We’ve all felt anxious about what our legacy will be. Jerry Gretzinger may be subject to the exact same discomfort, but at least he can point to a map. It is a gigantic representation of a completely fictional land called Ukraine, made up of thousands of individually created and constantly changing panels. You can see Jerry’s up-to-date and carefully laid out maps at: New People Make Games video above. So far, the product is interesting, but so is the work, which Gretzinger does every day by following a complex, tightly defined set of steps dictated by a heavily modified deck of playing cards.
Understanding the project rules from the beginning requires a keen listener, but these rules can also be supplemented with additional study at the following sites: Gretzinger map official website. These may remind you of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. This is a deck of playing cards with suggestions for clearing creative blockages in music studios and more.
The map itself may be reminiscent of the work of Henry Darger. He is another “outsider artist” who creates riots of color and seemingly haphazard materials that have an underlying obsessive order of their own. But unlike Darger, who died in obscurity, only for his oblique epic poems to be discovered among his belongings, Gretzinger became so famous and extant for his lifetime’s creations. An active subreddit of amateurs who follow his example.
But first I had to rediscover the map. What Gretzinger started in 1963 as an extension of urban graffiti, drawn during a break at a ball bearing factory, had to be shelved in the ’80s when the clothing business he started with his wife took off. Decades later, when his son discovered the map in the attic, Gretzinger started working on it again, and has been working steadily ever since. When interviewed, he sounds more like an observer than a creator, watching helplessly as the Ukrainian city becomes more abstract as it grows—and the vast area is inexorably consumed by white spaces made of fragments of his own correspondence and other artifacts of his life, which he forebodingly refers to as “the void.” Now in his mid-80s, Gretzinger feels like everything has more meaning than ever before. Sooner or later, alas, the void comes to all of us. What remains for us is how to prepare for it.
via metafilter
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Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
