Sympathetic Magic - Remote Location 1:100,000 video

I very much enjoyed the Wendover journal extract
posted to this list last year - a well written &
evocative piece of nature writing - so I immediately
turned to this movie.
It is of course difficult to judge the 1:100,000
work itself from the movie and the website - although
the earth paintings look beautiful and one assumes the
same painterly sense goes into the production of all
the other artifacts-for-display arising from the
project.
What particularly interests me philosophically
about this is how much, like a lot of the practices
name checked at the start of the film, land art,
walking art &c, it is dependent on something
incredibly old in human practice and consciousness -
an appeal to sympathetic magic (and this is also
underlined by the shamanic resonances of the fact we
are told the project takes place in a *very remote*,
and clearly rather inhospitable, place. I imagine
Paula and Brett, rather literally, suffered for their
art).
Rather as operations of a strictly codified and
ritual nature have for millennia been carried out on a
representation of nature or a person in order to
ensure a desirable outcome, here a set of very
precise, but ultimately rather random, instructions is
adhered to in order to create art - the map is broken
into 36 pieces, the piece is placed at the centre of
the kilometre it represents &c.
An interesting phenomenon,that something which name
checks the cutting edge to an almost frantic degree
has roots so ancient!
In this light the appeal at the film's end, to
*precision* and to a cycle of *better* representations
based on this kind of work seems a little strange.
Certainly artists have nothing to teach the
bourgeoisie and its hired technicians about the
*techniques* of mapping (and its a truism that the
*correspondance* between the thing and its
representation in a strictly technical sense is at the
heart of mapping) - since the start of the rise of the
bourgeois class the accurate map, for 'explorers', for
merchants, for colonialisers and colonial
administrators, and for military purposes ( the
standard set of maps of the UK is called the *Ordnance
Survey*) has been a central and extraordinarily well
funded area of activity .
Where artists can contribute is to muddy the waters
a bit with the beautiful, the random, the mischievous
the disturbing and the suggestive. It looks as though
some of this could be going on here, despite the
rather ponderous & predictable rhetoric of the film
commentary (a double disappointment from folk who can
so clearly write).
michael



— Brett Stalbaum <[email protected]> wrote:
> Paula Poole and I had occasion to create a short
> video describing our
>
gpswalkinggislocativedyidatabasesoftwarelandartpictoralinstallperformance
>
> bit titled *Remote Location 1:100,000*, which we
> completed for the CLUI
> Wendover residency last summer. It is available at
> http://www.paintersflat.net in the announce side
> bar.
>
> –
> Brett Stalbaum
> Lecturer, psoe
> Coordinator, ICAM
> Department of Visual Arts, mail code 0084
> University of California, San Diego
> 9500 Gillman
> La Jolla CA 92093
>
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