Tag Archives: maps

History of Croatia in Maps

September 2, 2018 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

We are going to Croatia today! Dubrovnik for a week and then Split, and a conference on… I’m not sure.

Gravity assist is a slingshot move, when one object uses the gravity of another to propel itself out of orbit. This concept from space travel, first used with the Mariner 10 probe in 1974, functions as a metaphor for escaping the constraints of the present to create change for the future. The conference, to be held by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Croatia, 14-15 September, 2018, aims to examine strategies for challenging the limitations of the present in order to escape from them.

I’ve been at RGS all this week, I presented a paper on rural homelessness in Wales, I spoke about how austerity is tearing its way through people’s lives and concreting itself into the landscape and service provision. This is why I do not have a paper for Split, which is really Mark’s bag of course, but it would have been fun to think about this. I will enjoy being there and seeing old friends again, but mostly I look forward to exploring a new space and place and have, of course, been reading a great deal. I read a short book on the history as it was all I could find in our library, it was all right. I most loved the maps that trace this much-contested area over time, and they are presented in order here. From Tanner, M. (2001). Croatia : A Nation Forged in War. New Haven: Yale University Press.

art, Building Social Spaces, Exhibitions

The Maps (and other awesome art) of Grayson Perry (Arnolfini: Bristol)

November 6, 2017 Andrea Gibbons 1 Comment

A quick break from writing and reading and writing to think for a minute about Grayson Perry’s The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! at Bristol’s Arnolfini. It started life in the Serpentine down in London I believe, and was so nice to see something like this outside of the capitol — I loved the Arnolfini focusing on one exhibition as well, it really opened up the space, made it feel larger than I remember it being. The official description of the exhibit:

[The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever!] tackles one of the artist’s primary concerns: how contemporary art can best address a diverse cross section of society. On show for the first time outside of London, the exhibition is central to the autumn season at Arnolfini and a programme of events inspired by Perry’s irreverent take on contemporary culture.

In the exhibition, Perry continues to explore many of the themes and concerns that recur in his practice, drawing from his own childhood and life as a transvestite, as well as wider social issues and his abiding interest in his audience. The works in the exhibition examine masculinity, class, politics, sex, religion, popularity and art, as well as contemporary issues such as Brexit and ‘Divided Britain’.

My favourite piece was this I think, Red Carpet. I love everything about it. I love that it is a tapestry, love fabric, love the rich textures of it that fit so well the highrise buildings that form its backdrop. I love its squiggly lines, its noting of the many boundaries and main thoroughfares, how it reflects back at the nation its own maps of us and them inscribed upon hearts and minds — safe and dangerous places, useful places, places marked in different ways by class and culture and kind of dwelling and our reception there. I love how this map resembles the kinds of maps Kevin Lynch uncovered in trying to understand how people visualised and understood and traveled through their everyday cities. It is such a beautiful object, yet does not make the discourse (and what it says about Britain in this particular time) all that beautiful, as it isn’t beautiful at all.

Grayson Perry himself describes it thus:

The title evokes the most formal and reverent of welcomes and the style is influenced by some of my favourite material culture – Afghan war rugs. This is a map of British society as evocative and inaccurate as a geographical one made by a medieval scholar. The distortions partly reflect the density of population rather than the lie of the land. It is covered in words and buzz phrases that I felt typified the national discourse in 2016. The background weave is made from photographs of tower blocks.’

The second map is no thing of beauty, which…perhaps if he had spoken to other people on the estate it might have been, but this rings pretty true for young men. Here we have the Digmoor Tapestry.

Grayson Perry writes:

This work is my reaction after talking to a group of young men from Skelmersdale, Lancashire. They are the victims of poverty, chaotic parenting, bad role models and disrupted education. They hung around street corners selling weed, riding motorbikes around parks and getting into fights with rival groups. They were at an age when a hormonal need to assert their masculinity was at its freshest. Deprived of acceptable badges of status, job, money, education, power and family, they exercised their masculinity in a way that seemed to echo back to the dawn of humanity – they defended territory. That territory was the Digmoor estate, a quadrant of a 1970s new town bounded by dual carriageways. They seemed prepared to kill for it. The Digmoor Tapestry is a map of the state the defended. The style was inspired by traditional African fabrics and the graffiti is taken directly from the boys’ environment. On seeing it one of them commented, ‘It looks like it’s been used to wrap up a body’.’

There is ‘Animal Spirit’, a different kind of mapping, very different elements, and oil everywhere oil. A foretelling of our own destruction and the death of our future in the entrails as the Greeks used to do…

He writes:

”Animal Spirit’ was a phrase that cropped up quite a lot during the commentaries after the financial crash of 2008. It seemed to be used as a way of offloading responsibility for the human chaos of the meltdown onto some mystical force, when in fact the men controlling the market are prone to irrational behaviour as anyone. Some of the symbolism within the image of Animal Spirit – the abandoned baby, the three black crowns and the hanging man – come from the names of the traditional patterns in Japanese candlestick graphs used by traders in the city.’

Maps…I so love maps. He has a map of days, a map of nowhere, a map of an englishman… I long to see them. Someday.

He loves shrines as much as I do! Though I prefer mine in the wild. There were bikes! And there were ceramics. This one evoked both phallic symbol and skyscraper and banking district, here we have Object in Foreground which provoked this headline from the Evening Standard: ‘Artist Grayson Perry has created a huge glazed ceramic penis he says is inspired by the City of London’s bankers and traders’. Funny that I too have always thought of them as giant penises. His description was quite provocative:

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of masculinity to examine was its pervasive effect on the power structures and unconscious bias within the City of London financial industry. Men working there are well-educated, confident and operate in a culture of their own making, so it was difficult to pick out the dominant threads of masculinity from the dense and perfect weave of their business. Object in Foreground was inspired by the bland lobbies of their corporate towers. The decor expresses imperial neutrality, but I saw them as bachelor pads write large.

My favourite though, was this one: ‘Luxury Brands for Social Justice’

Because it felt so good to be so angry and yet be able to laugh at this shit all at the same time:

Enjoyed this exhibition a great deal.

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Building Social Spaces, City & Country

Kevin Lynch: The Image of the City

November 1, 2016 Andrea Gibbons 5 Comments

Kevin Lynch — he’s been on my list of folks to read forever on architecture and cities and space, and with reason as The Image of the City is rather brilliant. He writes:

Looking at cities can give a special pleasure, however commonplace the sight may be. Like a piece of architecture, the city is a construction in space, but one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time. City design is therefore a temporal art… At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surrounding, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences. (1)

I love this nod to the overwhelming — and mostly pleasurable — nature of the city, the ways it works in both space and time, and like Lofland, Whyte, Cullen, Gehl and others, he is clearly writing as someone with an appreciation for city life. It is a life that is in many ways collectively constructed:

Not only is the city an object which is perceived (and perhaps enjoyed) by millions of people of widely diverse class and character, but it is the product of many builders who are consonantly modifying the structure for reasons of their own… No wonder, then, that the art of shaping cities is an art quite separate from architecture or music or literature. (2)

In The Image of the City, Lynch’s focus is primarily looking at what he calls the ‘legibility’ of the cityscape — how we read cities and how understanding that can help us (re)build better cities. Why is legibility key?

A good environmental image gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security. He can establish an harmonious relationships between himself and the outside world…(4)

I love this quote even more…

a distinctive and legible environment not only offers security but also heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience. Although life is far from impossible in the visual chaos of the modern city, the same daily action could take on new meaning if carried out in a more vivid setting. (5)

This is not to go against the many authors who write about the unknown, Lynch emphasises that this not to deny the value of labyrinth or surprise, but under two larger conditions — where there is no danger of losing basic

orientation, of never coming out. The surprise must occur in an over-all framework; the confusions must be small regions in a visible whole…. Complete chaos without hint of connection is never pleasurable. (6)

Another important qualification, the power of human beings to shape the urban environment:

The observer himself should play an active role in perceiving the world and have a creative part in developing his image. He should have the power to change that image to fit changing needs… what we seek is not a final but an open-ended order, capable of continuous further development. (6)

So to understand how this all works, he book tries to get at the ways people understand and read cities, the

‘public images,’ the common mental pictures carried around by large numbers of a city’s inhabitants… (7)

I love maps, and so found this a fascinating way to examine people’s relationships to the urban form, splitting it into useful divisions to be examined:

The mental maps that are shared of streets and landmarks. These are analyzed in terms of identity (its recognition as a separable entity), structure (the spatial or pattern relation of the object to the observer and other objects) and meaning (for the observer, whether practical or emotional). (8)

Above all in understanding legibility is this:

imageability: that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment. (9)

A highly imageable (apparent, legible, or visible) city in this peculiar sense would seem well formed, distinct, remarkable; it would invite the eye and the ear to greater attention and participation. The sensuous grasp upon such surroundings would not merely be simplified, but also extended and deepened. Such a city would be one that could be apprehended over time as a pattern of high continuity with many distinctive parts clearly interconnected. The perceptive and familiar observer could absorb new sensuous impacts without disruption in his basic image, and each new impact would touch upon many previous elements. He would be well oriented, and he could move easily. He would be highly aware of his environment. The city of Venice might be an example of such a highly imageable environment. (10)

Venice again, but I think this is definitely how a city works best, and this imageablity is the center of his study of Boston, LA and Jersey City. What follows is a really interesting way of mapping out perceptions of the city through surveys and interviews. The maps are brilliant:

Particularly interesting is the look at problems, as in the ‘Problems of the Boston image’ (p 24 — though you won’t be surprised to find that Boston has fewer problems than the other two):

This marks what Kevin Lynch describes as the

confusions, floating points, weak boundaries, isolations, breaks in continuity, ambiguities, branchings, lacks of character or differentiation. (25)

Of course it beats both Jersey City and Los Angeles hands down as a memorable, enjoyably walkable and legible city. I do myself have a great soft spot for Boston. I thought I’d go into more detail on LA in a second post, as it is my own city after all. It also highlights Lynch’s limitations, but there is much to be mined from the book.

First, what development has done to the US city centre:

There is the same piling-up of blank office structures, the same ubiquity of traffic ways and parking lots (34).

This has made them almost indistinguishable from one another, Lynch notes Jersey City as the least distinguishable of all — funny that what people most loved about it was the view of New York’s skyline on their horizon.

Common themes between the cities:

…people adjust to their surroundings and extract structure and identity out of the material at hand. The types of elements used in the city image, and the qualities that make them strong or weak, seem quite comparable between the three…

In terms of broad themes, the key favourite aspects of all cities were space and views:

Among other things, the tests made clear the significance of space and breadth of view (43) … there was an emotional delight arising from a broad view, which was referred to many times. …

Natural landscapes:

The landscape features of the city: the vegetation or the water, were often noted with care and pleasure. (44)

Also a deep sense of the spatialities of class (race is not discussed at all, except in an oblique way, a truly blindingly un-scholarly way which the post on LA will deal with more)

Quite as apparent is the constant reference to socio-economic class: the avoidance of “lower class” Broadway in Los Angeles, the recognition of the “upper class” Bergen Section in Jersey City, or the unmistakable division of Boston’s Beacon Hill into two distinct sides.

Space and time:

… the way in which the physical scene symbolizes the passage of time… (45)

So in broad strokes, there is a lot to think about here… the next post gets into the nitty gritty of design elements and physical space.

[Lynch, Kevin (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press]

More on building social spaces…

and even more…

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Environment & Justice, Pillars of Capitalism

The Superstitions, mining and mayhem

January 9, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 6 Comments

I thought of this twitching prospector and the chicken holding prospector and the dead, headless prospector and said, ‘it would seem to me that the solitude of working in the wild is not healthy for a man.’
–Patrick Dewitt, The Sisters Brothers

The incidental reading of Dewitt actually pales before the sordid reality experienced in Arizona with all of its killings over base metals. They have no grace or humor. Finding out about the history of the Superstitions though…I’m not sure I know of a more sustained story of greed and murder stretching across the years. Those old Wild West ‘antics’ just make you sad even when they have the same veneer as Victorian sepia prints, but they sure ain’t so palatable when taking place in the late 1950s.

All of it is set against the backdrop of the magnificent Sonoran Desert, and part of me just can’t understand how such beauty and its clean, if fierce, struggle for life didn’t straighten all these people out. It’s a particularly human madness, this lust for gold, it doesn’t make sense in the desert.

Of course the greed and murder all started with the conquest of Arizona first by Spain, and then by the U.S. (stripping both Spanish land grants and ancestral tribal lands) — structural, expansionary greed backed by the geopolitics of nations, a mixture of armies and missionaries and people desperate to build a better life all come together to conquer and colonise. Any amount of violence occurring after that can hardly be surprising on this bedrock of force used to confer rights. This is what is left out of most accounts of the west along with Jane Eppinga’s Apache Junction and the Superstition Mountains, upon which most of the following is based. Nothing about this death-dealing race to mineral wealth is natural, it is rather twisted around a sordid history of genocide and a larger seizure of land and resources.

It’s a strange bug, prospecting. One I know well because my dad was always out in the hills with Jim and Harold and Frank and Don, looking for copper and gold. I used to go with them sometimes, I’ve staked claims and filed them with the Bureau of Land Management. It is hard, dirty work. I loved those days, up early and into the truck and out for the whole day in a desert free of other human beings. Of course actually marking our claims once likely places were found always seemed to involve plowing through a whole lot of white-thorn acacias, so we definitely marked them in blood. At least it was always our own.

For my dad and his friends, it was as much about camaraderie, heading out into the desert in the old 4X4 Ford, exploring old back roads and mining lore. Adventure ahead with every sparkle of epidote and every fault and fracture, and the glimmer of an escape from the toil of working-class life. They worked damned hard, they deserved an escape. They knew this probably wouldn’t be it. That wasn’t the point.

This is what I have always loved about prospecting, and probably what draws the folks who continue to live in places like Apache Junction, Clifton, Tucson, Miami, Globe (and small towns across Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada), reworking old mines, seeking out new ones, panning for gold. There are still lots of them out there.

Jacob Waltz (probably), and several of those who followed him, were just a bit different. A German immigrant who arrived in the U.S. in 1846, he became yet another lone prospector in Arizona in 1861 in the face of Apaches bravely fighting to keep their lands, as well as other prospectors seeking instant wealth. Supposedly he and his partner Jacob Wieser found a rich vein of gold, Wieser died shortly thereafter. Waltz claimed Apaches killed him, but that sounds quite a convenient story to me. Rumour has it he killed up to eight others.

But then there’s another source states he was harmless, and lived the end of his life in poverty: ‘Contrary to stories of hoarded gold, he lived out his final years on his homestead at Henshaw Road (Buckeye Road) and 7th Street in poverty. He literally sold himself into peonage by deeding his property to a neighbor in exchange for that neighbor’s taking care of him for the rest of his natural life.’

Yet another source has Wieser escaping the Apache attack wounded, being taken care of by a Pima medicine man. Giving him a map to the treasure.

These conflicting accounts and more are from Jack San Felice’s rundown of accounts, which is very thorough indeed. There could be no better testament to the way that the mythical (and violent) west has been spun out over time.

Somewhere in the growth of this myth of the ‘Lost Dutchman Mine’, the German became a Dutchman (or Deutchman?).

Waltz never fully worked his claim or sold it, supposedly he simply lived off the gold. Eppinga follows one thread of the possible story in this, where Waltz was cared for in old age and sickness by Julia Thomas, a baker, who supposedly received a large sum of money from him to save her business and directions to his claim given her just before he died in 1891.

She was an African American woman out here on the frontier, she would have possibly been born during times of slavery, she owned a home, supported herself and cared for others. Yet there is no picture of her, no history. She is a footnote to a quest, and to me far more interesting than a lost mine. Another key storyteller of the Lost Dutchman is Tom Kollenborn, he writes this of her partnership with the Petrasches to find the gold:

Toward the end of the third week, the expedition collapsed from exhaustion and the lack of food and water. The search for the Waltz’s mine was abandoned and the three returned to Phoenix defeated and unsuccessful. A local newspaper, the Arizona Weekly Gazette, noted the expedition with the following excerpt on September 1, 1892, “A Queer Quest, Another Lost Mine Being Hunted By A Woman.”

This prospecting venture reduced Julia Thomas to financial ruin. She and the Petraschs were in a somewhat destitute situation with no source of income or a place to reside. Julia soon parted company with the Petraschs and married a farm laborer named Albert Schaffer on July 26, 1893.

At Schaffer’s encouragement, Julia produced maps with what information she could remember. She became very resourceful and began producing excellent maps illustrating how to locate the lost gold mine of Jacob Waltz. These fraudulent sheets of paper were probably the first maps to the Dutchman’s Lost Mine.

I love that there is no known picture of Waltz, but a large collection of pictures that could be him. I love that there is not one map, but loads of them. Here they are collected in the Superstition Mountain Museum (so worth a visit if you are in the area, words can’t describe it, and there are even more maps on another wall):

They are drawn on paper, and incised into clay with sections that are removable like so many mythical map halves to buried treasure.

Eppinga’s book is quite an amazing collection of photographs with detailed captions as are most of the ‘Images of America’ series, but there is less introduction here than in others and some of the captions a little repetitive. I wished it had been a little more chronological, instead it jumps around though the content is essentially all the same whether placed in chapters titled ‘Coronado’s Children’ or ‘Miners and Madmen’. There is page after page of weathered old men (and one or two women) who walked the Superstition mountains in search of gold.

The second murder came in 1931, when another German immigrant went missing. The elderly Adolph Ruth was working off a map received from his son Erwin. According to the book Erwin had been fired from a car-dealership in Texas, worked for the Mexican President eradicating ticks, met a guy named Gonzalez in prison and helped his family across the border. All that resulting in possession of a treasure map. Everything about these stories is hard to believe. Still, an archaeological expedition found his father’s skull a good distance from the body, and the forensic expert stated the hole through it was caused by a bullet from a high-powered gun.

In the 1950s a feud broke out between rival claimants and treasure seekers: Eddie Piper and his army vs Celeste Jones and hers. Amazingly, Celeste Jones was a second African American woman braving the desert and some really crazy white guys to find the Lost Dutchman’s mine, resulting in a fairly brilliant article from Ebony that you can read here. It throws in another popular legend of the mine’s Spanish origins, whereby its initial discovery was by a young Mexican ‘lover’ (Peralta) fleeing his sweetheart’s father who stumbles upon the mine and then he and others returning with him to get the gold are murdered by Apaches. Two boys escaped from the massacre, and were in turn murdered by Waltz.

That’s ancient, and like all of it, quite dubious history. An alternative history from Celeste Jones holds that the gold they sought had been hidden by Jesuit priests in the late 1700s. Real and sordid history? Three more men were killed in 1959 as part of this continuing feud over the gold. The book contains a few pictures of the armies but doesn’t discuss the racial politics (three of Celeste’s soldiers are clearly Mexican (though unnamed), unlike Bill Pipers crew — their names are all known, a microcosm of western historiography). After the murders Eddie Piper died of cancer and Celeste Jones disappeared — perhaps back to L.A. to continue her stated career of opera singer.

I’m so curious to know more about Celeste.

Then there is Robert Simpson Jacob, aka Crazy Jake. His list of crimes include: fraudulent mining securities, prostition and white slavery, pornography, narcotics, extortion, animal cruelty, and income tax invasion’ (42). He was selling shares in a fake company after having claimed to have found the Lost Dutchman, in 1986 he was convicted of fraud.

Clearly the only fortunes to have been made in these mountains have been those emerging from myth-creation. There is a most impressive chronology/bibliography of the Lost Dutchman Mine to be found here of what must be several hundred titles. This also seems to explain the large number of dubious maps that have never shown the way to anything. It is a puzzling thing, this proliferation of drawings to nowhere. I have never seen anything like it.

The most successful myth-maker was probably author John Clemson, aka Barry Storm, who filed claims in the mountains, took down oral histories, and also wrote Thunder Gods Gold in 1945 (among other books cashing in on these stories). It was made into the film Lust for Gold starring Ida Lupino and Glenn Ford. Obviously only very loosely based on the story of the Lost Dutchman, but I’m looking forward to watching it.

Eppinga’s book has a section on the Dons founded by Oren Arnold in 1934. Another successful cashing in on the legend through the writing of pamphlets and the creation of a historical society created to keep alive the myths of the Lost Dutchman in which white couples dressed in traditional Spanish clothing, called themselves the Dons and Doñas, and went on a yearly picnic and treasure hunt.

Definitely a slappable offense.

There’s a chapter as well on building the Apache Trail (this title is also a slappable offense, given whites killed most of the Apaches and took this land) and Roosevelt Dam. A final chapter on the Superstition Mountain Historical Society and Museum. More on the Apache Trail later, but here are some final pictures of the beautiful Superstitions: