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‘Use the country itself, as its own map’ - Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893)

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Art and art-related practices that are oriented toward usership rather than spectatorship are characterised more than anything else by their scale of operations: they operate on the 1:1 scale. They are not scaled-down models – or artworld-assisted prototypes – of potentially useful things or services (the kinds of tasks and devices that might well be useful if ever they were wrested from the neutering frames of artistic autonomy and allowed traction in the real). Though 1:1 scale initiatives make use of representation in any number of ways, they are not themselves representations of anything. The usological turn in creative practice over the past two decades or so has brought with it increasing numbers of such full-scale practices, coterminous with whatever they happen to be grappling. 1:1 practices are both what they are, and propositions of what they are. Scaling up operations in this way breaks with modernist conceptions of scale. By and large, the art of the twentieth century, like so many post-conceptual practices today, operated at a reduced scale; art was practiced as both other than, and smaller than, whatever reality it set out to map. In his 1893 story, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll tells of an impromptu conversation between the narrator and an outlandish, even otherworldly character called ‘Mein Herr,’ regarding the largest scale of map ‘that would be really useful.’ ‘We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile! (...) It has never been spread out, yet(...) the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’ A book could be devoted to unpacking that pithy parable! Were the farmers right, do maps (embodiments of the will to make-visible) constitute ecological threats? Every light-shedding device will also inevitably cast shadow, and a map (or any representation) is also a light-occluding device. But whatever it may mean to ‘use the country itself, as its own map,’ and Toward a Lexicon of Usership Toward a Lexicon of Usership 1:1 scale 4 however it may be done, one thing is sure: it provides an uncannily concise description of the logic of art on the 1:1 scale – as good a description of many usership-oriented initiatives as any on hand. Notorious for creating tales full of mesmerising warps in the fabric of space and time, Carroll undercuts some of the fundamental assumptions about scaled-back representation: its role as surrogate, its status as an abstraction, and its use as a convention that references the real to which it is subordinate. The ‘grandest idea of all’ – that is, producing a full-scale representation – turned out to be useless... And this is precisely the pitfall of so many politically motivated art initiatives today: they remain squarely within the paradigm of spectatorship. Mein Herr’s map, replaceable as it is by the territory it surveys, raises questions about what happens to representation when, at its limit, it resembles its subject so closely as to confound the distinction between what is real and what is not. It evacuates the mapping event altogether. The territory is neither mapped nor transformed in any way. And yet, used ‘as its own map,’ all is transformed. In this case, the representation not only refuses to be subordinate to its subject, it is also interchangeable with it, and even superior, as Carroll slyly suggests. The ontological discontinuity between map and land – and by extension, between art and whatever life form it permeates – disappears as soon as the territory is made to function on the 1:1 scale as its own self-styled cartography. What are the conditions of possibility and usership of a land’s cartographic function, the becoming-map of the landscape? Or more simply, what do 1:1 practices look like, when they start to use the land as its own map? Well they don’t look like anything other than what they also are; nor are they something to be looked at and they certainly don’t look like art. One might well describe these practices as being positively ‘redundant,’ as enacting a function already fulfilled by something else – as having, in other words, a ‘double ontology.’ Yet in many cases, being burdened with an ontology (let alone a double one!) seems to be just exactly what they are seeking to escape from. Certainly they are intent on eluding ideological and Toward a Lexicon of Usership 1:1 scale 5 institutional capture, and the kind of defanged representation to which it leads; but that does not describe the full thrust of these projects. They seem to be seeking to escape performative and ontological capture as art altogether. It is certainly possible to describe them as having a double ontology; but it may be more closely in keeping with their self-understanding to argue that this is not an ontological issue at all, but rather a question of the extent to which they are informed by a certain coefficient of art. Informed by artistic self-understanding, not framed as

art.

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 From Stephen Wright, 'Toward a Lexicon of Usership'

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