We learn to trust maps for their indexical, authoritative quality, for their capacity to be the arbiters of truth. Out comes the map from the glove compartment when we are lost. We put our faith in the soothing robotic voice of the GPS computer to tell us where to go. Maps ground us; they give us direction; they help us find our way. It is a lot to ask from a sheet of paper.
The artist Lordy Rodriguez makes maps, and it was a map of his that stopped me in my tracks, the first time I came across his work at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, when it was still in Golden Gate Park, back in 1998. The piece was called State of Quezon, near-obsessive in its hand-drawn detail, looking very much like a Rand McNally-style highway map, with different-colored freeways, airports, parks, and a legend in the upper-left corner.
This was, however, no "real" map of Quezon: the outlines resembled the Philippine province, but on it, San Francisco was the capital, a few cities southeast of Iloilo City. Across Laguna Lake, one could find Missouri City, Houston, and Brooklyn, the latter further north from Tacloban City and Davao City. Up Highway 15, past Rizal State Park in Zambales County, Baton Rouge and Dipolog City formed the gateway to the Basilan Sound.
Rodriguez's maps, I thought, were perfect visual representations of how Filipinos, in their dispersal throughout the American continent, brought something of themselves from their homelands. Baggage in tow, Pinoys were reconfiguring their relationships to places, and were simultaneously remaking their destinations, in the same ways that many migrants live their lives across borders. A metaphorical defiance, perhaps, of the map's authority, with migrants dissolving frontiers in their wake.
His next series of maps -- pastel renderings of every state in the union, and a few more besides -- also illustrated the symbolic aspect of place, how memory shapes personal geographies. There's no reason, you might say, why Quezon City and Palo Alto shouldn’t be located a few freeway exits away from each other, in Texas. But this series is more deeply haunted by history, with additional states like Disney, Internet, and Territory, the latter rudely forcing together Samoa, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. But instead of the utopian feel at play in his late ’90s maps, spilling over with the freedom of creating his own private Idaho, Rodriguez’s newer maps seem more like dislocations, throwbacks to pre-Industrial Revolution mapping technologies.
His new series, currently on exhibit at the Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco, plays with our notions of what maps ought to look like. Dispensing with words altogether, Rodriguez has drawn not maps, exactly, but abstractions of maps -- two hundred and one, to be exact -- turning the gallery into something looking more like a colonial surveyor’s office. The map grids are still there, but his cartographer’s eye has settled instead upon peacock tails, gray axons of barbed wire, cores of onion skin, Doppler patterns, cobblestones, and the Great Lakes looking like beached whales. Meandering rivers flow next to salmon-colored blobs. Electrified shards of olive green border tessellated peninsulas. Crumbling suburbias share space with seaweed poking out from an ocean bed.
The effect is both beautiful and jarring: they can be rivers seen from above, or they can be cells seen under a microscope. The maps foreground the interplay of landscapes and interiors being mapped, muddling our sense of recognition. What is most interesting about these maps are their precisely somatic quality, leading viewers to think not just of the land as a body, but of our insides being relentlessly explored by science as well. It’s a twenty-first century take on the old-fashioned method of cartography: re-imagining everything familiar as terra incognita, and finding dragons everywhere.
Posted by the wily filipino at June 3, 2008 08:15 PM