Quodlibetica originated from the desire to write about art and visual culture in ways not confined by academic conventions or journalistic hype. Part journal, part blog, Quodlibetica fosters critical conversations about visual arts in a forum that is accessible, engaging, and committed to quality writing. Based on the Latin quodlibet, which has entered the English language as (1) a statement proposed for disputation, (2) the actual discussion, and (3) the whimsical combination of familiar elements, Quodlibetica is a space to argue eloquently and whimsically about art, find out what’s happening in the Twin Cities art scene, and engage with writers, artists, and critics, who like to think. Contact us if you want to get involved.
Cartographies
In this constellation, we offer you seven pieces around the theme Cartographies. We explore visuality, power, time and, in our sense of displacement, we displace the centrality of our focus on fine art here and there. It’s fitting that in this issue, we have wandered blithely outward to see where the theme takes us, with no direction home. For more on this issue’s theme, visit our News page.
According to his website, rockpapercloud.com, John Mann “makes images.” Which means, to some, that he dwells more in the realm of ideas than objects; images, after all, are projections, Platonic ideals of form rather than their messy, concrete realizations, full of compromise and accommodation, that often fall short of the mark.
To create his work—because one [...]
Published 10.1.2010
Last year I hung a map of Puerto Rico on my bedroom wall. I stand in front of this map often, trying to plot my family’s circulation among its towns. I read names aloud, roll them over my tongue: Arecibo, Guaynabo, Utuado, Isabela. I believe that the more time I spend here, staring intently, the [...]
Published 10.1.2010
What pleasures do we experience from looking at maps, unfurling them before us, grasping the globe in our hands, and observing it as it spins? As a child, I remember asking for and receiving a globe at the age of five. As I spun it around, I tried to imagine the distant lands that my [...]
Published 10.1.2010
In Irish society there is a desire to keep things in their place, maintain tradition, and present a continuum of order, which became heightened after independence in 1922 when the desire for stability, secure social boundaries and norms increased. The Republic’s first Taoiseach, Eamon DeValera, further supported these norms in the 1937 constitution, wherein woman [...]
Published 10.1.2010
Let’s look at a dance.
Let’s look at you looking at a dance.
Let’s look at you dancing.
When we look at you, you are dancing. How does it feel?
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Here’s a dance to look at. It’s by Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad, otherwise known as The BodyCartography Project. It’s an excerpt from Mammal, a recent commission [...]
Published 10.1.2010
During the second season of the television series The West Wing, one episode featured a Peters projection map of the world. The characters Toby Ziegler and C.J. Cregg met with an organization of cartographers who advocated social equality by lobbying for legislation that would support the use of a South-up map with the new projection [...]
Published 10.1.2010
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Latin words terra incognita began appearing on European maps to mark unknown lands. The term had existed at least since the first century AD when the ancient Roman astronomer and mathematician Ptolemy postulated a southern continent of the same name. A Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Geography, a treatise [...]
Published 10.1.2010