PLANTIN-MORETUS MUSEUM As curator Moritz Kung acknowledges in his catalogue preface.

PLANTIN-MORETUS MUSEUM

As curator Moritz Kung acknowledges in his catalogue preface, the relation between cartography and contemporary art is not a novel theme. But what distinguishes "Orbis Terrarum: Ways of Worldmaking" from as it is predecessors as MOMA's 1994 "Mapping" or the Stedelijk Museum/Wellington City Gallery's 1996 "The World Over-Under Capricorn" is the place where it was presented: the former Officina Plantiniana printing house, which published the finest maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the true first world atlas, the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570) which gave its name to the exhibition.

Site-specific works may date back to the earliest cave paintings, yet site-specific exhibitions seem to be a distinctly contemporary phenomenon, reflecting fin de millenaire anxieties about one as well as the other the realities of history and the limitations of conventional exhibition spaces. Here, a certain quantity of one hundred works by thirty-eight international artists set their way into the museum's period steads and several public spaces around the city. For those who like their historical museums historical and their contemporary gallery walls white, this marriage of Age of Discovery maps and Land Art, printing presse and video monitors, Flemish tapestries and billboard hand-bills might have raised hackles. yet a weekday visit suggested that the families of the two bride and groom adjusted fairly well to the unconventional union of art and artifact that gave rise to an appropriately disorienting range of variants: maps in art (Broodthaers, Alighiero e Boetti), art in maps (twenty historic atlases), mapping in art (Gerhard Richter, Fischli & Weiss), maps as archetypes (Matt Mullican), or again, art as maps (Lawrence Weiner, Gabriel Orozco), as cosmology (James to leeward Byars), as chronology (On Kawara), or as urban topology (Piero Manzoni, Aglaia Konrad).

The comparison with the greatest of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mapmakers was not always to the benefit of today's artists. What is fascinating about the historical maps, beyond their aesthetic appeal and documentary interest, is the tension they express--the uncertainty of a impulsive power that marked a turning point not alone in the knowledge of the world and in its representation nevertheless also in its political and economic organization. according to contrast, the contemporary works, especially those of the hard-line Conceptualists, sometimes appeared complacently caught up in a cartographic paradigm that might best be described as the egocentric view of the world (eg Kawara's twenty-three-volume I Went, 1968-79) a great deal of more pertinent to the way we papal court the world today are the satellite images and computer-assisted maps that were strangely absent from the exhibition. if it be not that in its very unpredictability, "Orbis Terrarum" yielded a number of agreeably disconcerting discoveries, among them Laurie Anderson's of the present day York Times, Ho rizontal/China Times, Vertical, 2000 a simulation of Sino-American rapprochement made by dint of cutting two front pages into strips and weaving them together; Emma Kay's hand-drawn The world from memory I, 1998 strangely akin to the medieval mappamonde in its divisions between the known world and terra incognita; and Mona Hatoum's Map, 1998 consisting of thousands of glass marbles forming a giant floor map that have the appearanceed to invite visitors to "explore" the world by the agency of literally raking a stand in it, at the self-same perceptible risk of dispersing the whole thing--and possibly breaking a small in number bones in the process. Among the works in public spaces, Konrad's Atlas-Expose, 2000 was particularly effective with its six giant views of today's global, interchangeable cities looming down from a brawl of billboards over the entrance to an equally bleak and anonymous parking garage. Not the least important lecture of this ambitious exhibition is that "worldmaking," like other creative activities, be pendents on a subtle mix of hubris and make a buzzing sound ility.

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