While this approach seems to offer more scope for making theoretical responses to a wide range of ‘cultural artefacts’ identified with mapping, it remains problematic. Once they view Bradford’s segment in the “Paradox” episode, they realize his abstract work has deep personal meaning, and the places he chooses also represent moments in history.

Such an ‘isolation’ of the ‘object’ – here, the mapped place – ‘from its relation to its surroundings’ is performed in Targets. There is a disorienting echo inside the globe, so that visitors’ voices are amplified if they speak to one another from within, creating a kind of claustrophobia. The viewing position formed in the artwork offers an identification with an imagined viewing position of the United States, conspicuous by its non-depiction in this re-worked ‘world map’. Through Google Maps the bay appears as a beautiful sweep of dark blues, greens, grey and green patterns of the national park to the left, turquoise waters, and few signs of human habitation.

Having proposed that it is not straightforwardly countries themselves that find depiction in Targets’ painted maps, in reading images of the work it is hard to overlook the point that many of the segments feature a country name fairly prominently, in larger lettering, such that they may be read across Targets’ surface like phrases or sentences lacking their grammar: Nicaragua-Korea-Peru-Afghanistan-Cuba, Nicaragua-Korea [xiv]-Peru-Yugoslavia-Kuwait/Iraq, Nicaragua-Kosovo-Bosnia-Korea.

The term antipodes initially named both the inhabitants and land whose existence opposite the known world was theorised by ancient Greek philosophy (Hiatt, 2008, Goldie, 2010). The view from nowhere is re-performed as a viewpoint that is not objective, or disinterested, but instead is actively constitutive of viewing relations that enable political and military domination. I don’t see any sign of the ‘ruins’ that are indicated in Kozloff’s version, in the middle of the lake’s northern shore. It has sparked a bit of debate and conversation with my family about the places I’ve chosen to feature.

I see this in effect in Targets’ staging of a viewing position that opens out relations of engagement and complicity as against control and domination of the viewed. In the context of a ‘perverted’ and ‘inverted’ reality (Loftus 2015) we need more innovative and multivalent approaches to visual images that are engaging with some of the methods through which this reality is formed and how it continues to be reproduced. I thought I’d get tips on how to best construct things from the simple to more complicated and I don’t think this book offers that.