Communicative Space Of Drawing : Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.

 Outpost 081223

The Communicative Space Of Drawing.

Braking down research.

Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.

Re-combinent poetics/praxis.

The Architectural Scriptorium

The Photographic Darkroom.

The Observatory.

Drawing, defined variously as an extruding, a gathering and/or a pulling closer.

The paradoxical nature of drawing is that it is simultaneously a form of recording and invention, somewhere situated between unconstrained gestures and the reiteration of a point of view.

To re-examine the significance of the human body through drawing performatively and architecture.

To understand how buildings affect individuals and communities emotionally, how they provide people with a sense of joy-identity-and place.

Across The Space Of A Page.

Drawing Propositions/Propulsions from the Body.  

Landing Sites: Organism/Person/Environment

The World Opens Up In Front Of Us And Closes Behind.

The experience of our bodies, of what we touch and smell, of how well we are 'centred' is not locked into the immediate present, but can be recollected through time and memory.

Collisions with Bounded Spaces.

The Haptic and Geometric Grid/Centripetal and Centrifugal Radials. 

Haptic choreographies/circulations that create collisions with environments and bodies.

Body 'fit' and movement is affected by the haptic sense and by the tactile qualities of the surface and edges we encounter.

Patterns are composed mostly of paths and places, but it is the system by which they are related, that allows us to make sense of a bounded space.

Place and its choreography of collision that facilitate the transaction between body, memory and architecture, allowing us to dwell in them in the fullest sense.

All architecture in its beginnings was derived from a body-centred sense of space and place. The power of the home, comes from its being the one piece of the world around us which still speaks directly of our bodies as the centre and the measure of that world.

Buildings can encourage a choreography of dynamic relationships among the persons moving within their domains. 

Emily had been playing house in a nook right in the bow of a boat and tiring of it, she was walking rather aimlessly aft – when it suddenly flashed into her mind, that she was SHE.

Gaston Bachelard.

Poetics of Space.

Emily was neither particularly conscious of, nor looking at, the centre from which she was departing – nor the centre towards which she as walking. But she was able to detect her identity in the bodily act of moving from one centre to another, she recognized that SHE had been withdrawn and was now emerging.

How can the personal world of the body provide an alternative to excessive and disorienting events in the environment?

To diminish the importance of the body's internal values is to diminish our opportunity to make responses that remind us of our personal identity.

Memories at the Centre.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Bloomer/Moore.

John Latham.

Drawing/Unbounded Sensations of Time.

The Stage Of Drawing.

Gesture and Act.

Conversation : Avis Newman/Catherine de Zegher.

CdZ: What happens in the space between the gesture moving away from the body, towards everything that is outside of the self, and its landing as a trace on the page?

AN: I was thinking on the way the transmission of thought can depend on the hand and eye, and how this relates to the psychic space in which the mark exists as a potentiality. The effort of the mental and physical act of projection out from the body, away from the body, firstly into the air  -  an act that pitches the hand across the space of the page to site a mark where one intends – is quite a precise act : the most thoughtful and deliberate of acts, which I would speculate harbors a necessary thoughtlessness, in the sense that the certainty of coordinated actions is always in some way provisional and as such relies on the vigilant cooperation between eye and hand.

CdZ: Drawing may also be a recovery of the gesture that allows a discovery for the eye.

AN: To retrieve the gesture in a drawing is to translate the mark back into the action of the hand. It is very pleasurable to recover the gesture in that way and in so doing to follow the action of making. I think that experience in a drawing is very precise.

CdZ: Because the eye manages to discern what has become a trace on paper from a gesture in the air?

AN: Yes, the mind's eye. Perception becomes an act of reconstruction that moves unobtrusively between interior and exterior. I would make an analogy here between how we experience unconscious emotions in the repetition and accumulation of marks (irrespective of what is being drawn) and the intonation, hesitations, and inflections of speech, all of which hold a complexity of messages and can be at odds with what appears to be said, but which nonetheless determine meaning. It seems to me that this occurs independent of sight, as that which is generated by the mind and mediated by perception.

CdZ: In drawing, the space is open-ended and unframed, while the marks are articulated over time and in time.

AN: My concern in making images relates more closely to the conceptual space of drawing, which is less circumscribed  than painting. In particular, the manner in which the boundary or edge comes to define the work is of a completely different order in drawing. In fact, the idea of inside  and outside does not occur in the same way. The marks define a position across the surface and are not registered in relation to limits. As a result the often ambiguous nature of borders can leave a vague uncertainty as to the stability of the image.

CdZ: Can you elaborate on this different notion of boundary?

AN: The natural inclination of mark-making is a relational organisation of individual inscriptive acts, which is not an expression of a unitary world. The frame as the window on the world, which traditionally internalizes the picture. This view creates an illusion  of the unique experience of looking, in the sense that there is coherence to the image. There is not that illusory consistency in drawing, as the space and image are essentially open-ended and speculative. The unframed interferes with any anticipation we might have of ordered limits or completion, and suggests the possibility that something is missing and will always elude our attention, because it cannot be framed. It is the uncertainty of the edge and how it meets the real that I find fascinating.

CdZ: Drawing is thus not to do with perceptual illusionism, but with infinite space as mental possibility. Is the drawing itself, the ground, a space of transience?

AN: There is no pressure from the outside inwards; in drawing, it bis all pressure from the inside outwards. And the idea of boundary then becomes problematic, our boundary as we project it onto the work. The physical structure of a drawing is always conditional, and when one looks, for example, at the drawing by John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17'' 2002) (Time Signature 5: 1) the work itself defies any possibility of framing because the action is embedded in the pure sensation of time. We are left with only the effect. So the idea of framing as a way of 'confirming' the space – this is not part of  drawing's language. The condition of boundaries is that they are dissolvable.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Sense/Sensing/Feeling/Memory.

Hapticity and The Body of Memory/Experience.

Haptic drawings are composed of piece by piece responses to the situation at hand, rather than being based on any kind of visual or conceptual grand design.

The stone and wood of a house itself are embodied in these memorable centreplace's and even they belong to the body of memory, something that maybe regarded as possessing uniquely haptic properties.

The heat  from a fire, the rushing water in the fountain, and the smooth tactile objects on the mantle deliver feelings of touch and even permanence. Here in this interior space the lifetime memories of the person collaborate with the timelessness of the world outside.

Exercises on the Haptic Experience of Space.

Drawing Choreographies : Hapticity/Mark-making/The Body.

All architecture functions as a potential stimulus for movement, real or imagined. A building is an incitement to action, a stage for movement and interaction as such it is one partner in a dialogue with the body. 

Egon Schiele/Jenny Saville, drawings rendering an insistent corporeality.

Drawing marks that can be possessed, felt, touched and known, haptic drawings are memories of human experience, seeing, feeling, experiencing and exploring corporeality.