ABSTRACT
This book outlines a new theory of carto-graphic aesthetics, or what is here called a carto-aesthetics, through the concept of poetic cartography, offering a key to interpreting specific phenomena in modern and contemporary art. Taking the “spatial turn” of poststructuralist philosophy as a point of departure, the question of mapping is situated more firmly as hermeneutics while highlighting the role of artistic interventions in reconfiguring a new idea of cartography. It is posited that the emergence of “mapping” as a ubiquitous theme in contemporary art is to be attributed to the power of the cartographic model to constitute multiple worldviews that can be seen as paradigmatic of the postmodern and the contemporary era (rhizomatic, nomadic, horizontal, nonhierarchical, etc.). Bridging the aesthetic, ontological, and cognitive fields and crossing a variety of disciplines, these worldviews challenge the dominant idea of space as an essentially Western concept with universalistic aspirations and impositions, which we see reflected in the very notion of the Cartesian subject. It is further argued that contemporary artists deliberately deconstruct the rational appearance of the map in favor of the relational aspects of mapping to expose the architectonics of time through duration, disclosing a new power dynamic at work in an increasingly borderless world.
