Showing posts with label Arte Povera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arte Povera. Show all posts

Monday, 8 June 2026

Slow Philosophy : Diffractive Over Layering/Accretions Of Making.


Diffractive Readings/Visual Material and Resources.

Over Layering/Accretions : Asperity~Inhabitation~Urbanism

Of interiors, constructions and abject deconstructions into and around the ruinous. White (bleached) and soot fumed stains, textures, patinas of process and time, usage and possible shelter. Urban vessels poetically conveying a visual, tactile complexity, that of built and lived in spaces.

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








Orange School Graph Books 

Harleston 2020-2021


A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy


Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations

Tim Ingold 2010


The social life of making

Making speaks in vivid dialogue with two associated themes, material and skill

Creativity involves not merely a spark of innovation or the execution of artistic inspiration. But the capacity to respond to unfolding iterations with materials. To use slowly accrued haptic knowledge to manipulate processes on the fly, and to judge how to counteract error and seize opportunities as they evolve 


Making becomes a process of iteration, and a maker works with this iteration prolifically 


Matter and materials are lively and require attention, materials continue to thwart in unpredictable ways, decaying and breaking down or wearing or breaking under force

Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett 2010


Attending to the process of making opens up prospects for following the lead of the material, where the properties of the materials themselves shape the direction in which making proceeds

Tim Ingold 2010


New Urban Adventures in Collaboration/Conceptual Ceramics

Ceramic Practice as a form of research engaged in a process/ecology of inquiry, an exploration of ideas predicated on and exploiting the characteristics of clay


The transformation of the material is a central concern and semiotic significance unfolds with making

Seeking a symbiotic relationship between idea and object 


Materials are substances in becoming

Karen Barad


Towards an Ecology of Materials

Tim Ingold 2012


From the 'objectness' of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. It means to think of making as a process of growth or ontogenesis

 

Materials-Centered Perspective


Making, almost defies precise definition

The composition and/or manipulation of materials that bring into being new or revised objects

Tim Ingold 2010


Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair

Making encompasses the ingenuity of fluid, locally situated and adapted technologies


Materials carry on overtaking the formal destinations that, at one time or another, have been assigned to them


Sensibilities and dispositions that are centred on a deep and considered relationship with materials

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett 2008


Crafting, often reconnects mind and body in the sites and processes of production, thereby potentially reconstituting labour processes in ways that ascribe agency to workers


Makers finding ways to resist norms of gender and neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities, finding ways and spaces for ethical practice to predominate



Contemporary conceptual ceramics operates at the permeable boundary between art and craft, partaking of aspects of both, and ultimately demonstrating (or performing) that permeability


The emergence of the museum as proactive laboratory of social evolution


Extradisciplinary Investigations/Operative Principle

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice


Microtopias, small contained sites of functioning democracy


Tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline


The New Institutional Practice

Projective Enterprises (should unsettle, activate, and raise questions)


The exhibitions to emerge through new institutionalism are considered as points of exchange and collision, made through intersections of social, economic and political relations, it follows that the predominant forms of artistic practice included are the social, the spatial, the interdisciplinary 


So our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed , physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social-economic-cultural and political processes

Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity

Miwon Kwon 2002


Collaborations and its Discontents

Claire Bishop 2006


The motivating factors for participatory projects is its critiquing of the essentialising of site and community in context-specific activities/exhibitions


A complex environment, awash in affect and subjectivity

When subjective and analytic processes mesh together to form a new productive and political 'contexts' of communicational labour  


New curatorial initiatives must unpack the terminologies we use to distinguish one project from another

A playful psychogeographical situation, that resists the representative, illustrative and thematic narratives

Unsettling-Complicit

Provocative-Strategic

Interventionist-Collaborative


Perforative Curating/Prescribed Participation

Creating new/more coded patterns of behavior/conventions/role play for visitor's


New Institionalism and the Exhibition As Situation/Social Experiment

Claire Doherty 2006


Participation

In which people constitute the central artistic medium and material

In the manner of theatre and performance

Participatory art is both a social activity and a symbolic one, as it is both embedded in the world and at one, remove from it


The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects, than as a collaborator and producer of situations

The contemporary artwork is finite, portable, commodifiable product, and is reconceived as an ongoing or long term project with an unclear beginning and end

Artists are more interested in the creative rewards of participation as a politicised working process, than the relational aesthetic which renders discursive and dialogic projects more amenable to museums and galleries


Artificial Hells (exposing the political and aesthetic limitations in the work)

Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Claire Bishop 2011


Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997


Whilst temporary exhibitions can expand the scope of medium-specific discourse, they can also impose alternative, but equally restrictive frames

Participation, creating a bridge between socially engaged practice and the permanent collection


Expressing itself expressing 


Creating a conceptual and linguistic dexterity between absolutes, certainties, definitions


Dissolving the intellectual relevance, with its symbiotic relationship with utility to create 'vessels' beyond art and artifact


The strategy of making artworks as response

The Ceramic Object, by means of preservation and display becomes a vehicle/vessel for a social and historical narrative/entanglement/engagement


Making vessels, beyond the examining and intellectually impoverished questions 


A vessel is identified as such by its physical disposition, giving shape to the contents and clarifying what is inside and what is outside


Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce


Like the vessel, the house shapes and nurtures the life contained inside


The Factory I build in the Tate is a place to discuss the transactions and transformations of Labour that Create Knowledge and Community

In the Factory we will examine skills and how we form Exchanges at Work , with ourselves and with others

Clare Twomey, Lead artist at Tate Exchange 2017


Post Studio Ceramics

Interfaces between Making-Makers-Museums

Exploring object engagement beyond the known historical models of clay practice


'Generate' Historical Material and Spatial Relations as they interacted with the work, and reflected on the role of the Museum/Hospital

Clare Twomey


Ceramics In The Environment 

An International Review

Janet Mansfield 2005


With Fire, Richard Hirsch

A Life Between Chance and Design (invites the unknown)

Scott Meyer 2012

Hirsch takes us to the heart of the interface between ageless earth and the spare evidence of the rhythm of human utility 


Raku as an Ideology

Breath-Energy-Immanence


Raku, A Review of Contemporary Work

Tim Andrews 1994


The Poetry of The Vessel

A calm invitation to thought and imagination

Chris Tyler


The vessel (making, thinking, subject) as both a historically grounded form, and a vehicle to examine abstract aspects of the physical body and the natural world


Arte Povera/Germano Celant, an aesthetic-philosophical movement

An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields, that emerges into a total space where disparate categories can meet; a art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen



Friday, 3 April 2026

Clay~Vessel~Ritual~Body : Drawing Forms and Vessels

The vessel inhabits rich, liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction. (Daintry2007:12)

10/03/2017

CLAY : Speculative City : From Pilgrim to Tourist
From Pilgrim To Tourist (or a short history of identity). Zygmunt Bauman.

Clay Based Practices : Ecologies~Things Emerging in Relation




Clay drawing/situation/collage based on a performative script/reading

Constructed in-situ at the Yard, Winchester. A life-size record and memory of a human presence as a site for mutual introspection.

 Inspired in part from the novel  " The  Children of Men "  by P D James.



Artist Statement/Chapel Arts Residency 2010.

Practitioner using the creative receptiveness of material together with the inclusion of drawing to harbour transits and passages of human presence, vulnerabilities centred around the human condition. My work adopts strategies which articulate a sense of absence and anonymity within the abandonment of the work to its location. I feel drawn to this registering of passage, encounter together with its farewell. The choice of materials gathered together implies a personal geography, with both an emotional and aesthetic sense of locality and place. The performative recording by physical means which renders itself as a trace of human presence, now becomes a vacant territory open for the consideration of others.
My work continues to investigate this sense of material response with the performative trace of a human absences. The place-ment of these acts attempts to promote thresholds from which to reflect upon spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.
Currently working in clay, low fired to produce and promote a fragile vessel. This vessel is installed to act as a dwelling presence reverberating in a resting place. from which work is drawn into the human form to register a surface of absences resulting from past gestures and solitudes.

Russell Moreton a visual artist uses simple gestures of drawn Human traces gathered and presented amongst natural materials. Exploring themes around the Human condition, vulnerability and abandonment. Materials are employed to further underpin our sense of place and time. The act and gesture of drawing adds a ephemeral mark amongst the materiality and locality of place. Currently using clay to register these themes, installing work Augury Vessel 2010 into Chapel Arts as part of their research residency programme.








































Vessel as a fundamental expression of being and non-being a ‘no-thing’

A vessel is both a hollow receptacle for liquid, and also a place where
“The mind of man balances and reconciles opposites” Tom Chetwynd,

“We turn clay to make a vessel; but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.” Tzu, Lao, Tao Te Ching.



Around Form and Formlessness.
A Vessel is an effortless three-dimensional manifestation of form and formlessness.

‘The benign existential riddle of the vessel is that we only see the material bit that holds our coffee.’ (Daintry2007:8)



One comes about as a result of the other, and this search has a particular resonance at the beginning of this fledgling millennium as technological progress masks a perilous sense of physical and psychological uncertainty. (Daintry2007:6)

Pottery is bound up with the elemental needs of civilisation.
The search of form/cultural and individual through participating with the potters’ wheel.

Alternative “Thinking” States, Sensing, Doing and Being.

‘Its not easy to talk about sensing, doing and being. They’re not concepts as such, neat little fixed shiny packages of ideas, but more existential states which shift and move as you inhabit them-more amorphous, like clay.’ (Daintry2007:6)


Amorphous values of things/memory manifested through existential states (as a spatial device/movement/atmosphere) in architectural spaces?
Zumthor, Holl,Paalasa, Bachelard.

For the potter the making of a cup or bowl through the opening up or hollowing out of clay is itself ‘an essay into abstraction, a clothing of emptiness’; for a vessel is as much defined by the negative space in and around it, as the skin of the ceramic itself.

This skin is a sort of negotiation between inside and outside, between solid and fluid, and where they intersect. A vessel embodies something and nothing and is an effortless three-dimension manifestation of form and formlessness. (Daintry2007:8)














Monday, 17 March 2025

Spatial Interventions/Problems/Praxis of Method : Novalis/Bachelard/Arte Povera.

Outpost 131223


Body Movement.

Robert J. Yudell.

The interplay between the world of our bodies and the world of our dwelling places is always in flux. We make places that are an expression of our haptic experiences even as those experiences are generated by the places we have already created. Whether we are conscious or innocent of this process, our bodies and our movements are in constant dialogue with our buildings.







Problems of Method.

Novalis/Bachelard.

No vision invites him to do so, it is the very substance he has touched with his hands and lips which summons him. It summons him materially by virtue of what seems to be a magical participation. The dreamer undresses and enters the pool, only at this moment do the images appear. They emerge from matter, they arise as if from a seed out of a primitive sensual reality. A rapture which cannot yet project itself on the feminine substantiality of water. Water becomes woman against his breast.


Gaston Bachelard would like to develop a philosophy that has no point of departure, and a philosophy that is not a point of departure. Bachelard in his books, attempts to systematize formal material and dynamic imagination.


Space contains compressed time.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

The Autobiography of Lost Possibilities.

Gaston Bachelard.


A dispersed philosophy that must constantly operate on its very edge, at the very limit where its systematizing impulse is challenged by the actual creations in other domains of human activity. Bachelard becomes a 'hinge' between totalizing metaphysical systems and polyphilosophy.


Bachelard does not develop a fully fledged philosophy of values, rather his books offer lessons for working, reading, breathing and dreaming well, all of which constitute an art of living poetically. Throughout his work he developed the paradox, that the primitiveness of poetic consciousness is not immediately given, it can only be a conquest. Images reveal nothing to the lazy dreamer.

Colette Gaudin. 


Guiseppe Penone.

Souffle 6. 1978.


A large earthenware jar on which the artist has stamped the imprint of his own body. This process shows a sensorial conception of art, a concentration on the organic and the original, reasserting the permanent nature of myths and an animist conception. A vitality of matter, material and object.

The National Museum of Modern Art.

Georges Pompidou Centre.


Arte Povera as an artistic praxis, highly critical and anti-cultural. An art that explores a 'strange area' that is interested in elemental human situations. It was the art critic Germano Celano who in reference to the research done by the polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, outlined in his book 'Towards a Poor Theatre' proposed the notion of Arte Povera in 1967.


Epicurean Asceticism.


The Phenomenological Approach.


Problems of Method.


Reading as a dimension of consciousness.


For Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, the essence of life is not a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space.


Poetry as a synthesis of human existence.


Bachelard's auditive metaphor 'reverberation' for the poetic image brings together through sound, both time and space. In its reverberation, the poetic image will have made a sonority, a situatedness of being.


Science and Poetry.


Concepts and images develop along two divergent lines of spiritual life. The image cannot give matter to the concept, the concept by giving stability to the image would stifle its existence.


Nascent Material/Media.

Drawings rendering an insistent corporeality.


Drawings loosing their haptic senses of mark-feeling and becoming increasingly camouflaged into an image based on representation of an objectified art form/context. 


Life Drawings subdued by visual representation.

Is the initial situation/situatedness/awkwardness of drawing process becoming overwritten.

Drawings feeling the body marking its presence in the space /stage of drawing.



Jannis Kounellis: Gray is the Color of Our Time

Friday, 21 July 2023

Drawing Rooms/Slow Philosophy/Arte Povera : Cyanotypes/Collages/Photography/Installations

Slow Philosophy. 2017
Reading against the institution
Michelle Boulous Walker

Saturnian Form : Lead and Library Dates
Russell Moreton

Emilio Prini
The filter and welcome to the angel, 1967
Environment with participants, doves, artificial green grass, socks, ultra-violet light.
Dimensions variable,
Installation, Studio Bentivoglio, Bologna.

Artist-run exhibition space

Emilio Prini well illustrates the spirit of Arte Povera: the artist is not the creator of artefacts, nor even of a documented 'happening'. In the transferral of energy and subjectivity into matter or an event, the work exists in the instant it comes into being and is simultaneously received.

To document his work in photographs and present these as a record of it contradicts the very basis of Prini's art.
Arte Povera, Themes and Movements
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Intermedia Chart
Dick Higgins
Molvena, Italy. 1993