Monday 29 May 2023

On the property/structure of things/materials/colours : About philosophy/drawing

 Outpost Studio 261021


On the property/structure of things/materials/colours

Drawings going beyond figure/ground relationships









The manifestation of weight derives from form along with substance.


I no longer wanted to make markings on a piece of paper, I wanted to make the drawing integral to its structure and properties.

About Drawing, Richard Serra.


Serra has questioned whether his 'Deadweight' series borders on the pictorial, because these drawings set two similar shapes against a common ground as if to construct a compound figure. However Serra's use of overlap protects against this possibility and preserves the material independence of the two sheets of paper.



Preface, Being and Becoming. C. Robert Mesle.

The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time. James Taylor

Process-Relational Philosophy. 

An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. 2008


The assumption of a moving viewer, Richard Serra in a Japanese Temple Garden.


Richard Serra believes that the physical grasp of a space must occur through time in the form of movement or effort, so he temporally extends his own working of a surface.


Tempered, measured movement such as the application of layers of paintstick, narrows the conceptual gap between the space and time we imagine to experience bodily.


Serra's program  (a temporal art of substance), to link bodily consciousness to material substance, to integrate vision and touch as well as space and time.


Movement/Sensation marks both space and time, it does so psychologically as well as physically.


The Interaction Of Color

Albers theorized the relation of space and time to weight.

The two basic quantities or substances question, how much and how often, distinguishes two kinds of quantities, one of size, extension in area, and one of recurrence, an extension in number. These measurements establish weight in space and weight in time.


Serra's accumulated, living movement, his layering of paintstick, collects weight in space and weight in time.


The human body (corpus humanum) is composed of many individuals (of different nature), each one of which is highly composite.


The individuals of which the human body is composed are some fluid, some soft and some hard.

The individuals composing the human body, and consequently the human body itself is affected in many ways by external bodies.


The human body needs for its preservation many other bodies from which it is, so to speak, continually regenerated.


When a fluid part of the human body is so determined by an external body that it impinges frequently on another part which is soft, it changes its surface and as it were imprints on it the traces of the external impelling body.


The human body can move external bodies in many ways, and dispose them in many ways.


The human mind is apt for perceiving many things, and more so according as its body can be disposed in more ways.


Bento de Spinoza : Ethics, Part II, Postulates I-VI, Proposition XIV

Bento,s Sketchbook : John Berger. 2011


Manuel Neri

Bodies of intensity, imprinted with a ghostly figural outline.


Sculptures and drawings showing ambivalence,hostile, intimate, relationships.


The contradictory shocks between form and substance are absorbed by the emotional resilience of the dialectic of pleasure and doubt. Neri proves this in the course of his own work, through his successive approaches to different materials, which make him oscillate between allusive figuration and the most direct realism.

Pierre Restany. 1988

How do things translate into lived experience?

Whatever the answer, it will be known only in relation to the particularity of a personal physical encounter with the work, never as a principle of order or composition.

Drawing Thick, Richard Serra.


Agencies/ways of doing, phenomena and research emerge with specific relationalities to things at hand.


A diffractive methodology is a knowledge making process, creating ongoing differences, states of being/becoming.


Diffraction as a tool for analysis, attunes us to the differences generated by our knowledge.

Opening up ways for greater sensitivity towards how we are part of the worlds continuous becoming.


Organism-Person-Environment : The Architectural Body.

Arakawa and Gins 


The theoretical object/body in doing/sensate built architecture



Living Spaces : Spatial Agencies/Creative Philosophies into a world of continual process and becoming, where each person relates to every other and to all of nature.


Architectural Thinking/The Interrelated Universe : Process and Reality


Mattering : Mind-Movement-Material

Spatial Interventions in Architecture

Filtered Light and the interactions of objects


Entanglements of Materials and Substances

Asperities, opacities, reflections, textiles,


Lines Of Flight : Drawing on Mattering


Steven Holl, House,St Ignatius, Scale

Place Making/Drawing/Materials/Construction


Beach Ruins : Belgium


Rutile/Yellow Ochre washes, transparent glass/glaze, texture/textile and pierced clay/concrete.

Ceramic Slab Constructions : Facades/Massing for pacemaker utilities/living spaces

Material as drawing, drawing as construction, architectural models constructed into the assemblage of the making drawing.


Painted Clay Constructions : Gesso, Cyanotype, Cotton, Wire, Glass.


Process-Relational Philosophy : Alfred North Whitehead

Vibrant Matter : Jane Bennett


Blackness is a property, not a quality, that is to say, something fundamental, not an incidental embellishment.

About Drawing, Richard Serra.





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