Levi Barringer

Western medieval and Enlightenment Encyclopedias present maps and diagrams that distort other bodies and histories. Grayson Perry’s Map of Nowhere (2008) deviates from Western historical memory by “conjuring its behind” as a graphic display artifact. He undermines subjective belief through what Gilles Deleuze calls, the “transversal.” Transversal power is the potential for identity shifts between social and individual bodies in process of becoming other. Perry’s map highlights sadomasochistic sexual differences in national identities serving religious communities and the church-state. Overdrawn photographs and painted diagrams, Annette Messager’s Mes Tropheés (1987) and Kathy Prendergast’s To Alter a Landscape (1983), inscribe manual and automated extractions, ruptures, and encounters into female bodies. Networked anatomies of flesh and land displace the cognition-orientation divide of eighteenth century anatomical and physiological diagrams. These three artists’ transversal maps and diagrams expand limits of subjective difference by inscribing networked others directly within the life and matter of self-embodiment.