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rfmcdonaldI first encountered this map via a passing reference in Splendid Isolation: Art of Easter Island, an exhibition catalogue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that noted the import of Easter Island's traditional art for surrealists.
The distortions of this map are huge. The archipelagos of the Pacific are hugely enlarged and located at the centre of the world, while the Queen Charlotte Islands blockade the northwestern coast of North America, Africa and India are shrunken, and Paris clings to the western coast of a Europe dominated by Germany and Austria-Hungary. (The map, I should note, was published well after the First World War.) The genesis of the map was explored by Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps.
At Jacket2, Dee Morris and Stephen Voyce go into detail about the genesis of the map.
The distortions of this map are huge. The archipelagos of the Pacific are hugely enlarged and located at the centre of the world, while the Queen Charlotte Islands blockade the northwestern coast of North America, Africa and India are shrunken, and Paris clings to the western coast of a Europe dominated by Germany and Austria-Hungary. (The map, I should note, was published well after the First World War.) The genesis of the map was explored by Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps.
[T]he title of this work is Surrealist Map of the World. It first appeared in 1929 in a special issue of ‘Variétés’, a Belgian magazine, dedicated to surrealism – an art form remembered for its absurdity, but less for its political views.
In discussing this map in her excellent book You Are Here, Katharine Harmon quotes a Surrealist manifesto from 1925:
“Even more than patriotism – which is a quite commonplace sort of hysteria, though emptier and shorter-lived than most – we are disgusted by the idea of belonging to a country at all, which is the most bestial and least philosophic of the concepts to which we are all subjected.. Wherever Western civilization is dominant, all human contact has disappeared, except contact from which money can be made – payment in hard cash.”
At Jacket2, Dee Morris and Stephen Voyce go into detail about the genesis of the map.
By the early 1920s, many of the Dadaists had moved on from their former centers of activity in Zurich, New York, Berlin, and elsewhere, while Paris had once again become a hotbed of artistic activity. The Surrealist Map of the World first appeared in a special issue of the Belgian periodical Variétés in 1929. “Le Surréalisme en 1929” featured works by René Crevel, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, and André Breton alongside Belgian writers and artists Paul Nougé, E. L. T. Mesens, and others.
Denis Wood suggests that Éluard likely made the map. In 1924 he had toured Southeast Asia and parts of Indochina, where he encountered appalling colonial violence committed by Dutch and French powers. Wood explains that “Éluard had recorded his route on a map, Les Cinq Parties du Monde, Planisphère, Comprenant toutes les Possessions Coloniales, a classic of the era that displayed, on a Mercator projection, English colonial possessions in yellow, French in pink, Dutch in orange, Italian in mauve, and so on” (199). If Wood is correct that maps “blossom in the springtime of the State” (15), then the counter-map’s first appearance in the early 20th-century avant-gardes announces an unequivocally anti-colonial project.
A short piece by Sigmund Freud, entitled “L’Humour,” offers an especially fitting introduction to the Surrealists’ hallucinatory redux of the Mercator projection. Humor, we are told, “is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances” (163). The passage illustrates why an entry on humor should launch a “petite contribution au dossier de certains intellectuels a tendances revolutionnaires” (Variétés, Table of Contents). For humor renders absurd what the map purports to offer as an unproblematic representation of the real.
If the Surrealist map is a subjective projection (anticipating memory maps like Jake Barton’s City of Memory and Tim Roeskens’s Videomappings: Aida, Palestine), then one should dutifully recall that, of course, any 3D projection of a sphere onto a 2D plane distorts scale, shape, and other essential metric properties of maps. For instance, many variants of the Mercator projection make it seem that Europe is approximately the size of South America or that Greenland approaches the size of Africa. (In actuality, South America is twice the size of Europe, while Africa is more than ten times Greenland’s size. Interested readers might compare the Mercator’s use in nautical exploration to the Peters projection of land distribution for a clearer picture of things.) If maps are arguments, then there are certainly many of them. One reporter for the Geography periodical Directions Magazine complains: “Mercator projections present a surrealistic view of the world that makes them inappropriate choices for use in classrooms”!
