Drawing on Life : Bento's Sketchbook/A Hut of One's Own : John Berger/Ann Cline/Bento de Spinoza

In the backyard of where she was living, Cline once decided to build a hut inspired by Kakuzo Okakura's The Book of Tea.

As my dwelling took shape, it began to shape my life as well. And when I sat inside reading the recluse poets, the terse simplicity of their record framed my own perception, one I likened to a camera recording a world of pure experience.

The hut has a sense of immediacy that no room-filled house can achieve. The hut focuses its dweller on immediacy and meaning fulness. "I had found the commodity of my dwelling through the poetry of its use," Cline concludes.

The hut addresses the core of ritual as a part of nature versus the supposed freedom of modernist thought and the architectural contrivances it pursues. The hut represents the convergence of ritual and naturalness, at the same time addressing cultural issues and practices.

With an agility larger structures can never match, huts bring together the physical environment with such disparate aspects of culture as necessity, fantasy, faith, and "life-style." The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.

This may seem a bold conclusion given the modesty of the hut throughout history, and the modest ambitions of its makers, but this is Cline's point, that the experiment in solitude and simplicity is bolder than any social or culturally-sanctioned experiments or projects, simply because the latter are contrived and unnatural, even anti­ natural.

https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/cline.html

Then the days of working at home on it. The image in my head was often clearer than the one on the paper. I redrew and redrew. The paper became grey  with  alterations and  cancelations.  The drawing didn’t get better, but gradually she, about to stand up, was more insistently there.

The effort of my  corrections and  the endurance of the paper have begun  to resemble the resilience of Maria’s own body. The surface of the drawing - its skin, not its image — make me think of how there are moments when a dancer can make your hairs stand on end.

We who  draw do  so  not only  to  make something  observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.

The bodies of dancers with their kind of devotion are dual. And this is visible whatever they are doing. A kind of Uncertainty Principle determines them; instead of being alternately particle and wave, their bodies are alternately giver and gift.

They know their own bodies in such a penetrating way that they can be within them, or before them and beyond them. And this alternates,  sometimes changing  every  few seconds,  some­ times every few minutes.

The duality  of each  body  is what allows them,  when  they perform,  to  merge into  a single entity.  They  lean  against,  lift, carry, roll over, separate from, co-join, buttress each other so that two or three bodies become a single dwelling, like a living cell is a dwelling for its molecules and messengers, or a forest for its animals.

The same duality  explains why  they  are as much  intrigued by falling as by leaping, and why the ground challenges them as much as the air.

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

On the property/structure of things/materials/colours : About philosophy/drawing

 Outpost Studio 261021

On the property/structure of things/materials/colours

Drawings going beyond figure/ground relationships

The manifestation of weight derives from form along with substance.

I no longer wanted to make markings on a piece of paper, I wanted to make the drawing integral to its structure and properties.

About Drawing, Richard Serra.

Serra has questioned whether his 'Deadweight' series borders on the pictorial, because these drawings set two similar shapes against a common ground as if to construct a compound figure. However Serra's use of overlap protects against this possibility and preserves the material independence of the two sheets of paper.

Preface, Being and Becoming. C. Robert Mesle.

The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time. James Taylor

Process-Relational Philosophy. 

An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. 2008

The assumption of a moving viewer, Richard Serra in a Japanese Temple Garden.

Richard Serra believes that the physical grasp of a space must occur through time in the form of movement or effort, so he temporally extends his own working of a surface.

Tempered, measured movement such as the application of layers of paintstick, narrows the conceptual gap between the space and time we imagine to experience bodily.

Serra's program  (a temporal art of substance), to link bodily consciousness to material substance, to integrate vision and touch as well as space and time.

Movement/Sensation marks both space and time, it does so psychologically as well as physically.

The Interaction Of Color

Albers theorized the relation of space and time to weight.

The two basic quantities or substances question, how much and how often, distinguishes two kinds of quantities, one of size, extension in area, and one of recurrence, an extension in number. These measurements establish weight in space and weight in time.

Serra's accumulated, living movement, his layering of paintstick, collects weight in space and weight in time.

The human body (corpus humanum) is composed of many individuals (of different nature), each one of which is highly composite.

The individuals of which the human body is composed are some fluid, some soft and some hard.

The individuals composing the human body, and consequently the human body itself is affected in many ways by external bodies.

The human body needs for its preservation many other bodies from which it is, so to speak, continually regenerated.

When a fluid part of the human body is so determined by an external body that it impinges frequently on another part which is soft, it changes its surface and as it were imprints on it the traces of the external impelling body.

The human body can move external bodies in many ways, and dispose them in many ways.

The human mind is apt for perceiving many things, and more so according as its body can be disposed in more ways.

Bento de Spinoza : Ethics, Part II, Postulates I-VI, Proposition XIV

Bento,s Sketchbook : John Berger. 2011

Manuel Neri

Bodies of intensity, imprinted with a ghostly figural outline.

Sculptures and drawings showing ambivalence,hostile, intimate, relationships.

The contradictory shocks between form and substance are absorbed by the emotional resilience of the dialectic of pleasure and doubt. Neri proves this in the course of his own work, through his successive approaches to different materials, which make him oscillate between allusive figuration and the most direct realism.

Pierre Restany. 1988

How do things translate into lived experience?

Whatever the answer, it will be known only in relation to the particularity of a personal physical encounter with the work, never as a principle of order or composition.

Drawing Thick, Richard Serra.

Agencies/ways of doing, phenomena and research emerge with specific relationalities to things at hand.

A diffractive methodology is a knowledge making process, creating ongoing differences, states of being/becoming.

Diffraction as a tool for analysis, attunes us to the differences generated by our knowledge.

Opening up ways for greater sensitivity towards how we are part of the worlds continuous becoming.

Organism-Person-Environment : The Architectural Body.

Arakawa and Gins 

The theoretical object/body in doing/sensate built architecture

Living Spaces : Spatial Agencies/Creative Philosophies into a world of continual process and becoming, where each person relates to every other and to all of nature.

Architectural Thinking/The Interrelated Universe : Process and Reality

Mattering : Mind-Movement-Material

Spatial Interventions in Architecture

Filtered Light and the interactions of objects

Entanglements of Materials and Substances

Asperities, opacities, reflections, textiles,

Lines Of Flight : Drawing on Mattering

Steven Holl, House,St Ignatius, Scale

Place Making/Drawing/Materials/Construction

Beach Ruins : Belgium

Rutile/Yellow Ochre washes, transparent glass/glaze, texture/textile and pierced clay/concrete.

Ceramic Slab Constructions : Facades/Massing for pacemaker utilities/living spaces

Material as drawing, drawing as construction, architectural models constructed into the assemblage of the making drawing.

Painted Clay Constructions : Gesso, Cyanotype, Cotton, Wire, Glass.

Process-Relational Philosophy : Alfred North Whitehead

Vibrant Matter : Jane Bennett

Blackness is a property, not a quality, that is to say, something fundamental, not an incidental embellishment.

About Drawing, Richard Serra.

Atmosphere and Surrounding Objects : Loose Assemblages/Living Emotions/Theoretical Gaze

Paintings being living emotions. Mark Rothko

The atmosphere of a work of art, what surrounds it, that 'place' in which it exists - all this is thought of as a lesser thing, charming but not essential. Professionals insist on essentials ... not understanding that everything we use to make art is precisely what kills it. This is what every painter I know understands. And this is what almost no composer I know understands.

The Music of Morton Feldman, reprinted from his essay  "The anxiety in art"

OUTPOST STUDIO  July 2021

Loose Assemblages : The Movement of Ideas and Feelings

Touch and materials as a normative support/exploration for the theoretical gaze

Bento's Sketchbook : John Berger

Existence appertains to the nature of substance.

A substance cannot be produced from anything else: it will therefore be its own cause, that is its essence necessarily involves existence, or, existence appertains to its nature.

Ethics, Part 1, Proposition VII, Proof

Conscious minds arise from establishing a relationship between organism and an object-to-be-known. Damasio

Architectural Body

Organism-Person-Environment

Drawing is a  form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.

The Human Body through drawing and philosophy

Berger/Spinoza 141

Matters of a discursive consciousness are explicit and explainable, and the line between discursive and practical consciousness is fluctuating and permeable, both drawing on the other in the act of agency/making social.

The defining point of agency is namely its potential to transform the given.

Generative energies, entanglements, sensorial diversions from an open studio window overlooking Anglia Square

Improvisations/choreographed with the music/ambient noise are exploratory encounters  between flesh and sound

A hut of ones own (within and bounded by others), crafted and organized around simple processes and interactions within a fallow site given over to creative ecology of energies and enterprise

Vibrant yet curiously passive form of  urbanism

Affectivity as a mimesis of lively transfers between things, humans and non-humans

Human subjectivity : Mimetic Encounters/Explorations

Art works by gathering up forms and materials for affective experimentations in subjectivity

Corporeal unconscious animated by sensitivities/sympathies, a putative affinity (haptic) between certain things including bodies and organs which makes them liable not only to be similarly affected by the same influence, but more especially to affect or influence one another. 

Intentionality/Sympathy/Sentiment/Difference

Inducing a particular set of ethical/political/social responses in actor/social audience 

Mimesis : Paradox or Encounter. Jane Bennett

Calling a sympathy/subjectivity between coloured cloth/wallpaper/display cabinet and human flesh

Francesca Woodman

Mimesis and suggestion in the social,enacted through layers of mediation surrounding humans, objects and non-humans.

Camouflage. Neil Leach

Mimesis

Sensuous Correspondence

Sympathetic Magic

Mimicry

Becoming 

Sensations in Space and Time (the experience/entanglement of phenomena and idea)

Agency/Foraging/Making/Gathering

Subjectivity is relational (always in process)

A Species of Making Spaces

Tentativeness, attentive to situatedness 

A diffractive methodology enables a critical rethinking of science and the social in their relationality, moving beyond separate entities, separate sets of concern. 

Karen Barad 

Organism 

Person

Environment

Arakawa and Madeline Gins

For Merleau-Ponty, Experience can only be understood between the mind and the body or across them in their lived conjunction.

The mind is always embodied, always based on corporeal and sensory relations.

Elizabeth Grosz.

Richard Serra : Verb List Compilation

Actions to Relate to Oneself, 1967-1967

Drawing in its frameworks and dimensions/presence and absence/its here and elsewhere

Exploring the fragility of a painting in the landscape

Canvas as sheltering construction, Raveningham Sculpture Trail

Diagram-Map-Chart, is a symbolic depiction emphasizing (mapping) relationships

Diagrams For The Imagination : Arakawa

Apokatastasis : Jim Jarmusch, Jozef Van Wissem

Litany Of Echoes : James Blackshaw

New Music, for old instruments : Paul Metzger, Jozef Van Wissem

Brilliant Trees : David Sylvian

Body As Cultural Product

Both psychic and social dimensions must find their place in reconceptualizing the body, not in opposition to each other, but as necessarily interactive.

Volatile Bodies/Chaos-Territory-Art : Elizabeth Grosz

Spatial Asperity/Mesh, Membrane and Gauze, Möbius Strip, Pattening, 

Actuality : Robert Mangold

Paintings around the particles/flows of things/boundaries/intervals of presence and absence

Induction/Capacitance/Encapsulated Layers

Drawing and its attempts to map out/make visible contingent things

Contingency, is what remains, as it comes up against causality/constantly passing through

Objects/Things conceptualized by the exploration of drawing (intervals of blindness)

Linking Surface to the Aesthetic Experience of Space.

Experiences incorporating interests with environmental textures into Art.

Points of Contact/Confluence of Circumstances

Materials bound by contact/canvas

Patina, absences, gesso, textile wrappings, field chalk, exhumed oyster shells, yellow ochre,

A philosophy of Reading/Matter/Rooms, 

The Lake of The Mind

Stochastic Thinking, Steven Holl

Solitude/Libraries : Cell/Court/Domain

Capacitance, relationships between intensities and movements

Clay, Waxed Surface, Liquid Rust, Calico,

Sensate Bandages/Windings/Armatures : Corporeal Landscapes/Assemblages/Things

Flesh, elementary pre-communicative, subject and object develop.

Making as Growth : Tim Ingold

Social Architectures/Anthropologies/Imaginary Projects/Interfaces/Screens

Timothy Morton : Realist Magic

The elasticity of sensation, affective and wonderous

Sally Mann : Matter Lent/Collodion wetplate negatives

Corpus, liquid light, flesh, spirit, trace, outline, human body, performative,

Paintings/Enactments : Canvas as a spatial verb

Espace-Milieu, painting as environment/entanglements and situations

Ceramic/Process and its theoretical objects 

As a series of practices, making reality by bringing things together or separating them into their singularities, or making machines/desiring machines

Desire can be seen as an Actualization

Gathering Notations : Bernard Tuchumi  

Both presence and absence are coupled in this framework

Deleuze/Guattari

Glass/GLAS : Resistivity/Inclusions, A Field in England.

Translucent aesthetics, beyond the opacities of the sensible the rational.

An image that adequately expresses both the efficacy and the temporariness of the phenomena ( joining a diffused/invisible flow of energy, a breadth that wends its way ceaselessly through the world). Animating it as it goes.

Vital Nourishment, Departing from happiness, Francois Jullian.

What is a body capable of -  

Spinoza

Building/Making, into the theoretical performative object (that does theory)

Albers/Clarke : Interactions, Counterpoints, Intervals between colour/forms, 

Membrane, Discursive, Diffractive, Sensory, Layered and Filtered Light,

Body, Movement, Mind, Assemblages, Exploratory, Speculative, Choreographic,

Deleuze/Guattari, understand the body more in terms of what AFFECTS it is capable of, instead of the consequences of having a body.

Peter Zumthor : Thermal Baths

Human Agency/Temporal transitions between matter and movement.

Immaterial/Concrete/Water : Bodies in contact/the corporeal social human body

Manifolds/Theory of Temporality/3 Synthesis of Time

Memory     Past Preserved                    Condition

Present       Habit Instants                     Agent

New           Future, actual/virtual          Creation of The New

 

Multiplicity, purality of contemplating souls.

Asymmetries between particular past and general future.

Temporality involves multiple interacting processes.

 

Architecture becomes Spatial Agency

We all make space : Jeremy Till

Paintings, space, volume, surface, passages, actualizations, claddings/camouflage 

One conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences, both phenomenological and filmic, reading a space by its depth of field, its thickness.

Turbulence House, New Mexico, Steven Holl.

Aesthetics/Asperities : Resultants that incorporate the friction (asperity) of their trajectories through a medium. Tilt-up concrete construction, Chapel of St, Ignatius, Seattle. Steven Holl.

Navigations and Vectors/conduits/intervals and traces between discursive practices.

Wrapped Silences : Assembled Sectional Elements/Thresholds

Surfaces on Mourning/Samsara, a beauty fed on emptiness

Slow Materials/Philosophy : Spaces beyond objects/The Movement of Ideas and Feelings

 

Loose Assemblages : The Movement of Ideas and Feelings

Bento's Sketchbook : John Berger

Existence appertains to the nature of substance.

A substance cannot be produced from anything else: it will therefore be its own cause, that is its essence necessarily involves existence, or, existence appertains to its nature.

Ethics, Part 1, Proposition VII, Proof

Conscious minds arise from establishing a relationship between organism and an object-to-be-known. 

The Feeling of What Happens, Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness

Antonio Damasio. 1999.

Architectural Body

Organism-Person-Environment

Drawing is a  form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.

The Human Body through drawing and philosophy

Berger/Spinoza 141

Matters of a discursive consciousness are explicit and explainable, and the line between discursive and practical consciousness is fluctuating and permeable, both drawing on the other in the act of agency/making social.

The defining point of agency is namely its potential to transform the given.

Generative energies, entanglements, sensorial diversions from an open studio window overlooking Anglia Square

Improvisations/choreographed with the music/ambient noise are exploratory encounters  between flesh and sound

A hut of ones own (within and bounded by others), crafted and organized around simple processes and interactions within a fallow site given over to creative ecology of energies and enterprise

Vibrant yet curiously passive form of  urbanism

Affectivity as a mimesis of lively transfers between things, humans and non-humans

Human subjectivity : Mimetic Encounters/Explorations

Art works by gathering up forms and materials for affective experimentations in subjectivity

Corporeal unconscious animated by sensitivities/sympathies, a putative affinity (haptic) between certain things including bodies and organs which makes them liable not only to be similarly affected by the same influence, but more especially to affect or influence one another. 

Intentionality/Sympathy/Sentiment/Difference

Inducing a particular set of ethical/political/social responses in actor/social audience 

Mimesis : Paradox or Encounter. Jane Bennett

Calling a sympathy/subjectivity between coloured cloth/wallpaper/display cabinet and human flesh

Francesca Woodman

Mimesis and suggestion in the social,enacted through layers of mediation surrounding humans, objects and non-humans.

Camouflage. Neil Leach

Mimesis

Sensuous Correspondence

Sympathetic Magic

Mimicry

Becoming 

Composite Bodies in Spaces : Drawing into the contemporary sociological imagination

Drawing into the contemporary sociological imagination

Intermezzo : Nomadic Photographic Assemblage

a thousand plateaus
Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage
Becoming
Body Without Organs
Nomad
Rhizome
Smooth Space
State
War Machine

www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html

The Uberficiation of the University
BY MARK CARRIGAN ON NOVEMBER 22, 2016• ( 0 )
sociologicalimagination.org/archives/18986

The Sharing Economy
Platform Capitalism
Uber.edu
The Reputation Economy
The Microentrepreneur of the Self
The Para-academic
The Artrepreneur
Affirmative Disruption

A fascinating short book by Gary Hall, available open access at the Coventry University repository:
curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/file/4b7671d5-371f-438b-83c7-92...

img20161120_17325939 Photographic Forms

Drawing figure/ground, documentation of work in progress.

Life "drawing" trace on paper with water and field chalk. Work submitted to Interfaith Group Show at the Link Gallery, Winchester 2010.

"This particular event invokes for me the notion of simple material relations and collaborative gestures that underpin human agency.
Art space/practice can promote these working intimations that enter into the realm of beliefs."        

Artist's Statement (archive)  07.12.2009.

Camera Obscura : Kilquhanity 2011. #4
Dark Session's : Shadowy speculations in the pottery. Kilquhanity 2011

Silver gelatin prints from a "room obscura" set up at Kilquhanity, Scotland 2011 as part of "Back to Free school, Drawing out the Archive"

Sequential Photograph : In the space around the "spatial turn" (539)
Art as Spatial Practice.
Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

"All that is solid melts into air"

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

pictify.com/user/russellmoreton

PB144997a : Mapping.

Bento's Sketchbook : John Berger

The human  body  {corpus humanum) is composed  of many individuals (of different nature),  each  one of which  is highly composite.

The  individuals  of  which  the  human  body  is  composed  are some fluid, some soft and some hard.

The individuals composing  the human  body,  and  conse­quently  the human  body  itself is affected  in  many  ways by external bodies.

The human body needs for its preservation many other bodies from which it is, so to speak, continually regenerated.

When a fluid part of the human body is so determined by an external body that it impinges frequently on another part which is soft, it changes its surface and as it were imprints on it the traces of the external impelling body.

The  human  body  can  move  external  bodies  in  many  ways, and dispose them in many ways.

The human mind is apt for perceiving many things, and more so according as its body can be disposed in more ways.

{Ethics, Part II, Postulates I-VI, Proposition XIV)

Corpus : Propositions/Proofs and the situatedness of an environment

Architectural Body/An organism that persons

Organism, Person, Environment : Madeline Gins and Arakawa

You cannot see me from where I look at myself 

Francesca Woodman

Therefore the idea of the human body is composed of the many ideas of the component parts.

The idea which  constitutes the formal being  of the human mind is the idea of the body, which is composed of many indi­viduals,  each  composed  of many  parts.

(Ethics, Part II, Proposition XV, Proof)

Camouflage : Neil Leach

Mimesis

Sensuous Correspondence

Sympathetic Magic

Mimicry

Becoming

Mimesis : Paradox or Encounter. Jane Bennett

Yet,  freed  from the block, the relations between her and everything which was not her had changed. An absolute yet invisible change. She was now the centre of what surrounded her. All that was not her made space for her.

Where there are no  words, knowledge comes through  physical acts and  through  the space through which those acts are made; by permitting each act the space conferred  meaning  upon  it and  no  further meaning  was necessary.

John Berger

We sense and experience that we are eternal. For the mind no less senses those things which it conceives in understanding than those which it has in the memory. For the eyes of the mind by which it sees things and observes them are proofs. So although we do not remember that we existed before the body, we sense nevertheless that our mind in so far as it involves the essence of the body under a species of eternity is eternal and its existence cannot be defined by time or explained by duration.

(Spinoza, Ethics, Part V, Proposition XXIII)

Situatedness is a theoretical position that posits that the mind is ontologically and functionally intertwined within environmental, social, and cultural factors. As such, psychological functions are best understood as constituted by the close coupling between the agent and the environment.