Paula Scher: Mapping the Age of the “Sort of Right”

By Jennifer Liese

Mapmakers might be said to fall into two camps: the precisionists and the expressionists—those who seek to represent the world as it is, and those who construe it toward some particular end, from conquering lands to making art. But of course it’s not that simple. When Buckminster Fuller proposed his Dymaxion map as a corrective to the distorted Mercator projection of 1569 (on which both school maps and Google Maps are based to this day), he made a strong bid for precision. His map corrected continental proportions and a north-biased orientation, but it was more than anything a two-dimensional evocation of a philosophy—Fuller’s vision for Spaceship Earth. Is his map any more correct than the celebrated Hereford mappa mundi, which, like many medieval maps, places Jerusalem at its center? Peter Barber, in his scholarly and lavish The Map Book, calls his subjects “the most successful pieces of fiction ever to be created because most of their users instinctively suspend disbelief.”¹ In other words, all maps, no matter how objectively intended, no matter how convincing, are subjective inventions—whether of emperors, bishops, visionaries, or artists. Some mapmakers are just a little more upfront about it.

“These are absolutely, one hundred percent inaccurate,” Paula Scher declares of her colossal map paintings. Then, after a pause: “But not on purpose.” Another pause: they’re actually “sort of right.”² And therein lies their bracing paradox. Scher’s sites—Manhattan, Israel, and India among them—are instantly recognizable. Scanning the allover expanse of the canvases, you might easily pick out the swath of Central Park, the void of the Dead Sea, the dot of Mumbai. But they are also highly interpretive. The colors and graphic styles allude to loose, mostly media-fed impressions. Consider Middle East, where black paint predominates, reflecting both the dire conflict in the region and the oil underlying it. India—its painted letters pop like a Bollywood poster title—is a flamboyant hive of pink terrain, orange place names, and neon-celadon roads outlined in toothpaste blue and pocked with metallic copper nodes. Standing before it, you can hear the electric sizzle of the global outsourced economy pulsing through those wiry highways. This buzz might well distract from the fact that Scher’s source images are bona fide maps, which she copies with easygoing care—a glance at the map, a stroke of the brush, and so on (there’s no grid transfer here). But just like a tourist who takes a wrong turn despite an alternating glance at the map and step of the foot, Scher sometimes gets lost, misspelling a city’s name, shifting a border, diverting a river. And when that happens, she gladly lets the lapse go. History is rife with human error, not to mention shifting borders, and after all, the source map is already a fiction.

Ptolemy called his maps “portraits” of the earth. Paula Scher’s maps are portraits, too, not least of their maker. An early biographical note is telling: Scher’s father worked for the United States Geological Survey, designing stereo templates and developing aerial photography techniques that improved earth-curvature measurements. “I grew up with maps all over the house, and I thought they were beautiful,” she recalls. A prolific graphic designer and Pentagram partner whose nonprofit and corporate identities are displayed on the subway ads, facades, and ATMs of New York, it’s no wonder Scher has the instinct to emblazon words on the surface of the world. But here the words are personal and adamantly handmade. Scher describes her paintings as an antidote to the bureaucracy of design. She makes them alone in her studio, freed of client feedback. She makes them with brush and paint, rather than keyboard and printer. Most importantly, she makes them in rebellion against what she calls the excess of “useless information” in the information age. The profusion of text—words spilling off landmasses and jutting or swirling out to sea—recalls the cacophonous crawls of a cable news broadcast. But uselessness may be the least of our concerns as the anonymously scribed Wikipedia fast becomes the encyclopedia of record. The “errors” in Scher’s paintings are analogous to the inevitable and proliferating inaccuracies of the Internet, and thus sound like a warning shot in this age of the sort of right. Scher, being rather well known for her fearless yet good-humored pronouncements, goes one step further, speculating on the veracity of a certain newspaper of record: “If I want to get really sardonic and cynical about it, I would argue that my maps are about as accurate as the New York Times. The reporter writes down the information, gets part of it wrong, and slants it in a specific way. The truth is a matter of perception.”

It’s also a matter of editing. A comprehensive map is a contradiction in terms. Indeed, the content of every map is partial, selected, and invested. Scher’s map paintings of Manhattan, two of which are included in the current show, point to this fact purely by existing in varied iterations, not to mention being infused with esoteric data and mood. NYC Transit is dominated by a subway-system overlay and well-known transit landmarks: the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin, PATH tubes, and Amtrak are summoned in signature block letters. But why does the gas station at Nineteenth Street get a shout out? And the cloverleaf roadway where I-95 meets the Major Deegan in the Bronx, rendered so tenderly in Philip Guston pink—is this a hint at a route to someplace close to the heart? Seeking clues to the artist/mapmaker’s predilections is just one admittedly literal but irresistible stop on the itinerary of these paintings; one’s own imagined travels are another. Manhattan at Night reads like an old-school sparkling fantasy of an evening out on the town—pointillist marquee letters spelling out Ziegfeld, Radio City, and Restaurant Row, Broadway streaming along on its distinctive diagonal axis, doubly alight with yellow dots. But the perspective from up high suggests a view from a passing airplane, which in turn might conjure a touch of melancholy, as enchanting Manhattan slips away at the speed of flight. An editorial aside brings this sensation home: quietly inscribed on the Hudson River, neighborhood median income statistics tell a tale of disparity: $17,320 in Spanish Harlem, $80,406 on the Upper East Side, for example. Manhattan’s “average home (condo-coop) value,” hooking around the northerly reaches of the island in big boldface, is harder to miss: $1,000,001. Which is to say that for some, whether their nose is pressed to the window of an airplane or an exorbitantly priced apartment, life in Manhattan is nothing but a dream.

Scher’s income statistics suggest a political bent that is further reflected in her selection of countries or regions to paint. The map paintings proper (she started making small, “illustrative” maps in the late 1980s) began with the 1998 painting The World, which was followed by The United States in 1999. Since, Scher has telescoped in on regions and issues simultaneously. Florida 2000, from 2005, is a reminder of a vote count gone miserably wrong. The works of the past year travel further afield and into ever more hyped or conflicted zones. China, like India, is a mesmerizing festival of colors, the confetti colors of a capitalist boom. Paris’s bold blue-and-white périphérique encircles the city like a moat, defending its purist culture. Israel is a sober-hued and congested view of that country and its neighbors, their borders marked with blood-red dotted lines. At the top edge of the canvas, which cuts through Jordan and Syria, are reminders of slightly more distant neighbors—Iran and Iraq, named alongside tiny arrows pointing northwest. Middle East encompasses a fuller view, with each black-grounded country bathed in its own hue, as if to highlight their utter isolation, while white lines comprised of various dots and hatch marks indicate historical borders during the Babylonian Empire, Moslem Empire, Ottoman Empire, and Roman Empire—a reminder that the people of these lands have been allied and split ad infinitum. Tsunami suggests its subject compositionally, its texts running in a radiating circle around the eye of the ruinous wave.

Like Mark Lombardi’s line drawings, which chart covert relations among terrorist networks, multinational corporations, the Church, and other such global powerhouses, Scher’s paintings uncover unsettling truths. Her truths, however, are far more felt than factual. To experience Scher’s paintings is not to know a place, but to share in the lurking inklings of a collective subconscious. That she employs the form of a map to capture it is thoroughly of our time. In “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson calls for an “aesthetics of cognitive mapping” to aid the individual in coping with postmodern overload.³ Come 2007 his early-’80s wish has come true. As Janet Abrams and Peter Hall note in their pioneering 2006 anthology Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, we are in the midst of an “extraordinary efflorescence in the field of mapping, a creative proliferation” across a spectrum of fields, with artists in particular “engaging mapping technologies self-reflexively, questioning their social and cultural effects, or inventing dynamic visualizations that offer fresh perspectives on scientific information.”⁴ Two current traveling exhibitions, Experimental Geographies and An Atlas of Radical Cartography, survey this contemporary tendency, which engages social-network mapping as well as the old-fashioned topographical sort. Much of this wave of artists’ mapping is digitally wrought, and some of it exists only online. (Even Julie Mehretu’s large-scale paintings featuring bits and pieces of maps of African cities and international airports are partly computer generated.) Much of it takes advantage of the fast-increasing agency of the Web-enabled amateur to map regions previously defined only by the expert.⁵ Scher’s insistently expressionist map series—painterly takes on “the most successful pieces of fiction” ever—in steadfastly refusing digital means, remind us always to question the apparent precision of digital ends.

1. Peter Barber, ed., The Map Book (New York: Levenger Press, 2005), 8.
2. This and all quotes by Scher, in conversation with the author, September 20, 2007.
3. As cited in Brian Holmes, “Counter Cartographies,” in Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006), 20. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
4. Abrams and Hall, “Where/abouts,” in Else/Where, 15–16.
5. See Miguel Helft, “With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking,” New York Times, July 27, 2007. Helft reports that users of such programs as Google’s My Maps are mapping everything from graffiti tags in Washington to yarn stores in Illinois. He also quotes Donald Cooke, chief scientist at Tele Atlas North America, who notes, “Some people are potentially going to do really stupid things with these tools.” Whether he’s speaking of inaccuracy or devious stupidity is left up in the air.
*In addition to the sources directly cited, I am indebted for insights on art and mapping to You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, by Katharine Harmon, in which Scher’s work appears; Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays, edited by David Woodward; and the forthcoming History of the Grid: From the Brick to the World Wide Web, by Hannah Higgins.

Jennifer Liese lives in Providence and teaches at Rhode Island School of Design. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Cabinet, and BOMB.