Violence of Architecture : Bodies Violating Space/Space Violating Bodies.

 Outpost 170823

The Movement of Bodies in the Space of Architecture.

White Cubes/Art Museums/Architectures of  Ritualized Display.

Violence of Architecture.

Bodies Violating Space/Space Violating Bodies.

Any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence, for any use means the intrusion  of a human body into a given space, the intrusion of one order into another. This intrusion is inherent in the idea of architecture; any reduction of architecture to its spaces at the expense of its events is as simplistic as the reduction of architecture to its facades.

By 'violence,' I do not mean the brutality that destroys physical or emotional integrity but a metaphor for the intensity of a relationship between individuals and their surrounding spaces.

Bodies carve all sorts of new and unexpected spaces, through fluid or erratic motions. Architecture, then, is only an organism engaged in constant intercourse with users, those bodies rush against the carefully established rules of architectural thought. No wonder the human body has always been suspect in architecture: it has always set limits to the most extreme architectural ambitions. The body disturbs the purity of architectural order. It is equivalent to a dangerous prohibition.

Spaces are qualified by actions just as actions are qualified by spaces. One does not trigger the other; they exist independently. Only when they intersect do they affect one another. The same occurs in architecture: the event is altered by each new space. And vice versa: by ascribing to a given, supposedly 'autonomous' space a contradictory program, the space attains new levels of meaning. Event and space do not merge but affect one another.

When spaces and programs are largely independent of one another, one observes a strategy of indifference in which architectural considerations do not depend on utilitarian ones, in which space has one logic and events another.

A ritual implies a near-frozen relationship between action and space. It institutes a new order after the disorder of the original event. When it becomes necessary to mediate tension and fix it by custom, then no single fragment must escape attention. Nothing strange and unexpected must happen. Control must be absolute. 

Bernard Tschumi.

Everyday Life/Spatial Intimacy.

The original, spontaneous interaction of the body with a space is often purified by ritual.

Concerned with the way art museums offer up values and beliefs.

Civilizing Rituals/Inside Public Art Museums.

Carol Duncan.

Art always risks the plurality its iterations, that they can become colonized, immobilized and arrested within dominant belief structures. It is always the plurality alive in the art work that always risks being overtaken by the forces of encounter it invites.

Erin Manning, Relationscapes.

The Diagram/Drawing of the Work

In-Gathers the Works Feeling.

The Dreaming's, potential to create new kinds of futures in the present.

Making works/drawings that resonate/openings into the indeterminacy of experience.

Allowing the workings of art to facilitate the opening of the present to its potential for experiential complexity through the ontogenetic plurality of sense(s). 

Napangardi's work activates the Dreaming's potential, becoming both a technology of the future and a technique for the present.

Erin Manning/Dreaming's paintings by Napangardi.

The Final Act/Fact in the Work of Art.

Landing Sites, we land into the focus of an awareness that becomes with us.

The Decision of Emphasis is how the work satisfies its becoming, this satisfaction is the present finality of its current iteration.

Alfred North Whitehead.

Creating art-work that remains open to an infinity of potential evocations.

Feeling Drawing/Spatial Experience.

Indexical Traces/Decarcations/Materiality/Media

The flow of time in the event/duration of drawing.

Figuring it out, drawings/diagrams/lines/paths of sensory inquiry.

How we feel things/phenomenology.

Uncovering unconscious things/psychoanalysis. 

Life Drawings/Propositions with/for the human body.

What the ecology of the drawings show, what is hidden, seeing naked or nude.

Naked in Norwich.

Undercroft.

Space violating bodies : Architectures of Display/Ritual/Violence.

General Ritual Features of Art Museums.

Firstly, the achievement of a marked of 'liminal' zone of time and space in which visitors, removed from the concerns of their daily, practical lives, open themselves to a different quality of experience.

Secondarily, the organization of the museum setting as a kind  of script or scenario which visitors perform. Carol Duncan has argued that western concepts of the aesthetic experience, generally taken as the art museum's raison d' etre, match up rather closely to the kind of rationales often given  for traditional rituals (enlightenment, revelation, spiritual equilibrium or rejuvenation).

In the liminal space of the museum, everything, and sometimes anything, may become art,including fire extinguishers, thermostats, and humidity gauges, which when isolated on a wall and looked through the aesthetizing lens of museum space, can appear if only for a mistaken moment, every bit as interesting as some of the intended-as-art works on display, which in any case do not always look very different.

Circumstances are everything.

Notes on the making of a conditional art.

Robert Irwin.

Art is primarily a situation.

Robert Morris. 

Like everything else in life, art is not defined by its physical description, its formal qualities or even its conceptual foundation, circumstances are everything. Something could be art or it could not be art, it all depends on the situation.

Bernard Tschumi agues that architecture is never autonomous, never pure form, not a matter of style and cannot be reduced to a language. He opposes an over-rated notion of architectural form, and hopes to reinstate the term function and more particularly, to re inscribe the movement of bodies in space, together with the actions and events that take place within the social and political realm of architecture. In Architecture and Disjunction he refuses the simplistic relation by which form follows function, or use, or socioeconomics. In contrast, he argues that in contemporary urban society, any cause-and-effect relationship between form, use, function, and socioeconomic structure has become both impossible and obsolete.