Aesthetics of the Everyday : A Creative Human Praxis

Working Praxis into Creative Research
Clay, Paint, Matter/Everyday Landscapes

The Subject Matter of Lived Experience

The Potter's wheel creates cognitive enactments (materiality) through encountering clay.

The Heideggerian Roots of Everyday Aesthetics
A Hermeneutical Approach to Art
Cristian Hainic

The mere aesthetic experience of understanding one's being-in-the-world as made up by everyday phenomena, is in itself overwhelmingly sufficient to constitute a foundation for an aesthetic of everyday life. 

Textuality/Interpretations (Texts and their inherent lack of perceptual immediacy)

Everything in language belongs to the process of understanding

Human understanding/interpretation takes place not in the immediacy of representational thinking but rather in the lack of  objects and experiences available for direct confrontation. 

John Dewey
Live Creature, an aesthetic experience comes to be defined as active and alert commerce with the world. Life does not merely go on in an environment, but rather because of an environment and because we interact with it. 

Up, Across and Along
Tim Ingold

J.M.W. Turner (1775-1853)
Dunwich, Suffolk,c. 1830


THE ART OF SURVIVAL
Jacqueline Rose's catalogue essay on Therese Oulton

How to paint the earth lovingly but without false solace,a world in which love might be impotent?

But then, at the very moment you have ceded such intimacy, she manages to give you the sensation of a world hurtling to the point when there might no longer be anything, or anyone there.

The Art of Jeremy Gardiner
UNFOLDING LANDSCAPE

LANDSCAPE, MEMORY, AND PLACE
Robert Ayers

Often for these painters the experience that they concern themselves with most directly, is that of nature, which in its vast and enormously inflected range can act as a metaphor for lived experience.

They are concerned more with how nature feels than how landscape looks. They share too an awareness that it is the translation of that feeling into paint mark, the achievement of an equivalence, that is of crucial importance. It is in the consummation of paint and experience that picture-making finds experience.

Paint marks flicker as we look at them between substance and illusion.

CONTESTED SPACE
Urban/Social/Landscapes

Landscapes are contested, untidy and messy, tensioned, always in the making. Our landscapes of modernity are frequently on the move and peopled by diasporas and migrants of identity, people making homes in new places.
An Anthropology of Landscape

Christopher Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum

ORDINARY LIVES
Studies in the Everyday
Ben Highmore

Lukács’s Literary Cartography:
Spatiality, Cognitive Mapping, and The Theory of the Novel
Robert T. Tally Jr.






https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/26224308391

The Sleeper Awakes : Veiled Melancholy/Book Narratives : Film Collages. #3

Preface (1921) ” The great city of this story is no more than a nightmare of Capitalism triumphant, a nightmare that was dreamt a quarter of a century ago. It is a fantastic possibility no longer possible. Much evil may be in store for mankind, but to this immense, grim organization of servitude, our race will never come” H.G. Wells. Easton Glebe, Dunmow,1921.

28/01/2016

https://uk.pinterest.com/russellmoreton/art-objects-russell-moreton/

"Spatial turn" The increased attention to matters of space, place and mapping in literary and cultural studies, as well as in social theory, philosophy, and other disciplinary fields.

Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. Routledge 2013.

 The Politics of Architecture : Theorizing through speculative spatial practices.

Immediate Architectural Interventions, Durations and Effects : Apparatuses, Things and People in the Making of the City and the World. Alberto Altes Arlandis, Oren Lieberman. 2013

"He rubbed his eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his mind was quite clear - evidently his sleep had  benefited him. He was not in a bed at all as he understood the word, but lying naked on a very soft and yielding mattress, in a trough of dark glass. The mattress was partly transparent, a fact he observed with a sense of insecurity, and below it was a mirror reflecting him greyly. Above his arm- and he saw with a shock that his skin was strangely dry and yellow - was bound a curious apparatus of rubber, bound so cunningly that it seemed to pass into his skin above and below. And this bed was placed in a case of greenish-coloured glass (as it seemed to him), a bar in the white framework of which had first arrested his attention. In the corner of the case was a stand of glittering and delicately made apparatus, for the most part quite strange appliances, though a maximum  and minimum thermometer was recognizable."

H. G. Wells : The Sleeper Awakes. 1899/1910

Material/Semiotic Flows/Subjectivity : Towards Disentanglement

Social behaviour is trapped in inescapable patterns of interaction coded by techno-linguistic machines, smartphones, screens of every size, and all of these sensory and emotional devices end up destroying our organism's sensibility by submitting it to the stress of competition and acceleration.

Franco "bifo" Berardi

And : Phenomenology of the End

Signs and Machines : Capitalism and The Production Of Subjectivity
Maurizio Lazzarato









Sketching out an aesthetic genealogy of capitalist globalization. Berardi shows how we have arrived at a point of such complexity in the semiotic flows of capital that we can no longer process its excessive currents of information.

The Ceaseless Flux of Disappearances/The Examination of Sight.

Outpost 240923

Drawing in Charcoal : Sensing through Movement.

#The Examination of Sight.

The act of drawing refuses the the process of disappearances, and instead proposes the simultaneity of a multitude of moments.

#Light.

The Ceaseless Flux/Causality Of Disappearance.

#Seeing.

On Disappearances Opposed By Assemblage.

The Drawing Challenges Disappearance/Oblivion.

Catching The Light : The Entwined History of Light and Mind, Arthur Zajonc.

Drawn To That Moment.

A drawing is more than a memento, more than a device for bringing back memories of the time past.

From each glance, a drawing assembles a little evidence, but it consists of the evidence of many glances which can be seen together. On one hand there is no sight in nature as unchanging as that of a drawing or painting, on the other hand what is unchanging in a drawing consists of so many assembled moments that they constitute a totality rather than a fragment.

For Cezanne, one minute in the life of the world is going by, paint it as it is.

For John Berger, how does a drawing or painting encompass time? 

What does it hold in its stillness?

Thus if appearances, at any given moment are a construction emerging from the debris of all that has previously appeared, might it be understandable that this very construction may give birth to the idea that everything will one day be recognizable and the flux of disappearance cease.

Because the faculty of sight is continuous, because visual categories, red-yellow-dark-thick-thin remain constant, and because so many things appear to remain in place, one forgets that the visual is always a result of an unrepeatable-momentary-encounter.

Any image, like the image read from the retina records an appearance which will disappear.

The faculty of sight developed as an active response to continually changing contingencies, and the more complex the view of appearances it could construct from events. 

For the faculty of sight to become developed, the mind uses recognition as an essential part of the construction of appearances, and recognition depends upon the phenomenon of reappearance sometimes occurring in the ceaseless flux of disappearance.

An event in itself has no appearances.

To draw is to look, to examine the spectrum of appearance.

Drawings reveal the process of their own creation, and  their own looking.

On Drawing/John Berger.

Drawing into awareness.

Things/Feelings that are both hermetic and infinite.

Drawing 'situates' impressions between relations and responses.

Between seeing and feeling.

Butades/Haptic trace, inscription.

Derrida/Blindness inherent in drawing.

The drawing is as much about a haptic experience as it is an optical one, the actual contact between paper and brush informs me that a mark will materialize, a mark marking the abstract and the concrete, a hybrid image of reality.

Perceptual Psychology.

My desire is to set up a situation to which I can take you and let you see.

My art deals with light itself, not as a bearer of revelation, but as revelation itself.

Immersive architectural environments to carry the inner world into the outer spaces, so that our sense of lived-in-territory is increased.

James Turrell/Deer Shelter Skyspace.

In the trajectory of the intermezzo.

The Working Diagram.

Relays between points/paths.

Nomadology, Deleuze/Guattari.

Interactions of Colour and Bodies : Rothko/Neri/Kundera/Schiele, subjects alone in a moment of utter immobility.

Manuel Neri

Milan Kundera

Josef Albers

Mark Rothko

Egon Schiele

The use of the word 'immobility' recalls an article that Rothko wrote in the 1947

"For me the great achievements of the centuries in which the artist accepted the probable and familiar as his subjects were the pictures of the single human figure - alone in a moment of utter immobility."

p84, Possibilities , 1, New York, 1947

The world is overloaded/the nature of things : Peter Zumthor, Jean Baudrillard

The world is overloaded of signs and information, representative of things that nobody completely understands, because they are in turn nothing but signs representative of other signs.

The real thing remains hidden. Nobody can ever see it.

Peter Zumthor

The nature of things cannot be discovered by analyzing them according to their functions, by labeling or categorizing them but by understanding their relationship to people, their behavior and emotions which caused creation of these objects.

Jean Baudrillard

Acts of Drawing/Derrida : Becomings through immaterial, memory and blindness.

JACQUES DERRIDA THE SCEPTICISM OF DRAWING:

“perception belongs to recollection.” Butades daughter’s act is in blindness, as if she was drawing a declaration of love.

Jacques Derrida in 1993 wrote an extensive text to accompany an exhibition of paintings from the Louvre. This text titled Memoirs of the Blind, The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins contains within it some particular references to “Pliny’s Origins of Painting." Together with the aid of illustrations of paintings on this theme, he examines and interrogates their philosophical and historical qualities.

Derrida makes particular mention and emphasis of the “state of blindness” in his analysis of the Butades myth. In particular the notion of  “scepticism” which is at the very heart of drawing. This notion of the “difference between believing and seeing”1, and what he remarks as “believing one sees and seeing between” evokes the emergence of a “glimpse” caught in a state in which “doubt ever becomes a system“2. There is a moment of delay between the gaze with its vigilance and attention, and what one reflects upon seeing. These actions will conspire to create the moment of conclusion. So by keeping the thing in sight it is being constantly examined but not reflected on, until the point when the gaze is averted to the drawing .It is a this instant, withdrawn from the sight of the object, that a “blindness” forces the recollection (the moment of conclusion to emerge) to which the drawn mark is visual evidence of that moment Derrida makes the observation that representations substitute memory for perception and that blindness is a constant withdrawal into memory. Derrida is of the view that drawings, paintings are “representations drawn most often from an exemplary narrative." This myth of Butades with its “exemplary narrative” relates directly to the absence or invisibility of (being in) the drawing process whilst in the presence of the object, that the very act of drawing withdrawals and blinds its participant. Butades daughter is “blinded” in the acts of both love and the act of drawing. Through these conditions it can be seen that Butades daughter is blind to the vision of her lover and in drawing around his projection she is forced to recollect and reflect to produce a conclusion of that action by the simple gesture and act of an inscription drawn aided by a flickering silhouette.

Derrida uses the example of the painting by J. B. Suvee “Butades or the Origin of Drawing 1791” or as it is referred in English as “The Daughter of Butades Drawing the Shadow of Her Lover ” to illustrate that it was “as if one drew only on the condition of not seeing.” The drawing in effect becomes a “declaration of love destined for or suited to the invisibility of the other.”3 Derrida comments that the origin of drawing may have become born from the desire to create some sort of surrogate mark which originates “from seeing the other withdrawn from sight.“4 The important observation Derrida continues to make is that the daughter in “following the traits of a shadow or a silhouette” who is in effect drawing on a blindness which will through recollection, initiates a sense with which she is in effect “already loves in nostalgia.”5

Derrida dwells on the very nature of drawing moving away from “the origin of drawing” to “the thought of drawing” he comments that the thought of a drawing has a “certain pensive pose, a memory of the trait that speculates, as in a dream, about its own possibility.”6 It is as if the potency of drawings is a projected development that occurs as Derrida states “on the brink of blindness.” This notion of the “trait” (a feature to a line, stroke, or mark) a visible presence that accompanies the lines odyssey, a sense of presence that can witness something of the invisible in the visible is touched upon. ’’Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible is cited by Derrida as having already made “Indications” in this respect Derrida footnote from The Visible and the Invisible seems to sum up something of the invisibility and presence of the trait acting on a drawing. This extract taken from the “working notes” section of the book it reads” One has to understand that it is visibility itself that involves a non visibility.”7

Distilled from the salient points of Derrida’s extensive interrogation Memoirs of the Blind seems to acknowledge the fact that “whether Butades daughter follows the tracts of a shadow or a silhouette or even if she draws on the surface of a wall or in a veil.”8 the resultant inscription in any event “inaugurates an act of blindness.” Derrida’s revelation is that “perception belongs to recollection.” Butades daughter’s act is in blindness, as if she was drawing a declaration of love that simultaneously that also contains her anticipation of a loss, and as a result, a nostalgia that is reflected upon before it is actually perceived.

1  . Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, The Self Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: Chicago Press, 1993),page 1.

2  .Ibid., page 1.

3  .Ibid., page 49.

4  .Ibid., page 49.

5  .Ibid., page 51.

6  .Ibid., page 3.

7   Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968),257.

8   Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, page 51.

Materials at the Hungate Norwich/The Eyes Of The Skin.

Outpost 050823

Dwelling/Reading with Intensity.

Hungate Medieval Art.

11 Princes Street.

Norwich.

NUA Degree Show, Interior Design/Architecture. 2023.

Boardman House.

Redwell Street.

Norwich.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Dwelling with Intensity.

In our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology  of the verb to inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity. There is a strong identity between naked skin and the sensation of home. The experience of home, like that of a large cradle, is essentially an experience of intimate warmth. Our houses, and their homecomings from snow-covered landscapes turn the pleasure of the skin into a singular sensation.

Gaston Bachelard.

Architecture in the flesh of the lived world not as a construction of an idealised vision.

An Architecture of Visual Images.

The ocular bias has never been more apparent in the art of architecture than in the past 30 years, as a type of architecture, aimed at a striking and memorable visual image, has predominated.

Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.

The current deluge of images has consequences on the architecture of our time, producing a retinal art for the eye. Instead of being a situational bodily encounter, architecture has become an art of the printed image fixed by the hurried eye of the camera. 

As buildings lose their plasticity, and their connection with language and wisdom of the body, they become isolated in the cool and distant realm of vision. With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body, and particularly for the hand, architectural structures have become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction.

The contemporary city is the city of the eye, one of distance and exteriority.

The haptic city is the city of interiority and nearness.

The Significance of the Shadow.

In our time, light has turned into a mere quantitative matter and the window has lost its significance as a mediator between two worlds, between enclosed and open, interiority and exteriority, private and public, shadow and light. Having lost its ontological meaning, the window has turned into a mere absence of the wall.

Take the use of enormous plate windows, they deprive our buildings of intimacy, the effect of shadow and atmosphere. Architects all over the world have been mistaken in the proportions which they have assigned to large plate windows or spaces opening to the outside. We have lost our sense of intimate life, and have become forced to live public lives, essentially away from home.

Luis Barragan.

An architecture that addresses our sense of movement and touch.

Acoustic Intimacy.

Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni-directional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creates an experience of interiority. The wide, open spaces of contemporary streets do not return sound, and in the interiors of today's buildings echoes are absorbed and censored. The programmed recorded music of shopping malls and public spaces eliminates the possibility of grasping the acoustic volume of space. 

Sight is the sense of the solitary observer, whereas hearing creates a sense of connection and solidarity. Every city has its echo which depends on the pattern and scale of its streets and the prevailing architectural styles and materials.

On Skin-Architecture-Corpus-Corporeality-Matter-Sensuality

Architecture and its materials of patina and petrified silences.

The hollow smells of abandoned houses stimulated by the emptiness observed by the eye.

In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke gives a dramatic description of images of past life in an already demolished house, conveyed by traces imprinted on the wall of its neighbouring house. The retinal images of contemporary architecture certainly appear sterile and lifeless when compared with the emotional and associative power of the poet's olfactory imagery.

Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter-space-light. 

The most persistent memory of any space is often its smell.

Every dwelling has its individual smell of home and every city has its spectrum of tastes and odours.

The experience of home is essentially one of intimate warmth.

The Visible and the Invisible.

The Intertwining – The Chiasm.

The skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter. The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsman and the assiduous hands of its users, seduces the stroking of the hand.

Spaces of Intimate Warmth.

The fireplace and its immaterial alcove, sensed by the skin, a warm cave carved into the room itself that is an intimate and personal space of warmth. Antonio Gaudi, Casa Batilo, Barcelona, 1904.

The bath with its heightened experiences of intimacy, home and protection are sensations of the naked skin. Pierre Bonnard, The Nude in the Bath, 1937.

The door handle is the handshake of the building. The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition, through impressions of touch we shake the hands of countless generations. It is pleasurable to press a door handle shining from the thousands of hands that have entered the door before us, the clean shimmer of ageless wear has turned into an image of welcome  and hospitality.

My body is made of the same flesh as the world, this flesh of my body is shared by the world and the flesh of the world or my own is a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself.

Merleau-Ponty's sense of sight is an embodied vision that is an incarnate part of the flesh of the world. Our body is both an object among objects and that which sees and touches them. Merleau-Ponty saw an osmotic relation between the self and the world - they interpenetrate and mutually define each other – and he emphasised the simultaneity and interaction of the senses. My perception is not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens; I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of a thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Juhani Pallasmaa.

Being and Circumstance.

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

Robert Irwin.

Here in the phenomenal realm we can no longer say that one is more real than the other. Consequently, this 'mark X' no longer rises out of ground as before, but remains an integral part of, and interacts with, its circumstances. To quote Merleau-Ponty on this point, 'Our visual field is not neatly cut out of our objective world, and is not a fragment with sharp edges like a landscape framed by a window. We see as far as our hold on things extends. Far beyond the zone of clear vision and even behind us.'

The Condition of Postmodernity

The experiences of space and time have become fused into each other by speed (David Harvey uses the notion of 'time-space compression), and as a consequence we are witnessing a distinct reversal of the two dimensions – a temporalisation of space and a spatialisation of time. The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase of speed in the technological world is sight. But the world of the eye is causing us to live increasingly in a perpetual present, flattened by speed and simultaneity.

Silence-Time-Solitude.

A powerful architectural experience silences all external noise; it focuses our attention on our very existence, and as with all art, it makes us aware of our fundamental solitude.

Architecture emancipates us from the embrace of the present and allows us to experience the slow, healing flow of time. Buildings and cities are instruments and museums of time. They enable us to see and understand the passing of history, and to participate in time cycles that surpass individual life.

The essential auditory experience created by architecture is tranquillity. Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. Ultimately architecture is the art of petrified silence. The finished construction becomes a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture is a responsive, remembering silence.

Power Of Gentleness

Meditations on the Risk of Living.

Anne Dufourmantelle.

The Eyes Of The Skin

Architecture and the Senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Enchantment/Embodied Knowledge : The Intertwining of Vision and Movement.

The Embodied Image.

Imagination and Imagery in Architecture.

Juhani Pallasmaa. 2011

Drawing Studio/Life Room

Outpost 280122

Assemblage : Wire, Fabric, Fired Clay, Glass on drawing.

The World on Edge

The Body and Spatial Boundaries

A spatial inquiry, a means of exploring agential cuts/spatial agency.

Text Extract/Inclusion. "Pure Presence"

The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics : Jane Bennett 2001.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

Merleau-Ponty, intertwining of vision and movement into an embodied knowledge.

The body and space are reflexive/diffractive and interdependent, we need spatial contexts/entanglements for our physical bodies and the intangibles of our inner beings.

The un-doing of place/sites of making

Responses to place and interventions on temporal space.

A spatial practice cannot be divorced from its response to the specificity of place.

Acts of exploratory dissection, in which one is un-making/making into a space with new realms of sensory engagement.

Architecture comes from the making of a room, a room is not a room without natural light.

All spaces need natural light, That is because the moods which are created by the time of day and seasons of the year are constantly helping you in evoking what a space can be if it has natural light and can't be if it doesn't. Artificial light is a single tiny static moment in light and can never equal the nuances of mood created by the time of day and the wonder of the seasons.

Louis Kahn, 1959.

Light forms a real presence in empty space, and even within/between physical things, its vibrant intensity stemming from a complex interaction of light with matter and the way in which solid volumes could throw attention to the flowing energy they trapped and displayed.

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer, 2009.

She rarely used artificial lighting and instead relied on the often sharp geometries of a room's natural daylight.

He created new openings, that welcomed new infiltrations of light, sound and smells all revealed through the previously unseen materials and their structural layers. 

It was the urgency of the forthcoming demolition that Matta-Clark inserted himself in order to artistically deconstruct, while also reconstructing to produce radical spatial interventions. 

Beyond privileging her body as subject and ruinous spaces as sites, Woodman made certain methodologies and technical approaches characteristic aspects of her spatial practice in furthering the effects of the body and the space it encounters. 

Spaces to be activated by her performative body, offering new photographic carnalities of flesh, taken from imprints of the bare, textured concrete walls of the factories interior.

Exploring the surfaces and movements of her own body, by transferring traces of the surrounding architectural material onto her skin by pressing her skin into the wall. 

Francesca  Woodman's work, although performative, is explicitly photographic, her work is not only informed by a history of photography, but it is also actively engaged with addressing some of the medium's limits and possibilities. 

The relationship between self and objectified image through a re-staging of the drama of the photographic medium process on her own skin.

Skin, Surface and Subjectivity

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

A generation of young photographers were becoming more and more interested in how the photograph sees than what it sees. Woodman's method of exploring and exposing the process of image making itself also resonates with the critical framework in which photography was being interpreted at the time. Her work is a critique on the way in which the photographic medium is itself a means through which meaning is fixed, identity lost and subjectivity de-formed. 

Woodman's work could be read as a post-modern project of appropriation and de-familiarisation.

Woodman draws attention to the way in which the subject always evades the frame/framing of the photographic representation.

Using the terms of the medium, to draw attention, to evasion or disappearance, to using and re-situating the cropping edge onto her body, and ultimately diffusing her image by the light on which the photographs visualisation depends.

Movements/thinking, staged within photographic moments of capture, producing,entangling and amalgamated, overwritten subjectivities presented on the photographic surface.

By frequently configuring the photograph's relationship to her body as one that is tenuous or fragile, fleeting in which a subject is captured in flight, as if slipping from its surface reality, its situation.

Leylines 2012 : Spatial Drawings on Paper and Glass. #14

Spatial Drawings on Paper and Glass. #14, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Ceramic Deconstructions of Architectural Forms : Spaces/Surfaces/Interiors on Solitude/Sensuality

Sheltering Places/Dwelling/Thinking within ruinous reconstructions.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/53757637955/in/dateposted-public/

A Philosophy of Solitude.1933

In Defence of Sensuality.1935

John Cowper Powys

Exploring the space of solitude, to explore ideas and thoughts with a public. The hermit as a proto-performance artist displaying qualities of spirituality, intelligence, artistry and sensuality.

Anne Douglas.

The Hermit Project.

The Follies Journal. 2003

The House Fifteen Foot Square.

The proposed Hermitage at Cadland (drawing).

Interior Spaces.

The Alchemy of Imagination.

In the dead linen in cupboards I seek the supernatural.

Joseph Rouffange.

The wardrobe is filled with linen, there are even moonbeams which I can unfold.

Andre Breton. 1932

The Permanence of Childhood.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

Gaston Bachelard.

While the child was dreaming in solitude, he experienced a limitless existence. His reverie was not merely an escape. It was a reverie of flight. Dreaming of childhood we go back to the den of reveries.

All the ideas that I want to put forth in this chapter tend to establish the persistence in the human soul of a nucleus of childhood. Of a motionless but enduring childhood outside of history, hidden from others disguised as history when it is narrated, but having real existence only in its moments of illumination which is to say in its moments of poetic existence.

Chamber Music/Reverberations.

Constructed Space/Ceramic Forms.

On Silences, Surfaces, Interiors and Depths.

Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life, indeed without these 'objects' and a few others in equally high favour, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy.

They are hybrid objects, subject objects, like us, through us, and for us they have a quality of intimacy on the shelves of memory and in the temples of the wardrobe.

But the real wardrobe is not an everyday piece of furniture, it is not opened everyday and so like a heart that confides in no one, the key is not on the door. Many a time we dreamed of the mysteries lying dormant between its wooden flanks.

Rimbaud designates a perspective of hope, what good things are being kept in reserve in the locked wardrobe? This time it is filled with promise, it is something more than a family chronicle.

Exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image, and to add fantasy to linen is to draw a picture, by means of a volute of words off all the superabundant blessings that lie folded in piles between the flanks of an abandoned wardrobe.

Hortus Conclusus : A Serious Place, Peter Zumthor, working ideas.

Hortus Conclusus : A Serious Place

01/04/2021

 

Hortus Conclusus : Enclosed Garden

Often translated as meaning “a serious place”

To construct a contemplative room, a garden within a garden.

Pavilion as both a monumental physical structure and as a site of emotional encounter.

 

 

With a refined selection of materials he has created a contemplative space that evokes the spiritual dimension of our physical environment, in so doing he is successfully emphasising the role the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture. (Zumthor 2011: 15)

 

 

Enclosed all round and open to the sky.

A garden in an architectural setting.

“ Sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

 

Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smells and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora.

 

A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.

 

There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.

(Zumthor 2011: 15)

 

 

Illustration of “Orchard” from Bible of Wenceslaus IV,Vienna, Austrian National Library

 

Depicts in the manner of an illuminated manuscript, the husbandry and community of the medieval workforce in the secure and sheltered space of a walled garden. This pastoral craft/gathering is evocative of Zumthor’s Hortus Concluses.

 

Working with ones hands, with the earth in sheltered spaces of a pastoral community.

 

Zumthor underscores this pastoral setting when he places a pavilion at the centre of the garden; he talks of future meeting there, of looking forward “to the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

 

The Vintner’s Luck, Elizabeth Knox.

Tasting the soil in the wine, the soil and the wine are of the same substance, from the same locality; they are bonded together by the landscape.

 

Gardens Are Like Wells: Alexander Kluge

Inside every person (however serious or playful) lies an “enclosed garden”

 

Monasteries in medieval Europe were wells in which the clear waters of antiquity mingled with the dark waters of faith. At the centre of these monasteries was a garden, the most important part of which was enclosed. It was here that the most beautiful plants and medicinal herbs were concentrated. (Kluge 2011: 19)

 

Interestingly Kluge notes that these gardens were not everyday places, they were “timeless” because they were not subject to the general daily rituals of monastic life. These gardens were dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, but exposed perhaps to other texts, Homer, Ovid or the Gnostics. This relationship of literature finding a place of contemplation in the enclosed garden speaks perhaps of an “innerness”, an ability to unite mind and eye in the confusing realities of our age.

 

Civilisation and societies need ground that is uncultivated, gaps that are not subject to the principle of unity, something that is sufficient unto itself, which we do not consume: a sacrifice. Cities need spaces of piety. (Kluge 2011: 21)

 

“We need places in which we can engage in acts of mourning” Richard Sennett

(Sociologist)

 

 

 

Gardens of Information: DCPT (Development Company for Television Programmes)

 

 

Using the emblem of the Hortus Conclusus/The Enclosed Garden to stand for the relationship between the barren wastes on the one hand, and the happy isle on the other.

 

“To rescue facts from human indifference”

 

“To make gardens out of raw material and the bare bones of information.”

 

“A precursor of individualism, but has unmistakable traits in a way individualism never can.” (Kluge 2011: 21)

 

 

Spatial Practices for the Next Millennium.

 

Forming relationships not through superstructures, concepts or societies, but through inclusive structures/practices and localities. The Hortus Conclusus could stand for this type of concentration of identity (an inquiry, a person and a practice) within an intimate setting or situation.

Relationscapes : Open Systems/Speculative,Dynamic, Creative. An assemblage/energy of images,collage, drawing and texts and other disparate elements.

Practices on Solitude/The Alchemy of Imagination

Outpost 290524

Between The Lines.

Drawing as notation/mapping of an event/time/place recorded.

Sunlight Six Hours on Paper, Harleston 2022.

Sunlight on Wood.

1974. Starts making timed sun drawings in the time scale of one minute or one hour.

As many have for centuries I want to offer back into the world an affirmation of what is wonderful. I work on the surface but am aware that the spirit is often hidden within life a shadow in the darkness.

Roger Ackling

There is an aspect of Roger Ackling's work that might easily be forgotten in its assumed familiarity more usually performed onto something come across and minutely altered in the middle of a journey.

Simon Cutts.

The Work and Teaching of Roger Ackling.

A Philosophy of Solitude.1933

In Defence of Sensuality.1935

John Cowper Powys

Exploring the space of solitude, to explore ideas and thoughts with a public. The hermit as a proto-performance artist displaying qualities of spirituality, intelligence, artistry and sensuality.

Anne Douglas.

The Hermit Project.

The Follies Journal. 2003

The House Fifteen Foot Square.

The proposed Hermitage at Cadland (drawing).

Interior Spaces.

The Alchemy of Imagination.

In the dead linen in cupboards I seek the supernatural.

Joseph Rouffange.

The wardrobe is filled with linen, there are even moonbeams which I can unfold.

Andre Breton. 1932

The Permanence of Childhood.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

Gaston Bachelard.

While the child was dreaming in solitude, he experienced a limitless existence. His reverie was not merely an escape. It was a reverie of flight. Dreaming of childhood we go back to the den of reveries.

All the ideas that I want to put forth in this chapter tend to establish the persistence in the human soul of a nucleus of childhood. Of a motionless but enduring childhood outside of history, hidden from others disguised as history when it is narrated, but having real existence only in its moments of illumination which is to say in its moments of poetic existence.

Chamber Music/Reverberations.

Constructed Space/Ceramic Forms.

On Silences, Surfaces, Interiors and Depths.

Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life, indeed without these 'objects' and a few others in equally high favour, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy.

They are hybrid objects, subject objects, like us, through us, and for us they have a quality of intimacy on the shelves of memory and in the temples of the wardrobe.

But the real wardrobe is not an everyday piece of furniture, it is not opened everyday and so like a heart that confides in no one, the key is not on the door. Many a time we dreamed of the mysteries lying dormant between its wooden flanks.

Rimbaud designates a perspective of hope, what good things are being kept in reserve in the locked wardrobe? This time it is filled with promise, it is something more than a family chronicle.

Exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image, and to add fantasy to linen is to draw a picture, by means of a volute of words off all the superabundant blessings that lie folded in piles between the flanks of an abandoned wardrobe.

Sensing Spaces/Creative Imagining : Making through emergent/speculative practices

Outpost 070624

Vitamin D

New Perspectives in Drawing.

The Spell Of The Sensuous

David Abram.

Outpost 130624

Clay Nests/Alloplastic/Malleable/Reciprocal.

Environment/Self.

Spatial Boundaries : Cell/Court/Domain

To experience the poetics of a space through the 'poetic image' that is itself about the function of inhabiting.

INTIMUS.

Interior Design Theory Reader. 2006

Developing architectural practice through a phenomenologically rich creative discourse, that lies in their capacity to create 'images' rather than in their 'prudence' as actualisable architectural works.

Notes on Digital Nesting : A Poetics of Evolutionary Form.

Mark Goulthorpe.

Drawing on/Dwelling in the poetics of 'nesting'

Bachelard's chapter on Nests seems to articulate forms that were predigitally imaginary but which now merit consideration in their actuality by architects. He muses on the nest as an intricate imprint of the inhabiting body, adjusted continually as a soft cocoon that outlines the aura of movement of the bird's rounded breast. This raises the spectre of an environment adapting to our bodies and continually recalibrating to suit the vulnerability of our relation to the environment. 

For Bachelard, the mesmeric geometries of shells, their outer appearance, actually defeat the imagination: the created object itself is highly intelligible; it is the formation, not the form, that remains mysterious. The essential force of a shell being that it is exuded from within, the secretion of an organism; it is not fabricated from without as an idealised form. The shell is left in the air blindly as a trace of a convulsive absence, the smooth and lustrous internal carapace then exfoliating in its depth of exposure to the air, a temporal crustation.

Goulthorpe shares Bachelard's concern to interrogate the very manner of creative imagining, and is eager to implicate the felicity of Bachelard's thought into an emergent digital praxis. 

It is the processual capacity of a digital medium that is its most compelling attribute.

The poetic reverie of form generated by inner logic, by generating 'images' from internal and poetic imagination rather than through fabrication of an idealised external form. The implication for the interior when considered as an 'implosion,' a force of egress trapped in form, is a malleable relationship between self and environment in which 'forms of absence' indicate the function of inhabitation. Critically, Goulthorpe projects a dream of imagination enhanced and actualised by digital generation that uncovers the need to address an 'image' adequate for inhabitation of a displaced spatial sense.

An Evolutionary Architecture.

John Frazer. 1995

Ceramics+Space+Life

Gate/Wall/Pavilion/Object.

Clay as a material of creative 'implosions,' matter that gathers up, and becomes a force of egress that is made malleable/reciprocal into ceramic forms. 

Sensing Spaces.

The Life Class.

Drawing : Lines of Seeing/Lines of Looking

Collages: A Discussion Between Brian Clarke and Hans Ulrich Obrist

Brian Clarke: The Art of Light | HENI Talks

Gordon Baldwin - Objects for a Landscape, York Art Gallery, 11 February ...

The Great East Window: Brian Clarke | HENI Talks 'Perspectives'

A Great Light: Brian Clarke in Conversation with Damien Hirst

What is the nature of the drawn line? : Thinking/Becoming through Drawing.

Outpost 070524

Studio representations from the Life Class, negotiations around the physical body through drawing. 

The difficult question?

What is drawing?

What is the nature of the drawn line?

The first condition that precedes them all, the blankness of a surface, and the motions, now commencing of a point tracing, marking lines across its spaces into further spaces.

Of all the Arts, drawing has the potential to reduce to its smallest the smallest, the gap between meaning and non meaning, between repeatability and singularity.

What exactly is a mark, and how does it, might it distinguish itself from say a trace?

Drawing because of its status as becoming (blot becoming mark-mark becoming line-line becoming contour-contour becoming image-image becoming sign) the direction of this movement being always reversible, posits a continuum of sense, from one sense of 'sense' to the other, yet it seems impossible to observe, or to catch hold of. 

The precise moment or experience of that 'flip-over' from pre-sign differentiated, but not yet diacritically caught in an opposition to signification, image, and meaning. It happens in a blink, when the eye is closed insofar as something is given to us that we cannot experience, it is something like death, or a trauma, or a transport from one place to another without our knowing how we got there.

What would be the distinctive mode or modes of the manifestation of drawing.

The problem is to 'slow' the consideration of the mark, so that it does not move too quickly towards line-contour-figure or image. To allow it to hesitate on the edge, to show what it hides.

The blind-spot marks that point in the field of vision that we cannot see. If to look at something means to impose a distance and to objectify it, the blind-spot would be the 'place' in the visible from which we cannot detach ourselves and which we cannot objectify, it marks our attachment or our adhesion to the world.

Drawing, shows what it hides.

Jackie Pigeaud argues that the sense and the practice of the contour is doubled. 

The contour is the joining of the traits to make the line and the contour is doubled by being finished by a second contour that does away with the imperfections of the first. In this sense of the creative act, the artist shows what he hides and furthermore he hides the transitions and joints that make this showing possible, a collapse of the distinction between mark and line as they become contour, image, representations.

Michael Newman.

The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing.

The Stage of Drawing, Gesture and Acts.

Thinking Through Drawing.

Lines of Enquiry. 2006

Drawing as thinking as opposed to drawing as aesthetics.

It is the seemingly paradoxical nature underlying all drawing, simultaneously a form of recording and invention, situated between unconstrained gestures and the reiteration of a point of view, perspective or analysis. Each drawing is first of all a 'working sketch', the individual work forms part of a much wider and longer project and is an instance within that exploration.

Drawing/Project.

Both words drawing and project are both spatially and temporally orientated, project implies a throwing forward, a casting into the future towards some yet to be realised destination, drawing variously as an extruding, a gathering and a pulling closer. 

Drawing allows you to both evolve, describe, communicate all at the same time, it holds together many disparate factors, potentials, all of which may influence an outcome.

Non-Things : Byung-Chul Han: “I Practise Philosophy as Art”

Byung-Chul Han: “I Practise Philosophy as Art”

Gesine Borcherdt Features 02 December 2021

ArtReview

https://artreview.com/byung-chul-han-i-practise-philosophy-as-art/

The philosopher on how we might respond to a world of digital alienation.

I would entrust art with the task of developing a new way of life, a new awareness, a new narrative against the prevailing doctrine. As such, the saviour is not philosophy but art. 

Courtesy Byung-Chul Han

Byung-Chul Han is a philosopher with a broad following in the artworld, where his writings, originally in German, on such perennial modern conditions as alienation, loneliness, the fragmentation and disintegration of reality, and the role of technology in fostering so many ills have found traction as well scepticism. The South Korean-born, Berlin-based thinker’s latest book, Undinge (Nonobjects), was published earlier this year.

ArtReview Undinge revolves around our loss of connection to things in favour of digital information. What do objects have that new technologies don’t?

Byung-Chul Han Undinge proposes that the age of objects is over. The terrane order, the order of the Earth, consists of objects that take on a permanent form and provide a stable environment for human habitation. Today the terrane order has been replaced by the digital order. The digital order makes the world less tangible by informatising it. Nonobjects are currently entering our environment from all sides and displacing objects.

I call nonobjects information. Today we are in the transition from the age of objects to the age of nonobjects. Information, not objects, now defines our environment. We no longer occupy earth and sky but Google Earth and the Cloud. The world is becoming progressively less tangible, cloudier and ghostlier. Nothing is substantial. It makes me think of the novel The Memory Police [1994], by the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa. The novel tells of a nameless island where objects – hair ties, hats, stamps, even roses and birds – disappear irretrievably. Together with the objects, memories also disappear. People live in an eternal winter of forgetting and loss. Everything is seized by a progressive disintegration. Even body parts disappear. In the end it’s just disembodied voices, floating around in the air.

In some respects, this island of lost memories resembles our present. Information dissolves reality, which is just as ghostly as those disembodied voices. Digitalisation dematerialises, disembodies and eventually strips away the substantiality of our world. It also eliminates memories. Rather than keeping track of memories, we amass data and information. We have all become infomaniacs. This infomania makes objects disappear. What happens to objects when they are permeated by information? The informatisation of our world turns objects into ‘infomat’, namely information-processing actors. The smartphone is not an object but an infomat, or even an informant, monitoring and influencing us.

Objects don’t spy on us. That’s why we trust them, in a way that we don’t trust the smartphone. Every apparatus, any domination technique, spawns its own devotional objects, which are used to promote submission. They stabilise dominion. The smartphone is the devotional object of the digital-information regime. As a tool of repression it acts like a rosary, which in its handiness the mobile device represents. To ‘like’ is to pray digitally. We continue to go to confession. We expose ourselves voluntarily, yet we’re no longer asking for forgiveness, but rather for attention.

AR Undinge emphasises the ideas, found in many of your books, that in the place of building relationships with others – or the other – humans are increasingly mirroring themselves. Nevertheless people do live in relationships and even today remain attached to objects that they don’t want to throw away. What’s the difference between then and now, then being the time before globalisation and digitalisation?

BCH I don’t know if people who spend all their time looking at smartphones still have or need objects that are close to their heart. Objects are receding into the background of our attention. The current hyperinflation of objects, which has led to their explosive proliferation, only highlights our increasing indifference towards them. They are almost stillborn.

Our obsession is no longer for objects, but for information and data. Today we produce and consume more information than objects. We actually get high on communication. Libidinal energies have been redirected from objects to nonobjects. The consequence is infomania. We are all infomaniacs now. Object fetishism is probably over. We are becoming information- and data-fetishists. Now there is even talk of datasexuals. Tapping and swiping a smartphone is almost a liturgical gesture, and it has a massive effect on our relationship to the world. Information that doesn’t interest us gets swiped away. Content we like, on the other hand, gets zoomed in, using the pincer movement of our fingers. We literally have a grip on the world. It’s entirely up to us.

That’s how the smartphone amplifies our ego. We subjugate the world to our needs with a few swipes. The world appears to us in the digital light of complete availability. Unavailability is precisely what makes the other other, and so it disappears. Robbed of its otherness, it is now merely consumable. Tinder turns the other into a sexual object. Using the smartphone, we withdraw into a narcissistic sphere, one free of the unknowns of the other. It makes the other obtainable by objectifying it. It turns a you into an it. This disappearance of the other is precisely why the smartphone makes us lonely.

AR You write, ‘Objects are resting places for life’, meaning that they are charged with significance. You cite your jukebox as an example, which holds an almost magical power for you. What do you reply when someone accuses you of nostalgia?

BCH Under no circumstances do I want to praise old, beautiful objects. That would be very unphilosophical. I refer to objects as resting places for life because they stabilise human life. The same chair and the same table, in their sameness, lend the fickle human life some stability and continuity. We can linger with objects. With information, however, we cannot.

If we want to understand what kind of society we live in, we have to comprehend what information is. Information has very little currency. It lacks temporal stability, since it lives off the excitement of surprise. Due to its temporal instability, it fragments perception. It throws us into a continuous frenzy of topicality. Hence it’s impossible to linger on information. That’s how it differs from objects. Information puts the cognitive system itself into a state of anxiety. We encounter information with the suspicion that it could just as easily be something else. It is accompanied by basic distrust. It strengthens the contingency experience.

Fake news embodies a heightened form of the contingency that is inherent in information. And information, due to its ephemerality, makes time-consuming cognitive practices such as experience, memory or perception disappear. So my analyses have nothing to do with nostalgia.

AR In your work you repeatedly circle around digitalisation for how it makes the other disappear and lets narcissism blossom, as well as facilitating voluntary self-exploitation in the age of neoliberalism. How did you initially conceive of these subjects? Is there a personal angle to it?

BCH At the core of my books The Burnout Society [2010] and Psychopolitics [2017] lies the understanding that Foucault’s analysis of the disciplinary society can no longer explain our present. I distinguish between the disciplinary regime and the neoliberal regime. The disciplinary regime works with commands and restraints. It is oppressive. It suppresses freedom. The neoliberal regime on the other hand is not oppressive, but seductive and permissive. It exploits freedom instead of suppressing it. We voluntarily and passionately exploit ourselves believing that we fulfil ourselves.

So we don’t live in a disciplinary society but in a meritocracy. Foucault did not see that. The subjects of neoliberal meritocracy, believing themselves to be free, are in reality servants. They are absolute servants, exploiting themselves without a master. Self-exploitation is more efficient than exploitation by others, because it goes hand in hand with a feeling of freedom. Kafka expressed this paradoxical freedom of the servant very fittingly in an aphorism: ‘The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master’.

This constant self-flagellation is tiring and depressing. The work itself, no matter how hard it may be, does not lead to profound tiredness. Even though we can be tired after work, it is not the same as a destructive tiredness. Work at some point comes to an end. The pressure to perform that we apply to ourselves, on the other hand, outlasts the working hours. It torments us in our sleep and frequently leads to sleepless nights. It is possible to recover from work. But it is impossible to recover from the pressure to perform.

It is especially this internal pressure, this pressure to perform and optimise, that makes us tired and depressed. So it is not oppression but depression that is the pathological sign of our times. Only an oppressive regime provokes resistance. The neoliberal regime, which does not suppress but exploits freedom, does not encounter resistance. Authority is complete when it masquerades as freedom. These are insights that lie at the heart of my sociocritical essays. They can be summarised as: the other disappears.

AR You don’t shy away from terms like magic and mystery. Would you classify yourself as a romantic?

BCH To me, everything that is is magical and mysterious. Our retina is completely covered by the cornea, even overgrown, so that we no longer perceive it. I would say that I am not a romantic, but a realist who perceives the world the way it is. It simply consists of magic and mystery.

Over three years I established a winter-flowering garden. I also wrote a book about it with the title Praise to the Earth [2018]. My understanding from being a gardener is: Earth is magic. Whoever claims otherwise is blind. Earth is not a resource, not a mere means to achieve human ends. Our relationship to nature today is not determined by astonished observation, but solely by instrumental action. The Anthropocene is precisely the result of total subjugation of Earth/nature to the laws of human action. It is reduced to a component of human action. Man acts beyond the interpersonal sphere into nature by subjecting it entirely to his will. He thereby unleashes processes that would not come about without his intervention, and lead to a total loss of control.

It is not enough that we now have to be more careful with Earth as a resource. Rather, we need a completely different relationship with Earth. We should give it back its magic, its dignity. We should learn to marvel at it again. Natural disasters are the consequences of absolute human action. Action is the verb for history. Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is confronted with the catastrophic consequences of human action. In front of him, the heap of debris of history grows towards the sky. But he cannot remove it, because the storm from the future called progress carries him away. His wide eyes and open mouth reflect his powerlessness. Only an angel of inaction would be able to defend himself against the storm.

We should rediscover the capacity for inaction, the capacity that does not act. So my new book, which I am working on at the moment, has the title Vita contemplativa or of inactivity. It is a counterpart or antidote to Hannah Arendt’s book Vita activa or of the active life (Vita activa oder vom tätigen Leben, 1958), which glorifies human action.

AR In Undinge you write, ‘We save masses of data, yet never return to the memories. We accumulate friends and followers, without encountering an other.’ Similar incantations were heard at the time of the invention of the letterpress and later newspaper and television… Could it be that you are catastrophising the situation?

BCH My aim is not to catastrophise the world, but to illuminate it. My task as a philosopher is to explain what kind of society we live in. When I say that the neoliberal regime exploits freedom instead of suppressing it, or that the smartphone is the devotional object of the digital-information regime, it has nothing to do with doom-mongering. Philosophy is truth-speaking.

In recent years I have worked on a phenomenology of information in order to make today’s world comprehensible. In Undinge I have made the proposition that nowadays we perceive reality primarily in terms of information. As a consequence, there is rarely a tangible contact with reality. Reality is robbed of its presence. We no longer perceive its physical vibrations. The layer of information, which covers objects like a membrane, shields the perception of intensities. Perception, reduced to information, numbs us to moods and atmospheres. Rooms lose their poetics. They give way to roomless networks along which information spreads. Digital time, with its focus on the present, on the moment, disperses the fragrance of time. Time is atomised into a sequence of isolated presents. Atoms are not fragrant.

Only a narrative practice of time brings forth fragrant molecules of time. The informatisation of reality thus leads to a loss of space and time. This has nothing to do with doom-mongering. This is phenomenology.

AR You are currently in Rome, the epitome of a place of patina and history, where life happens on the streets, food with friends and family is important, and the Vatican is omnipresent. Do you not have the feeling that your grievances about the isolation of man and digital substitute-satisfactions only concern certain groups or situations?

BCH What is the point when people meet and mostly just look at their smartphones? Despite interconnectedness and total communication, people today feel lonelier than ever. We turn you into an available, consumable it. The world is running short of you. This makes us lonely.

In that respect there is no difference between Rome, New York or Seoul. Rome impressed me in a different sense. For happiness we need a towering, superior other. Digitalisation gets rid of any counterpart, any resistance, any other. It smoothes everything over. The smartphone is smart because it makes everything available and removes all resistance. Rome is especially abundant in towering others.

Today I again cycled around the whole of the city and visited countless churches. I discovered a beautiful church that bestowed a now very rare experience of presence on me. The church is rather small. Once you enter, you find yourself immediately under a dome. The dome is decorated in patterns formed by octagons. These decrease in size towards the centre of the dome, so that the dome creates a strong optical upwards pull. Light bursts in through windows arranged around the peak of the dome, where the depiction of a golden dove floats. The whole forms a sublime other with a vertical pull that effectively made me float in space. I was lifted up. That’s when I understood what the holy spirit is. It is nothing other than the other. It was an exhilarating experience, the experience of presence, right inside a holy object.

Dome of San Bernardo alle Terme

Dome of San Bernardo alle Terme, Rome. Photo: Architas / Wikimedia Commons

AR In your opinion, what has to happen for the world to once again concern itself with real objects, charged with life – and most of all with other people? How can we learn to deal with the dilemmas of our time?

BCH Every book of mine ends in a utopian counternarrative. In The Burnout Society I countered I-fatigue, which leads to depression, with Us-fatigue, which brings about community. In The Expulsion of the Other [2016] I contrasted increasing narcissism with the art of listening. Psychopolitics proposes idiotism as a utopian figure against complete interconnectedness and complete surveillance. An idiot is someone who is not networked. In The Agony of Eros [2012] I propose that only Eros is capable of defeating depression. The Scent of Time [2014] articulates an art of lingering. My books analyse the malaises of our society and propose concepts to overcome them. Yes, we must work on new ways of life and new narratives.

AR Another book of yours is called The Disappearance of Rituals [2020]. How do rituals, people and objects help to root us in our lives? Can we not manage by ourselves?

BCH Rituals are architectures of time, structuring and stabilising life, and they are on the wane. The pandemic has accelerated the disappearance of rituals. Work also has ritual aspects. We go to work at set times. Work takes place in a community. In the home office, the ritual of work is completely lost. The day loses its rhythm and structure. This somehow makes us tired and depressed.

In The Little Prince [1943], by [Antoine de] Saint-Exupéry, the little prince asks the fox to always visit at the exact same time, so that the visit becomes a ritual. The little prince explains to the fox what a ritual is. Rituals are to time as rooms are to an apartment. They make time accessible like a house. They organise time, arrange it. In this way you make time appear meaningful.

Time today lacks a solid structure. It is not a house, but a capricious river. The disappearance of rituals does not simply mean that we have more freedom. The total flexibilisation of life brings loss, too. Rituals may restrict freedom, but they structure and stabilise life. They anchor values and symbolic systems in the body, reinforcing community. In rituals we experience community, communal closeness, physically.

Digitalisation strips away the physicality of the world. Then comes the pandemic. It aggravates the loss of the physical experience of community. You’re asking: can’t we do this by ourselves? Today we reject all rituals as something external, formal and therefore inauthentic. Neoliberalism produces a culture of authenticity, which places the ego at its centre. The culture of authenticity develops a suspicion of ritualised forms of interaction. Only spontaneous emotions, subjective states, are authentic. Modelled behaviour, for example courtesy, is written off as inauthentic or superficial. The narcissistic cult of authenticity is partly responsible for the increasing brutality of society.

In my book I argue the case against the cult of authenticity, for an ethic of beautiful forms. Gestures of courtesy are not just superficial. The French philosopher Alain says that gestures of courtesy hold a great power on our thoughts. That if you mime kindness, goodwill and joy, and go through motions such as bowing, they help against foul moods as well as stomach ache. Often the external has a stronger hold than the internal.

Blaise Pascal once said that instead of despairing over a loss of faith, one should simply go to mass and join in rituals such as prayer and song, in other words mime, since it is precisely this that will bring back faith. The external transforms the internal, brings about new conditions. Therein lies the power of rituals. And our consciousness today is no longer rooted in objects. These external things can be very effective in stabilising consciousness. It is very difficult with information, since it is really volatile and holds a very narrow range of relevance.

AR You enjoy the German language in an almost dissective way and celebrate a paratactical writing style, which gives you a unique voice in contemporary cultural critique. It is like a mixture of Martin Heidegger and Zen. What is your connection to them?

BCH A journalist from the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit once said that I can bring down thought constructs that hold up our everyday life in just a few sentences. Why do you write a 1,000-page book if you can enlighten the world in a few words? A 1,000-page book, which has to explain what the world is about, perhaps cannot express as much as a single haiku can: ‘The first snow – even the daffodil leaves bend’ or ‘Temple bells die out. The fragrant blossoms remain. A perfect evening!’ (Basho)

In my writings I do indeed make use of this haiku effect. I say: It-is-so. This creates an evidence effect, which then makes sense to everyone. A journalist once wrote that my books are getting progressively thinner, that they will at some point completely disappear. I would add that my thoughts will then permeate the air. Everyone can breathe them in.

AR At the end of Undinge, where you quote The Little Prince, you refer to values like trust, commitment and responsibility as being at risk. But aren’t these core human values that outlast any era – even during dictatorships and wars?

BCH Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing. Everything is shortlived. We tell ourselves that we will have more freedom. But this short-term nature destabilises our life. We can bond with objects, but not with information. We only briefly make note of information. Afterwards it’s like a listened-to message on the answering machine. It’s headed towards oblivion.

I think trust is a social practice, and today it is being replaced by transparency and information. Trust enables us to build positive relationships with others, despite lacking knowledge. In a transparency society, one immediately asks for information from others. Trust as a social practice becomes superfluous. The transparency and information society fosters a society of distrust.

AR Your books are more widely read in the arts than in philosophy. How do you explain that?

BCH Effectively more artists than philosophers read my books. Philosophers are no longer interested in the present. Foucault once said that the philosopher is a journalist who captures the now with ideas. That’s what I do. Moreover my essays are on their way to another life, to a different narrative. Artists feel addressed by that. I would entrust art with the task of developing a new way of life, a new awareness, a new narrative against the prevailing doctrine. As such, the saviour is not philosophy but art. Or I practise philosophy as art.

Gesine Borcherdt is a writer, editor and curator based in Berlin

Translated from the German by Liam Tickner

ArtReview’s Power 100 – the annual ranking of the most influential people in art – is out now

Gesine Borcherdt

Features02 December 2021ArtReview