The Black Workbooks : Forces of juxtaposed areas.

Harleston 290623

Research Creation : Revisiting the image archive as an anachive for movements in material matters.

Perception, folds in an infinite play of foregrounding and backgrounding.

Eternal objects are nodes of relation for this elastic process of pulling in and out of experience's continuum. Perception moves-with these openings towards changes in nature occasioned by minuscule folds that are endlessly unfurling and bending on the edges of juxtaposed areas.

Erin Manning, Deleuze, Relationscapes.

Black Artist's Books

Visual Art, WSA 2007 

Like a mist or fog that makes their surface sparkle at speeds that no one of our thresholds of consciousness could sustain.

Deleuze, 1993.

Bodying/Scaffolds/Tentative Architectures : Modes of Existence creating Architectural Surrounds

Outpost 291024

Space And Subjectivity.

Collage with glass and documentation from Francesca Woodman.

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

Making/Building made indeterminate through a retention/questioning of a framework and the insertion of an event that introduces a slippage/deviation of that of a framed outcome.

Bernard Tschumi. (equation as a provisional framework)

Tentative/Processual Architectures. 

Arakawa and Gins.

Lucy Orta.

Shortcomings of Phenomenological Thought.

One places oneself at the centre, designates oneself, measures oneself and uses oneself as a measure. One is in short a 'subject' and space is a projection of oneself or its counterpart, that it is defined therefore not in its own right, but in relation to the subject. Space, my space is not the context of which I constitute the 'textuality' instead it is first of all my body and then it is my body's counterpart or other, its mirror-image or shadow. It is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand and all other bodies on the other. This maintains the boundaries between body and space, subject and object.

Henri Lefebvre.

Phenomenology always stops at boundaries, at the boundary of the body, which is precisely where abject(ion) continues beyond. It is because phenomenology concerns the lived body rather than bodies in a plural and more general sense that it is a discussion of wholes rather than transitions and exchanges unable to accommodate volatile processes.

Inhabitations : Cultures Of Melting Snow.

The In-Between.

There is no room for the in-between, no way to describe exchanges between entities and the effect of those exchanges. All is static and no cannot as Francois Jullien wrote of Plato, think of the snow in the process of melting. One can only think of either snow or water, but never the process of change.

Abject(ion) Architectures of Process, with brings to the fore interrelated areas of Relational Architecture and Emergent Phenomena.

Architecture in Abjective(Abject (ion) States of Subjectivity.

Frameworks/Scaffolding.

Affective Matter/Mattering.

Kovar turns to Abjection a concept developed by Julia Kristeva, abjection-abject(ion) is both process and product, and can hold a discussion of the transgression of borders. It concerns anything that crosses the symbolic, anything that is expelled literally or figuratively, and that is necessary to keep at bay in order for subjectivity to prevail, issuing from abject(ion) is therefore a threat to our subjectivity, a threat to the boundary between Subject-Object/Body-Space.

Expanding on the processual and material nature of abject(ion), such an undertaking begins with Event and is rounded off with discussions of Affect and Matter.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Disclaimer.

Following Deleuze this book is interested in what 'Abject(ion)' does, rather than what it is.

Drawing (at times) on aspects of the same theory, Kristeva is interested in the disruption of psychological boundaries and Deleuze who deals with both psychological and physical boundaries. Through Deleuze we are able to engage with abject(ion) more holistically.

This book is not concerned with making 'abject' architecture, that is making buildings with abject matter. But is rather concerned with developing ways of thinking about bodies, spaces, and the relations within and between these through the lens of abject(ion).

Architecture in abject(ion) promotes an interest revealed by a sensibility that favours theory and textual practice over images and objects, and goes towards explaining why illustrations of examples referred to throughtout are withheld.

Project 3.1

Body aject(ion) space: A collection of contracts.

The Contracts is the collective name given to a series of projects that explore the notion of abject(ion) as event. Critically, The Contracts are not only explorations (as accommodated by Tschumi), bur also spatial events (as accommodated by Deleuze), and hence the architecture that is defined by the interplay of these events. Given the centrality to this book of the simultaneous abject(ion) of human bodies and spatial bodies, and the indiscernibility in which this results, The  Contracts have come to span a period of three years, hence establishing themselves as the most developed body of work included here.

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces-and Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Species of Spaces.

Reclaimations, between a desk and a skip.

Russell Coates.

Archive Mappings/Concerns : Lines/Linkages/Nodes/Points/Intersections.

Architectural Constructs/Events into Material/Making.

Abject (ion) : Affective Resonances/Matter : Clay+Ceramic.

Vessels/Voids/Making from folded spaces.

The simple issues of attending to the material.

Re-Casting Matter, not 'materials'.

Becoming mindful of 'materials' and their 'hylomorphic tendencies'.

Clay retains transitions and exchanges, collects up discrete entities/symbols/inscriptions, places them into volatile spaces/processes of change .

Questioning Subjectivity : Fluidity of matter/material out of place.

The Cinema of Catherine Breillat.

The Process of Abject(ion).

In critical theory, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts. Julia Kristeva explored an influential and formative overview of the concept in her 1980 work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, where she describes subjective horror (abjection) as the feeling when an individual experiences or is confronted by the sheer experience of what Kristeva calls one's typically repressed "corporeal reality", or an intrusion of the Real in the Symbolic Order.

The process of a body excreting from within itself. A transition between inside and outside, a disruption of physical and psychological boundaries of the still prevalent understanding of body as subject and space as object.

A moment of indiscernibility, the result of which is the product of repulsion, the abject and where body, space and abject become an ambiguity, ranging in intensity from subtle gestures to confronting actions immersed in the viscosity of our leaky bodies.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Ecologies of Experience~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.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Spatial Representations : Apparatus~Fictions~Readings~Embodying~Inhabiting~Folding

Reflexive Pavilion : Conversations through void~like subjectivities.

Structural Modalities/Making/Tensions : Spatial Formulations  to gather/interact with discursive research.

Spatial Practices/Forms of Enactments : Speculative Vocational Learning Processes

Archive 2012

Teaching Academy/Brockwood Park School.

Undone-Without-Unfitting-Entangled

Performativity/Practice/Assemblages

Responses perceived as the enactment to make something as yet non existent.

‘The crisis is not in the economic world, nor in the political world. The crisis is in consciousness. I think very few of us realise this.’

—From the book THE NETWORK OF THOUGHT 

Krishnamurti

Leylines : Drawing frame, lead strip and drawings.

Leylines : Drawing frame, lead strip and drawings., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

25/10/2012 

Brian Clarke, Collages/Drawing/Paper cuts and lead lines.

Outpost 010424

The adoration of the art object is in some way contrary to the nature of art, which does not seek fame or reward for its existence.

It is the nature of the artist that should be treasured, not the objects that he makes.

Dangerous Visions 1977.

Those paintings represented something really significant to me, and that was that there was something much greater than aesthetics and skill beyond making a work of art. 

Collages  2022-2023.

Sometimes there are as many as ten layers of paper. Some of them are absurdly dense and rather difficult to maintain because, before they're ready for framing they have to be disassembled and glued down with permanent glue.

The literal nature of them, the kind of objective, analytical nature of them is no longer a matter of concern to me. The world is such a rich place and whether they're literal or abstracted or positive or negative, seems to me a matter of profound insignificance.

Humility 2023.

Love.

Meekness.

Optimism.

Renewal.

No matter how beautiful, all objects ultimately perish, but the artistic spirit from which they are born does not. The artist will die, but he will be replaced by another who will create things of beauty too, that will ultimately decay. I don't propose a revolution that seeks to devalue beauty or art objects, but only to ask that we remember the virtuous nature of natural creation and quietly move our thoughts away from objects that perish to the spirit of creation that does not.

Brian Clarke.

Drawing.

The pencil for Isozaki, remains the ultimate tool for expressing early ideas about architecture.

Lead Lines/Paper Cuts.

I was painting and drawing figuratively, but I abandoned that because I was more interested in how much nervous energy a line could carry when it wasn't attempting to describe something objective. 

Collage/Assemblage : Architectural Blueprint and Historical Garment (detail/archive) Winchester 2011

The Unfolded Garment

Embracing Subjectivity

Pierced Assemblage on Photogram

What is Philosophy?

Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari

Their book is a profound and careful interrogation of what it might mean to be a 'friend of wisdom', but it is also a devastating attack on the sterility of what has become, when 'the only events are exhibitions and the only concepts are products which can be sold'. Philosophy, they insist, is not contemplation, reflection or communication, but the creation of concepts

Assemblage/Garden Design : Architectural Plan/Victorian Corset

Blueprint, Photogram and Collage.

a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage

The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine

Art practice/agents of a discursive social praxis : Building on Differentiated Data/Collage

Folder Cover, The Thinking Hand
TheThinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture.

Juhani Pallasmaa

Frameworks with Enclosures

Of the mason's who built them, we can say that they both designed as they drew, and drew as they designed. But their designing, like their drawing, was a process of work, not a  project of the mind.

Tim Ingold 'Making'

Openings and Conclusions
Text Fragments

Aerial Imagery/Remote Sensing

Openings and Conclusions 3
https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/14618816405/in/photostream/

Collage on paper,written fragments and images from Peter Greenaway, Josef Albers and Robin Evans. Photo montage of The Physical Self (Greenaway) and Waverley Abbey UK.Visual research as part of The Waverley Project/Obscura and Reading Room.

On the horizon, then, at the furthest edge of the possible, it is a matter of producing the space of the human species-the collective (generic) work of the species-on the model of what used to be called "art" ; indeed, it is still so called, but art no longer has any meaning at the level of an "object" isolated by and for the individual.

Henri Lefebvre, Openings and Conclusions. from On Installation and Site Specificity (introduction) Erika Suderburg