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.


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