I was going to end my last post, “Against Compression,” with a coda about a fictional artist, but I decided the piece already placed enough demands on the reader’s patience. So here it is, a free-floating coda. Affix it to whatever you’d like.
The career of the contemporary French artist Jed Martin is a twisty one, full of incursions and recursions. (Michel Houellebecq chronicles them all in his 2010 novel The Map and the Territory.) As a boy, Jed would sit in his family’s garden and, under the intermittently watchful eye of his pretty babysitter, draw flowers with colored pencils. As a teenager, he began painting landscapes in a style reminiscent of Cézanne. In art school, he abandoned painting for photography. Soon he was taking simple but exquisitely detailed photos of everyday artifacts: forks, Pendaflex files, printer cartridges, nuts and bolts. He wanted to create “an exhaustive catalogue of the objects of human manufacturing in the Industrial Age.” The project consumed him for six years, and out of it came eleven thousand photographs, neatly stored as TIFF files on a single, small Western Digital hard drive.
The photos gained him a few admirers among his art school colleagues, but it was only after he shifted the focus of his lens from industrial goods to Michelin roadmaps that he found fame. In the tire manufacturer’s lovingly detailed maps of the French countryside, Jed discovered a world more ordered, more understandable, denser with information, than the one the maps portrayed and in which he lived. His first solo exhibition, underwritten by the communications department of the Michelin Corporation, caused a stir in the Paris art world.
The entrance to the hall was barred by a big panel, leaving two-meters-wide passageways at either side, on which Jed had displayed a satellite photo taken around the mountain of Guebwiller next to an enlargement of a Michelin Departments map of the same zone. The contrast was striking: while the photograph showed only a soup of more or less uniform green sprinkled with vague blue spots, the map developed a fascinating maze of departmental and scenic roads, viewpoints, forests, lakes, and cols. Above the two enlargements, in black capital letters, was the title of the exhibition: THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY.
The review in Le Monde was “ecstatic in its praise.”