On Sol LeWitt

Modern geospatial information systems give the cartographer-artist the ability to pin maps of any historical era onto a satellite basemap, a process known as orthorectifying.  Painstakingly aligning maps over maps over maps scratches the same itch that playing video games used to for me:

animation by Joel Silverman

This animation I made in Cesium Ion shows three maps of an area defined by the coordinates 41°51'18.73", -87°38'49.28" at the lower left and 41°52'51.41", -87°35'47.55" at the upper right.  The oldest rendering is an 1876 map made by cartographers Warner & Beers when this area was known as Chicago’s Second Ward.    A later evolution shows it transformed into the Chicago Loop in a street map created by crowdsourced OpenStreetMap volunteers.  Finally, we see this scene rendered in a satellite view captured by NASA’s Landsat 7 camera and streamed via Google Earth.

But art with formal cartographic qualities might encompass more than just geographic or physical realities, and can explore abstract and conceptual representations of space and place.  I overlaid the above coordinates to coincide exactly with the view chosen by Sol LeWitt in a notable 1979 cut paper map:

Sol LeWitt, A Square of Chicago Without a Circle and Triangle (1979)

LeWitt created a series of cut maps between 1974-1979 in which he removed geometric forms from maps and aerial images such as this orthophotograph of Chicago.  His map artworks were part of his “Rips and Folds” series of cut or folded paper artworks intended to be sold “as cheaply as possible”.  The series grew out of the late 1960s countercultural sense that artists might maintain autonomy in the face of a rapidly growing art speculation market by preventing their work from being traded as commodities.  Accordingly, LeWitt inscribed many of his Rips and Folds pieces on verso: “NOT TO BE SOLD FOR MORE THAN $100”.  While most of these “$100 pieces” were ripped or folded blank paper, the most distinctive of them consisted of modifications of aerial scenes of Chicago, Florence, London, Amsterdam, and Manhattan appropriated from plat map survey images.  Often, LeWitt gestured towards both the real estate and navigation functions of these maps by tracing a migratory biographical route with his excised shapes (e.g. Map of NYC with the Area Between the Points Where I Have Lived, Removed (1979).  In other cut maps, Le Witt removes pure geometric forms without specific reference to landmarks.  He made 35 known Rips of this same Chicago map distributed by the Chicago Bureau of Maps and Plats.  Photographed in a nadir view from an airplane, the source map is at a birdseye scale at which roads and buildings are reduced to abstractions.  The orthogonal map evokes the grid form one immediately associates with most of LeWitt’s work.  I show in the animation below how this planar view compressed and equalized everything from the then-recently completed 110-story Sears Tower to the low two-story Art Institute of Chicago.

Cesium Ion animation by Joel Silverman

For LeWitt, such demarcation of space played a central role in conceptual art: 

It is the interval between things that can be measured…If space is relatively unimportant it can be regularized and made equal (things placed equal distances apart) to mitigate any interest in interval. ... When the interval is kept regular whatever is irregular gains more importance.

When LeWitt explored the scale of the lakeshore of Chicago in 1979 with expressive intent, he surely chose that site because two years earlier, designers Charles and Ray Eames started with the same scene in their experimental 1977 film The Powers of Ten.

Opening scene from Charles and Ray Eames, The Powers of Ten (1977)

The Powers of Ten begins with an overhead view of a couple lying in a park having a picnic. The camera slowly zooms out to a view 100 meters across, showing them to be in Burnham Park near Soldier Field at the Chicago lakefront.  The zoomout continues to a scale of 1 kilometer (3,300 ft) to show the entirety of Chicago, and then zooming out exponentially until a galactic field of view 100 million light years across could be surveyed.   The viewer is encouraged to think of their role as a citizen of the universe, with both an awareness of their insignificance in the vast scale of the cosmos, but also their interconnectedness with every other point in the cosmos.  The Eameses contacted the same Chicago Aerial Survey company that two years later provided Sol LeWitt’s 1979 basemap, and commissioned a series of three large-scale photographs to be taken on a sunny day.  Cinematographer Alex Funke recalls, “For the widest shot, they went up in a pressurized high-altitude plane, a Cessna, which was really high. Later at the office we received the images on Ektachrome positive film, captured with these gigantic aerial mapping cameras. Everyone in the office gathered around the light tables to look at them. It was quite marvelous. Everything was sharp.”  The resulting color images anticipated Google Earth satellite views that would not become commonplace until decades later and remains iconic as an optimistic depiction of human scale after almost half a century.