Volunteered Geographic Information

The American artist Jasper Johns once claimed the following:

“My work is largely concerned with relations between seeing and knowing, seeing and saying, seeing and believing” – Jasper Johns, 1965

Jasper Johns focussed a lot of his work on everyday objects, emphasising that we do not often see the everyday object, we merely look at it. Johns was interested in getting beyond the surface interpretation of objects; similarly he conducted a series of paintings using numbers as the subject, aiming to strip away their quantitative exactitude and submit them to the same artistic processes as other more qualitative subjects, such as landscape or the human body.

In a geographical forum, Johns is perhaps best known for his ‘map’ of the United States of America (of which there are several versions) which I had the fortune to see hanging in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York:

Figure 1: Jasper Johns. Map. 1961 source: http://www.moma.org

Johns is doing the same thing with the bounded, containerised, territories of the USA as he did with numbers. He is using new representations to challenge pre-existing ones. In this work the representation of the US loses its clarity, it becomes fuzzier and de-federalises. Thus the importance of this map is not that it is accurate, but that it tells a story that is deeper than the surface of the map, I’m hoping to get some work out on this kind of thing soon.