Gwen Widmer,

The End of the Universe

“The End of the Universe” as Black Map

by Chris Burnett

Gwen Widmer has been long involved in the making of certain imagetexts that I will call, for the purposes of this brief essay, "black maps."  Their black quality comes not from any sense of melancholy or darkness; to the contrary her constructions are a delight to behold, full of a playful graphic wit and keen imagination.  Rather, the blackness stands out as a kind of gestalt reversal of the blank areas of maps. Dark forms bring to the forefront the fleeting awareness of gaps in maps: hidden information that falls beneath the filtering grid as well as absent masses where the onlooker projects forms and stories cut between the cartographic lines.  Her black maps operate according to imaginative projection and cognitive association but, again, not in a dark romantic way as internal revelations of an agitated mind or being.  Rather, her maps are projective diagrams that indicate external relationships of knowing and imaginative connections to one's place in the world.
Projection emphatically carries the imagination to the farthest reaches of place in this particular work, "The End of the Universe."  The ends suggest beginnings, not so much of the world, but of maps and mapmaking before humans had any precise idea of the form of the Earth. The ensemble of radiating blots, swirls and constellated masses suggests a black map before geography had any kind of objective detachment or the pictorial means to specify precise position in space. In prefiguring geography, they constitute black mirrors that reflect an absence of form before discernible spatial features were present as such.  Before Ptolemy and his second century Geography, geographers worked primarily with narratives by sifting through travelers’ tales, commingling fact and fiction.  Black mirrors owe their existence solely to their frames, and in a similar way, early traveler's stories brought home fables that vaguely and variously sketched the blank outermost regions as girding oceans, shoreline rims, all-encompassing roads and surrounding voids. Herodotus followed his routes of travel outward, like the spokes of the wheel, eventually postulating eremoi or "empty spaces" at the edges of the earth, surrounding in all directions except the West. The ancient Greek expression, apeiron literally means "without boundaries" or peirata. Black mirrors reflect the sense of the self without discernable borders, and, in this instance, "The End of the Universe" resembles the shield of Achilles polished brightly to dissolve its representational edges.
Just as Achilles' shield could be turned down to reveal its concentric boundaries and interlaced figures, Widmer's work when seen from another angle has its own revealing set of boundaries.  It's really a two-fold composition with a image in deep perspective of the Great Wall of China insinuating itself into the mushrooming pattern of black.  The thread of the wall forms the beginning of the viewer's visual journey into the composition, and yet it symbolizes the political reach and ultimate borderline of the great dynasties of Imperial China.  The black map puts us on black ice now, as forms and meanings slip in relation to one another. Suggestive figures and world origin myths shift from the West to the East. The wall visually suggests a dragon and renders as Oriental the major graphic symbol for indicating terra incognita at the corners of early Western maps: hic sunt dracones.  Whether East or West, dragons disturb and simultaneously give meaning and sense to a map's logic of classification. A single line of text in the composition extends the undulating wall stating, "A stone is thrown." The starkness of subject and predicate in this sentence breaks the map’s surface into a simple division of earth object and hand/eye action. The world is so divided by earth and air, order and chance.  As in many accounts of classical Chinese travel writing, there is a lyrical response to parallel forms followed by classification and a reorientation of self in relationship to the landscape. No names appear on these map-like forms, and so it seems that the slippery presence of categories with no names is another attribute of black maps.  There are few words here but there is nevertheless a text.
The wordless text, an enigmatic hieroglyph, brings to mind the traditional Eastern practice of inscribing landscapes.  Inscriptions in natural scenes in China traditionally have a wholly different basis of meaning than in the West where marks, such as graffiti, only defile a pristine scene. Alternatively, Chinese travelers would optimistically inscribe scenes in order to participate more fully in the totality of the place. The harmony of written inscriptions and nature stems from Chinese myth where writing was believed to have originated from the observation of natural patterns or animal tracks. Widmer's map as a wordless text of traces suggests that writing, too, is innately projective and as much as part of orienting ourselves to the everyday world as way-finding in the wilderness.  In this black map, literacy is a feature of maps and integral to the act of reading.  If there is difficulty of reading, the world itself is also hard to discern. Just as Chinese inscriptions were reproduced by rubbings, the sense of black moves once again to the black ink of printing and the dissemination of graphic signs. This black map may be difficult to read, but it projects a sense of our primordial place in language as a process of worlding.

Coda: The flattened travel narratives of Isabella L. Bird
Widmer's “The End of the Universe” further suggests ways to reread travel writing of the West. As an experiment, I have chosen and electronically processed two texts of travel writing by Isabella L. Bird: A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1873); and, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880).  These popular texts were issued at the pinnacle of colonial travel writing when the empires of Europe and the United States were at their fullest extent, and map making was fully formed as a visual projective technology and a discourse of power. Yet there still existed wild places, frontiers and unknown customs to speak of.   The breaking up and alphabetical sorting of Bird's texts flattens the narratives by rendering them discontinuous and reordered according to a democratic logic. This frees the texts to form images that, with interspersed fragments from different stories, juxtapose her visions of the far-West and far-East.  Like the disturbance of the fundamental distinctions of East and West in Widmer's black map, I hope the collision will flatten the Orientalism that stands out in such high-colonial travel narratives.
I also hope that this process, along with Widmer’s “The End of the Universe,” might stimulate imaginative methods of visually interpreting travel writing. Black maps might unleash their ideological messages revealing the variety of images that make up travel narratives: boundaries, markings on the edge, mirror places, translation, transformation, strata, exile, hardship, being lost, broad views, and so forth. These images are figments of a narrative and as much features of the world as earth, air, water and fire.