Progressive Geographies

Jackson Pollack, Blue Poles, 1952

The Royal Academy of Arts in London has a major exhibition of Abstract Expressionism. I went on Friday after an interesting, but deeply depressing, day at the British Academy at a workshop on European Union and Disunion.

Here’s the Royal Academy’s description:

In the “age of anxiety” surrounding the Second World War and the years of free jazz and Beat poetry, artists like Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning broke from accepted conventions to unleash a new confidence in painting.

Mark Rothko, No 15, 1957

Often monumental in scale, their works are at times intense, spontaneous and deeply expressive. At others they are more contemplative, presenting large fields of colour that border on the sublime. These radical creations redefined the nature of painting, and were intended not simply to be admired from a distance but as two-way encounters between artist and viewer.It was a watershed moment in the evolution of 20th-century art, yet, remarkably, there has been no major survey of the movement since 1959.

This autumn we bring together some of the most celebrated art of the past century, offering the chance to experience the powerful collective impact of Pollock, Rothko, Still, de Kooning, Newman, Kline, Smith, Guston and Gorky as their works dominate our galleries with their scale and vitality.

I don’t know much about this movement, so the audio guide was helpful. I had a sense of the size of some of the many Mark Rothko canvases, but the scale of two Jackson Pollack murals was quite something. The guide was helpful on some of the techniques used to produce these – more than is perhaps obvious. There was a lot to take in, and the Friday crowds were a bit overwhelming, so perhaps I’ll be able to make a return visit before it closes in January. Worth a visit.

I mentioned the new British Library maps exhibition on Friday, and lead curator Tom Harper now has a post on the BL maps blog discussing it.

Welcome to Maps & the 20th century: Drawing the Line, the biggest map exhibition of the decade and the first to showcase the mapping of the ‘cartographic century’.

We have selected 200 maps from our collection of 4 million maps, supplemented by a handful of crucial loans) in order to showcase their technological development, their increasing variety, and what they meant to 20th century western  society

Viewing history through objects is an important way of unlocking our past, and maps are more eloquent than most objects in providing snapshots upon a past that may be just behind us, yet appears like a foreign country. [more here]

12 Critical Theory books that came out in October 2016 – another useful roundup. Includes Rowbotham, Rancière, Perreau, Lacan, Cavarero etc.

Last night I attended the opening of the British Library exhibition ‘Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line‘.

The lead curator is Tom Harper, but as he insisted, this was a collaborative project, and there were external experts used such as Mike Heffernan from the University of Nottingham.

The British Library has a huge collection of maps, and one of the challenges was selecting just the 200 on display in the exhibition. Not all come from the BL collection, of course. Given the twentieth century focus, much is explicitly political or geopolitical, but there are also maps from fiction, artworks and tourism. There were some striking juxtapositions of maps and a single visit wasn’t enough to take it all in. I’m hoping to go back. I was particularly struck by Satomi Matoba’s Topographical Map of Utopia, which uses military maps to build up a representation of the island. Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor both appear. There was an example of the Sykes-Picot agreement map, with the blue and red pencil lines demarcating the French and British areas of the Ottoman Empire. Not all the maps were so serious – there was an example of The Weetabix Wonderworld Atlas – a child’s atlas from the early 1980s you could get by saving up breakfast cereal tokens.

The exhibition is open until 1 March 2017. It’s well worth a visit if you can get to London. There are a series of lectures and other talks linked to the exhibition happening over the next several months. I’ll be part of a session with Tim Marshall on ‘Power, Territory and Borders’on 31 January.