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.

Christopher Wilmarth : Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity

Light : Drawing into Sculpture
Archive Material/Folders 2008/2013



The sense that glass provides an opening, a means of passage through to something else, is as central to Mallarme's Poetry as it to Wilmarth's Art.
Steven Henry Madoff


Christopher Wilmarth
The Museum of Modern Art
May25-August 20, 1989

The exhibition features glass and steel constructions that manipulate light and shadow and suggest poetic, even romantic content through a constructivist, geometric idiom.

Other Architecture
Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE
Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION
Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS
Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION
Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION
Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE
Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE
Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."
Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.

Celestial Architecture/Skyspaces/Serenity/Re-Animating Thought.

Outpost 190923

Matter and materials that create the potential to act. 

STRUCTURE AS OBJECT

Light supply's the raw material for consciousness and its perception. 

The structural frame as generator of architectural form.

Vitruvius implies that the geometric forms of both the  Colchians and the Phrygians primitive houses are the consequence of direct operation with physical objects, rather than the abstractions that pre-existed in the mind of the builder.

Space/Structure/Light/Performativity/Physical Participation and Play.

Tate St Ives. 2011

Profound but intimate subjective evocations/assemblages of space and time.

Prototypes for Sculpture.

Model for Spheric Theme. 1937

Naum Gabo.

These prototypes give a unique insight into his working process, one in which he employed a playful intuition and childlike, hands-on approach to the development of what were often extraordinarily complex and apparently 'manufactured' forms.

Concetto Spaziale/Spatial Concept 1962

Lucio Fontana.

Buchi Works by Lucio Fontana are characterised by holes or punctures through various surfaces. By opening up these surfaces, Fontana introduces another dimension to his work, one of space, depth and time. In their almost infinite variation and difference, as well as their primal simplicity, they seem to approach something both fundamental and universal. 

Celestial Architecture.

Architecture Without Architects.

Bernard Rudofsky.

Among abstract architecture, some of the most imposing examples stand in Jaipur, India. They are gigantic astronomical instruments built in the eighteenth century to the plans of Maharajah Sawai Jai Singh 11.Their purpose was to achieve greater accuracy of astronomical data than that available from portable brass instruments. Since they never lived up to expectations, they represent that rare instance of pure, or nearly pure, architecture of a functionless kind.

Oxfam, Madeleine Street, Norwich. 

Aesthetics of Installation Art, Juliane Rebentisch.

Situation, Documents of Contemporary Art, Claire Doherty.

Deer Shelter Skyspace, James Turrell.

The layering of traces where the reader can find the intricacy of memory and imagination.

Rethinking The Animate.

Re-Animating Thought.

Tim Ingold. 2006

Contemporary western cultures have created our estrangement to nature, which has been established by the spiritual and religious ascendency of humankind over nature, and by the rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world. 

European civilizations neglect of the natural world and its needs has clearly been encouraged by a style of awareness that disparages sensorial reality denigrating the visible and tangible order of things on behalf of some absolute source, assumed to exist entirely beyond, or outside of, the bodily world.

Spell of The Sensuous, David Abram.

Cosmic Serenity/Solitude.

A Mind Attuned to the Intimate Garden.

In a culture exhausted and irreparably fragmented, the walls surrounding Luis Barragan's gardens are, perhaps one of the last defences to preserve centuries of thought and emotion.

On Nomadology.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 1980

Fieldwork.

Deterritorialized Spaces.

The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay.

A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys  both an autonomy  and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. Even the elements of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilizing them. 

The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory.

Skyspaces.

James Turrell.

The sky is no longer out there, but is right on the edge of the space you are in. The sense of colour is generated inside you. If you then go outside you will see a different coloured sky. You colour the sky. 

In working with light, what is really important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought. The Deer Shelter is one of only a handful of private and public Skyspaces in Britain, including Cat Cairn, Kielder Forest in Northumberland.

Across the world Turrell has realised around forty temporary and permanent Skyspaces, although the Deer Shelter is one of very few that have been formed from an existing historic structure.

Drawing/Diagram/Script as a gesture of propulsion into the world.

Emotional Sensibility/Selective Intuition.

Making with the Inner Tensions of Each Element.

Timbre/Tone/Colour/Patina.

On Sonority.

Art and Technique.

Marcel Moyse. 

Spatial Distinctions/Piercings and their Movements.

In and Out of Material/Traces and Trails.

Interstices/Voids, Surfaces, Ceramic Forms, Black and White Slip over Terracotta.

Templates,Setting Bocks, Prototypes, Geometry Sets, Monoprints, Boxes.

Use of experimental photographic techniques and new materials through invention and application.