COLLAGE and ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICES
THE TRANSPOSITION AND ABDUCTION OF PLACE
The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty
The Field-Fieldwork-Ethnography-Anthropology
The Body-Spatiality-Creative Practices- Arts and the Humanities
A PAINTING IS BOTH CONCEPTUAL AND SENSATE, Robert Mangold
TRANSFORMATION AND PROPHECY
JACOB’S LADDER----Robert Fludd
The Spatial Practice of Humans
The idea of the human being as both transmitter and receiver of energetic forces on spiritual, physical and emotional levels.
Beuys, Klein, Rothko “ Paintings as Presences”
The Ruin as a facilitator in the search for forms and patterns of Spatiality.
Environments, emotional states, late capitalism and its technology as it feeds into the posthuman predicament.
Materiality(creative speculative response to the found situation), the innovative presence of building processes and their subsequent spaces.
PRODUCTION COLLAGES TO ILLUMINATE DESIRES AND CONCERNS.
Colour, Space, Building and the Multiplicity of Dwelling in Place.
Contextual creative content through research material, collages and site based qualitative drawings and experiences with materials and the sense of place.
CREATIVE STRATEGIES
DEEP ECOLOGY : FINE ART, ARCHITECTURE, PLACE STUDIES
Extracting, Abstracting, Subjectivities from the experience of Place
ABBEY : INTERPRETIVE SITE FOR EXPORTING INTERIOR DESIGN THROUGH RELATIONAL AESTHETICS
ART WORKS AS IDEALIZED MODELS FOR GENERATING FORMAL STRUCTURES AND THEORIES
A UNIQUE UNIT OF PRODUCTION WITHIN A DEVELOPING DESIGN PROCESS (Mangold 1996)
SECTIONAL UNITS THAT COULD BE ADDED
THE CRITICAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN OBJECT AND UNIT.
A section is part of something concretely physical, but a unit is merely an independent entity, equal in existential status to others of its kind , perhaps nothing more than an element within a conceptual system, a digital unit (value).
Richard Shiff 2000
MEANING IS NEVER MEANT IN ANY WAY TO BE AN EXPLANATION OF THE PAINTING OR A REPLACEMENT OF THE VIEWING OF THINGS
(Mangold 1987)
Mangold uses writing to ponder the mystery of his own visual production, within the privacy of his studio, long periods of ‘looking and thinking’ about his paintings are followed by a ‘third activity’, as if it were, if not an equal, then at least an essential part (catalyst) of the complex of his creativity. (Mangold 1994 Lecture notes)
NATURALISTIC ABSTRACTIONS FROM THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
CONCERNED WITH THE MAN MADE LANDSCAPE IN PARTICULAR THE GAPS IN THE MASS OF STRUCTURES AND THEIR RUINS THAT DOMINATE THE HORIZON.
One of the things that used to fascinate me was those architectural sections between buildings (Life between Buildings/Spatial Practices), sections of air that would glow. Sunsets or mornings … you’d see these incredible areas of light, and they were architectural shapes and yet they were nothing, because they were the voids of architecture. I used to think about them, and I used to think about a painting that would be atmospheric and architectural. (Mangold 1978)
Robert Storr, Betwixt and Between, 2000:81
VISUAL ACUITY/ACCUTANCE IS BEING REPLACED BY THE EXPLICIT RENDERING/ACCURACY OF THE SIGN/DISPLAY AND ITS IMAGE
Tensions between aesthetic appreciation and objective measurement can occur even within the realm of measurement and calculation.
The analogue slide rule and the miniaturized digital calculator ( both handheld devices) (Shiff 2000:56)
MEANING THROUGH IDEOLOGICAL VALUES OF AUTONOMY ACTUALITY AND EXPERTISE.
THE FACT PRESENTED IN THE LIGHT OF ITS PRESENCE
BEYOND APPEARANCES: ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION
CONSTRUCTING ELLIPSES BY EYE
A LIBERTY DEPENDANT ON A SPACE OR MOMENT OF ACTUALITY which is in itself inhospitable to anything ’scheduled’,’ calculated’ or ‘controlled’.
THE SILENT RECEPTION OF A TRANSLATION NOT ON OFFER
THE LACK OF RECOGNIZABLE REPRESENTATIONAL IMAGERY
Krauss as critic is concerned with meaning.
Mangold as artist is concerned with experience.
Little common ground can be established, except to ask: what is the meaning of aesthetic experience itself, experience without ‘meaning’?
Can an artist strive to increase the directness or intensity of experience without also attempting to communicate ‘meaning’? (Shiff 2000:17)
Having assigned no meaning in advance, Robert Mangold presents his works to his viewers’ experience without guarantee of conceptual payback.
The paintings exist to record consciousness and underpin the subjectivities, timbre and shape of conversations through the soul into a personal knowledge./
ARCHITECTURE as becoming formal exercises in aesthetic problem-solving.
Society lacking the resources to locate the significance the work was creating.
AUTONOMY AND ACTUALITY:
TOWARDS A SPATIAL INQUIRY.
A THEORY OF MAKING LAYERED SPACES.
The painter probes into the situation of his paintings, an art of ‘answers’ that lack articulated questions, or maybe the questions have not yet been ‘realised’ enough to be asked.
Finding significance and situation in the art/activities of others
ACTUALITY
Between moments of ‘meaning’ lie spaces or blanks of immediate experience. Such blanks are actuality. Usually the blank, the actuality, goes unnoticed because it works so efficiently to differentiate one meaningful event from another.
THE SHAPE OF TIME, George Kubler 1962
Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events. Yet the instant of actuality is all we ever can know directly. The rest of time emerges only in signals relayed to us. The nature of the signal is that its message is neither here nor now, but there and then. (Kubler 1962:17)
Meaning is always differentiated, dependent on what cannot be co-presented. Meaning, distanced from the thing it purports to interpret, resemble, identify with, has the problematic structure of de Man’s realization that ‘I’ cannot say and cannot mean ‘I’.
THE VOID ALLOWS DIFFERENTIALS TO CO-EXIST
THE BODY IN SPACE AND TIME
MEMORY AND THE FATE OF PLACE
Blankness, the void, the ‘dark’ between flashes, generates meaning by distinguishing events, separating one moment from another. Or simply marking time; but it has no form or structure in itself and therefore no ‘meaning’.
STILLED SENSE OF ACTUALITY- SLOWED TIME
CULTIVATING STILLNESS
EXTENDING THE DURATION OF ACTUALITY
DEEPENING THE DENSITY OF THE VOID
CHORA
Imagine the blanks between constructs. Committed to preserving his independence and its autonomy, Mangold has achieved an art outside articulated critical discourses, neither Formalist (Greenberg) nor Minimalist (Morris), neither picture nor object- an art that moves ‘outside’ by becoming ‘between’.
The meaning of this no-reference, no-meaning art is actuality (the condition of being between) as much as it is autonomy (the capacity to move outside, unbounded).
(Shiff 2000:47)
PRACTICAL DEFINITION OF AUTONOMY
He sees perhaps the very best evidence of his own autonomy, achieved in making an object devoid of ‘meaning’, one without a fully determining discourse to enframe or fix it.
GESALT AND VARIABLES
REFERENCES TO AN ABSTRACT UNIVERSE
The painting, whatever it was, was actual?
ACTUAL, What have I done?
Rather than a relay or reference to something belonging to some other moment or situation.
CRITICAL EVALUATION :
VISUAL SYNERGIES formed from FORMAL and PERSONAL SUBJECTIVITIES
THE PAINTINGS OF BRIAN CLARKE and ROBERT MANGOLD.
Brian Clarke, On Polarities of Experience.
Decoratively speaking these amorphs introduce a sense of oxygenating randomness into the experience. (Clarke 2010:5)
Robert Mangold, The Correlative of Active Intuition is Passive Contemplation or The Assessment of Rightness.
The success of a work by Mangold must continually be reaffirmed though the artist’s prolonged encounter with it. The artist needs a great amount of time alone with each and every painting, taking in the ‘oxygen’, which becomes for him an expansive experience (as it should be for his viewers). (Shiff 2000:47)
ABBEY SITE SUBJECTIVITY BECOMES A GESALT/ORGANISATIONAL MOTIF (LEITMOTIF, small signs or shapes that constitute the basic building blocks of the design, its intervals, spaces between figure and ground)
Robert Mangold : Studio Notes (29 April 1993)
Painting and Seeing and Being.
A camera cannot see, it can only record.
A person can only see, he or she cannot record.
When you view a painting, you exist in relation to it.
The relationship is one of seeing and being, not seeing along, since it is impossible to separate seeing from being.
It is the experience of seeing and being in front of a work which affects us.
Artists are always struggling against history and the moment, to propel themselves forward, not forward as in progress, but forward as reaching for oxygen, or as a plant reaches for light. You struggle both on behalf of and against what you have already accomplished. (14 March 1994)
AN ART DERIVED FROM EMPIRICAL EXPERIENCE: OF ARRANGEMENTS AND RE-ARRANGEMENTS OF CONCRETE ELEMENTS.
‘Thrusts of the moment’ it approaches neither a limit nor a totalising conclusion. Open, it seeks its fortune rather than attaining some aim.
RECEPTIVITY IN ARCHITECTURE
Robert Mangold speaks of an architecture that is not conducive for the contemplation of art.
Mark Rothko said a picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world.
RECEPTIVE SPACES IN ARCHITECTURE FOR PUBLIC INTIMACY
In confronting a Rothko, the viewer becomes acutely sensitised and conscious of his own receptivity on many levels. He also seems to dematerialise in response to the nature of the painting in front of him, identifying with it almost to the extent of becoming it (dwelling within it). But while the receptivity is part of it, the viewer also loses the intrusive sense of self as he feels the emotion the painting contains.
(Seymour 1987:12) Beuys, Klein, Rothko, Transformation and Prophecy.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF SCIENCE IN ART
THE ANATOMY LESSON
SPECTATORIAL ARCHITECTURES AND EXHIBITIONS DEDICATED TO CORPOREALITY.
The Anatomist is the allegory of curiosity and the invader of private spaces. He could reveal to the world not only the superficial misdemeanors of the exterior of the naked corpse that he pawed and trawled alone in his nocturnal morgue, but also its interior felonies. (Greenaway 1998:221)
THE BUILDERS: Peter Greenaway, 100 Allegories to represent the World
The Architect, the Gardener and the Greenman are a small family concerned with the building and the protection of a sense of place.
BUILDING AND CONSTRUCTING VOID SPACES
Green Tilted Ellipse/Grey Frame 1989
Acrylic and pencil on canvas
256.5x424cm
The centre space, the void, had to be large enough for a big expanse to be there. It isn’t like a hole, but an actual area of wall (Mangold 1989)
I’ve always had the desire to make the work a unity, to make all the elements-the periphery line and the internal line, the surface, colour-equal, totally locked together.
(Mangold 1990)
A beautiful thing about a quarter circle is that it is a fragment that implies a circle, but is also a complete thing in itself. (Mangold 1993)
‘Red Wall 1965’ was almost like a revelation to me. I understood the essential nature of what painting is: painting is surface, painting is edge - and painting is flat. (Mangold 1993)
In Mangold’s hands, colour and its shaped support acquired neither illusion nor allusion, nor any general theory that could explain that colour and shape. He had his own way of letting materials and forms remain mere matter-as matter-of-fact as the edge of a building or the distant horizon, no explanation necessary. (Shiff 2000:29)
Robert Irwin was concerned to preserve the direct experience of a physical form, one that would dissipate into second-hand worlds of exchangeable ‘meaning’ or ‘identity’ if distributed by photography, verbal description, or any other means of representing what the artist had already presented. Mangold shared Irwin’s concern for material specificity and physical ‘fact’, as well as his apprehensiveness regarding reproduction.
(Shiff 2000:34)
I am concerned with specifics and reject the generalities of photographs. Every element in painting has had both an identity and a physical existence-identity has always lent itself to being transferred in both photographic and literary terms. The physical existence never has. (Irwin1965:23) Artform 3 June 1965.
GORDON MATTA-CLARKE
CONICAL INTERSECT, 1975
FOUR GELATIN SILVER PRINTS
42x42x3in each, framed.
GORDON MATTA-CLARKE
SPLITTING 32, 1975
FIVE GELATIN SILVER PRINTS, CUT AND COLLAGED
41x30.5in, framed.
No comments:
Post a Comment