Lightness/Synthesis/Solitude

 Outpost 190822

LIGHTNESS

QUICKNESS

EXACTITUDE

VISIBILITY

MULTIPLICITY

Six Memos for The Next Millennium.

Italo Calvino, 1992.

The difference between the first versions I read and the final ones lies in structure, not content. 

Calvino wanted to call the sixth lecture 'consistency' and he planned to write it in Cambridge. 

I found the others, all in perfect order, in the Italian original, on his writing desk ready to be put into his suitcase.

Esther Calvino.

The Drought.

J.G. Ballard.

Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things.

Walter Benjamin on the origin of German Tragic Drama.

Photographic ruins an amalgam/agency of what remains.

Brown and Blue.

A Field in England.

Cyanotype material on canvas with iron pigment.

Developing a spatial serenity/synthesis/synergy.

This amalgam of colour with various substances demonstrates the change and transformation of the material world, which can be interpreted as essentially an alchemistic procedure.

The goal of such procedures is ultimately to resolve the material object into its spiritual substance.

Yves Klein.

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue.

Magdalena Broska.

Air and Dreams.

An essay on the imagination of movement.

Gaston Bachelard.

Shotesham, site based inquiry,studio practice.

Spatial registers around the corporeal and the transcendental.

Ruin its relation to time.

Fragment as ruin and on melancholia as an attitude of retrospective contemplation.

Dialectics at a standstill, a moment where the past is recognized in the present as a ruin that was once desired, allowing allegory to be understood, felt as a contemplative calm, an equilibrium in the becoming and wrapping nowness of the self/situation.

Dialectical thinking involves the clarification of ideas through discussion and contradiction.

What remains after the process of dialectical thinking?

An initial thesis is opposed by an antithesis, then resolved through a synthesis of the two terms, which can in turn become a new thesis.

Objects/inclusions for painting with/layered transitions and movements.

Holga 120WPC, f135.

Ilford Delta 100/8 exposures 92x55mm.

The Gaze of Orpheus.

Maurice Blanchot.

The Essential Solitude

In the solitude of the work, we see a more essential solitude, a self communion.

MULTIPLICITY

The work grew denser and denser from the inside through its own organic vitality.

For Musil, knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality, while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos.

Everything he knows or thinks he deposits in an encyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands.

The result is that not only does he never manage to finish the novel, but he never succeeds in deciding on its general outlines or how to contain the enormous mass of material within set limits.

The network that links all things is also Proust's theme, but in him this net is composed of points in space-time occupied in succession by everyone, which brings about an infinite multiplication of the dimensions of space and time.

The world expands until it can no longer be grasped, and knowledge, for Proust, is attained by suffering this intangibility. In this sense a typical experience of knowledge is the jealousy felt by the narrator for Albertine.

It is the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy.

But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.

Remembrance of Things Past : The Captive.

 

Infra-ordinary.

Species of Spaces

We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.

But where is our life?

Where is our body?

Where is our space?

Georges Perec.

CHORA : trace/mark/map/body

The drama of encountering space.

Recombinant Poetics via Interventions.

Thinking about temporal issues through visual, material and spatial registers.

Concerned with artworks and architectural projects that reconfigure the temporality of sites, repositioning the relationship of the past and the present in a number of different ways.

Allegory, Montage, Dialectical Image.

Between Art and Architecture.

Jane Rendell.

Performativity/Drama of Residency

Transient readings and encounters.

Other Enactments,Dialogues,Relationalities. 

Sites of evidence/knowledge and understanding.

The scheme should incorporate both careful repair of existing fabric and a significant element of new construction in a contemporary design.

SPAB, design competition.

We are not calling for a new disordered architecture to match the disorder of culture; this would only affirm the chaotic. 

Rather, we propose experiments in search of new orders, projections of new relationships.

We do not wish to transpose our study into a system or method.

The energy inherent in opening up relationships presents us with a continuity of ordering that compels refection.

Steven Holl. 

Correlational Programming, Parallax.

Studio Works

 Outpost 050822

The Thinking Field/Speculative Curriculums.

The Body-In-Action/Making Spaces between Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Anthropology.

Sequences of actions that add up to an observational-heuristic procedure.

Conserved without restoration of lost detail.

The problem of historical materials, which we can never ignore but can't imitate directly either, is an issue that has always concerned me. I am primarily interested not in any concepts of restoration but an idea to do with historical clarity, making history visible by the co-existence of overlaying fragments of construction.

Carlo Scarpa, Castelvecchio.

Lime Wash, Field Chalk, China Clay.

Human Figure Drawing.

Waxed Paper, Canvas.

Charcoal, Clay, Liquid Iron Oxide.

 

Essential Work Only.

The SPAB Approach.

The Society's approach very often involves carefully considered inaction.

Where no problems exist, or where a problem has no major effect on use or conservation, an old building is best left alone and simply enjoyed.

Problems need to be tackled, but the society encourages work which is no more, but no less, than is essential.

 

Restricting work to these things helps ensure the maximum survival of historic fabric.

Site Sequencing/The Infra-Thin/The Viewing Chamber.

Tactically posed surrounds that contrast/entangle one segment of world with another.

Mapping Photons/Subjectivity.

Architectural Body/Collaged Users

Procedural Movements of Conservation/Care and Repair. 

Extracting that which has become interred.

Observing quotidian detail within the ruins of a  fabric of building.

Domestic and intimate details that create poetic themes that are universal and transcendent.

Wanting to see what things look like photographed/interrogations.

Pushing the photographic image to the point of failure, using the fading twilight to create new abstractions of light and movement.

The intermediate space of the negative.

A gap created between the mechanical attentive and unassumptive nature/vision of the camera and the presumptive and subjective vision of the human eye. 

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau Ponty struggled with the development of a theory of vision that would take account our embodied relationship to it, describing the 'chiastic' relationship between the viewer and the world, an intertwining through which the world was bought into a kind of visibility.

What needed to be put into question and seen as problematic was how the viewer came to be seen as separate from the world, how the visual ever became positioned as something other, something differentiated and separate from the spectator.

The force of presence/presentness.

Stillness and Time, 2006.

Still Video Portraits and the Account of The Soul.

Joanna Lowry.

The Visual, is predicated upon the construction of a distance between the spectator and the world, a distance maintained through the work of culture and the work of technology.

Photographic technologies have provided one key cultural mechanism for defining the place of the visual and positioning it in relationship to us.

In representing the subject they also define the site of the subjects's visibility, the place at which he or she can be seen.

They cut through the world, interrupt it, producing difference and distance and projecting it onto the surface of the paper or the screen.

They produce a differentiated space of the visible within which the subject and the spectator are made aware of their otherness and their distance from from each other.

 

Photographic Drawings/Haiku.

Luminous/Insubstantial Spectral Abstractions. 

Focus and detail  would drag it back to our world. 

Vision is the place where are continuity with the world conceals itself, the place where we mistake our contact for distance, imagining that seeing is a substitute for, rather than a mode of, touching, and it is this anaesthesia, this senselessness, at the heart of transparency that demands our acknowledgement and pushes our dealings with the visual beyond recognition.

Stephen Melville. 

Recombinant Poetics

Pinhole Photography/Qualitative Visual/Haptic Soundings.

St Martins, Shotesham. SPAB

Camera Room/Still Life

Paintings from the overlaying intervals of materials and processes of construction.

The Essential Solitude

Maurice Blanchot

Self Communion.

The person who is writing the work is thrust to one side, the person who has written the work is dismissed. What is more, the person who is dismissed does not know it.

This ignorance saves him, diverts him and allows him to go on.

The writer never knows if the work is done.

What he has finished in one book, he begins again or destroys in another.