioè di 1 a 86.400) è esposta nella mostra in una riproduzione che invade tutto uno stand dilagando dalle pareti sul pavimento.”
n4. “Un chilometro di strada tra Albissola Mare e Savona,” oil on linen canvas, 2.1 × 35 m. Conceived in 1975, and installed in August 1976 in the Palazzo Grassi for an exhibition of Rossello’s works; it was later exhibited at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville (Paris, April 1977) and at the Galleria d’arte moderna (Milan) before its permanent installation in 2015 in a cruise ship terminal in Savona, in Liguria, Italy (Borneto 2015).
n5. “La cartographie vit de cette sorte d’ambiguité qui la siyue à la confluence de la science exacte et de l’art. Fondée sur la description physique et la théorie mathematique, elle retrouve nécessairement à un moment ou à un autre de son histoire, cette sorte de pari que réintroduit l’imaginaire dans le principes théoriques et fait de la carte une representation. …Elle traduit cette ouverture de l’art à des objects nouveaux, en rupture avec la tradition des thèmes obligés et consacrés. Désormais, plus de confinement des domaines d’expression, plus de hiérarchie esthétique arbitraire.”
n6. “En 1980, le Centre Pompidou, sous la houlette de Jean-Loup Rivière, organisait une grande exposition sur les cartes, Cartes et figures de la terre, qui eut un retentissement certain hors du seul cercle des géographes. Son catalogue, richement illustré, devint très vite un livre de reference, mais fut aussi rapidement épuisé. On y trouvait des contributions très diverses, où les geographies et les specialists de la cartographie côtoyaient les littéraires, les urbanistes, les mathématiciens, les philosophes et les historiens de l’art.”
n7. “Ce rapport des deux Atlas met en évidence la difficulté essentielle de la carte où il faur laisser les objets géographiques à leur place et en même temps leur assigner un ordre; ou, autrement dit, construire une image, c’est-à-dire une representationdont les éléments ont une localisation fidèle, des relations et des dimensions analogues à celles qu’ils ont dans la nature, et en même temps, un discours, c’est-à-dire une certaine organisation logique des différents éléments. Deux ordres se combattent plus qu’ils ne se complètent, celui de l’image et celui de la légende. Ce paradoxe, s’il essentiellement fondateur de la cartographie, ne lui pas exclusivement spécifique. La médecine rencontre le même problème et quand Michel Foucault étudie le regard clinique, il remarque qu’il a ‘cette paradoxale propriété d’entendre un langage au moment où il perçoit un spectacle.’”
n8. Each of the volume’s four sections began with a title spread featuring a grayed-out map. For the first section, the map was a topographical one showing a small region of the Pyrenees just inland from Biarritz, cropped so that the toponym “Barthes” is in a privileged location, just inside the upper-left corner; Rivière had been a student of the renowned literary critic and semiotician, Roland Barthes, who had only recently died, in March 1980.
Works Cited
Anonymous. 1980. “Cartes et figures de la terre: Information Presse CCI.” 24 May 1980. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/media/6PSIHDy.
Besse, Jean-Marc, and Gilles A. Tiberghien, eds. 2017. Opérations cartographiques. Paris: Actes Sud ENSP.
Borneto, Elena. 2015. “Mario Rossello, un omaggio: Palacrociere di Savona.” Espoarte. 30 April 2015. https://www.espoarte.net/focus/mario-rossello-un-omaggio-nuovo-terminal-costa-crociere-savona/.
Calvino, Italo. [1980] 2013. “The Traveller in the Map.” Trans. M. L. McLaughlin. In Collection of Sand: Essays, 18–25. London: Penguin Books. Originally published as “Il viandante invisibile sulle strade della Terra: Il mappamondo più grande del mondo, carte geografiche, mappe e globi celesti, in una eccezionale mostra al Beaubourg di Parigi,” La Repubblica 5, no. 140 (18 June 1980): 18–19, and then as “Il viandante nella mappa,” in Collezione di sabbia (Milan: Garzanti, 1984), 23–29.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. [1976] 1987. “Introduction: Rhizome.” Trans. Brian Massumi. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 3–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published as part of Rhizome: Introduction (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1976) and in Mille plateaux, vol. 2 of Capitalism et schizophrénie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980), 9–37.
Edney, Matthew H. 2005. “The Origins and Development of J. B. Harley’s Cartographic Theories.” Cartographica 40, nos. 1–2: Monograph 54.
———. 2009. “The Irony of Imperial Mapping.” In The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire, ed. James R. Akerman, 11–45. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2017–25. “Contributions to Map History.” 8 vols. Mapping as Process. www.mappingasprocess.net/contributions.
Foucault, Michel. [1963] 1973. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. Originally published as Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963).
Rivière, Jean-Loup, ed. 1980a. Cartes et figures de la terre. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou.
———. 1980b. “Cartes et figures de la terre.” Le Bulletin [du Centre Georges Pompidou] 18: 8–9.
Tobler, Waldo R. 1966. “Medieval Distortions: The Projections of Ancient Maps.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 56, no. 2: 351–60.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. [1953] 2009. Philosophical Investigations: The German Text with an English Translation. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Ed. P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. 4th ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
