An ornithologist, recently taken ill, is given or discovers among his possessions a number of maps, which seem to indicate the path for a journey through or toward a place called H. The place may represent heaven or hell, neither or both. Such is the scenario of Peter Greenaway’s 1978 film A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist, for which the artist prepared the drawings in this show. The maps, drawn or painted on such diverse surfaces as a laundry bag, a disposable medical glove, and a musical score, are not cartographic in the strict sense. Dense layering of existing and applied texts provides multiple codes that can be read in various ways. In Four Crosses (all works, 1976–78), rows of typed Xs are the only signposts on a white field; in The Wonderful Story of the Human Body, certain letters on the title page of a science textbook are circled, while free-floating numbered columns provide instructions such as “Right, left, straight on,” etc. For Illustrated Manuscript, the artist punctuates a handwritten text with colorful graphic symbols and appends a corollary text with journey-instructions in the margin; in Defenestration Instructions, progress across a gridded domain is directed via elaborate calculations based on bizarre factors, such as the square root of the number of trees in one square added to the number of trees in an adjacent square.
According to the film’s narrator, the maps are of varying degrees of use on his journey. He suspects that some are either deliberate misrepresentations or simply the wrong maps for the given territory. In certain cases the landmarks—a passing cloud shadow or the scent of a variable wind—are simply too ephemeral to discern. The narrator must frequently retrace his steps and often admits that he is lost. Moreover, many of the drawings fade before he can use them or else they disintegrate when he wanders beyond the designated territory.
While the instructions on the maps are quite literal and detailed, Greenaway does exploit the metaphorical implications of his construct. The journey moves from cities to wilderness, from known to unknown; the journey signifies the traveler’s passage through life into death, as does the artist’s insistence that each person’s use of the maps is unique and that no journey is repeatable. At one point the narrator speculates that the countries exist only in the minds of the cartographers; as he himself begins to alter maps, the traveler/artist gives pattern to his own existence. His haphazard acquisition of maps corresponds to our erratic gains in knowledge, and to the role that chance and accident play in our lives. Increasingly fragmentary maps indicate the traveler’s failing memory and general disorientation as the end of the journey nears. Meanwhile the intrigues surrounding some purloined drawings (everyone, including the narrator, plays a thief at some point) create a perplexing web of unresolved mysteries recalling the loose ends that figure in our pasts and presents.
At the end of the film the narrator notes that he has arrived at his destination at the same time at which he left, implying that his journey has transpired in the timeless, spaceless realm of the imagination. The back and forth between drawings and the world, imagination and fact, art and life demonstrates how minds give meaning to experience. Such detached meditations can seem overly ingenious or self-consciously intellectual. But like the late Italian author ltalo Calvino, Greenaway manages to channel his speculations into works whose humor and beauty make the journey a pleasure.
—Lois E. Nesbitt
