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Themesicon: navigation pathMapping and Texticon: navigation pathThe Carthographic View
 
Ansicht und Plan von Toledo (El Greco)
 
 
 

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position, in order to explore this cartography in rhizomes. The diagram is already in itself a map or an overlay of maps, that allows one to explore movements, such as in Etienne Jules Marey’s «Diagrammes chronophotographiques,» and virtual volumes. Le Corbusier's «Diagramme d’un nuage de fumée à Alger» even anticipated fractal mathematics. The cartographic Cogito is thus that of a voyage in space-time and of a plural subject: being here and elsewhere, being near and far, being multiple, up to immersing oneself into all the possible utopias of a Space Art. The diagram explores continuous space, the constructed, within an abstract figurative which initiates an experience of thought, through its allusive and schematic structure. That is why the diagrammatic reasoning that inspires so many artists—including Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin — is a kind of Leibnizian reasoning, that one rediscovers in the new connections made between the numeric continuousness and the morphogenesis that are so characteristic of architectures of the virtual. Seeing is to (construct, build) and to know, to link topology and tropologies within systems, arrangements made of lines, of forces and of vectoral points, as in Paul Klee’s

 

schemas, where the arrows are forces. In that, the map combines the two space-times distinguished by Boulez and developed by Deleuze and Guattari in «Mille Plateaux.»1 The striated space that is metric and pulsed, and the space that is smooth and infinite like the ocean or the desert, with its affects of a universe, its curves and its interstitial graphs.

2. The Contemporary Cartorama

Between exploration and passage, the cartographic view constantly confronts the abstract with the real, the place with the delocalization. This was confirmed by the numerous experiences of artist cartographers that I analyzed in «L’œil cartographique de l’art,» [2] where the painting is indeed «a Diagram of the Idea» (Duchamp). Certainly, the map in Vermeer’s work or in El Greco's (such as in his «View and Plan of Toledo«) was straight away an allegory of painting, a kind of optical image that was distinct from the perspectivist image, and that captured the micro-shapes within an «Art of unpainting,» as Svletana Alpers demonstrated. It is an attentive eye that registers minuscule things and inscribes the world onto a surface, to the point of

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