Magnificent Maps at the British Library, NW1
Maps are the precursors to the landscape paintings that flourished after the 17th century. They are works of art




The art of map-making is an ancient one. It’s hardly surprising: over the centuries, as cartographers crept their slow way across the surface of the planet, the pictures that they created helped people to fit the myriad scattered fragments of a sprawling geographical puzzle into place. But, as the face of the world has grown ever more familiar, have we come to think of the map merely as a literal translation? Accurate, objective and useful it may be but where, many may wonder as they anticipate the British Library’s latest exhibition, is the creative flare that can turn a dry topographical record into a fertile territory for imaginative exploration?

Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art is a show to overturn such expectations. It leads the visitor — a bit like some erstwhile explorer — on a creative adventure around the back of that flat piece of paper we think of as the world. Drawing on the finest collection of maps on this planet — the British Library has more than four million to choose from, the vast majority of which are only very rarely, if ever, put on public display — the exhibition sets out to make clear that these pictures are about far more than mere physical description. They are a series of subjective images, each shaped by the beliefs and desires, the ambitions and prejudices, the passions and anxieties of its period.

The spectator looks at the world from myriad perspectives. “Which is more important — the Last Judgment or the correct placement of Birmingham?” asks the curator Peter Barber who, even in the 30 years that he has worked at the library, has probably managed to examine barely a third of its collection. What tells you more about a country: a picture of a dog-headed cannibal or a description of its coastline? The visitor is invited to wander through a world before it was charted, into lands where the unknown is as vivid as the observable fact.

Nothing is fixed — not even magnetic North. The show is not chronological. Wall texts are minimal. There is no audio guide. Rather, rambling through sections that set out to conjure the sort of spaces in which maps would once have been displayed from the splendid audience rooms of boastful rulers to the private “cabinets” of the educated, the spectator is encouraged to discover the complex variety of purposes maps have been made to serve.

The map comes in all shapes and sizes and forms, from Queen Mary’s dolls-house miniature to the massive 17th-century Klencke Atlas, which stands taller than a man. Here is the world captured in eye-confounding monochrome mazes, in glowing watercolour pictures and richly-gilded charts, in rare surviving fragments of once far larger carvings, in medals and globes and manuscripts and tapestries.

There are maps (or precious surviving fragments of them) from the medieval era when the mystic and philosopher Hugh of St Victor declared the world to be like a book written by the finger of God, including a vividly coloured replica of the Hereford Mappa Mundi (the original is never lent): a complex knot of earthly marvels that bear testimony to the power of their divine maker. Alongside it hangs a contemporary version by the artist Grayson Perry, in which the rays of light that illuminate mere terrestrials stream from his sphincter in the middle of the picture.

Maps, as this show makes plain, are art works. It does this most directly when it hangs a cartographical commemoration (complete with all the gory details including pillage, hangings and torture) of the 1625 surrender of the besieged town of Breda to the Spanish alongside an image of a Velázquez painting of the same subject. Maps follow the prevailing styles of the period, from the Baroque extravaganza of a chart of Bohemia to the meticulously observed records of a pupil of the 18th-century map-maker Paul Sandby. Maps are the precursors to the landscape paintings that flourished after the 17th century.

But their artistry serves a purpose. Far from objective, scientifically created records, these images have an imaginative agenda. Together they tell a story of power, plunder and possession. They are made to keep watch over spreading dominions, to assert forceful ownership or project a sense of civic pride. Maps — from the medieval visions of a king as a godlike power to the blatant posters of the Bolsheviks — serve as propaganda. The more ornate, the more striking, the more pleasing they look, the more persuasive and easily swallowed their message becomes.

A watercolour of Dover harbour illustrating proposed plans for the prevention of erosion need not have been so delicately accomplished. But this map was dispatched to Privy Counsellors who, if so inclined, would put up the money for improvements. The counsellors were far more likely to find the money if the image appealed.

This is a show to be interpreted at a deep cultural level. The more closely you examine the objects, the more you find yourself embroiled in the ambitions and intrigues of their subtle worlds. Maps, this show argues, are as much to do with philosophy as geography. They are not two-dimensional pictures of the world but windows on to a subtle and complex world view.

Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art is at the British Library, London NW1 (020-7412 7676), from Friday to Sept 19.

The BBC Four Maps Season continues on Sunday (9pm) with Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession

Music to your ears....

A range of free and not quite free events and performances starting this Thursday 29th April.....at

http://www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/project/experiment

Jannis Kounellis

Welcome back all

Time to get the blog up and running again?
This really is a must see show. Not open Monday, perhaps we might go as a group on Tuesday.



Jannis Kounellis, at 74, remains the patriarch of an Italian art movement that has long since slipped away, though brevity was always a part of its nature. The radical gestures of arte povera – flame throwing, horse wrangling, missile straddling – were as short-lived as the humble materials the artists used, such as ice, bread, newsprint, flowers and lettuce that wilted even as you watched. This was a 60s art, it seemed, that would never grow old or repeat itself.

Yet Kounellis has achieved both. Born in Greece in 1936, he moved to Rome aged 20 and has lived and worked there ever since. Repetition has gradually become his modus operandi. Not the exact reproduction of one work, however, but, rather, the conception of each separate piece as a kind of chorus, reiterated over and again, to the larger elegy of his work.

Burlap sacks, beans and lentils, empty bottles, stones and coal: if you saw the gallery recently devoted to Kounellis at Tate Modern you will be familiar with most of his stock, the inventory of dry goods from which he makes his dark and plangent works. There are variations – coffee, piano music, very occasionally paint (he started out as a painter) – but Kounellis is faithful to his repertoire of uningratiating materials. Each time you see one of his grain sacks or dry-stone walls, you are reminded of all that went before: plain things, universal, ancient and yet unarguably modern.

In Ambika P3, the vast underground bunker beneath the University of Westminster, Kounellis has found the ideal gallery. Acres of bare concrete rising up to cathedral height, the former engineering hall is both desolate and inspiring. The artist has filled this space with one colossal installation and many smaller works that feel like further meditations on the theme.

The central work is overwhelmingly dramatic: immense steel walls diverging through the concrete gallery, each supported by a steel table and each forming a substrate for the most haunting configurations of glass bottles, meat hooks, tensile cords and black overcoats pinioned like dead or dying bodies. What first strikes is the sense of a whole gallery of martyrdoms combined – compressed – into a single work.

But as you walk down one avenue, a particular panel may suddenly take on the glow of a stained-glass window as the light catches the green and sepia of the empty bottles. Or the funereal clothes may be arranged in a manner more reminiscent of flags or revolutionary banners. The silver meat hooks are by turns bleakly functional or rococo in their curlicues. Everything you look at feels unfixed, no matter how solemn and still – a stream of proliferating associations.

And like avenues, these walls are directional – down one side, up the other, into a tight convergence in the middle. It feels like a vast cross; in fact, as the viewer eventually discovers, it takes the form of a letter K. An outsize signature, presumably it is also an allusion to Kafka's character who can never penetrate the bureaucracy of the castle, still less its walls. That allusion shouldn't be overstated, though, since Kounellis has created his own mysterious edifice, its fortifications topped with heaps of coal.

You become a wanderer, trying to get to the heart of it all – and what's going on in your mind is translated in the most physical terms. Hooks, coats, bodies, bottles: traces of humanity, of labour and pain, of the solitary worker in the industrial machine. It feels like a game of word association played out in objects and images, or knowledge encrypted, waiting to be revealed if one only had the key. The experience is powerfully affecting and theatrical. Kounellis has designed sets for Heiner Müller and the Berliner Ensemble. The wrangled horses were his, tethered live in a Roman gallery. And the smaller works dispersed among the pillared halls have the presence of characters escaping the main performance to speak for themselves.

A descent from the cross, in which the overcoat is dangling upside down, person and winding sheet all in one; a jacket wrapped around itself, huddled, confused and lashed by steel wires whose hard glint is reflected over and again in the clear glass of the bottles; frozen air in a cold-hearted world.

The effect stops short of bathos every time because the decisions are so well judged. Just the smallest adjustment – barely perceptible – in an arrangement of bottles introduces a threat of danger, just as the angle of a garment can make it seem more or less human or abstract.

And in the end, despite the accumulation of so many objects – hung, strung, stockpiled, stacked – the sense is of looking at paintings by other means. Portrait, still life, history painting, battle scene: the installation is like an art gallery made abstract.

"My focus is to present, not to represent," Kounellis has said. No matter how complex or unfathomable the works may seem, their elements remain irreducibly simple. A dozen black overcoats hanging on hooks exceed the obvious anthropomorphism – garments as people – to evoke some distant age of dignified men going to their deaths. An old black sewing machine dangling from a wire and you might sense the hot dusty village and the soldiers hammering at the cottage door.

Clearly, each viewer will have their own associations, but there are fundamental overtones here of our European past. Kounellis has found a way of rearranging his repertoire of objects differently in each location to maximise the emotional impact. Here, he has made an industrial-scale elegy that speaks to the site as a deserted construction hall. Imagine what this Greek poet might produce for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.