Tuesday 18 May 2021

Speculative Indexes of Agency : Template and Form/Enchantments and Insights between materials

 



THE BODY AS A TERRITORY IN RAW CLAY

Developing Formative Histories/Indexical and Involuntary Markings 

Observational essay/account whilst work is resident in the Yard,

Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry and Craft

Temporality. The state of existing within or having some relationship with time. A clay form with its pre-performative drawing used as a template.

These distinctively different yet closely related works are arranged with the clay piece on its custom made trolley with its calico material that acts as a sheet on which the clay work rests. The drawing is placed behind it fastened to a wall with the drawings bottom edge just making contact with the floor adjacent to the castors that grant the clays supportive trolley mobility. The clay work has a direct relation to this adjacent drawing, the drawing is revealing the traced female that is just discernable on the surface of the clay. On closer inspection of the drawing it is just possible to see a rubbing taken from the periphery of the clay form. Both the paper and the clay seem to be in some reflective mode of mutual intimacy, marks transferred between one another during the manufacture of both are subtly replicated on the form of one and the surface of another. The pierced clay slab (vessel) is the first visible casualty of the entropic process of shrinkage. A significant crack separates the clay vessel into two separate but unique entities that share the same defect as if they were still whole. This division through the continent of the body has been subtly marked by the raised furrow of silica deposited when the clay bodies were in closer proximity. The calico has also rendered a new visual territory around the entire periphery of the form, created by the deposited silica sand and the resultant shrinkage that is taking place. There is the sense of this form moving in two dimensions, creating an extended footprint of previously covered territory whilst continuing to shrink bodily within the details and markings on its surface. This phenomena seems to give the piece a strange complexity of both temporality and a duration on which that temporality is directly charted, the calico is instrumental in registering this perception. The agencies of both the silica sand and the calico sheet between them regulate and guide our understanding of the observation of the clays infinitesimal shrinkage. The compression of the clays structure due to its shrinkage increases its density and visually alters the arrangement of the piercing that are mapped over its surface, the concise circles and holes cut through the clay have now blended into the overall tension imparted by shrinkage, there is a sense that precision of the marks, their machined appearance which contrasted to the locality to the clay around them has been lost, reclaimed by the inner natural torsions taking control of the piece as a whole. The clays surface with its sandy granular deposits whose particle size has become visually larger at the expense of its hosts shrinkage now auger for a territory, a land mass devoid of water, the sense of this territory becoming anhydrous, giving rise to thoughts of thirst and fragility, even the once precise holes give the impression of barren watering places isolated within a landscape in a state of drought. The once visible markings are now obscured by the action of the shrinking territory and its granular coating as it now gains in its ability to obscure features. The traced and drawn female form is still harboured somewhere under this obscuring sand. Yet she now resides as a brittle uncompromising inscription of her former self, the plasticity that once gave her a sensuality into the yielding and pliable surface has succumbed to the unstoppable internal shrinkage of the clay particles starved of moisture. The clay is acknowledging the atmosphere of its given surroundings, our environment.


The Draught, J G Ballard 

The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe

The Disposition of the Body, Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman’s Contract)


The clay suffers, dehydrates as its moisture is absorbed by the surrounding atmosphere, giving up its plasticity and its almost inhuman sensuality and tactility. Presented amongst us, it is rendered into a state of its own homogeneity Conversely the working drawing which has evolved from being a simple template to aid the registration of celestial information within the territory of the body. Has itself become involved in its own creation as an art object. On completing its initial purpose, the task of transferring details onto the surface of the embryonic clay form. It has now become embroiled and entangled as it were with the creative issues of the clay form; “they” have become members of the same intuitions the same creative flux, sisters. The drawn “sister” contains the origin of their shared inscription, the originating female trace. The gesture and act still remains, visible only by physical impression of transference; which is left proud, raised and projecting passed the original flatness of the paper. These material read together render insights into superimposed temporalities shared by the art object, they question and reveal the reverse side of origins, of the work or its working drawing, they all underline the complexities and multiplicities of contemporary art practice.





The Drawing strangely or ironically displays values in a state of stasis, now lost with its sister. The cyanotype “sea” with its fluidity bleeding into the porosity of the news print. The “ streams” of residues washed from other areas are now deposited into the interior space where they have collected finally to evaporate leaving their watery remains. Only the clarity of the “permanent” marker pen remains untouched by any entropic activity. Objectively the drawing materials has slowed down to the point when one might grant it a measure of completeness. Its particular temporalities now exist within the interactions it can manifest from others, other things, other situations that are drawn into its proximity, its particular field of intuitive reverberations, its unique dwelling place.

The clay form seems to have gathered up its history of temporal acts that culminate in its present form. This presented object, with temporalities marked on site has become a vehicle, a vessel for its own entropic voyage, another temporality that itself adds a spatial dimension. This object for me appears to be totally contingent yet relational to aspects of space and time, it exists uniquely “once” in the present, presence it creates with its observer. The result of this contingent object is that “we through it” are constantly travelling away from its point of origin, we as a result feel the passage of the entropic value of time through the human condition. Whereas the drawing does refer to a now and a past, an elsewhere ,it seems locked between these two comprehensions.

The clay form has clearly an entropic element which seems to give rise to phenomenologically driven inquiry which in turn helps to creates our sense of a spatiality. Uniquely formed between observation and our own movement, we are in effect made to sense that the object heralds our own becoming.


Material Agency : Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

Visualising Environmental Agency


"Agents are defined as persons or things, which have the ability and intention to "cause" something "in the vicinity" or "in the mileau" to happen ( Art and Agency, Alfred Gell 1998)"

"These latter artefacts are described with the term "index", to remove the appellation "art" and to imply that they are indexes of agency."

Some Stimulating Solutions, Andrew Cochrane.


Drawing intervention and speculative sculptural environment. 









Speculative Learning Environment : Russell Moreton.

Re- Imagining Education, Brockwood Park School. 

Teacher Education Manual

Insight-Bohm-Krishnamurti. 1979

David Bohm, Are we saying that insight is an energy which illuminates the activity of the brain, and that in this illumination the brain itself begins to act differently?

Krishnamurti, You are quite right. That's all-that is what takes place. That is -this flash has altered completely the pattern which the material process has set.


a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari


Assemblage

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine

The book, as described above, is a jumbling together of discrete parts or pieces that is capable of producing any number effects, rather than a tightly organized and coherent whole producing one dominant reading.

The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.


Hiding Making Showing Creation : The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean 2013, Academia post

 Making : Tim Ingold

The Materials Of Life

Re-Shaping Learning










You read the paper FROM IMAGE TO INTERACTION: MEANING AND AGENCY IN THE ARTS. A related paper is available on Academia.

Rachel Esner, Sandra Kisters, Ann-Sophie Lehmann (eds), Hiding Making, Showing Creation. The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean, Amsterdam: AUP 2013
Paper Thumbnail
Author Photo Ann-Sophie Lehmann
2013
View PDF ▸ Download PDF ⬇

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Monday 17 May 2021

Mechanisms of Seeing : 10 Days at the Laundry/Axisweb post migrations

MOLECULAR SIEVE, is a performative analysis of “this place” utilising the simple properties of the pinhole camera. This appropriated apparatus makes visible the extrusive nature of time as it is deposited on the photographic surface. 







The extended durations required to register “place” impart a sense of dwelling as recorded by the apparatuses passive gaze. These surfaces record and register a relation constructed by the architecture of the chamber and what is beyond it. Movements when visible appear as simple abbreviated enactments caught like inclusions within this consolidated and timely consolation of place.






https://www.axisweb.org/p/russellmoreton/#projects








Cameras consist of small voids, the ‘camera’, a lens and photographic film. They are camerae obscurae  that collect light and allow it to meet the surface of the film. But in fact the light comes from the larger void outside the camera. The moment the light has registered on the light-sensitive surface of the film, memories are constructed. The memory is literally conceived in this meeting and is added to life as an additional layer of being. The process through which void meets surface is therefore also about love—the love of ancestors and relatives, but also of life and its conception.

Daniel Libeskind’s building will, when finished, offer a path for the visitor, the path of history that crosses the void of commemoration. 





Saturday 15 May 2021

Working with/into experiential perspectives : CHOREUTICS : Principles of Dynamic Space and Movement





The Curse of the Contemporary
Living in Spatial Times
Instantaneity/depthlessness
Doreen Massey, for space

Making sites that matter : choreographing situated knowing in architectural analysis and design. 
Oren Lieberman

Organism, Person, Environment :  Architectural Body
Madeline Gins and Arakawa









Space for Peace, Winchester

Situated Knowledges : Donna Haraway

chaos, territory, art
Deleuze and the framing of the earth
Elizabeth Grosz






The Illuminated Cathedral

RELATIONSCAPES
Movement, Art, Philosophy
Erin Manning

Prelude : What moves as a body returns as a movement of thought

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition


Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,
Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

Temporal Perspectives

Working Notes/Spaces

Space and Place
The Perspective of Experience
Yi-Fu Tuan










Experiential Perspective
Space, Place, and the Child
Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values
Spaciousness and Crowding
Spatial Ability, Knowledge, and Place
Architectural Space and Awareness
Time in Experiential Space
Intimate Experiences of Place
Attachment to Homeland
Visibility : the Creation of Place
Time and Place


for
space
Doreen Massey






A Relational Politics of The Spatial
Making and Contesting time-spaces



Contemporary artists aim to produce specific relations with the technologies they adopt and adapt;
This schematic offers a partial taxonomy.
Caroline A. Jones, Sensorium : Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art 2006










Immersive
the "cave" paradigm, the virtual helmet, the black-box video, the earphone set

Alienated
taking technology and "making it strange," exaggerating attributes to provoke shock, using technologies to switch senses or induce disorientation

Interrogative
work that repurposes  or remakes devices to enhance their insidious or wondrous properties; available data translated into sensible systems

Residual
work that holds on to an earlier technology, repurposes or even fetishizes an abandoned one

Resistant
work that refuses to use marketed technologies for their stated purpose; work that pushes viewers to reject technologies or subvert them

Adaptive
work that takes up technologies and extends or applies them for creative purposes, producing new subjects for the technologies in question





Transactive Memory
Systems Virtual Teams
The Body
Minds and Metaphors
Laban-CHOREUTICS

The Mind In The Cave
David Lewis-Williams

The Matter of The World
Minds and metaphors
Cathedrals of Intelligence
The 'Looking mind'

Information Processing and Performance in Traditional and Virtual Teams
The Role of Transactive Memory
Terri Griffith, Margaret A. Neale

Acquisition/Sharing of Implicit and Explicit Information

Organisations increasingly rely on teams to do much of the work traditionally accomplished by individuals.
Successful groups are those who are able to create synergies in the form of information aggregation and innovation that is beyond the ability of any single member.

Nascent Knowledge
Information Diversity
Task Conflict

The knowledge and perspectives of group members from the same social networks may be more redundant than diversified. However a total diversity among work group members is not desirable; some 'redundancy' (agreement in perspective) among group members is necessary to ensure enough common ground to facilitate successful group interaction.

Transactive Memory : Knowing and Accessing What We Know

For teams to have synergy they must be able to access their information, it is important to know who does what.
Wegner 1987; 1995)

RELATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
TIME
Synchronous/ Asynchronous
COMMUNICATION

Transactive Memory : A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind
Daniel M. Wegner

The study of transactive memory is concerned with the prediction of group (and individual) behaviour through an understanding of the manner in which groups process and structure information.

Individual Memory
Information is entered into memory at the encoding  stage, it resides in memory during a storage stage, and is bought back during the retrieval stage.

Organisation : differentiated/ integrated
Label
Location

THE LABAN SOURCEBOOK
Dick McCaw

Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) was a pioneer in dance and movement, who found a extraordinary range of application for his ideas; from industry to drama, education to therapy. Laban believed that you can understand about human beings by observing how they move, and devised two complimentary methods of notating the shape and quality of movements.

Diagram : Three Planes of Movement from Choreography
Inner and Outer Tension : Inner and Outer Form

CHOREUTICS : Principles of Dynamic Space and Movement

Choreutics presents the grammar and syntax of spatial form in movement and the nature of movement's harmonic content.

Effort
Exertion of Power, Physical or/and Mental

Force
Space
Time
Flight

Indulging/Contending

SPACE Flexible/Direct
WEIGHT Light/Strong
TIME Sustained/Quick
FLOW Free/Bound

Shadow Moves
An acute observer of Shadow Movement of a person in different situations and at different times will show the consistency of that individual's basic attitude and personality.

Effort and Recovery

Movement Psychology
Thinking
Intuiting
Sensing
Feeling


AN
ANTHROPOLOGY
OF
LANDSCAPE
Christoper Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum

Materiality
From our perspective in this book representations of landscape, textual or pictorial, are of secondary significance and we should treat them as such; they are selective and partial, and often highly ideological, ways of seeing and knowing.
It forms a material medium in which we dwell and move and think.
Redirecting the study of landscape from representation to the materially grounded messiness of everyday life and the minutiae of material practices that constitute it.
Landscapes are contested, untidy and messy, tensioned, always in the making. Our landscapes of modernity are frequently on the move and peopled by diasporas and migrants of identity, people making homes in new places.

Field Observations
Spatial relations within the landscape are complex.
The manner in which persons and their bodies cannot be understood apart from the landscapes of which they are a part, reciprocally involved in forms of movement, action, awareness and social memory.
Embodied Identities
Art in and from the landscape
Fragile Environments : Nature and Culture

On Ways of Walking and Making Art
A personal reflection
M Collier
Making art is a practical application of phenomenology
Engaging  with an embodied experience of space and depth (what Merleau-Ponty called the 'flesh of the world').

WATERLOG
Journeys Around An Exhibition
Landscape and Memory

AFTER SEBALD
Essays and Illuminations
Edited by Jon Cook


The Forum, Norwich : Research Outposts
Alternative Photography


Tuesday 11 May 2021

Drawing, a place of exchange : Social Mappings : Traces and Indexical Wanderings, containing the anticipation of loss

 ART AS A CUSTODIAN WITHIN ARCHITECTURAL SPACE.

INTERLOCUTOR between ART and ARCHITECTURE

AS AN “OBSERVER” AS IN CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORY

The evidence of this correspondence is fabricated in the situation and its attendant traces and material residues, the “indexical” knowledge and its familiarity are encountered in this fabrication of the observer, as “being of human sensibilities”.

Phenomenological traces begin this process of observational identity as a condition of being human, we see as we know ourselves to be seen, we comprehend ourselves in the knowledge and existence of others.

The anticipation of an appointment, situation grants a sense of autonomy in as much as the potential of expectation is still fluid, unfixed in the location of others.

Espace-Milieu : Painting as Environment

Aerial

Social Mappings : Winchester Cathedral 

Space for Peace 2011

Drawings more than ever have become the site of investigations and correspondences in the search of an authenticity, fidelity and truth; they indorse the activity. comment and energy of the artist.

The trace seems to emit a contaminating sense of communication based around proximities and their anarchical sensibilities, it attempts to develop a language brought from a contaminating communication in as much as it is not based on a subject as such, rather the trace of an occurrence now dislocated by that very action. 






Cyanotype as a method of passing a “blueprint” a proposal to others, a working set of ideas for the transposition into a reality framed by a situation of realisation and construction.

Cyanotypes originally concerned with the production of things, not images rather working documents of both evidence and possibilities.

In the role of transposing scientific observations into the practical application of the everyday.

The theatre of experimentation, scripted between a proposal and its practical application in and amongst the spatial relations it is presented with.

The blueprint is presented as something proposed against an already present arbitrary and temporal reality.





Contemporary' drawings are all about “thinking” to paraphrase Joseph Beuys. They are an intimate language, in fact the first visual language visible to both the artist and to others. Drawing is the beginning of the synthesis of internal thoughts being tentatively externalized in the search of a form they can inhabit. Drawing uniquely brings together a complexity of gesture attitude sensation and creative invention simultaneously into the light of the moment. Drawing could even be said to present a possibility as a fact, praesentia the fact in the light of its time. These values conspire to engender a presence, a semblance of some physicality that the artist is trying to form, a form that may be forever absent the drawing acting as a gesture of remembrance, or as an emergence, a premonition of an evolution of a per formative response to situation.
Drawing has always been a verb, and in the contemporarily of art it is the activity or performance that is of interest, a being in the intension of drawing. This sense of performance and the spatiality of both space and time have given rise to the notion of mapping with its direct correlation to the body. Drawing attempts to map the relationship of the body as a locus in its surroundings. We are now much more interested in the situation and immediate proximities that the artists body and its gestures being traced in spacetime. Drawings map dynamics and velocities, they interact with the fluidity of liquids and contingency. Materials are also bought into the arena, to act as indexical witnesses, to record and echo the gesture and act of drawing. The artist Monika Weiss writes with regard to drawing in her own practice, "Weiss makes marks, videos and objects, but she does not pour, drip or fling, she inhabits, smudges and draws. This is a distinctly female approach. Drawings more than ever have become the site of investigations and correspondences in the search of an authenticity, fidelity and truth; they indorse the activity. comment and energy of the artist.


Drawings by sculptors that place the relationship of the line derived from the body.- on the same field as material/media residues. These configurations give rise to conceptual associations and meanings. This contemporary ’approach is in evidence in  a  number of artists work where the per formative aspects of drawing are the key issue. To put it simply there is a growing awareness of the gesture of drawing as the work, and not just simply the representational merit of recognition that has previous acquainted skill and draughtsmanship. I am talking about the authentic gesture of inscription, the combination of both the trait and trace that the trait has circumscribed. This almost primal visual rendering from a sensation of blindness. 

Life "drawing" trace on paper with water and field chalk. 

Work submitted to Interfaith Group Show at the Link Gallery, Winchester 2010.



"This particular event invokes for me the notion of simple material relations and collaborative gestures that underpin human agency. Art space/practice can promote these working intimations that enter into  the realm of beliefs."          

Artist's Statement (archive)  07.12.2009.


The human trace, a continuous line traced around the presence of a living body. Within its boundaries their emanates, a curious absent presence with its uncanny silence. These attributes give the trace its force of absence its haunting manifestation on the present. The human trace surrounded by indexical residues echoes an act of archiving within the materiality of the world. The work embodies both action and trace, it contains a drawing as a trace of an activity and beneath this its conceptual language with its associations to the proximity of the viewer. The performative ritual that the trace has undergone is now a meditation, a site of lament this confirmed signification endorses the fact of the performance having passed leaving a sense of the moment that is still resonating yet irretrievable. A moment suffused by the proximity of residues. The trace is not only an activity but it is simultaneously a phenomenological proposition .The physicality of the artists movement articulate an echo, a reverberation within the vacant zone of the absent body. This reverberation induces a compression of time and space between trace as act and trace as loss. This site of slippage is held by indexical residues that indorse its authenticity via its intimate proximities drawn on its surface. The relationship between an activity and its trace promotes a trajectory with a velocity that articulates and implicates the past in present. The very nature of the relationship between action and trace allows the past to manifest itself through traces which both act as records of the past, but also suggest future actions. The radical nature of the human trace amongst indexical residues conspire to create not only a comment of the time, but questions what other residues may the human trace be conceptually associated with in the future.

The notion of trace brings with it a sense of the traces embodiment in the particularities of a given time and place. This empowering which gathers into latency is marked by the traces occurrence its event of becoming. In the story of the maid of Corinth in which she seeks to trace the shadow of her lover, the trace literally underlines and implicates her proximity to her lover. The trace catches and snares them both in witnessing praesentia of candle light. They are forever bonded conceptually by this simple action; the fact of this action is brought into the eternal light of day. The almost mythic quality of the story its concise exactitudes that can be deduced from its very lightness evokes much said by Italo Calvino in his book “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” when he elaborates in the chapter centred around the values, qualities, or peculiarities of literature. The notion of lightness of fleetingness and a temporality of presence adheres to the veiy periphery of the trace as it viewed disconnected and dislodged from the encounter of its origin. The love of daughter is transcribed by the inscription around her lovers head into a conceptual truth enclosing a poetic proximity. This poetic notion of a semblance of a human body traced by the action of another’s activity is used by Tony Harrison in his short film Hiroshima. 

The ritualistic repetition of this motif throughout the film adds to the sense of pathos that like the trace it emanates from seems to conjure up a Promeneathen Tragedy, reinstalled daily as if it can continually exist before history can grasp it. That the human trace replicates through our proximities to loss, a colossal conceptual depth of presence that reverberates in the mind, a sublime lightness of terror. For the daughter the trace is something more than mere representation it colludes in its very action to form a relationship with the moment that contains her fidelity to the performance of what will eventually site her loss. The trace has the ability to encapsulate and contextualize these actions and their possible propositions. The trace remains framed by indexical signs that emit residues from the activity of the drawing .Is the trace really just an action of drawing, a marked presence with that presence confirmed by the inscription of the moving point following a shadow. In the instant of its activity and in intimate proximity to its phenomenological origin ,the trace because as yet there is no absence, only a proposition of absence, cannot exist as such. The trace awaits in a state of expected latency, almost pregnant with loss. The marking and its referent hold the trace moribund inoperative, language seems to wait on events. The slippage that occurs will be in the instant of recognition when the physical separation of the lovers body is removed from the situation and leaving with him the gesture of the drawing, their collective mark as a perfomative entity without substance, yet still withheld within residues contained in the emergence of the trace. The trace may well be the conceptualization of a mark, its ability to give via proximities a deeper significance and connectivity, a site that conceptually has a latent quality that disrupts superficial perceptions. Something within the human trace radically assaults the primacy of language; it attempts to arrest the connectivity of the existing historical system, as if the trace is always in advance of existing language, or rather it proposes changes.

I propose to utilize the story of Plinys shadow to illustrate and elaborate the particularities of the human trace in its situation , activity ,action and proposition .I further wish to investigate the inherent intimacy of the human trace its sensuality brought by the sensibilities of proximity which become gathered and tethered by the trace of another. The story is about the maid of Corinth, this extract comes courtesy of Michael Newman, contained in his essay “The Marks, Traces, and Gestures of Drawing” this essay is included in Tate Moderns publication “The Stage of Drawing."

“...all agree that it began with tracing an outline round a mans shadow..”

It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; And she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the Shadow of his face, thrown by a lamp .Her father pressed clay on this And made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest Of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine Of the Nymphs until the destruction of Corinth by Mummius.

The trace by the maid of Corinth, that of tracing her lovers shadow on a wall is essential a love story, it possesses a human quality that is felt by a feeling of a shared proximity. Emmanuel Levinas describes proximity as a communication of an anarchic sensibility that occurs before the subject can gather itself into a position in relation this otherness which cannot be assembled in a representational present. He comments further that rather than being apprehended by the subject, proximity is a signifying of an expositional, there is that is alien to but suspended in presence. The human trace has the ability to solicit this notion of proximity, signaling a sensibility which is different than that which occurs in experience and knowledge. The trace seems to emit a contaminating sense of communication based around proximities and their anarchical sensibilities, it attempts to develop a language brought from a contaminating communication in as much as it is not based on a subject as such, rather the trace of an occurrence now dislocated by that very action. 

The human trace with its inherent sense of presence seems strangely unmarked except in the fact that it acts as a kind of residue of the indexical memory of its absent host. This unmarked quality allows proximity to dislodge ,knowledge and experience and induce a sense of the uncanny ,a familiarity without fore knowledge or experience. There is imprinted by the action of circumscribing an outline destined to become a trace an intimate betrayal, a boundary marked, a territory claimed whilst in a state of passitivity. The daughter due to the sensibility of her proximity to her lover may be to close to objectify this betrayal of intimacies. The fathers work which will hide all trace of authentic sensuality of the act, and render a mere likeness a representation culled from an action whose very performance was an expression containing the anticipation of loss, an anticipation now made permanent.

The trace through its indexical sign and its conceptual space latently awaiting a return of the sensuality of the act, like ”the Sirens with their elusive and forbidden form of the alluring voice. They are nothing but song.” Maurice Blanchot, Eurydice and the sirens. and Indexical  The human trace of another intimately marked in the proximity of a shared intimacy, now vacant, void by withdrawal, only the visible intimacy of a residue remains into which to harbour our sensibilities.

“They are nothing but song, no presence shimmers in their immortal words, they are pure appeal, an invitation to pause, a seduction.”




Sunday 9 May 2021

Working Spaces/Six Memos : Sites of Inquiry and Dialogue/Investigative Thinking/Post Studio

Every action happens in its own right and every action is an analogy of something else. 

What I do need be no more than what appears at the moment of the happening.

Peter Brook, The Open Stage.


BOUNDARIES AND JUNCTION POINTS ARE IN THE NATURE OF THINGS POINTS OF FRICTION.

Lefebvre, The Production of Space.


MAKING : Essentializing of site and community through artistic presentation and production.






ITALO CALVINO

SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM

LIGHTNESS 

QUICKNESS 

EXACTITUDE 

VISIBILITY 

MULTIPLICITY

CONSISTENCY not written at the time of the authors death.


SETTING UP THE IMMEDIATE THEATRE

MA Spatial Practices, Canterbury.

Project analysis and comment from Prof. Oren Lieberman, Dr Terry Perk, Dr Judith Rugg.

The desire to register working spaces is an interesting, and I believe fruitful, direction in the work. It is important that through this registration, you allow and encourage a theory to evolve. ‘Register’ is a useful term in that it accommodates both the index (through the notion of recording information) as well as the performative registering of, say, an opinion. As the pinhole apparatus registers ‘public’ spaces as well, it would be worthwhile assigning them the value of ‘work’ spaces also.

Also: you should understand the apparatus as a significant performative, spatial practitioner in its own right, and be careful about focussing only on the very engaging images produced by it.

Developing an engaging thesis exploring various forms and frameworks for thinking about thematics of photography and architecture in relation to space and its potential meanings and productions.

Using both practical workshops and theoretical enquiry to explore the differing values for both reading or engaging with the poetics of spatial formation in an ‘post’ sense of the studio. 

The work explores the concept of the open text in various ways and traces a development of the research from various approaches. This is a useful document of investigative thinking around ways of working for the project.

There are some methodological approaches proposed here through a range of contestatory areas - in particular, the nature of the document and the text as spatial tools or ways of thinking about the interfaces between them.

Some fascinating areas of insight and propositions on the nature of space - especially concepts of latency, peripheral space and methods of interaction/intervention. How could this area be explored in conceptual and crucial terms for the development of the project? - Behind your fluid approach, there is a sense of the need of the relational.

The bibliography could be further developed in terms of defining its taxonomies and the rationale or relationships between them and with the proposal.







Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of super modernity (London: Verso, 1992).

Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (Boston :Beacon Press, 1964). 

John Berger, Berger on Drawing ( Aghabullogue: Occasional Press, 2005). 

Peter Brook, The Open Stage (London: 1968).

Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy, Architecture and the Visual Arts (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007).

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992). 

Martin Clark, The Dark Monarch, Magic and Modernity in British Art (London: Tate St Ives,2009).

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1994).

John Houston, The Abstract Vessel, Ceramics in Studio (London: Bellow Publishing, 1991).

Lefebvre, The Production of Space (London: Blackwell, 1991).

James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, A Final Warning (London: Penguin books,2009).

James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1967). 

Richard Serra, The Matter of Time (Bilbao: Steidl Publishers,2005).

Rose Temkin, Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).

Tracey Warr, The Artists Body ( London: Phaidon Press,2000).

Christopher Wilmarth, Drawings into Sculpture (New York: Fogg Art Museum,2003).

I propose to register a site by its boundary. This new space will attempt to represent the internal dimensions of the artist’s current working studio space and be given a similar terrestrial orientation. Into the interior of this marked space objects from the working studio are to be reinstalled. This intervention attempts to create a spatial temporality into which a contemporary art practice will act as a context. The intervention sets out to display the complexities of the contemporary practitioner, the research material and works completed and those that are to instigated as a direct adaptation/response to the situation and site at hand. The temporal nature of this staged work reflects issues of mobility needed by the professional practitioner to be able to set up working sites and the ability to transpose them into other hosting environments, other challenging opportunities.


BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DISPLAYED/BOOK MARKED MATERIAL.

Edward Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)

                     Giving a face to place in the present, 

                     By way of the body.

Yve Lomax, Sounding The Event (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)

                     An impossible refrain, 

                     Fortuity,

Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy, Architecture and the Visual Arts (London: MIT Press, 2007)

Modernist Ruins Filmic Archaeologies,

DRAWING SPACES.

This activity of marking out an elsewhere (the studio space) and presenting it here and now is a fundamental quality of drawing. The act of drawing is in itself a private act undertaken primarily for the artists benefit. The finalisation of the research project revolves around issues of public intimacy with art objects whilst being in public spaces. This investigation into public intimacy and the reception of contemporary art practice as an open site; complete with works completed but not yet “framed” for any given spatial or social context attempts to stage this reality. Together with supplementary material present including in some cases work in progress, this might allow the temporal space frame of an absent space the ability to create a privileged and therefore valued experience of art objects within and amongst the intimacy of their conception.




Letting the practice stage its own intimate theatre might engender more collaborate speculation and interdisciplinary workings. “Spatial Practices” envisaged practitioners from Architecture, Fine Art and Performance driven disciplines, my own research at Canterbury has attempted to orchestrate a spatio-temporal theatre of reception for this purpose.

The Architecture of Science in Art: An Anatomy Lesson, 

                      The room as the real protagonist of the film. 

Bridget Elliott, Peter Greenaway, Architecture and Allegory (London: Academy Editions, 1997)

                       On Common Ground, 

                       Allegory as Architecture.

                       (Un)Natural Histories Collecting Cultures, Crossing Limits.

Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Space (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005)

                       The Nomadic Subject in Smooth Space, 

                       Territories and the Refrain,

The nomadic subject open to unconventional spatial orientations can make new connections in keeping with the movements of life as it unfolds. 

Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, geography's visual culture (London: Routledge, 2000) 

Vicente Todoli, Time Zones, Recent Film and Video (London: Tate Publishing, 2005)

                    The Where of Now,

Bernard Poerksen, The Certainty of Uncertainty, Dialogues introducing Constructivism (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004)

Gerhard Richter, Zufall, The Cologne Cathedral Window (Koln: Walther Konig, 2007)

Glen Onwin, As Above So Below (Halifax: HMST, 1991) Caroline Christov, Arte Povera (London: Phaidon, 1999)

Guy Brett, Force Fields, phrases of the kinetic (London: Hayward Gallery, 2000)


The Laboratory : Spatial Practices, 

Canterbury School of Architecture. 2009

Post studio practice/social processuality






Superimposition of studio space into the main foyer of a university. The disclosure of creative practices, spatial relations entangled by the private and the public.

Lefebvre in his chapter on Spatial Architectonics makes reference to the relationships established by boundaries and the relationship between boundaries and named places. These relationships promote significant and specific conditions or features to a space. This in turn results in various kinds of space. Lefebvre states that “every social space, then, once duly demarcated and oriented, implies a superimposition of certain relations upon networks of named places.”1

It is this superimposition of space that can within it demarcate other thresholds of experiences, within an existing demarcated space that interests me.

The act of “blocking in “ the dimensions of another space onto the floor of another create a temporal junction between a host space and a site within this host, a guest. This sets-up the notion of a temporal double occupancy held by the demarcation of a boundary and a site of proposal. This basic and temporal site marking could be said to have affinity towards some sort of anthropological marking, a territory. (Lefebvre defines anthropological marking as being at the stage when demarcation and orientation begin to create place and its social reality in archaic cultures)2. This activity also has associations with nomadic and agricultural-pastoral societies as they use paths and routes as spatio­ temporal markers or determinants.







Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through “which without colliding would produce the establishment of places (localities made special for one reason or another).”3Within my practice drawing is used to form sites which contain visual information, evidence of temporal activities and traces of actual objects. These territories within other territories create fields from with boundaries form material relations, differences. My drawings are inside the temporality of site I have instigated and yet they propose a territory and a surface of light years which could accommodate the temporality of terrestrial space.

Interestingly Lefebvre comments “there is no stage at which ’’man” does not demarcate, beacon or sign his space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.”4

1 Lefebvre. The Production of Space, (London: Blackwell, 1991) pagel93.

2 Ibid..page 192

3 Ibid., page 192. 

4 Ibid.,page 192











UCA CANTERBURY 2010.Brief outline of final realisation.

I propose to physically register a site by creating its boundary, by way of applying 50mm self adhesive tape to the main reception area at UCA Canterbury. This new space will attempt to represent the internal dimensions of the artist’s current working studio space (5.0xl2.0metres) and as such it be given a similar terrestrial orientation. If it is necessary (through issues of setting up and health safety) a contingency plan would be to crop the footprint of the space by the use of a broken detail line where required. Into the interior of this marked space objects from the working studio are to be reinstalled and where possible to match existing placements, these initial positions will be documented to allow the registration of changes to be recognised. It is envisaged that these first points of departure may well migrate as the site becomes populated by activity and the spatial dynamics of the hosting space. This intervention (the superimposed space onto and within the existing) attempts to create a spatial temporality into which a contemporary art practice will act as a context for an investigatory and performative setting in public space of a creative private practice. The intervention sets out to display the complexities of the contemporary practitioner, the research material and works completed and those that are to instigated as a direct adaptation/response to the situation and site at hand. The temporal nature of this staged work reflects issues of mobility needed by the professional practitioner to be able to set up working sites and the ability to transpose them into other hosting environments, other challenging opportunities.