Monday 14 October 2024

Art and Architecture : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Jane Rendell

Art and Architecture. 2006


If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time – the conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event. The associated verb to situate describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective situated defines something’s site or situation. Situatedness, then, is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or being situated.

 ‘Critical spatial practice’ came to my mind back in 2003 as a helpful way of describe projects located between art and architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated. In Art and Architecture (2006), I argued that such projects operated at a triple crossroads: between theory and practice, between public and private, and between art and architecture, and I was keen to stress three particular qualities of those works: the critical, the spatial and the interdisciplinary. 

Other practitioners and theorists have since worked with the term, evolving it in different directions. For example, there was the reading group and blogspot initiated by Nicholas Brown in the early 2000s, which came out of discussions around Brown’s own artistic walking practice. In 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Marcus Miessen started a book series with Sternberg Press called Critical Spatial Practice which focused on architectural discourse and practice, and in the first publication they asked the question: ‘What is Critical Spatial Practice?’.

But as this website shows a whole multitude of practitioners and theorists have been developing work in an ‘expanded field’ such as this, quite different perhaps from the one Rosalind Krauss identified in 1979. This is work that overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel, and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond; from transparadiso’s ‘direct urbanism’ to Steve Loo’s ‘sites of perdurance’, these practices incorporate ‘event scores’, ‘insertions’ even ‘banalities’ and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation, as well duration.










Making/Matter/Material : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Claywork/Correspondences : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Drawing Participation : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Indexical Awareness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Mechanisms of Mutuality : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Viewing Assemblage : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

A Process of Consciousness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.









https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Sunday 13 October 2024

Drawing : From Blindness to Evidence/Figures, Doors and Passages.

Outpost 131024


Taking Sides.

On The Phenomena of Vision : From Blindness to Evidence.

The debt at the origin of all drawing.




Derrida in 'Memoirs of the Blind' opens our eyes to this strange filiation, to this sort of conversation or duel between different generations of 'Taking Sides'. It not only teaches us much about blindness, vision, and drawing – about philosophy and art – but leaves us another way to understand the legacy of drawing and vision, the legacy of representation, the legacy of legacy itself.


I have grown to believe that a really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter, for painting requires a certain blindness – a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.

Mrs Talmann, spoken words from The Draughtsman's Contract




It thus will have seen to it to interrupt the legacy of a monocular vision in order to lead us by the hand towards this other legacy that is passed down in darkness. Opening eyes, then, yes – but only in order to cancel them, and to recall that the draughtsman's contract always concerns a pleasure and a condition that are not only out of sight, but out of this world.


Jacques Derrida.

Memoirs of the Blind.

The Self Portrait and Other Ruins.

Witnessing/Testimony/Legacies/Inheritances.


Like a dream, then, of whispering clouds, one can almost hear this obscure communication between past, present, and future, between Derrida and Greenaway, between them and us, between all those 'taking sides' on the other side of vision – in the night.


These are Derrida's themes in 'Memoirs of the Blind'


Blindness, dispropriation and the interruption of a lineage or filiation: the cancellation of what makes representation possible, the difference between the body proper and the supplement, the living body and the scarecrow, and the ruination and death of all foresight, all representation, and all legacies. 


A singular genealogy, a singular illustration of oneself among all these illustrious blind men who keep each other in memory, who greet and recognize one another in the night,

Derrida.


An exhibition ( of selected works) that reflects Derrida's inquiry on vision through the metaphor of blind men and visionaries.


Drawing/Filiations, the relations of one thing to another from which  it is derived or descended.




The Draughtsman's Contract.

Peter Greenaway.


A film about the differences between drawing, painting and sculpture, about allegory and ruin, about masks and funeral monuments, about strategies and debts, optics and blinds, about living statues and sounds represented in drawing. But above all it is about witnessing and testimony, about legacies and inheritances. The very themes of 'Memoirs of the Blind'.

Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas.


Friday 11 October 2024

The Darkness of Interiors/ The Absence of Openings.

Outpost 081024

Connections remaining sensuously in play.

The Darkness of Interiors/ The Absence of Openings.










On the formation of the Japanese house.

In making for ourselves a place to live we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house. The quality that we call beauty must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows.

In Praise of Shadows, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. 1933


The Trace Drawing

Interstitial Mappings/Spaces/Interiors/Parts/Intimacies.


Obviously, it is not being suggested that we should somehow be able to think something timber back into its tree, nevertheless, the reciprocal associations enjoyed by obtaining the one from the other depend upon certain conditions of connection remaining sensuously in play.

Peter Beardsell.


Making with circumstance/attention to place.

Giving buildings decisive readings that inform our readings of place.


A 'decisiveness' arrived at through attention and circumstance.


Living in a world reconstructed by information, deformed by restrictive economies.


Ontologically/Making Relations, having something to do with its being, not with exactly how it appears or its data – measure. Flat ontology is an idea that things exist in the same kind of way, no matter what they are. 


Things are much more mashed together than we like to think, and also much more distinct.


The biosphere is made of its parts, but it is distinct from its parts, and these parts are not reducible 'upwards' into wholes – the 'biosphere'.

There is one Biosphere, and its whole is less than the sum of its parts. Because the whole is one, and the parts are many and things exist in the same kind of way (flat ontology). Parts are distinct and non reducible if they exist in the same kind of way, no matter what they are.

Timothy Morton. 



You Are The Weather.

Roni Horn.


Weather isn't just a symptom or climate.



Anselm Kiefer.

The High Priestess. 1989


VIII : Book 88


In this book as a whole nature and architecture alike convey only the absence of life.

Armin Zweite.


Grey Works/Charcoal.

Lead/Ceramic/Inscriptions.



Weird Things


Things are entangled with interpretations of things, yet different from them.


Tim Morton, the thinker of that thought.


Reflecting on the bamboo screens and log columns of Osaka and Kamiichi, I realise that those details could be read as some kind of mask for a bucolic future. However, the choice of detail is derived from the capability of the material's presence to determine the quality of space- what the late David Pye refers to in his book Nature and the  Art of Workmanship as 'the weather in the space'. Japan has confirmed my view that architecture is inclusive – a collusion between different technologies and constructions that make the relevant accommodation for society.

Peter Salter. 



A Hut Life.

A life-lived as it is evolving.

Of Japanese/Chinese reclusive poets.


Interstitial Spaces.

The interior structure braces the external timber shell against snow loads. Between the braces are interior rooms for looking out. Moving between these rooms is like walking in the space 'between' which is sometimes 'clogged' by structure.

Kamiichi Pavilion, Peter Salter. 1995 


The hut and its hut life is a material process of living a relation, not (restricted or contextualized) as form or its container. The hut retains that which is frequently 'explained away' by relating things to a decade, a country, a state of human economic relations.


Roof top turrets, bits of former utility. A city of huts, of hut dwellers, of found places, of inspiration for new memories even as they invoke old ones. Visiting one another's sites, they climb creaky stairs and slip onto rooftops, balconies, or parapets. There they touch something deep in the needs and memory of people. Something that refuses to be dismissed, yet is fully alive only in the hut.

Anne Cline.


Kamiichi Mountain Pavilion.

4+1 Peter Salter : Building Projects.


The Buildings Reactions to the Weather/Ground/River and View.


Steadily the snow buries the building, but the exterior shell, which takes compression like a boat and behaves almost as if the building were in water, inversely anticipates the snow-load. This annual load exerts wear and tear, and will repeatedly leave its marks and defacements by way of distortion and pressure. But the building is designed to encode and record these batterings.

Conditions of Connection, Peter Beardsell.


The building is located in a clearing on the edge of a meltwater river. The intent is to provide a place to rest and enjoy the view. The building is first seen from a bridge through a clearing in the trees. Visitors approach it by a path along the river's edge.


Once within the building, their movement is directed towards a special room which is oriented towards the borrowed landscape, with a view of the two mountain peaks at the head of the valley.


A large gutter on the south side brings this water into the building, as if to guide the visitor. This same gutter also becomes the entrance canopy to the building, offering shade from the summer sun. The building aims to be cool in summer, full of shadows, with views out to the bright reflected light.


The building is naturally lit, with no electricity, and fresh water is provided by a hand-pump. All timber used in the construction has been taken from renewable or second-hand sources. The building is closed down in winter and becomes a part of the snow covered landscape.



Before the onset of winter, the townspeople of Kamiichi come to clean and prepare the building for the expected snow. It is then left to the small hibernating mammals and roosting birds. In the spring the shutters are opened and the snow barriers removed.


The copper water tank collects water from the gutter on the south elevation. Three overflows celebrate the abundance of meltwaters in the spring.


Section of first proposal. It was intended that the building should collect snow along its slatted roof structure, allowing the melted snow to drip down through the interior of the building.


Paper cut-outs were used to reassess the mass of the building proposition.


The building is snow-bound for seven months of the year, with snow reaching 12m. It is shaped hydro-dynamically to resist the snow, with two timber latticed compression shells. Within these shell structures a new landscape is created, as a resting place for climbers and a winter hibernation space for animals.


Students in Peter Salter's Diploma Unit are often asked to work at scales of 1:500 and 1:5, and nothing in-between. The defining properties of a strategy (not a programme) describable at 1:500 should carry a definitional force capable of determining detail at 1:5. Intermediate scales are disallowed to let a strategy's connective energies make their way, unimpeded, into detail. One applying pressure on the other, both tightens and expands the possibilities of connection and exchange.


Afterword/Making with beautiful circumstances.


Rules For Detail/A Search For Legibility Through Detail.

Peter Salter.


Rules are made to govern the definition of space through the accuracy of constructional detail. In the reading of such detail the spatial emphasis of the room can be understood to be mute or otherwise, giving it a kind of legibility. This ordering and quality of space help determine the accommodation and relevance of the architecture in circumstances where the programmatic brief is unavailable, underdeveloped or redundant. Legibility implies a variation in the reading and definition of the proposition. This is explored through a number of recurring strategies:


To make ever finer territories in order to relieve the burden of scale upon the architectural piece.


To look for possible scale differences – architecture as furniture – as a way of offering emphasis within a sequence of rooms.


To work with an additive architectural programme rather than a conglomerate form.


To introduce the metaphor of the boat as a raft that assembles parts of programme common to the wider building form.


Each strategy offers tactics for proceeding and the possibility of detail. Each implies a layering, a kind of stratification of idea and details; the control of the spatial hierarchy and the design of the door furniture can be layered together.


The strategy offers rules for construction when intuition runs out, and a way of testing form. The layering suggests an in-situ construction – a serialising of programme that offers a crafted building.



Ceramics

Anglian Potters.

Cambridge Exhibition.

https://www.anglianpotters.org.uk/members/russell-moreton/

Walmer Yard by Peter Salter talk by John Comparelli

Arakawa and Gins : Architectural Review.

 https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/reputations/arakawa-1936-2010-and-gins-1941-2014

Arakawa (1936-2010) and Gins (1941-2014)

Using architecture as their medium, Arakawa and Gins encouraged people to reassess perceptions, liberate their senses and challenge mortality

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Illustration by Saki Matsumoto

In 2010, artists-turned-architects ShÅ«saku Arakawa and Madeline Gins founded the Reversible Destiny Foundation at their loft and studio on Houston Street in New York, a network for collaborations primarily intended to further their project pursuing immortality through speculative architecture and theoretical inquiries. Created under their provocative mandate ‘we have decided not to die’, these visionary sites of ‘reversible destiny’, implemented in the 1990s and early 2000s, aimed to increase mental and bodily awareness. Their buildings were designed to train the occupant to ‘not die’ through built features including uneven and undulating floors, unusual shifts in scale, and vibrant colour combinations, intended to make the occupant confront their body and senses. 

Arakawa and Gins’ modus was to create environments that demand attention, challenging the senses through constant visual and physical stimulation, compelling us to re-evaluate our world and ourselves. In problematising our bodily states, they suggest, we cannot subsist in stasis or succumb to death. As Gins said, ‘We don’t have to be passive. We can reverse the usual downhill course of things’.

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Screen Valves, 1985-87

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Drawing for a Ubiquitous Site X, 1990

Developed over a five-decade-long creative partnership, Arakawa and Gins’ collective projects encompassed architecture, film, painting, philosophy, poetry and scientific research. Their oeuvre is an odyssey in metamorphosis and mutability – themes the pair would continue to explore throughout their career. Central to their artistic experiments was an underlying questioning of the potential of human perception and experience, and how understanding ourselves as bodies in space can be shaped and reshaped, thought and rethought.

The couple (in both work and life) belonged to the downtown New York art milieu of the 1960s. Arakawa, born in Nagoya, Japan in 1936, attended the Musashino Art University in Tokyo where he began his affiliation with the Neo-Dadaist Organizers, the avant-garde group who borrowed from the materials of everyday life to exploit notions of wit and deadpan humour, and elicit participatory performances that made viewers self-aware of the very act of looking. Gins was born in New York in 1941 and, shortly after graduating from Barnard College in 1962 with a Physics and Eastern Philosophy degree, turned to experimental fiction and poetry. Arakawa moved to New York in the autumn of 1961 and quickly befriended Marcel Duchamp along with other notable figures including John Cage, and was exhibiting works at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles by 1965. He met Gins in 1962 while taking classes at the former Brooklyn Museum Art School (BMAS), at a time when many seriously questioned socio-cultural and political life in the US. This, paired with the fact that Arakawa was born in the recent aftermath of the Second World War, alludes to their collaborative efforts to construct a more optimistic version of the world, one that bridged the discourse of conceptual art with the rhetoric of Dadaism and philosophical investigations into phenomenology, linguistics and cognition.

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© 1994-2018 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins

Biography

Key works

Screen Valves, 1985-87 Ubiquitous Site * Nagi’s Ryoanji * Architectural Body, 1994
Critical Resemblance House, Yoro Park, 1995
Elliptical Field, Yoro Park, 1995
We Have Decided Not to Die, 1997
Reversible Destiny Lofts, Mitaka, 2005
Bioscleave House, East Hampton, 2008
Biotopological Scale-Juggling Escalator, New York, 2013

Quote

‘Most people, in choosing a new home, look for comfort ... Nonsense. People, particularly old people, shouldn’t relax and sit back to help them decline’

Through their independent practices – Arakawa as a conceptual artist turned painter and Gins as an experimental writer – both explored signification through the use of words and symbols, and sought to push possibilities in art and language. Arakawa’s early paintings challenge the capacity of cognition and many already reference architectural elements, such as highly schematic imagery, that suggest blueprints and diagrams, including the windows depicted in his Alphabet Skin (1965-66). In her books, poems and scripts, including her first two publications WORD RAIN (or a Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) from 1969 and What the President Will Say and Do!! in 1984, Gins employed linguistic stunts and playful typographic treatments to explore philosophical issues within an activated space between reader and author. 

A concern for sensorial and perceptual stimulation is evident in their first truly collaborative project, begun in 1963. The Mechanism of Meaning is a collection of 83 mixed-media, human-sized puzzle-panels, proposing a series of visual, language, and thought exercises, many of them requiring physical interaction to test the automatic ways in which people perceive their surroundings. Intended to shape our cognitive apparatus, The Mechanism of Meaning anticipates later works by Arakawa and Gins that became increasingly spatial, going from the page to three dimensions, and eventually to the realm of architecture. In 1969, Arakawa and Gins contributed to guerrilla literary and art project Street Works IV, creating artworks on the pavements of Manhattan; Arakawa planned to ‘remove the Empire State Building and place it in front of the Architectural League’. 

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Reversible Destiny Lofts, Mitaka, Tokyo

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Reversible Destiny Lofts, Mitaka, Tokyo

Forgoing traditional notions of comfort and convenience, their work intended to confront the physical body with corporeal and mental challenges in an attempt to multiply the ways the body interacts with architecture. Their first consideration of architectural space at full-scale was in 1983 with Container for Mind-Blank-Body, an unrealised proposal for the Venetian island Madonna del Monte. The project lives on as extraordinary exploratory drawings, which illustrate the sequence of different sensorial units one would pass through, featuring undulating topography, walls to be walked through, and trench-like passageways to confront the body’s limitations.

‘Arakawa and Gins put architecture in the service of the mutable body, aiding in the structuring of the self’ 

Many of these elements can be found at Yoro Park in Gifu, Japan; this 18,000m2 urban experiment from 1995 is an elliptical public space known for its tilted terrain and conceptual sculptures. In Critical Resemblance House, one of the park’s buildings, a maze of walls bisect everyday items such as a bath, chair or toilet, questioning how we define objects and their respective functions. The potential for the reassignment of meanings and experiences is also central to Ubiquitous Site * Nagi’s Ryoanji * Architectural Body, one of three large-scale permanent installations at Arata Isozaki’s Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art in Okayama. Realised in 1994, the capsule-shaped installation is also Arakawa and Gins’ first permanent architectural work; two replicas of the Ryoanji Garden in Kyoto affixed to the walls mirror one another while a see-saw appears on the floor and ceiling in different scales, toying with our perceptions and causing a sense of dislocation. Two residential projects, Reversible Destiny Lofts, Mitaka in Tokyo from 2005 and Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) in East Hampton, NY, three years later, incorporate multi-coloured spaces – the lofts are rendered in 14 paint colours while Bioscleave has 52. With textured, bumpy floors to stimulate the senses, these two projects allow inhabitants to ‘discover the full potential of the body’. 

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Elliptical Field at Yoro Park, Japan, 1995

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Critical Resemblance House at Yoro Park, Japan, 1995

These are the only full-scale architecture projects realised in their lifetime, yet they constitute the ideas and methodologies Arakawa and Gins explored throughout their careers, and speak to their ultimate commitment to architecture. As with the duo’s early independent investigations, their radical architectural ethos attempted to systematically undo physical and mental habits in an effort to unsettle automatisms and what they perceived as a complacency with normative behaviours. They saw their architectural projects as strategies for heightened awareness and life-extending experiments, where commonplace sensorial experiences are deliberately denied, and replaced with ‘procedures’ for new ways of thinking and moving in space: a practice conceived to re-educate, or even coerce, the body. Space, time and the self are seen as a dynamic progression of experiences, rather than as one static, concluding experience. 

To transform the mind and body through space, they expanded on diverse discourses, straddling conceptual art, experimental poetry, philosophical inquiry, linguistics, cognition, disability studies, medical research and phenomenology, bringing these pluralistic interests into their architectural projects. Gins once referred to the architectural manifestation of their work as ‘an interactive laboratory for everyday life’. 

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Bioscleave House, East Hampton, 2008

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Bioscleave House, East Hampton, 2008

Their approach to architecture, like all subjects they pursued, might be best understood as a way to pose questions more than offering precise answers. As Duchamp put painting back ‘in the service of the mind’, Arakawa and Gins put architecture in the service of the mutable body. Central to this ideology is the notion that architecture can aid in the structuring of the self. In what could be described as the artists’ architectural treatise, the human form is inseparable from site, as body, person and world are interlaced. Both Arakawa and Gins were independently inspired by American blind-deaf writer Helen Keller. Gins’ genre-bending, multi-person biography, Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994) commingles the lives of the historical figure, the artist Arakawa, as well as the author, Gins, to collapse time, place and identities, and question what constitutes an able body.

In their attempt to radically reshape the conditions of perception, they devised their own set of terms to describe their goals, including ‘architectural body’, articulated in their 2002 manifesto-book of the same name. In it, they describe the reciprocity between body and architecture, and how, through architecture, meaning is created and defined through a process of self-invention.

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Ubiquitous Site * Nagi’s Ryoanji * Architectural Body, 1994

Later speculative projects were envisioned on an urban scale, including the development of apartment complexes, public housing and plans for entire cities, which live on today as schematic studies, models and digital renderings. Arakawa and Gins brought to these projects similar elements from their past works, including labyrinthine terrains, colourful and volumetric architectures (cubes, spheres, pyramids) and a continued experimentation with programme and space. Of the 2003 unrealised Isle of Reversible Destiny, Fukuoka, Gins wrote: ‘A very natural-appearing engineered terrain, an extremely re-articulated terrain makes it possible for the body and the city to operate conjointly – as much kinaesthetically, proprioceptively, and tactilely as visually.’ Though these projects were never realised, their questioning of what constitutes a body, through an approach to creating designs for the reconstruction of experience, brings their work into proximity with fields such as artificial life research. 

Since their deaths (Arakawa in 2010 and Gins in 2014), many have argued the various interpretations of their work. Some have suggested it was metaphorical provocation. Some believe it was to be taken at face value. Others still offer the idea that the work was about the act of processing, rather than an argument about whether or not they truly believed architecture could reverse death. For Arakawa and Gins, the best way to understand the world (and thus ourselves), is to overturn it as it is. If anything, such an ambitious and experimental undertaking remains their greatest legacy. 

Friday 4 October 2024

Outpost 041024


Sensing Peripheries/Gestures and Acts. 

Trace Drawing

Body Outline/Material Flows.




A sudden quantum like jump between a thing and its parts, between its different scales, its ontological gap. In a way a whole is really another specific, not a generalization about a specific thing, this means that there is a 'weird gap' between the whole and the parts, an ontological gap.

Timothy Morton.


Architecture in the Space of Flows, 2012.

Andrew Ballantyne, Chris Smith explain that everything can be understood as functioning in terms of flows – flow of various kinds and scales make up architecture and connect it with the world. Here, a volatile mode of thought begins to proliferate architecture as a whole, rather than developing the thought in relation to the body or space in isolation.


The Extracorporeal Space.

Architecture in Abjection.


A visceral assault, an affect that passes through the subject. 

An architecture that gets distilled down to experience and the chemical exchanges between body and space that begins to function within a similar realm to abject(ion).



The basic unit of study is body coupled with architectural surround. 

Arakawa and Gins.


You shouldn't force the memories. Just try to untangle them slowly.


I would suddenly have the feeling that a story was coming back to me and I would reach out instinctively to seize it. But there was nothing for me to hold. When I could no longer stand to stare at the blank page, I would type a, i, u, e, o, and then, imagining that I would now be able to write something, I would erase them again. But of course nothing came to me, and I would return to a, i, u, e, o. And the process would repeat itself. In the end, all that was left was a torn page, from the many times I'd erased what I'd written.


The Burning Library.


It may take a long time for every word to disappear, we held our breath as though fearful of disturbing this beautiful scene. 


The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.



Ceramic Objects/Monumental vessels that explore contemporary society's relationship to death and ritual.


Abstractive figurative forms invite the viewer to meditate on the intimate relationship between the clay vessel and the human body.


Stair's exhibition explores humanity's reliance on art as a means to transcend the unknown.


Themes of Containment/Embodiment.

Julian Stair : Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre, 2023.


Developing explorations in which material culture and artistic practice can engender 'a new , expressive language to both mediate loss and celebrate life, Julian Stair'.



Francesca Woodman.

Gagosian, 2024.


Putri Tan: In those pictures the objects bisect the space and also consume it. Counter to that , as you said, is the body. I'm never wholly convinced of the idea that she is part of the architecture when she's holding on to a column or contorting her body to fit into the environment or to disappear into it.


Corey Keller: There's both a brutality and a monumentality about the bodies she depicts, you don't quite know whether they're trapped or liberated. I think what's interesting about the work is it's never quiet only about the space and it's never quite only about the body, but it's about the psychological spark (tension) that ignites when those things intersect.


Architectural Body

Arakawa and Gins.


The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.


A bioscleave is an event-fabric within which all exists only tentatively, within which all is perpetually shifting, and within which architectural bodies form and collapse, here distinctions between body and space, subject and object are diluted. This results in a certain indeterminacy of boundaries, as body and surround are collapsed into one, and as they are constantly shifting in relation to one another.


I found it terribly difficult to come to terms with the old man's death. I had lost many people who were important to me in the past, but somehow my parting with them had been different from what I experienced now.


But the laws of the island are not softened by death. Memories do not change the law. No matter how precious the person I may be losing, the disappearances that surround me will remain unchanged.. But this time I had the impression that something was different. In addition to the sadness, I was overcome by a mysterious and menacing anxiety, as though the old man's death had suddenly transformed the very ground under my feet into a soft, unreliable mass.


The materials of the world that surrounded R and me were simply too different-as though I were trying to glue a pebble I'd found in the garden to an origami figure. And the old man, who always reassured me at such moments, who promised we could find a different type of glue, was no longer here.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.

Tuesday 1 October 2024

Moments/Marks/Gestures differ because of their fecundity.

Outpost 010724


The Rehabilitation Of The Imagination.

Correspondences between humankind and the world.




In the heart of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; in the night of matter black flowers blossom. They already have their velvet and the formula of their scent.

Gaston Bachelard 





Imagination must infuse a second life into familiar images, it must create 'metaphors of metaphors'.

Reverie, reconciles the world and the subject, present and past, solitude and communication.

Gaston Bachelard.


Moments differ because of their fecundity.

The Intuition Of The Instant.


The imagination is not a state, it is the human existence itself.

William Blake. 


For Bachelard, Blake's poetics, presents a complex around the dialectics of rock and cloud. A dynamic imagination, he is a poet of absolute imagination for whom the unreal directs the real.


The Reverberation of Images.


In a word, the phenomenological approach is a description of the immediate relationship of phenomena with a particular consciousness. It allows Bachelard to renew his warnings against the temptation to study images as things. Images are lived, experienced, re-imagined in an act of consciousness which restores at once their timelessness and their newness.


Therefore a poetic image does not duplicate present reality.


From phenomenology Bachelard retains above all the admonition to return to 'phenomena themselves' this requires putting aside naïve belief in the reality of things and approaching phenomena through consciousness which is always intentional, always consciousness of something.


I realized then we were thinking the same thing. As we looked into each other's eyes, I felt, once again, the anxiety that had taken root in our hearts a long time ago. The light reflecting from the spray of the fountain lit R's face.


The boy was fiddling with a nondescript stone as though it were a toy with some elaborate hidden mechanism. His plain light blue gloves had obviously been knit by hand. They were connected to each other with a strand of yarn, to keep them from becoming separated. I remembered wearing the same kind, long ago, and, in this basement so full of anxiety, they seemed like the lone sign of innocence and peace.


The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.


The Immaterial Body.

Proposals through transparency and trans-illumination.


Sensate Inscriptions. 

The Mechanized Image.


Thresholds and projections of creative perception.


Drawing into the visual field.

Paint, pigments, lines, bought to light. 

Gestures, lines from sensations and its seeing.


Life Drawing/Corporeal Social Bodies.

Drawing/Sensations into the memory and anxieties of physical things.


Drawing attention to the relations of the body.

Social and sexual politics.


The Modernist Offence.

Schiele And The Naked Female Body.

Gemma Blackshaw.





Feminist art historians have developed new ways of thinking about the relationship between sex and spectatorship.


As Abigail Soloman-Godeau has claimed in her exploration of photography and female subjectivity in the Second French Empire, the barriers between what is deeped licit and illicit, acceptably seductive or wantonly salacious, aesthetic or prurient, are never solid because contingent, never steadfast because they traffic with each other – are indeed dependant upon each other.


How might such an engagement with difference, with the binary system, shift not only our understanding but also our appreciation of Schiele's representation of the naked female body, of what continues to be described and displayed as 'the nude'? 


Egon Schiele.

The Radical Nude.



Monday 30 September 2024

Sensing Spaces : Working Assemblage/An extended phenotype of creativity.

Painting/Assemblage/Ceramics.

Ceramic Vessels on Site Specific Ground.

On the sensorial nature of creative inquiry


Indexical markings into the aesthetic realm between objects.

Making With Clay.









Relationscape between organism-person-environment.

Architectural Body.

Arakawa/Gins/Manning