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.

Assemblages of Event : Visual Art+Spatial Practices/Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies

Outpost 111225

The Everyday.

ANTONIO  He misses not much.

SEBASTIAN  No, he doth but mistake the truth totally.

The Tempest.

The Transparency Of The Morning.

One never sees what is always seen.

The immediate, just like the simple, the natural and the ordinary, does not perceive itself.

Substances : Artworks, rituals of purity and impurity.

Demarcations/Systems/Fields of order and contravention.

Material Margins/Transitional  Spatial Spaces.

Knowing that this clarity which has sprung up will soon dissipate.

Morning coincides with the emergence, giving back a possibility of springing up, of rising before the day has started to spread out.

For Jullien, it is possible to gain access to it only as we gain access to the immediacy of the day from the night. A world in which living is not right away (in which respect metaphysics is correct) it is necessary to cause it to rise. But without again being concealed by whatever has been entrusted with revealing it.

Life, is devoted from the outset to what its 'end' might be (telos) in the full sense of the Greek word.

Telos, at once a conclusion, aim, perfection, abandoning all the preceding 'between of life' to indifference.

The Way- Without demarcation, rather a way of viability by which the continuum of life is renewed.

The Philosophy of Living.

Francois Jullien.

Developing Open Subjectivities/BwO : Visual Art, Winchester. 2006.

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

Bodies are conditioned by architectural surrounds.

Architectural Body.

Reversible Destiny. 

Arakawa and Gins.

The transformative body, creates bodily interiors/relations that can open up to become productive alliances in which using spatial bodies, (other than the ideal types) they can be brought into new affiliations with systems outside of their boundaries. 

Creating an affective intensity.

Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Relationscapes/Bodies/Events.

Organism-Person-Environment

Event-Space-Movement, superimposed over one another creates disjunction(Tschumi) and assemblages (Deleuze).

Drawing/Beginning a dialogue with matter/material between human bodies and spatial bodies.

Simple articulations (frottage) with the immensity and immediacy of the everyday.

Abstracted-Diagrammatic-Inhabitations.

Paintings/Drawings/Sculptures/Instalations.

Francis Bacon.

The Logic of Sensation. 1981, 2003.

Deleuze.

Reliquaries/Enclosures of Spatial Silences and of Light/Air.

A type of labyrinth with a momentary impossibility of escape (soul cages)  these are minoritarian architectures (Deleuze).

Real Spaces for Fictional Events.

A becoming architecture to provoke potentials to occur.

On the everyday, abjection of the human body.

The Clinic.

Bathrooms are spaces associated with the clean body and simultaneously with the dirty body. They are spaces that allow for hygienic evacuation of our excretions, they order our un-containment.

At the end of the day , the curtain is hung and there is a certain visceral repulsion to the damp curtain hanging in the window. To the drying of our bodily excretions and their gradual visual indiscernibility with the fabric. So no one knows what the fabric has absorbed.

All that remains is us, inhaling ourselves as air passes through the curtain and into our lungs. A re-absorption of our expulsions.

Zuzana Kovar.

The work of Deleuze and Guattari as a whole provides a way of approaching all bodies void of a dualistic framework. In particular for Kovar, Deleuze's work specifically touches on abject(ion) through his notion of an open and transformative or spasmodic body, which he discusses in the work of Francis Bacon.

Figure at a Washbasin. 1976

Francis Bacon.

Event-spaces in the paintings of Francis Bacon.

The Body-Figure/Figural-Event.

From the start, the figure has been a body and the body has a place within the enclosure of the painting from which the figure expels itself, gymnastically on the fields of colour. Is this the event of a body escaping itself into a figure, of the body in Deleuzean terms of trying to escape any notion of identity/form of repression?    

For Bacon, the body-figure exerts an intense motionless effort upon itself in order to escape down the blackness of the drain. This plexus (the body as plexus) its effort or waiting for a spasm, becomes for Bacon a painterly approximation of horror or abjection.

Paintings that create spasms that re-order the human organism, in order to escape it, by growing bodily organs as prostheses, or by allowing the enclosure of painterly space and contour to become an apparatus, an extension of the body-figure-figuration.  

The body waits to escape itself in a very precise manner, to escape itself via a spasm, the movement of the figure towards the material structure, towards the field of colour.

For Deleuze, the body repeatedly attempts to escape the organism, the particular organisation of organs that may be understood as constituting the subject the 'I', for Deleuze the body attempts to escape the 'I'. It is not 'I' who attempt to escape from my body, it is the body that attempts to escape from itself by means of, a spasm. But the body is not simply waiting for something from the structure (its place is an enclosure), it is waiting for something inside itself. It exerts an effort upon itself in order to become a figure now it is inside the body that something is happening, the body is the source of movement.

Athleticism, The Logic of Sensation. Deleuze.

Elliptical Circulations

Studio Wall Spaces/Artist's Books.

Between 'Devices'

Documentation/Research/Reading/Places/Images

Interpolation/Interpolation/Interstitial. 

Sculpting In Time.

Tarkovsky.

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

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

Making Processual Paths Of Volatility : Ceramics/Sinopis Red/Palette from Antiquity.

Outpost 171225

Early palette from Antiquity:

White, yellow ochre, sinopis red (earth red), black (bluish).

Michael Grimshaw, Winchester School of Art. 2007

Intricate Local Behaviours : Conversations/Correspondences between unrelated entities.

Lines. (Making/Thinking/Matter/Material)

Tim Ingold

What Is Art ?

Joseph Beuys.

I find it interesting that you say that this stool or box speaks to you, whereas this floor, as you said, doesn't. A similar thing happens to me, and I ask myself: What is this due to, the fact that it doesn't speak to me, or only a little? It makes me think that these ready-made things, this precision, actually compels me to behave in a particular way, not just these things here, but also a certain window, or a specific type of architecture that is very fixed very straight, that derives from something very thought out; this compels me to live or behave in a similar way,

Volker Harlan.

Beuys: Yes, right, exactly; in other words, this lives (points to the box) while the other (points to the floor) is dead. The first doesn't force itself on you, the other continually forces itself on you.

Thinking Processual.

Resistance/Viability : Mapping/Living

Meaning that it is not so much a matter of crossing boundaries, but rather a matter of open-endedness. A place where boundaries have become diluted and single figures are already coupled or heterogeneous figures (in the case of Bacon, man-animal).

Kovar/Deleuze.

The Architecture of Abjection.

The Logic of Sensation.

Working From Simple Things/Gestures/Materials.

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

Theoretical Movements in Clay+Ceramics.

The Circular/Elliptical Matter/Mattering of Things.

Gathering/Pouring/Manifolds : Forms of Thinking. 

Events.

Arte Povera.

The Way, without demarcation, rather a way of viability by which the continuum of life is renewed.

The Philosophy of Living.

Francois Jullien.

The Quiet Mind :  Silently without resistance

(Sound of barking) Do you listen to that dog? Wait, wait. Silently? Listen to it completely silently, which means without any resistance, without any irritation, just listen to it. When you listen quietly there is no resistance, there is no irritation, you do not identify yourself with the dog and the barking of it, your mind is quiet.

Meditation

The meaning of that word is to measure, basically (for oneself).

https://www.krishnamurti.org/transcript/in-meditation-there-is-no-direction/#:~:text=One%20must%20be%20wholly%20and,is%20vain,%20full%20of%20confidence

Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Kounellis/Opera, interventions, unscripted by workmen, bodies on trolleys. 

Penone, wooden frame, human body, empty frame installed in a stream.

Beuys, accumulator, clay balls, wires, simple sturdy wooden table.

Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits.

The Enabling Constraint. 

Erin Manning.

Visual Art Practice. 2024

Whether abject(ion) issues forth from a human body, a space or any other entity, it sets the whole world in motion and instigates a chain of exchanges.

In 'becoming' for Deleuze and Guattari we form a multiplicitous assemblage where individual elements are blurred, and together begin to act as a kind of whole. But a whole that is not fixed, as the assemblage also has a side facing a BwO which is continually dismantling the organism.

Through abject(ion) the smells, textures and physical forms of our body space and this excrement leaking out, become fused together. We become part of the space: the space becomes a part of us.

Abject(ion) re-configure the body and space physically through the transference of matter.

Architecture Without Organs (BwO)

The BwO is in fact produced as a whole, but a whole alongside the parts. A whole that does not unify or totalize them. But that is added to them like a new, really distinct part.

Deleuze and Guattari.

BwO plays a role in the notion of an open subjectivity. Kovar asks, are or how are abject(ion) and BwO related, and how might this relation be played out in architecture?

The BwO for Deleuze and Guattari is a concept that uses the virtual dimensions of the body as a set of potentialities that may be activated through becoming, importantly it is a body, understood as process that is continually constructing and deconstructing connections. 

To speak of process and the continual construction and deconstruction of connections is to implicate numerous entities between which these connections are made and therefore speak of heterogeneity.

Open Subjectivities.

Unmaking The Human Body/Subject.

Blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior.

Translucent assemblages are all that are left from the transparency/clarity of the morning that will soon dissipate.

Reliquaries of Light and Darkness.

Bodies, spatial and human in transitional movements. 

The Sacred and The Medical Body.

The Hospital Room.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

Cronos.

 

Clay/Working/Learning/Making.

Working in Clay and Fire /Mapping Resistance and Viability.

City of Orion, ceramic objects in the landscape.

Raveningham Sculpture Trail. 2024

Ceramic works investigating the relationship of water to the human body and the architectural body of interior spaces.

Water at The Hungate, Norwich. 2023

Exhibitions with Anglian Potters.

Ferini Gallery, Lowestoft. 5

Undercroft, Norwich. 4

All Saints, Cambridge. 2

2019-2024.

Revisited Contemporary Ceramics

Things of Beauty Growing.

The Fitzwilliam Museum. 2018

Anglian Potters. 2018

Teaching Sessions, throwing/handbuilding.

Brockwood Park School. 2012-2015

Speculative Clay Workshop/Walking in the Landscape.

Teaching Academy, Brockwood Park School. 2011

Raku Firings.

St Ninian's Cave.

Scotland. 2013

Bodyscapes, raw clay installations.

Chapel Arts Studios, Andover. 2010

The Yard, Winchester. 2009 

Contemporary Craft Ceramics. 2004-2006 

Life Drawing/Sculpture, figurative/abstractions in clay. 1996-2002

Dexterity Crafts.

Potter throwing domestic pottery.

Walton on the Hill. 1985

Ceramics, architecturally influenced vessels in slab and thrown processes.

Epsom College of Art and Design. 1981-1984

Industrial Pottery experience.

Grayshott Pottery. 1979-1981

Studio Pottery experience. 

The Hop Kiln Pottery. 1978

A Level Ceramics.

Farnham Sixth Form. 1976-1978

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

Studio Works/Architectural Surrounds : Drawing into the indeterminacy of boundaries.

Outpost 250924

Research Collage 2015

Disjunction and Event/Architecture In/Between.

The task of the architect is to modulate, orchestrate, or simplify the potential reciprocity, indifference, or conflict that spaces can generate. Most problems in architecture are disjunctive, namely they are multiple, heterogeneous, divergent and even contradictory, involving site, program, budget, schedule, and interest groups, among other factors. All of these contradicting and disjunctive forces eventually contaminate one another. Bernard Tschumi, Notes on Architecture 2010 (unpublished).

Making/Adaptations/Using The Made.

Drawing into the indeterminacy of boundaries.

Organism-Person-Environment

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

Studio Drawings.

On Feeling More Matter than Form.

There is always more of everything than a thing can contain.

Immediate Architectural Experiences.

Bodies, Spaces and Their Relations.

Creating an independent yet meaningful reality, that are direct aesthetic experiences of the real.

Kenzo Tange.

Regaining our experience in a world of mass media  culture, regaining a world that is directly lived.

Ann Cline.

Architectural Body/Sited Awareness.

Arakawa and Gins  end up pointing to the inseparability and affect of body and surround, for them this inseparability is what gives rise to the architectural body. They write that a person should never be considered apart from her surroundings, that their hypothesis of the Architectural Body/Sited Awareness, announces the indivisibility of seemingly separate fields of bioscleave: a person and an architectural surround, and that the two together give procedural architecture its basic unit of study the architectural body.

This results in a certain indeterminacy of boundaries, as body and surround are collapsed into one, and as they are constantly shifting in relation to one another. 

The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. 

Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.

Architecture in Abjection.

Zuzana Kovar.

Relevance/Relation as a way of organizing things through both contingency (philosophy) and metonymy (linguistics).

Relevance has by its nature, wiggle room because things have wiggle room. Because things never quite coincide with how they appear for or how they are used by or interpreted by other things (and possibly even themselves).

What we want to do and how we feel and what we are wanting and feeling about are all mashed together into an ecological awareness.

The Context of Relevance is Structurally Incomplete.

Whenever you want to do something, you always encounter a whole thicket of things that are relevant to what you're wanting to do. This thicket of things creates an explosion of contextualization, and you can't – won't be able to stop it.

Timothy Morton.

An interconnection without an edge or centre called General Economy.

Bataille.

Architecture and Material Practice

Katie Lloyd Thomas.

Susannah Hagan argues for a return to a cyclic model where matter is only ever reformed and make (or adapt) architecture accordingly – but without necessarily returning to old forms of building. In a responsible future, architects may have to relinquish their role as form givers, and 'grow' materials rather than give them shape.

Social imperatives and new technologies may well, finally, be the undoing of the grip that hylomorphism has held on architectural and material practices for so long.

Caryatids/Project Spaces.

Architectural Surrounds.

Studio Floor Drawing/Painting.

Mattering/Of and For the Body of Others.

Material Worlds : Frottage, charcoal, wax, Indian Ink, crayon on water.

Material and buildings are always implicated, in and of the world. In discussing her work with a group of African women who are beginning the process of making their own homes, Doina Petrescu asks how their principle of 'putting together and sharing' might be realized in an architectural project. 

The specificities of place, culture, gender and local forms of negotiation make an 'architecture' that is more fluid than solid, and more matter than form, and demonstrate the radical alterity of building in another context.

Architecture in Abjection.

Organism-Person-Environment

Human bodies and spaces flow  through one another – a chemical indiscernibility that is invisible.

Two of the most fundamental things that come out of the work of Rahm and Arakawa and Gins for architecture, in mapping out a more open-ended and volatile understanding of bodies and spaces, are the reduction of these to matter and a thinking in terms of relations or events rather than static and discrete entities. These link directly into the area of process and intelligent material philosophy that is at the forefront of this thinking, and that is employed here, namely through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, in order to approach abject(ion) productively. 

What the introduction of abject(ion) and a reading of it through the filter of Deleuze and Guattari allows for and contributes on top of its own way of reworking dualities is a bringing together of the material and processual approaches already in play within the work of Rahm and Arakawa and Gins, respectively. It is with this in mind that we move to the Kristevan concept.

The Hot Death. 2006.

Philippe Rahm.

Rahm's work has a very particular quality. There is almost no building, which is usually the measure or ground of architecture. There is nothing left but the ritual, experience, coder and effect of architecture itself.

Physiological/Meteorological Architecture operates across fields of art, architecture and science. Rahm through his spaces, manipulates temperature, oxygen and hormone levels. Importantly, as his works straddle this range of fields, it frees up the architecture, allowing it to be distilled down to its effects and to experience.

An architecture that gets distilled down to experience and the chemical exchanges between body and space. It begins to function within a similar realm to abject(ion). It becomes about a visceral assault, an affect that passes through the subject.

This extracorporeal space, especially in contemporary man, consists of filling to the point of overflow where the subject is ensnared, a condition  of the state of stress and an endemic breach of adaptation.

The Hot Death is a choreography piece that investigates the indiscernibility of the body and space at a chemical level. A levelling between body and space occurs, where the temperature of the space slowly comes to equal that of the living body, stabilising the two and eliminating their differences: a  play on death.

The bodies are on stage at the start of the order of individuality, each with its own movements, independently of others, as a multitude of energy. Then gradually, the temperature, humidity of the room rises to match that of the human body. The movements are slower, heavier, gravity wins put up any ground, motionless, without more space between, more movement possible.

Body and space are at the fundamental level of a base materialism, merely matter, and that because of this, 'can wind quintets carry and spread the flu virus?' such exchanges are possible.

Raum's work moves away from an architecture that is constituted by body and space to an architecture that is the active exchange between body and space. It is in this understanding – that bodily and spatial boundaries are not clearly demarcated as architecture still generally assumes them to be, and that they regularly are transgressed and diluted – that constitutes a move beyond dualistic modes of thought.

Processual Makings of The Everyday : Between Silences on The Sympathy Of Things

Clay~Ceramic~Theoretical~Things~Ties

Clay Based Practices : Ecologies~Things Emerging in Relation.

Archaeologies of making material sensitive.

A processual object that both poses an agencement~question and carries its gathering.

Sites of building over lived lives.

This item is a sculptural ceramic artwork by artist Russell Moreton, specifically developed from his interest in architectural spaces and material construction.     Artist: Russell Moreton, a visual fine artist based in Harleston, Norfolk. Material: Slab-built clay and ceramic bodies. Theme: Explores themes of 'Making', interior spaces, and metaphysical immersive nature. Style: Involves intense textures and architectural, almost meditative forms.

Sociological Bindings~Matter(s) of Concern

Felt Abstractions~Inspirational Radicalism.

Urban Gothic : An Excess Of Changefulness.

Of the creation of concepts, explored through the plane of immanence in which it can be born and the 'conceptual personae' which can activate it.

On Other Forms Of Thought.

What Is Philosophy?

Deleuze and Guattari.

Can perhaps only be posed late in life with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking concretely.

It is a question posed in a moment of quiet restlessness at midnight when there is no longer anything to ask.

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.

Essays : Critical and Clinical.

Deleuze is concerned with the delirium, the process of life that lies behind this invention as well as the loss that occurs. The silence that follows when this delirium becomes a clinical state. 

Material~Felt Abstractions : Delirium and Dissolution.

Spatial Bodies : Between Silences on The Sympathy Of Things.

A Growing Thicket of Thing~Ties

White Odyssey~Archaeologies of making material sensitive.

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

Speculative Learning Environment : Study~Studio : The Library/Hidden Curriculum

Study~Studio : A Philosophy of Solitude~Making

Hidden Curriculum , a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

26/10/2013

Inquiry into learning environments through contemporary art based practices.

Speculative Learning Environment : Russell Moreton.

Re- Imagining Education, Brockwood Park School. 

a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine