A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly, a fact first noticed by Royce.
Alfred Korzybski 1
As a system, collage inaugurates a play of differences which is both about and sustained by an absent origin: the forced absence of the original plane by the superposition of another plane, effacing the first in order to represent it. Collage's very fullness of form is grounded in this forced impoverishment of the ground-a ground both supplemented and supplanted. . . . But in collage, in fact, the ground is literally masked and riven. It enters our experience not as an object of perception, but as an object of discourse, or representation.
Rosalind E. Krauss 2
As a map is not the territory, so representations presuppose an alterity, an absent other that is re-presented. Representation references the absent other. Representation entails referencing of one or more domains selected from within a universe of fields in an other domain within another universe of fields. Referencing entails mapping, to a greater or lesser degree of specificity, of the aspects of appearing of the represented domain onto the representing domain. To define representation by such mapping is itself a mapping, from the domain of discourses in which artworks are embedded to other domains: projective geometry, linear perspective, cartography, topology, set theory.
To reference maps and mapping in representations is one mode of representing representation as such. As such, representation need not be a matter of one to one correspondence. Indeed, as Jorge Luis Borges suggests, a one to one correspondence may have unfortunate consequences:
...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. 3
Within the domain of visual art, a direct correspondence of represented to representation implicates a condition of simulation in which the distinction of signifier and signified is supposed to collapse into identity. In this condition, the distinction of original and copy, of mapped and map, has no meaning. A naïve realism then obtains, on which view one might suppose a hypertrophy of technique of facture to be the sine qua non of art, so that as in the tale of Zeuxis' painting of grapes, 4 the illusory imitation is indistinguishable from the original actual.
One need not be so naïve. One might assert, as Wollheim has, that "What is unique to the seeing appropriate to representations is this: that a standard of correctness applies to it and this standard derives from the intention of the maker of the representation. . . . 5 The requisite standard of correctness is neither that of a copy theory of naïve realism, nor of the arbitrariness of an extreme relativism:
Then there is the story of the two detectives in the Chicago Police Department. One was a naïve realist who believed literally in the copy theory of representation. The other was a sophisticated irrealist who believed in the relativity and arbitrariness of representation. Both detectives, it seems, had to be fired from the force: the realist, because he didn't see any need to arrest a suspect if he already had a mug shot; the irrealist, because once he had a mug shot, he started arresting everyone in sight. 6
As Desmond's works on paper are not identical in scale to the territories they reference, so also are they not identical to their referents in their modes of signification: they are not instances of a naïve realism. Rather, both in their scale and in their deployment of signifiers, Desmond's works entail a high level of abstraction. To abstract is ab + strahere, 'to take from.' To take from is always already to take from in accord with a framework of criteria determining selection within a field of possible choices. It is these choices, and the framework of criteria within which they are made, that are no less the content of the works than are their ostensible referents. If Desmond's works have the topography of territories, of terrains, as their referents, they utilize these referents as places of departure in the facture of the works. For all their reference to the topography of territories, of terrains, to maps and the processes of mapping, the works are works, even as they elicit the resonances associated with their referents. This duality of reference and resonance in Desmond's work is contingent not on the referents per se, but on the process of collage. Thus Franz Mons:
A collage unites in a composition elements which originate from the civilized environment, bear traces of modification, and are thereby socially mediated. . . . Collage transposes received reality, as seen through the filter of civilization, into an artistic world ripe for reconstitution. 7
Desmond's works exploit the process of collage as a symbolic form. 8 The image plane is worked, drawn on, painted into, torn, cut, taped together, transformed into transparency and translucency, layered, masked, pushed out into the viewer's physical space. The works have a strong sense of being in yet in process, which is not at all to say they seem unresolved. It is to say that Desmond's works represent the contingency of representation in itself, and of the contingency of the representations which are worlds.
Missy Desmond received the Master of Fine Arts from the Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University.