Paula Scher
Maya Stendhal Gallery

Paula Scher’s giant map paintings, despite the fact that they are composed entirely of boundary lines, place names, and information relevant to the identity of their subjects, do not depict any place. The hum of information overload, the fullness of the overwritten surface of the canvas, and a suggestion of wistful wanderlust bring a hint of thaw, but the icy disjunct between the land in question and its treatment remains absolute—and more informative than any depiction could be. Scher’s palette, intuitively chosen, captures an atmosphere either remembered from visits or built from second-hand experience, a vague but insistent feeling. Her Africa (where she has indeed spent time) is a bumpy black-and-white study in scarification, its stark tones summing up the logic of apartheid and the continent’s extremes of beauty and poverty. A world away, the zip codes that delineate the neighborhoods in her Manhattan are the pale lemony color of a gala’s spotlights in the night sky. The entire United States, painted in 1999, is quiltlike, the familiar patchwork of the Lower 48 merging with a grid of horizontals and verticals of place names spilling into the leaden ocean. The handmade quality of the paintings, their ad hoc jazziness, corresponds to their obvious lack of precision as maps: meant to express an emotional comment rather than serve as a reference, they simultaneously point to the shortcomings of all “definitive” maps and express a resonant idea of place itself as an entity that cannot be charted.

At the heart of Scher’s process is the filtration of information through the logic of visual systems that are determined by a set of given data, the complex relation among a word, a picture, a referent, and a context. Scher lives and breathes such systems in her design work, from her early album covers and record-company identities (remember Manhattan Records’ distinctive Mondrian-esque grid?) to her influential ads in the mid-’80s (the Swatch campaign based on Herbert Matter’s travel posters) to her more recent creation of the visual identity of organizations from the Public Theater to Citibank. Currently a principal of the renowned firm Pentagram, Scher has developed a synchronicity of rigorous structure and organic fluidity, self-contained minimalism and chatty inclusion; her diagonal axes, red-and-black palette, and low-budget transparency of approach are distinctly constructivist. Though she is perhaps best known as a typographical designer, her texts are often written in her own casual but precise handwriting, a set of architectural capitals laid down with a hint of a scrawl. Her first handwritten design project, the covers of the 1989 American Institute of Graphic Arts annual, features a swarm of nonsense and made-up statistics alongside a brightly colored, cartoonish map of America, drawn (inaccurately) from memory. Scher describes this project as a breakthrough, a defiant lesson in anticomputer primitivism. Echoing her own neo-constructivist aesthetic in its simple economy but advancing the concept of time laboriously spent, the spread ironically advertises “less is more”—that is, “unless less is less,” according to the words circling the eye central to the cover, a watchful presence over the AIGA’s visual arena.

Scher’s maps reflect this paradoxical pair. Behind the cacophony of the mapmaker’s coordinates lies a more elusive, coherent subject. In her 2002 rendition of South America, a blood-red Brazil pulses beside the landlocked pituitary of Bolivia, from which the hot-pink strand of Chile trails down to Cape Horn like a vibrant artery. The entire continent seems to throb and sparkle in a heated dance. In these paintings, Scher takes great pleasure in crafting her own subject. As she learned from her father—who worked as the USGS’s coordinator of mapping, developing the measuring technology of stereotemplates—every map has a personality: every mapmaker must leave out some information, and some add extra (Mobil maps will include the tiniest of roads if it hosts a gas station). It is this small space between fact and fiction that Scher nurtures in her quasi-fantastical maps, to allow them to speak about place and people and to comment on the ambiguous and often dystopian nature of globalism. In a larger sense, but no less authoritatively, they speak of the chasm between what we think we know and what is truly knowable.

To trace the conceptual movement of these paintings, one should consult Scher’s drawings and works on paper. By her own admission, her first paintings (in gouache on cardboard) were “snide,” inspired by frustration with the news media’s fear-mongering, sensationalism, and prioritizing of the trivial and the seedy. As she pointed out in a later series of prints (an open commission from Print magazine), the news in the ’90s ran against a backdrop of sex, a kind of titillating background noise, and after 9/11 the permeating hum shifted smoothly to terror. Scher widened her critical gaze in a drawing on the minimal white cover of Design Issues, Winter ’05, aiming to forcibly inject a scribbled dose of worldly politics into her own neutral, insulated field: in scathing red pencil, on opposing diagonal axes, the words Iraq, AIDS, and world hunger dwarf small caps, leading, and smart quotes. None of her large map paintings is as overtly enraged as these—except, perhaps, her recently completed rendition of “Florida 2000,” a predominantly red (but blue-bruised) digit extending southward into a sea of swirling statistics, each county’s unlikely tallies that fateful November.

The subtlety of the large paintings, however, allows for a deepened critique. In paint, historically the medium not of reportage but of expressive depiction, these works’ anti-pictorial reserve only calls attention to what does not appear: what, and who, actually exists in these jostling towns. By refusing any vestige of representation, save a primitively expressionist reinterpretation of some landmasses, Scher calls on us to complete the picture, overriding the image’s traditional domination of the viewing experience. In the paintings’ flat literality lies an insistence on the uncapturable real. Yet though Scher will never truly know Africa except as an exotic land to visit, her Africa is one perfectly real incarnation of Africa, as real as its “true” incarnation—say, to those who live there. The French place names extending surprisingly far south on the postcolonial continent highlight the Western perspective. It might seem ironic that such information-based paintings would allow for a truer (read: fragmented) picture of a place than, say, a painting of a peopled landscape, but probably not to Scher: after all, it is a web of clamoring words in her design work that conjures a simple concept, and the most abstract word-graphic combinations that suggests a complete corporate identity.

The act of referring with a word to something that is not on hand to be pointed to involves an agreement between speaker and listener. In the alchemical world of painting, as in poetry, a word suggests a range of meanings: a burrowed passage through the most mundane, least painterly object, the letter, to distant lands—in this case, almost literally. Scher’s stark geography lesson becomes a mirror held up to our imaginations, a deceptively simple construction that can bear many layers of significance. For the Russian avant-garde, the artist was an engineer, “constructing” objects that in their transparency of structure, their harmony of whole and parts, and their emphasis on breaking with the eye-lulling figurative styles of the past expressed the utopian future of a true people’s state. Scher’s agenda, in the end, feels heartily constructivist. Without actually painting any thing, Scher presents a way to think about a country, a continent, a world. What began as a private outpouring of anger with the media has developed into a statement about reporting the truth and showing lands that can never be truly, fully mapped. Hers is an attempt to do justice to the very idea of representing place.

-Nell McClister
Nell McClister is the senior editor at Bomb Magazine and a
contributing writer to Art Forum.