I’ve been sitting in on an undergrad “Modern Prose: Travel and Narration” comp lit class. Readings this week in included the preface and several other bits of German author Judith Shalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will. It is a beautifully made and subtly provocative book.
I don't know if you are familiar with it or not. You might find the interesting, especially in this American moment where borders and barriers outweigh rule of law, sound policy, and human rights. The class has a blog to share insights from our weekly reading. I found the book interesting enough that I couldn’t decide whether to share my class blog post to my social critique Substack, Modern Curmudgeonry, or my musings on art Substack, The Intentional Observer.
I’m posting to both. Don’t get me wrong. I am a decisive guy. But in this case the right decision fell outside of our either/or default mode in responding to the world. We should challenge, not run, whenever we fall into the deeply ingrained impulse to isolate and to disconnect. It is an abyss that blinds us to everything but self interest. But unlike falling into a crevasse, we find false comfort rather than rightful dread in our urge to isolate.
My class post connects to my visual arts’ central themes of identity, including place identity, of the ideological and linguistic imperatives to sacrifice nuance in favor of distinction, and of the implications of living in a world fully of made things without recognizing that madeness. And right now consideration of the nature of borders is especially urgent. So I decided that that I would like to share the post on both my art and my social critique Substacks.
My goal with you is simply to ask you to consider the role of hard edges—in borders and in policy and our daily spheres—in our controlling world view. Perhaps an hour or two with Shalansky will get you going, in which case the class blog post below be worth its two minutes of reading time. Otherwise feel free to skip to the artwork near the end for a peek at what maps without sharp edges can be.
If Islands Aren’t Islands then What Is an Atlas?
Bang! Right from the start Schalansky tells us that we should approach her atlas with open eyes to what it is and isn’t about. Her atlas isn’t based in experience of the physical place. These are “Islands I Have Never Set Foot On” the subtitle instructs us—and the text itself will continue to remind us that this atlas is a made thing and was made as an author’s off-site production.
Like all made things, atlases are made to an end. They have an intent and a stance, and they shape our shared sense of the world: “Every atlas is an ideology” (8). This comes just one sentence after telling us that place identity is a liquid thing, at least temporally: “the country I was born in disappeared from the map.” Wow. That statement begs us to look beyond itself—and to consider the depth of importance of its ambiguity. What actually disappeared? What remains? What does the statement ask us about borders, about atlases, and about our ways of understanding identity?
But Schalansky has the subtitle distance her atlas a few furlongs further from the expected, rejecting the assumption that atlas making is properly a scientific enterprise. She will never set foot on any of these islands. She sees no reason to visit these places to verify the accuracy of her personal sense of them. The atlassed identities come from elsewhere. Indeed, the major arguments of the preface consider both the unreliability of maps and that unreliability’s relationship, through and beyond politics, to defining place through acts of disconnection. (Terry Tempest Williams is as skilled as any writer I know at layering intricate themes across a work and her Finding Beauty in a Broken World follows the theme of mosaic making in multiple contexts.)
For me, Schalansky’s separation of text and maps highlights the act of isolation. The placement of the maps is literal opposition. She is practicing, intentionally, the failings that she rails against in the preface. The maps themselves are in solitary confinement, places without reference to anywhere else, and they are further separated from their textual opposites by color. But on the facing page the text is a lesson in connection, using its double slashes to connect disparate pieces into something a bit more substantial even as it tells us that place identity remains liquid.
I am willing on my first encounter to take her at her word. Will you?
I’m not sharing one of my own works with the class this week. Given our discussion of broader sorts of maps I will introduce you to Karey Kessler, a Seattle artist whose work centers on maps that explore the interconnectedness of memory, time and place. Her website (https://kareykessler.com/home.html) has lots of interesting work, which you can see in a May exhibition in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood at The Vestibule.
One of the things I like best about Kessler’s work is that it rarely, if ever, has hard edges. Her labels are allowed to intersect. Her spaces not only flow into one another but also contain seemingly unjoinable conjunctions. That flow becomes overflow as their edges extend the seen in ways that insist on the presence of the further unseen.
Your can hear Kessler talk about how her maps connect to the physical world outside of the physical geography. Her segment begins at the 33:55 mark of one of ecoartspace's Tree Talks series.