Maps can also ba a piece of art

The topic of using maps in lessons came from the idea I have always wanted to materialise, namely, that of visualising (on a map) lives of two people, whose paths finally crossed somewhere in the world.... Maybe one day...


I start the lesson with a map of the London underground:

We, obviously, identify it, see whether students are familiar with it, have used it before, their experience of using it, its aesthetic side etc.

Then we compare it with the Great Bear by Simon Patterson:

Some ideas for discussion:

What are maps and what is their purpose? (quite an obvious question, I suppose, but a good enough to start with)

What do you think of O.Wild's comment: “A map that does not contain utopia is not even worth glancing at”? 

The other ideas come from a lecture by Jerry Brotton, who is a Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. The lecture ca be found on BBC radio 4's website:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03lrzjm

Each period of history gets the map it deserves – whatever version of salvation it offers.

A map answers an enduring human question, that is as much existential as it is directional – Where are we?

How you see the world depends where you stand on it.

All maps have to omit some things to show others.

Any map is only as good as the data that is fed into it.

The digital maps we find on google these days fulfill primarily a commercial goal - the idea of a map driven by profits?

Map as a metaphor of our life?

There is another good example of how maps were interpreted by artists, this time from MoMa.

It is a video which presents a Jasper Johns' map. I use it as a gap filling exercise and, of course, another prompt for a discussion:

….It’s this beautiful 1……… where the colours are all interacting with 2….. other.

You see his different consistencies of paint, all these 3……… that Jasper Johns made. 

And in the 4…………………….. is this almost grid –like structure, this modernist idea that represents the country. I think it’s jam-packed with interesting …………… to talk about.

…..

It’s a map you couldn’t use if you were driving a car, you couldn’t use it to find 5……………..

Jasper Johns has put in just the basic information where you have the 6………….. of the states and then he stencilled in, not very carefully, but he stencilled in the names of a lot of these states.
….

What students notice when they look at this piece 7…………………… is the different ways in which Jasper Johns put the paint physically on the 8………….. So they focus in on places like Kansas her in the 9………….., you can see that the paint is really built up, and you can imagine that he is using a really thick consistency of paint. And then as you move over to the East Coast you’re seeing that the paint gets a little bit drippier; New York, Pennsylvania…

Students invariably 10…………….. to ask why Jasper Johns has made these decisions, why the painting looks so chaotic, and 11…………… I point them to the label, where we 12…………….. that the painting was made in 1961 and we start to come up with theories about what was 13…………… in 1961 and then kids start to take it into these metaphors. There are ideas that come up all the time about, you know, the messiness of the country and the politics always come up and thinking about what was Jasper Johns trying to process in his head while he was taking on this image and making this piece.

You can imagine Jasper Johns 14………. around his studio, flinging paint at this canvas, and there is an energy to it that I think really reads when you’re looking at the piece, you know, 15………… year after it was made.

Time for some reading:

I have chosen Going Underground by Dorian Lynskey, as it is related to the London underground maps.




Could we chart the branches and connections of 100 years of music using the London Underground map? Dorian Lynskey explains how a box of coloured crayons and lot of swearing helped.
It seems like a deeply implausible project: to plot the history of 20th century music on the London Underground map devised by Harry Beck in 1933. Artist Simon Patterson transformed the tube map into a constellation of famous names in his 1992 work The Great Bear, but he didn't have to make them all link up. It is, after all, a tall order to find a saint who was also a comedian. But for this one to work every interchange had to be logical in the context of musical history, an unlikely prospect.
I started out with a packet of coloured crayons, four sheets of A4 taped together and a big box of doubt, but the different character of each line quickly lent itself to a certain genre. Pop intersects with everything else, so that had to be the Circle Line; classical music for the most part occupies its own sphere, which made it perfect for the Docklands Light Railway. There were a couple of false starts but by the end of one afternoon I had assigned genres to almost all the lines.
The system thus in place, the next couple of days were devoted to writing names in, scribbling them out, agonising over certain omissions, asking classical music critic Tom Service for invaluable help with the DLR, and swearing just a little bit. Amazingly, it just seemed to make sense.
Some bands I cannot stand are in here, while some that I love dearly aren't. I also followed chronology wherever the path of the line allowed it. Each branch line represents a sub-genre: rock sprouts off into grunge and psychedelia when it reaches South-West London; hip-hop diverges, north of Camden, into old school and New York rap. If I was really lucky, the band name echoed the original station name: Highbury & Islington became Sly & the Family Stone.
Of course, it is not flawless. Musical influences are so labyrinthine that any simple equation will be imperfect. But this is not some definitive history of music. It's an experiment to see if one intricate network can be overlaid on a completely different one. I hope you like it.

TATE modern has published a little booklet entitled "More than Meireles", which is a resource pack for artists, teachers and educators. It is a really interesting read. Among the different activities I have found "Tagging Boundaries" which is very much related to maps and hopefully will be inspirational for you:

If you are still looking for ideas, you may have a look at:
Influential Power of Maps by Denis Wood

Influential Power of Maps on amazon

or Where You Are published by Visual Editions (have a good look at all the books they have published, as they are definitely out of the ordinary) 

 http://www.visual-editions.com/our-books/where-you-are





One last thing, as homework, I ask students to prepare their own custom-made maps and describe them using 200- 300 words.

Those bespoke maps can be very insightful.