Crossing Map (Book)
1983
Softback edition of 2000.
23 x 17 cm
160 pp, 150 illustrations.
Thames and Hudson, London and New York by arrangement with Editions Hansjorg Mayer.
ISBN 0-500-27291-3
Each book is unique because the artist entered the press, distributing the colours and varying the flow of inks throughout the printing. Crossing Map uses language as a mirror for our culture, avoiding the use of nouns and punctuation, and inventing a new prose structure.
In Crossing Map, a woman artist questions the meaning of time, enters the web of her memory, and transcending the present, discovers a world bearing no trace of man’s presence. There she meets the last man and is witness to the death of her society and the dematerialization of man.
Lijn thought that if we could relate our understanding of atomic behaviour to ourselves, we could learn how to transform ourselves and hoped to direct scientific knowledge inwards, feeling that it was high time that we demolished the barrier between the observer and the observed.
Crossing Map explores the idea that the human mind is disposed of a vast supply of untapped energy. What would it be like, Lijn posits, to inhabit a world in which humans became light? Crossing is the point where meeting occurs. Meeting leads to exchange and that is the basis of all relationships.
