Seymour Chwast

Inspired by the pages of a sex manual, this image appeared in the issue of Push Pin Graphic and was illustrated by Liz Gutowski. It could be described as one of the most popular maps of all time, not because of its subject matter, but because it is a masterpiece of the application of cartographic semiology in an editorial project that had nothing to do with something geographical. From the book The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast by Steven Heller: “[Chwast] moves in search of the perfect squaring of the circle in the disparate myths of modernity, between round bodies of 1950s sports cars and pre-made in Italy shoes, between masks ghosts of Mexican wrestlers and creatures ‘not entirely human’”.

Coitus Topographicus was published by PushPin Studios in their magazine of March/April 1980, created by Richard Mantel, Liz Gutowski and Seymour Chwast. For the exhibition, the artist conceived the original map to be enlarged and become part of the room itself. Chwast’s work has the potential to revise and re-evaluate a classic cartographic approach applied not on the territory but on the human body. The idea of mapping is explored in relation to the surface of the body and also in cross-section, in a quasi-radiological, medical-scientific form. It involves the use of appropriate and correct anatomical terms that map the sexual act in progress: a “perfect squaring of the circle” in the exploratory sense of self.

Seymour Chwast (New York, USA, 1931). He lives and works i New York. He is the founder of Push Pin Studio, a graphic communications studio that altered the way we communicate. His works have been exhibited in galleries and museums in America, Europe and Asia and he has had a retrospective at Musée des Arts Décoratifs del Louvre in Paris. His posters can be seen in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Many monographic catalogues have been published, including: Seymour Chwast: The Left-Handed Designer (Abrams, 1985); Seymour: The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast (Chronicle Books, 2009).