Sunday 18 February 2024

Drawing Zones/Studios/Sites of Inquiry/Concern.

 

Outpost 230124


Architectural Body.

Thresholds.

Drawing.






Confronting Bodies.

Drawing : The Indexical/To Work Inside Feeling.

Inscripting Self : The Daughter of Butades.


Kairos : The movement and its moment.

Being Alive.

Tim Ingold.


There is no stage at which humankind does not demarcate, beacon or sign his space, leaving tracers that are both symbolic and practical.

Lefebvre, The Production of Space.



Drawing on the Movements of Desire and Attention.

Empirical evidence carries emotional connections, Bachelard.


The drawing itself is desperate to keep hold of an absence, it all began with a silhouette of a shadow on the wall. In the myth of Butades, the drawing is not generated by 'loss' itself but the her anticipation of loss captured in the moment of turning away, and act that unites blindness to memory.

Derrida.


Drawing is a gaze turned inward into the task at hand, it draws on the inevitable, displacement and absence of the 'thing' and its relation, its otherness.


The 'mark' and its imaginary space are encountered as a fact of existence. In drawing it is this evidence of beingness that is invested in the work, 'drawing itself' becomes a coming-into-being into the presentness of language of the image.


The image corresponds to its own unfolding pulsion, to an obsession, to a desire to expand its own flux beyond the assigned body. Material keeps desire on the inclined plane of appearances surrounding it with its gravity, the drawing materializes a surface in which desire condenses itself and infiltrates inside the oppressive operative grids/apparatuses of language.


Drawing on the holding apart instances, moments and intervals between consciousness and self consciousness. The early formative drawings of children are not guided by a visual exploration of space, but by the hand as an exploration of movement, it is only later that drawing is guided by the eye. In children graphic expression is blind, disconnected from perception, rather it is led by muscular, tonic and plastic sensations.


The 'Stage of Drawing' is at attempt to discuss what Avis Newman believes to be a crisis in art as to how an artist deals in a non-literal way with a sense of humanity, which for her is part of the essence of the artistic project. Her selection from the Tate Collection is based on a definition of drawing not as expression, but as an act of consciousness, the manifestation of which is culture, and by extension the social and political realm. In this exhibition, drawing tends and relates to the indexical as the effect of a corporealized process. In fact the aim is partly to divest drawing of the artist, so one can see this act of consciousness.


According to Newman, this indexical definition of drawing is opposed to a materialistic one, which would be about investment/authorship in the material world and would concern itself indirectly with sociological art, for Newman on the contrary we are trying to locate the area where meaning has no economy and does not have to justify itself by purpose.


Drawing even in the most fragmented of forms, there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me but also the activity of sensation.

Avis Newman.


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 provide/produce the establishment of places, localities made special for one reason or another.



In looking at drawing, one may see not the thing itself but its possibility, its suggestion and its uncertainty as to what stage it is in its becoming.


What ever the intent, the drawing is always the artist's response to whatever, draws-the-artist's attention. To what Cezanne called the 'little sensations' and for the artist it is a question of how to rescue sensation from its subordination by representation.


Drawing as experience and experimentation, demands that the artist be susceptible to and capable of taking advantage of the uncoupling of everyday space-time and with it the expansion of the field of consciousness, to engage in what Klee once described as 'polyphonic attention.'


In the end drawing is rooted in the dematerialized space of the image, indexical or imaginative, privileging more the world of shadows than the world of appearances. The drawing surface is confirming the possibility and use of a language that albeit in a fragile way, leaves open an interstitial passage through which the imaginary may realize itself as an image.


Drawing manifests the very nature of a feeling-thinking-consciousness-of-the-body.


Drawing makes visible the synthesis, its interval and split between subject and object, between the desiring subject and the subject of language.


To draw is to protect the intensity of thought-feeling, and as such the drawing is always a formulation or elaboration of the thought itself at the very moment/instant in which it translates itself, makes itself 'visible' as an image.


The material of art, any material is that which imprisons and makes definitive desire. It is the way the material is manifested in revealing what defines the split between the imaginary and the subject. Drawing becomes the apparatus, the mechanism that tends to give order to the only dimension in which desire moves, space and time.


Drawing seeks always to reveal the gesture of the artist through the space of the surface, to capture the moment that precedes the birth of the sign. The external space becomes a specular surface, a field that captures and organizes the image. The image always corresponds/is a correspondence to a pulsion of desire, a vector that puts it in communion with tactile and visual sensations.


Drawing makes reversible the movement of desire/attention suspending it in a place understood as a place of projections and reversibility. For John Berger, the drawing shows the paths taken.


Drawing/Spatial Practice.

UCA Canterbury.

Artist Statement. 2009

Zones/Studios/Sites of Inquiry/Concern.


Within 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 flows formed from their permeable boundaries gathered from material, relations and differences. My drawings are about and are inside this temporality of site.



Thresholds.

Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa.

Ina Macaione.


Antonello da Messina.

St. Jerome in His Study, 1474-75.

National Gallery, London.


The only figurative work in the world in which entering and crossing coincide in a unique concept of physical space, defining the specificity of the architecture by transforming the limits of solid materials into the construction of a liminal space which can be crossed by passing through thresholds.


The concept of architecture is the crossing of a space that becomes physically visible when one enters the space itself. In Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa, architecture thus becomes an art form which helps us to overcome the absence of life by expanding the horizon of our minds and hearts, freeing us from our bodies, giving dignity to the void left by the loss of living presences and emotional ties.


The spatial dimension of this small building is a metaphor for the mental workings of meditation. The pavilion is the place where we can enter the mind's empty space, where we can get away from all our passing concerns.


Small cylinders of different heights and sizes, barely visible below the surface of the water. A small, inaccessible maze. A maze through the water, a maze through time, a maze of symbols and enigmas. Here, as in the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges, the maze is an allegory for the complexity of the world, which cannot be understood merely through reason. The maze itself was created to confuse those who rely on reason alone. Its winding paths lead us to a reality that lies far beyond that existential normality which hides deeper complications.


In 'The Garden of Forking Paths' Borges describes the possible outcomes of an event, each of which leads to a further multiplication of consequences, in a continuous 'branching off' of potential futures.


The Stage of Drawing.

Gesture and Act.

Catherine de Zegher.


Architectural Body.

Arie Graafland, Michael Speaks.


Drawings and Ceramic Models.

Making-Living-Environs


Hannsjorg Voth 1973-2003.

City of Orion.

Boat of Stone.

Hassi Romi.



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