Working Towards a Secular Retreat in the Landscape

Working Towards a Secular Retreat in the Landscape.

The task of architecture is to maintain the differentiation and hierarchical and qualitative articulation of existential space. Instead of participating in the process of further speeding up the experience of the world, architecture has to slow down experience, halt time, and defend the natural slowness and diversity of experience, architecture must defend us against excessive exposure, noise and communication. Finally, the task of architecture is to maintain and defend silence.

Juhani Pallasmaa : The Thinking Hand.

Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. 2009

This exploratory project centers around the heritage site of Waverley Abbey. This site has ruins from its ecclesiastical architecture that could be utilized in the sensory aspects of an architectural experience. The site offers up the possibility of constructing and choreographing enclosures and interiors by directly working with its unique sensitivities of place, mass, light, materials and surfaces. This project sets up real potentials to explore the possibility of crafting interior spaces that can host a rich layering of place perceptions. Currently my research has explored a number of themes and formal structures that might engender these concerns through my professional engagements with contemporary art practices and experience in the construction industry.

Peter Zumthor, Hortus Conclusus, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 Adam Sharr, Heidegger for Architects 2007

Leon van Schaik, Spatial Intelligence 2008

Henry Plummer, The Architecture of Natural Light 2009

Architecture is not made with the brain. The labour of Alison and Peter Smithson.

Architectural Association 2005.

Smithson’s on modernity, not as a goal but as an established reality that needs to be interpreted.

Articulation of the volumes based on rigorous rules that derive from the ordering capacity of the necessities of daily life.

Holistic Practices.

The way person and work fit together so seamlessly.

Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker,2005:85)

Transitions between spaces.

‘Building relationships to relate to what already exists.’ Herzog and de Meuron The Parallel of Art and Life

Aesthetics about Perception Poetics about Production

‘The approach leads from the static object of the mere picture to the dynamic process of imagining. ’(Schregenberger,2005:82)

‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ (attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place) Peter Smithson 2001

‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction and a concern for that which exists.’ (Schregenberger,2005:81)

Complex Ordinariness Bruno Krucker

Urban Structuring.

Importance of urban planning, specific responses to the surroundings generated different shapes. Testing out spatial bound volumes and aligning them with the site or urban fabric/passages of use and existing features.

The Everyday.

Life between buildings.

The necessities of daily life (the repetition of basic sequences) giving shape and layout to the architecture.

Heavy Prefabrication. Whole wall sections used to a homogeneous expression that emphasises their tactile qualities.

To systematise transitions of both components and internal spatial orderings. The sizes of elements are determined by the inner spatial ordering in an almost organic, non-schematic way.’

We developed elements that embrace the entire thickness of the wall.’ (Krucker,2005:85)

The search for directness while avoiding too much design, but still ensuring that our buildings look right in their surroundings.

Cultural Background.

Fitting in with the ordinariness of the environment, an ordinariness that only reveals its strength over time.

Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker,2005:85)

The anonymous settings of settlements and agglomerations create documents/cinematic presences of familiarity within these architectural contexts. It is important to go beyond any superficial fascination with the ‘periphery’.

Structural Thinking. Anti Object: Kengo Kuma.

Identity out of structure/layers of latticed structure.

Character-forming ability of structures, through the transitions of interior to exterior spaces. ‘Our approach was to act decisively at an urban and a spatial level and to create precise alignments that would strengthen existing elements. Within the structure, it becomes possible to give specific places an individual identity and to create an awareness of the relation between repetition and difference. Seen in this way , the facades are less a surface around a volume, and more the outer edges of the structure itselfi importantly the structuring becomes independent of the programme, which can change over time). ’   (Krucker,2005:87)

The power of a building originates from its structuring (a character of a building that is not wholly subservient to its programme).

Neutrality and Character.

‘This kind of structural thinking supports the search for a more anonymous everyday architecture that can nevertheless develop a character of its own.

The prefabricated parts generate complex volumetric forms that remain only partly visible after assembly. The effect is similar to that of Japanese timber construction, in which the simplicity and clarity of appearance belie the complexity of the joining techniques involved.’ (Krucker,2005:89)

‘The Smithson’s embraced an architecture that was not purely driven by formal intensions but by questions regarding content. This is an architecture that results from an attitude of openness towards the world (of worlds) and an acute awareness of the impact of the architect’s actions. Such an architecture insists on addressing the nature of real conditions and how they fit into the fabric of a larger context.’ (Krucker,2005:90)

Lessons Learnt from Alison and Peter Smithson Jonathan Sergison and Stephen Bates.

‘I remember finding the work awkward, even ugly in its removal from architectural conventions.’

Research Contexts/Materials

The Shift/Italian Thoughts, both became pivotal in the understanding of the intensions behind their work.

What does it mean to be an English architect? The lessons presented as six themes.

Strategy and Detail, as a design concept and method.

A manual for negotiating our way through the development of a project. 

‘All our projects begin with an interpretation of the specifics of the programme and a response to the place we are adding to, either as a series of sketches or a model exploring a building form. A dialogue then begins about the ‘feeling’ of the project, its material presence and its language of construction; this provides a framework in which to take decisions and a structure that can be referred to.’(Sergison,2005:92) Trying it out, testing its placement in place, its on-site feelings. 

A detailing of open brick perpends (a breathing building envelope) that is overlaid on all three elevations, giving a quiet expression to the building’s tectonics.

Conglomerate Ordering, as an overall interconnected building solution. 

‘A bold simple form adjusted by the forces of the site, thereby containing an equivalence, an overall tonality through the concrete frame as a structural solution and the block infill and their aluminium dressings. The building form and plan arrangement were adjusted according to the particularities of the site and to rhyme with the geometries of the neighbouring industrial buildings.’ (Sergison,2005:94)

Ways, (a spine providing a variety of spatial experiences coupled with the means by which circulation is distributed) sometimes Ways are employed in a manner that is latent and discreet; in other instances they are the most public part of a project. 

‘The concept of Ways as a means of organizing circulation and supporting activity.’ (Sergison,2005:94)

A simple organizing circulation element that can be read, at one level, as a street or lane running the length of the plan, linking the apartments. This space is given a strong material intensity, entirely timber-clad on floor, walls and soffit. At selected moments views of the city are framed or the sky is revealed.

Janus Face, origins in Italian Thoughts, teaches us to understand how mediation is possible between inside and outside, or between one side of a building and another; as all faces are equally engaged with what lies before them.

By focusing attention on the enclosing envelope and how the building should engage with the conditions around it.

The opposing forces of a site and its relationships to the different faces of the building can become multifaceted, through scale, the choice of material or even the layering of its construction; a discreet link is sought which connects rather than confronts.

‘The Solar Pavilion, is both a lookout over the distant landscape on the north facade, sitting on top of the existing cottage wall, and a garden pavilion mediating between two types of controlled landscape. It aims to provide a minimal enclosure that allows as immediate a relationship between interior and exterior as possible.’

(Sergison,2005:97)

Ground Notations, the need to find an existing physical structure, see ‘Shifting the Track’ (Smithson.)

‘The Smithsons’ search for a strong existing element that could be added to and adjusted, if necessary, ensures that a project is grounded in its place. Successful ground notations operate at varying scales, ranging from large pieces of infrastructure (roadways, etc) to natural, seasonal landscape infrastructure (trees and meadows). Once absorbed into an existing situation, new ground notations begin to refocus a place and act as the basis for subsequent actions’ (Sergison,2005:97)

Drawing on an existing topographic ground notation (earth-bunds) matrices of bundways that help irrigate the marshlands and define land ownership. 

‘New topographical features containing the infrastructure necessary for development, with roads on top and supply conduits inside them. Public buildings were located on top of swollen bunds, for visibility and orientation, while the spaces in between bunds became serviced fields for new settlement.’ (Sergison,2005:98)

Could it be that where a human settlement seems structure less, without purpose, we invent and build ‘ground-notations’ to offer an analogous power to that offered by strong natural landforms?

‘As Found, is a small affair: it is about being careful, the as found (is) where the art is in the picking up, turning over and putting with.’ (Smithson.)

‘The essence of ‘as found’ as a concept lies in accepting the value of the everyday. Any aspect of the built environment can be interpreted and employed as a trigger for architectural propositions. To consider ways in which the ‘ordinary’ can be harnessed through reinterpretation.’ (Sergison,2005:98)

From One Place to Another : Contained Inner Spaces/Systems.

Outpost 220724

Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space.

Gaston Bachelard.

The Poetics of Space.

Art is energy.

Graham Gussin.

We take ...our everyday external reality very much for granted: the room that we sit in, the streets around us, the virtual space of billboards, and movies and TV ... we take all this for granted. But in fact it is, literally speaking, an illusion generated by our central nervous system. It's as much a virtual reality as the one the cyber people are working on ...Within our minds all these different planes of spatial reality are intersecting.

J.G. Ballard, KGB 7, KGB Media, 1995

All of Graham Gussin's work engages in some way with the human experience of the infinite. He is conscious that our perception and understanding of the world is manipulated and transformed by a complex layering of mass communications and consumer culture. Often his work suggests a sense of displacement, playing on our desire to be somewhere else, in a different time or space.

He has been particularly influenced by science fiction, especially of the sort that presents a set of circumstances requiring resolution, such as H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, or touches on what J.G. Ballard has described as the 'internal landscape',

Any Object in the Universe relates to a romantic tradition of landscape, together with the idea of a uropian space which is often explored in these types of science fiction.

Much of Gussin's work is experiential, dependent on the viewer for its completion. In Beyond the Infinite of 1994, for example, the artist appropriated a scene from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. He edited and displayed two film loops of the same scene, one slightly longer than the other so that one loop appears to wait for, or follow, the other: 'The shorter loop has the spaceman wandering around the hotel, endlessly looking for himself. The longer loop includes not only this search but also the discovery of himself as an old man', Kubrick's narrative sequence is effectively disrupted. Standing between the two monitors, the viewer becomes a conductor of time and space between the two scenes.

States of mind seem to be the main subjects of Gussin's work, conditions or states that might be, for example, associated with the sublime, the sense of awe and wonder that takes one out of oneself, But it is the failure to find the sublime moment that he appears to linger on. In Fall (7200-1) he deals very literally with the agitated state of expectation, Confronted by a large video projection of an unspectacular landscape the viewer stands on the edge of it waiting for something to happen, Suddenly the tranquility and emptiness of the landscape is disturbed by something falling dramatically out of the sky, shattering the still surface of a lake: 'I like the idea that Fall embodies the possibility of this thing happening without anybody seeing it. The splash occurs infrequently so the subject of this piece isn't really the disturbance- rather it's the possibility of it happening'.

The idea for Any Object in the Universe stemmed from a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, A Tale Of The Ragged Mountains, which the artist summarises as follows: 'The whole text is a vision ...there is a character who takes a lot of opium and coffee. He then goes for a walk and slips into a previously unrecognised region within his geographic locality. Within that second or parallel space he dies, but somehow returns to tell the tale of his death in that space. When his tale is complete he dies in real space and time. So it's a kind of closed loop, returning in and out of and being effected by two parallel spaces, an illusory space that becomes so powerful that it results in death'.

A similar notion of slipping between two spaces underlies Any Object in the Universe. Walking in to a darkened room the viewer steps on to a slightly raised floor, each step producing an electronically generated echo. The walls are clad with what appears to be sound-proofing material. Projected on to one wall is an image of the same room, empty but for a microphone on a stand. Confusingly, the echo appears to be coming from the fictional, projected space. 'What at first seems to be an echo chamber becomes a space where sound cannot escape, a trap of some kind.' The viewer, like the echo, seems to be caught between a real and an imaginary space.

The other fictional space that influenced Gussin's making of Any Object in the Universe is the sound- proofed capsule depicted in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 film The Man Who Fell To Earth, a capsule where, as Gussin describes it, 'all sound is deadened and disappears ...It's an enclosed, very precise and exactly measured space, but also an infinite space ...In the film David Bowie falls to earth. The whole film is a struggle against gravity, ...about him attempting to get back into the sky, which he doesn't achieve'. Commenting on his use of an image from the cinema screen the artist has said, 'I like the way that filmic space spills out into reality'.

As if standing in front of a painting by Mark Rothko, or on the 'beam-me- up' platform in Star Trek, we stand on the raised floor, waiting for something to happen, desiring to be transported in some way to another dimension. The artist explains: 'What I was interested in trying to do was to place the viewer in the space that is projected, just for a split second, so that it makes him or her disappear from the space he or she is standing in to occupy that space, even just for the blink of an eye ...That's where the work really lies, in that momentary confusion of not being able to tell'.

Alongside Any Object in the Universe Gussin shows a number of black and white line drawings. Like the installation, these Drawings of Nothing and Nowhere explore how we experience space. The rectangular shapes seem to hover on the surface of the paper yet perspectivally they disappear towards a central vanishing point. As familiar as the introductory credits for Pearl and Dean advertising that prepare audiences for the immersive space of cinema, they ask the viewer to think about location, about their position in time and space. The drawings cannot succeed in the aim suggested by their title, instead they draw attention to the way we attempt to articulate and measure both internal and external space.

Text written by Virginia Button

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/art-now-graham-gussin

From One Place to Another.

From Another System.

Contained Spaces/Systems.

It's true, I know, that there are more gaps in the island than there used to be. When I was a child, the whole place seemed ... how can I put this? ...a lot fuller, a lot more real. But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner too, diluted somehow. I suppose that kept things in balance. And even when that balance begins to collapse, something remains. Which is why you shouldn't worry.

Yoko Ogawa.

The Memory Police.

Things oriented in time present themselves to us as irreversible phenomena.

Drawing, traces that create the intermediate spaces of perception.

Visual traces of both the macroscopic and microscopic phenomena/memory/of matter.

Art is all about energy (free energy from one system/person to another)

Durational/Immediate Matters of Concern/Media.

Things/Correspondences in their propositional state of becoming.

Developing the creative liberty with a conceptual structure. This development grows through analogy and recombination. Making an analogy involves taking an aspect of a concept and re-using it in another context, preserving something of its original meaning, while letting something else go. In such a way that the resultant combination produces new and effective meaning.

Carlo Rovelli.

Drawing as an analogically informing process.

Architectural/Conceptual Frameworks.

Making Immediate Spatial Relations/Situatedness.

What Remains?

Why Does It Remain?

The intermediate/immediacy space of drawing as the traces of disequilibrium. 

The formation of every trace is nothing other than an intermediate step towards equilibrium. 

If the present has traces of the past it is solely due to the disequilibrium of that past. It is for this reason that we remember the past not the future. Because of the disequilibrium in the past, we know the past, because there are traces of it in the present, in our memories for example. To say that the past is determined is to say no more that we have traces of it. It is not a direction intrinsic to time that makes the past knowable, determined.

What we call the past is how things were arranged at one point in time.

It is the disequilibrium of the past, only that, that gives rise to traces.

A meteorite that falls on the moon carries free energy with it, its crater is the trace that it leaves until the incessant unravelling of things erases it. In this intermediate phase, the crater is a trace of the impact/event, a memory of it. Only traces exist in this intermediate period. 

The same goes for a photograph, for the memory in our brain, it exists thanks to the fact that free energy has arrived in a system, the camera film, our brain, from another system that was not in equilibrium with it, and the fact that it takes time for equilibrium to be re-established.

White Holes

Carlo Rovelli.

Notes

36. The low entropy of the past is the ultimate source of all the information contained in every trace or memory.

37. The distinction between causes and effects has no meaning in the microscopic description of phenomena. At the microscopic level of things there are regularities, physical laws, and probability and these notions do not distinguish between past and future. The distinction between past and future is a property of history of the universe from the variables that we call macroscopic, it is only for this reason that we can speak about causes.

Gaston Bachelard never developed a metaphysics capable of unifying his reflections on science and poetry.

Much that our powers here cannot sustain is permitted there.

We fly to the other side of space and of time.

The equations of quantum gravity describe a world more complex than a simple spatiotemporal continuum.

Indexical Trace/Drawing : Anthropocentrism/Hospitality.

Outpost 14082

Figurative Anthropocentrism in the Visual Arts/Humanities.

Organism-Person-Environment

Architectural Body.

A figure in congress with its environment.

Attunement is a living dynamic relation with another being, it doesn't stop.

De-constructivist Drawings.

Causal Matter Remains.

Reclaiming the papers reserve, its infinite space, through the reclamation of mark making.

Drawing/Veering towards things.

All lines as vectors of movement, situated to have immediate phenomenal values.

Seeking out, a line that searches for a corporeal congress.

Immediate primal territories of making/tuning differences.

Marks of attunement and adaption that we can own and explore.

Indexical Trace/Butades, definitive space/body of a boundary of sensation. 

Bodily inclusion, a drawing hidden yet revealing its presence intimately to the papers total surface. 

A lines movement, its attunement/demarcation to the body, of the body, creates the flow of sensation, simultaneous lines make explicit the absence of the matter into form.  

On the manner of attunement, since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy. Nor is this attunement a 'merely' aesthetic approach to a basically blank extensional substance. Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing. 

In Art As In Life.

What would it look like if we allowed more and more things to have some kind of power over us?

There is an excessive intensity to the energy of things that can't be contained efficiently. This can produce a type of restricted economy, that is an economy in which the dominant theme is efficiency.

Living in a society based on principles of restriction and efficiency, a modern life that is tight and restrictive and full of all kinds of police and policing, of policing pleasure, of keeping lifeforms alive. In the end any style of efficiency is going to be stifling and uncreative, not allowing for malfunctions and accidents.

Art is a place where we get to see what it means to be human or whatever, which is why what I do is called humanities, which contains a lot of different temporal formats, realising this is what ecological awareness is all about. It's the equivalent to acknowledging in a deep way, the existence of things that aren't you with whom you coexist. Once you've done that you can't un-acknowledge it. There's no going back.

All Art Is Ecological/Tunings. Timothy Morton.

Painting adds perspectives of emotions through colour.

An idea for a painting is a way of seeing inquiry/nurturing it/gathering an idea for exploration between interior-exterior. 

 

Cell/Court/Domain : Inner Spaces/The Quiet Room/Reverie and Dwelling.

Dom Hans van der Laan.

Monastic Order/Ritual/Silences.

Clay-Ceramic/Thinking Architectures/Interior Places.

Gaston Bachelard.

The Poetics of Space.

An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.

Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.

The cell of myself fills with wonder.

The white-washed wall of my secret.

Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.

Theoretical Objects/Interiors.

A Philosophy of Solitude.

What do I know?

Michel de Montaigne

Pigeon Houses/Dovecotes for Philosophers. 

Spatial Object Diagram/Drawings as Tuning Towards OOO

All Art is Ecological.

Timothy Morton.

On the significance of things, an attunement that is alert and relaxed.

Site drawing from a propositional garden.

Causal Environment.

Cyanotype/Sculpture Trail.

Art/Agencies and movements that open up the world to curiosity, wonder and lightness.

Drawing : Proximities and The Sensing Self

 Outpost 221223

Drawings re-examine, explore the 'Body Boundary' its feelings between the world of the individual and the world. Drawings attempt to establish a common boundary condition between themselves and the outside world.

We experience architecture not by aggressively seeking it, but by dwelling in it.

Drawing is always a formulation or elaboration of the thought itself at the very moment it translates itself, makes itself as an image.

Proximities and The Sensing Self.

You see and hear things figuratively and at a distance. But you touch the actual thing. You can extend haptic perception with an instrument, in which case the 'feeling/sensing' moves out to the end of the cane. But when you extend sight or sound, telescopically or electronically you continue to see and hear figuratively and at a distance. 

Kinaesthesia a property of haptic sensing that allows one to sense the body motion (haptically) by detecting the movement of joints and muscles through your entire bodyscape. No other 'sense' deals as directly with the three dimensional world or similarly carries with it the possibility of altering the environment in the process of perceiving it. No other sense engages in feeling and doing simultaneously. This action/reaction characteristic of haptic perception separates it from all other forms of sensing, which in comparison come to seem rather abstract.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Bloomer, Moore.

Organism-Person-Environment

Affect Architecture : Sociological Inquiry. 

Architectural Body. 

Awakawa/Gins.

Caloricity/Corporeality.

The Dreaming Physical Body.

Poetry as a synthesis of human existence.

Novalis, Bachelard.

I've always loved encountering a Rothko, up close, they really hum through your body.

I like the spaces that a large scale offers.

I think of each mark or area as having the possibility of carrying a sensation.

Jenny Saville.

Bodily Boundaries.

Body-Image-Theory.

The 'Physical' Body is the private property of the individual, but the individual's Body Image is developed, socially and thus has a social property. The tendency to associate the body with physicality rather than image over associates the body with notions of privacy.

Bloomer, Moore.

Paint/Haptic Fleshings.

The Bodies She Paints.

Chadwick/Saville.

If Painting presents Being, the drawn line presents Becoming.

Norman Bryson.

Drawing : Bodily Transactions/Making Public.

Displaying : Showing Possession.

Possession, like a body is a feeling that calls on all the senses, but is the direct consequence of feelings that are confirmed haptically, in contrast to the more distant and figurative feeling that are experienced visually and audially.

Bloomer, Moore.

Drawing/Sensing Haptic Relations.

Situatedness through drawing produces the hapticity of the experience of seeing/sensing/feeling with the body. 

The Anatomy of The Body.

The Exposed Interior of a Painting. 

The Space between Abstraction and Figuration.

Having flesh as a central subject (what it feels) I can channel a lot of ideas.

I need my marks to construct the anatomy of the Body.

If there's a narrative I want it in the flesh, in the body of painting.

I try to find Bodies that manifest in their flesh something of our contemporary age.

I find having the framework of a body essential.

Jenny Saville.

Elpis. Gagosian Gallery. 2021

The monumental paintings explore the human body and its fascinating aesthetic potential. Saville's bold and sensuous impressions of surface, line, and mass oscillate between rational and irrational forms, capturing a unique approach to realism specific to the twenty-first century. The publication documents the twelve paintings in the exhibition alongside photographs of the artist's studio and reference materials, including snapshots taken by Saville. It also features a poem by Anna Akhmatova, whose work Saville learned about while she was in Russia, where she photographed many of the models pictured in the paintings.

Primordial Memory/Dreaming/Making/Corporeality : Antony Gormley/Francesca Woodman/Bodies/movements of becoming.

Concept of the Body : Merleau-Ponty

Fundamental assumption that the body was not an object, the body is the condition and context through which I am able to have relations with objects. 

The mind in its insertion in (creating/becoming) corporeality creates the ambiguous relation with our body, and correlatively with perceived things/superimpositions/entanglements.

Understanding the material/body image in discursive terms

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

The body generates and presumes interpretations, perspectives which serve its needs in the world, its will to power and its drive towards self expansion/self overcoming, the movement of becoming, vigorous, free, joyful activity. (Nietzsche)

 

Francesca Woodman explores the spatial relationship of the body in space and time.

These performative images and her relationship to the pictorial space, her body traces, are witnessed and further manipulated/annotated by drawn lines enclosing and creating other spaces.

Barad: Thinking with intra-action

There is an important sense in which practices of knowing cannot fully be claimed as human  practices,  not simply  because we use nonhuman  elements in  our practices but because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part. Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain  knowledge by  standing  outside the world; we know because we are of the world.  We are part of the world  in  its differential becoming.  The separation  of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inher­ent difference between  human  and  nonhuman,  subject and  object,  mind  and  body, matter and discourse. Onto epistemology—the study of practices of knowing in being— is probably a better way to think about the kind of understanding that we need to come to terms with how specific interactions matter.

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 141.

Antony Gormley, states, that one of his central concerns has been to recover a sense of being in the conditions of today's increasingly materialist and mediated social environment. He uses sculpture, via the intimate process of the body cast, to construct surrogate forms, derived from an almost sacrificial process. A rehearsal of death of an absent body, recorded as an enclosed volume of air, entombed in a lead sarcophagus of fragmented body sections, soldered to reconstruct a new wholeness. He creates, within this sculptural volume, an “infinity of space within the body.” His works are embodiments of the body. They are literally body cases. The use of lead with its own alchemical and historical contexts and its particular non­ aesthetic further adds to the tomb like qualities of the work. 

Each sculpture invites occupation; it is complete when the imagination or the mind inhabits them.

Gormley’s body cases are almost orphans, cast adrift from their symbolic maternal mother. They have become shells; empty humanoid spaces, awaiting an identity in the mind of the post-modern witness. In return their identification identifies the witness. The experience of metaphysical inhabiting this surrogate human space might allow us to lose all sense of the present and our identity with ourselves. Gormley’s sculptures, with this lack of identity or questioning of identity with the space they are placed in, prompt a different mode of questioning the purpose of their presence. The viewer becomes more interrogatory, more concerned, almost asking the sculpture to confirm its placement, not its actual identity. We see in them something of ourselves, externalised for scrutiny, a dialogue of intervention caused by a bodily proximity to something unknown, which can compound meaning, or conversely it can fragment it. 

An investigation into a disembodied physicality, inducing elements of fetishism and narcissism, with the search for an identification of the feminine, within the confines of spaces, loaded with tactility, dust, dilapidation and decay?

Some of  Francesca Woodman’s work involves herself and female characters in staged film, feminised melodrama. Stills with an unknown and possibly convoluted narrative, together with ambiguous relationships amongst the characters. The images are shot as straight documentary stills and seem to be searching for the identity of the partially hidden women, as seen through the response and body language of the other characters facing us. These works are full of conceptual ambiguities.

Photographs are indexical; they point to something else; a mirror with a memory; a stage for an inquiry.

Francesca Woodman’s use of the camera’s ability to witness and document, is subverted into a personal language of aggressive tactility and the notion of the body’s identification being partially hidden or even lost; just its trace remains recorded in the latency of the camera’s recorded time.

Her work seems to have an inherent almost codified, femininity, probably due the semiotics and symbolism of early surrealist influences. She performs, re-enacts and exposes her body for the witnessing of the camera. She seems to, fleetingly, seduce and then disappear, just leaving a trace of her being, her sexuality and its actions, entrusted to the fragility of the light sensitive gelatin.

 (extracts from The Body, Francesca Woodman and Antony Gormley, WSA Russell Moreton 2006)

Reading The Landscape

This Enchanted Isle : Peter Woodcock 2000

Radio On by Chris Petit.

The film has a hallucinogenic noir-like quality, a weird hybrid of Fifties Americana and a displaced Britain. It is a seismographic disruption of British culture in a limbo land of displaced dreams, elements of an almost mythical Britain fleetingly appear.

What distinguishes Neo-Romanticism from traditional romanticism is the feeling of danger, the juxtaposition of the urban with the countryside, the element of darkness, dissolution, an almost pagan reverie breaking through the ruins of post-industrialism (Woodcock,2000:55)

England Dreaming : Primordial Memory/Dreaming

The darkness is a silent solid, the light etches its surface, it is simultaneously sign and cypher. The light etching itself on the dark surface is akin to a revelation, an epiphany before the building is transformed by its users and movement. (Daniel Libeskind)

The Drought : J G Ballard

The Tempest : Alchemy, Prospero.

The Neo-Romantic Vision from William Blake to the New Visionaries. 

‘A new alchemy is being formed which encompasses traditional methods of art, the new technology, and the revolutionary new scientific discoveries.’

Re-Enchanting the Land. (Woodcock,2000:140)

‘When one lacks outer space one creates inner space. Invention becomes more complex, cup and circle markings on stones, intricate Celtic spirals and knots, illuminated manuscripts, gothic architecture with its inherent story telling.’ (Woodcock,2000:131)

Throughout John Piper’s long and prolific life he remained fascinated not only with churches, country houses and landscapes but also ancient sites. He comments on the landscape of Snowdonia, each rock lying in the grass had a positive personality, for the first time I saw the bones and the structure and the lie of mountains, living with  them and climbing them as I was, lying on them in the sun and getting soaked with rain in their cloud cover and enclosed in their improbable, private rock-world in fog. Piper never dismissed the archaic spirit of place.  

(Woodcock,2000:31)

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are in the status quo remaining unchanged. It is to be in complicity with what makes a subject interesting.

Cameras consist of small voids, the ‘camera’, a lens and photographic film. They are camerae obscurae  that collect light and allow it to meet the surface of the film. But in fact the light comes from the larger void outside the camera. The moment the light has registered on the light-sensitive surface of the film, memories are constructed. The memory is literally conceived in this meeting and is added to life as an additional layer of being. The process through which void meets surface is therefore also about love—the love of ancestors and relatives, but also of life and its conception.

The camera records subjects considered disreputable, taboo and marginal. Sontag notes Times relentless passage and photographs as a pause of evidence, Together with the camera’s ability to turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. She recognizes the inherent pathos in .objects being photographed, and the compulsion to take photographs. Sontag realizes the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as a daily activity in our consumer society. Photographs do not explain themselves, they just acknowledge.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston, Psychoanalysis of fire, New York, Beacon press 1964 

Benjamin, George, Antony Gormley: critical mass, London, Royal Academy of the Arts 1998 

Curtis, Penelope, Sculpture in 20th Century Britain, Leeds, Henry Moore Institute 2003

Deneuve, Catherine, Bettina Rheims, Munchen, Schirmer-mosel, 1989 

Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, London, Ark Paperbacks, 1984 

Gormley, Antony, European Field, Museum of Modem Art, 1994 

Greenaway, Peter, The Physical self, Rotterdam, Museum-Boymans, 1992 

Israel, Deborah Turbeville: Wallflower, London, Quartet, 1978 

Karabelnik, Marianne, Stripped Bare, London, Merrell, 2004

Krauss, Rosalind, L ’Amour fou, New York, Abbeyville, 1985 

Moszynska, Anna, Antony Gormley Drawing, London, British Museum, 2002

Sollers, Philippe, Francesca Woodman, Paris, Foundation Cartier, 1998 

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, Francesca Woodman, Photographic work, New York, Hunter College, 1996

Thewelt, Kllaus, Antony Gormley, Germany, Kerber Verlag, 1999 

Articles

Riches, Harriet, A disappearing Act; Francesca Woodman’s portrait of a reputation, Oxford Art Journal, 27.1 2004 95-113, Oxford university press

Rus, Eva, Surrealism and self-representation in the photography of Francesca Woodman, www.palazzoesposizioni.it/schede/woodman, 2004

Figure/Foreground/Afterimage : Drawing

In drawing the moments of choice have been kept visible.
John Berger, Berger On Drawing.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artists own needs.
The Drawn Line-A Recession-A Past Statement Brought Forward

The Body of Drawing
Drawings by Sculptors
South Bank

Drawing registers the transforming effects of the imagination and the memory.
Drawings are images of flux; flux both imaginative and physical.

Drawing is a verb.
There is no way to make a drawing-there is only drawing.
Richard Serra

The Drawing Book
Tania Kovats

Drawing is something where you have  a really direct-immediate relationship with the material. You make a mark, and then you make another mark in relation to that mark.
Kiki Smith

The Body
Rodin's lines dont just represent carnality; they are themselves carnal, invasive, sexy. Uninterrupted by the space between the material and the body; the line made by the drawing hand stands in for other haptic things. The body is where drawing begins and where it ends.

Looking at images does not lead us to the truth, it leads us into temptation.
Marlene Dumas

Sexuality and Space
Beatrice Colomina

Drawing and Random Interference
From Chaos To Order And Back Again
Sally O'Reilly

Quantum Chance
Janna Levin

AFTERIMAGE : Drawing Through Process
Cornelia H. Butler


Rather than regarding life-drawing as an event of realism, it may be more productive to
explore it as an assemblage of events, a field of practices, or as a cluster of performances.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/26820152469/in/photostream/

The Architecture and Analogies found in Interior Spaces : Analogue Processes in Photography

 Analogue Processes in Photography 

"The imprint of light on emulsion"

"The alchemy of circumstance and chemistry"


Tacita Dean : Filmworks, Kodak Analogue, page 96/97


Analogue : On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean. Margaret Iversen 2012

It is only now, with the rise of digitalization and the near-obsolescence of traditional technology, that we are becoming fully aware of the distinctive character of analogue photography. This owl-of-Minerva-like appreciation of the analogue has prompted photographic art practices that mine the medium for its specificity. Indeed, one could argue that analogue photography has only recently become a medium in the fullest sense of the term, for it is only when artists refuse to switch over to digital photographic technologies that the question of what constitutes analogue photography as a medium is selfconsciously posed. While the benefits of digitalization—in terms of accessibility, dissemination, speed, and efficiency—are universally acknowledged, some people are also beginning to reflect on what is being lost in this great technological revolution

http://murrayguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Iversen-Critical-Inquiry-36-4-Summer-20121.pdf

Translucency/Waverley Abbey, (Harold Brakspear FSA, courtesy of Damien Blower)
Pinhole Photography, Winchester Discovery Centre and Library.

In Solarized Light : The Unbound Body #2
Photogram from Victorian corset.

Concrete Surfaces : Anatomy #2
Dark Gothic Sensuality
Contact Photography
Science and Art

Alternative Processes, Tate Modern.
Photography and Architectural Space.
Cyanotype from Pinhole Camera

Clay Impression : Form and Segments
Surrounding Objects : Critical Proximity ~2
Research Material
Photographic Drawings

PETER ZUMTHOR                 ATMOSPHERES 

Architectural Environments
Surrounding Objects
2006 Birkhauser, Basel, Switzerland.

Geodesic Drawings : Observatory #2

Core, Periphery and Semiperiphery : Spatial Drawings #1

EMULSION : Photographic Landscape

A few feet below the ground a thick line of rock would mark us off from all that had gone before. Condensed into that six-inch sooty layer would be our cities, vehicles, roads, bridges, weapons. Also, all sorts of chemical compounds not found in the previous geological record.

Ian McEwan : The Children Act,  2014.


Reverberations from excavated land #1 (Excavated Shells)
Reverberations from excavated land #5 (Leper Graves)

The Leper Hospital : Anthropomorphic Geography/Landscape on Photographic Ground
Against SPACE : Place-Movement-Knowledge

"I wish to argue, in this chapter against the notion of space. Of all the terms we use to describe the world we inhabit, it is the most abstract, the most empty, the most detached from the realities of life and experience."

Tim Ingold

Environments
Land
Earth
Pastures
Country
Ground
Landscape
Indoors
Open
Sky

Air

Excavated Landscapes : Morn Hill #2





























2017