Mind the map

Critical Geography is a field of study dedicated to the analysis of the unequal relationships reflected in our use and understanding of geographic spaces. ACME is an electronic journal that features writing on this subject. I'm not sure if it is still publishing, but there are many articles from back issues archived on the site.


Psychogeography is another really interesting tool for thinking about how we interpret the world around us. A product of the Lettrist and Situationist Movements, psychogeography is a subjective, non-scientific examination of our relationship to space, often through a technique called mental mapping. Mental mapping depicts the way we relate one location to another and combine this ego-centred understanding with our "objective" knowledge of geography.

This type of mental mapping is analogous to (and might even be seen as an extension of) the brainstorming technique that is also sometimes also called mental, cognitive or concept mapping, in which concepts and questions are explored through the creation of diagrams that describe the relationships between related ideas. This background image for the Institute for Lateral Research is an example of this, and the site itself is based on the same principle.

Maps may seem inherently visual, but an interesting paper by a psychologist at the University of Surrey on creating practical maps for the blind explores the non-visual aspects of both cognitive and "real" maps.

Looking around the world

Theme parks, food courts, fashion and film are just a few of the ways we demonstrate our understanding of the world and other people in it. They are, in a sense, maps of what we think our culture means, and what we find most interesting, desirable or confusing about the cultures of others.

This is the idea at the heart of postcolonial and postructualist social critique: that the ways in which we pursue, organize and put to use our knowledge about the world and the other people in it really says more about us than it does about the apparent objects of that knowledge.

Here is a short and lively paper along these lines by critical theorist Louis Marin, with the compelling title "Disneyland as Degenerate Utopia".

Here, on the other hand, is a lesson plan from National Geographic that demonstrates how one culture's ideas of what other cultures are "made of" are passed along. This is how ideas become ideology.


Dan Graham's rooftop installation for the DIA Chelsea in New York, Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube functions as an elequent illustration of the problem of "objective" perception. As you look through its reflective glass panels, your view of the world around you is filtered through your own reflection, which varies in its intensity as the light changes.

Yum Yum: a serving of cultural imperialism

In the years before widespread international travel and global migration, World's Fairs and other exhibitions were a place where one could sample the cuisine of far-flung places. From 1885 to 1887 Knightsbridge, London was home to a "Japanese Village". Among its visitors was W.S. Gilbert, who visited its shops and tearooms while writing the libretto for the Mikado. The drawing above of the character Yum Yum is Gilbert's own. These are some of the denizens of Knightsbridge village:




Now, even small and medium-sized North American and European cities are home to restaurants that serve food that until recently would have seemed unimaginably exotic.

But cultural exchange through food is an unequal phenomenon, one that reflects the global migrations of people, money and ideas. While the global sushi boom may pose a threat to ocean ecology, it is unlikely to be labelled as cultural imperialism. American fast- and convience-foods on the other hand are widely perceived as symbols (and agents) of world domination.

Chinese multidisciplinary artist Zhang Hongtu's Kekou Kele Bottle captures this concern beautifully:

A brave new world of food and drink

In one way or another, food has always been an important part of the World's Fair. Visitors to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1903-04 in St. Louis were among the first to enjoy ice cream cones, hot dogs, candy floss, iced tea and puffed rice (although in the case of the latter, "enjoy" may not be quite the correct term). Some believe the hamburger as we know it was also unleashed at that fair, by a Texan named Fletcher Davis.

There's a nice essay on the British Film Institute's site on the fair as it relates to Vincente Minnelli's 1944 film Meet Me In St. Louis.

A second essay on the BFI site reveals that not everyone was welcome at this "celebration of the human family". It would seem that karma fuels the widespread misconception that esteemed African-American agricultural scientist George Washington Carver invented peanut butter – another food introduced at the 1903-04 Fair.

By the time of the 1964 World's Fair in New York, the snack food industry - in particular the soft drink industry - was firmly ensconced among the world's giants of commerce. Witness the achitectural marvel that was the Coca-Cola pavillion:



Other pop pavillions included Pepsi Cola and Seven-Up. One might have been forgiven for mistaking the soda makers for oddly-named countries.

Big Arc, big harvest

The most elegant harvest tribute I've ever seen (unfortunately not firsthand) is the 1990 Grande Moisson on the Champs Elysées. Thousands of pallets of live mature wheat were brought into central Paris, laid out on the street between the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe, then harvested by hand by hundreds of "peasants".

House of plenty

Cosimo Cavallaro's cheese house (see previous post) may seem bizarre and outré, but consider its relationship to a particular form of American vernacular architecture: the corn palace. After all, the Cheese House was part of Powell, Wyoming's cheese festival and was executed in association with the town's chamber of commerce.

The Mitchell, South Dakota Corn Palace (for which new corn murals are commissioned every year) is the only extant example of this type of building, but it was not the first. Late 19th century North America was obsessed with agricultural fairs and expositions. Exhibitors were eager to provide proof of the miraculous bounty produced by their regions, so they erected monuments not only to their harvests, but from them.



In addition to Perth, Ontario's Mammoth Cheese, the agricultural exhibit at World's Columbian Exhibition of 1893, in Chicago, featured a breathtaking and diverse collection of walk-through cornucopias. Among them were a Moorish-style tribute to corn and sugar-beets from Nebraska, a sort of wheat-sheaf baldaquin from Minnesota, and Pennsylvania's cozy fireside scene, pictured above. One of Canada's contributions was this ethereal display of Ontario fruit under glass:



Compared to these elaborate installations, the CNE's Food Building seems like fairground conceptualism :

The uses of cheese

Art has been made to embellish and promote cheese, and art (of a sort) has been made as a tribute to cheese. (For more on the story behind the mammoth cheese of Perth, Ontario, click here).

But has art ever been made out of cheese?

In a word: yes.

Argentinian Pop Art sculptor Marta Minujin has covered a Venus figure with little processed cheese cubes.



Montreal-born artist Cosimo Cavallaro has applied melted cheese to some unlikely objects, including boots, a suit jacket, Twiggy, and an entire house and its contents in Powell, Wyoming.



He has since moved on to ham, but that's not really germaine to our current discussion.

For her 1992 installation "The Cocktail Party", multimedia artist Sandy Skoglund covered a room, furniture and people with cheezies.



Not strictly cheese, perhaps. Not really food either.