Afterall

This issue of Afterall addresses these questions through the work of artists with different relations to the act of mapping, the land and locality.

Andrea Zittel’s interest in California’s Joshua Tree National Park and its surroundings, which she has used as the staging ground for her collaborative projects, sustains a focus not just on the land, but on the interaction between the park and its inhabitants: do humans react differently within different vistas?

Jef Geys’s highly localised practice, centred in his hometown of Balen, Belgium, suggests a similar escape from the institution of art: if implicit in participatory art’s anti-elitism and its use of ‘everyone’ rather than ‘the anointed few’ is a form of institutional critique, then Geys’s attempts to open up artistic practice by delineating it through spatial territory (rather than through social code or norm) is indeed a reformation of the whole art system.

The idea of mapping as revelatory — implicit also in the exhibitions cited above — is germane to Suzanne Lacy’s Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (1995), a seminal survey of public and participatory artwork (re-assessed here by Stephanie Smith), which sought to create the field as much as document it.