We were in a client meeting yesterday, talking about the way we wanted a new project to be received by the intended audience, and Harold Fisk’s amazing maps of the course of the Mississippi over time came up.
Am I the first to notice that this:
has basically the same color scheme as Jeff Koons’ “Puppy”? And that they actually look pretty similar?
I’ve tried to make work that any viewer, no matter where they came from, would have to respond to, would have to say that on some level ‘Yes, I like it.’—Jeff Koons
It occurred to me when I started looking at both projects that there’s something else that links them, in addition to their visual similarity. The only thing I can say about Puppy is “Yes, I like it.” I can kind of only say the same thing about the Fisk maps, too: “Yes, I like it.”
There’s no way anyone’s using these to navigate anything. I’ve seen them for sale in expensive hipster vintage stores on Valencia Street. You can even buy reprints of them on Amazon from an art printer.
Commissioned by the Mississippi River Commission, these maps clearly weren’t intended as works of art. I’m willing to bet that very little art has been archived by the US Army Corps of Engineers, as this has. But that’s how we read them now. As their utility fades, their aesthetic value comes to the fore. I haven’t been able to find anything in the literature about the project (and would love to hear about it if anyone else has), but there’s no way that Harold Fisk didn’t know he was making something really extraordinarily beautiful when he made these drawings.
Anyhow, I want to think about this a bit more. How can we make a map ‘that any viewer, no matter where they came from, would have to respond to, would have to say that on some level “Yes, I like it.”’
In some ways this was the point behind our Watercolor maps project, funded by the Knight News Challenge; I got bored adjusting line weights and thinking about label hierarchies and wanted to see something different in the world.
But what if this went further? How can we go beyond the novelty of new technical approaches (cause there sure are alot of people experimenting with map technology now), and take this into the realm of culture and art? Not just “that’s cool,” but “hey, I like it!”
Anyhow. It’s time for Stamen’s 15th anniversary party tonight, and I have a date with a pinata. Hope to see you there.