The Inner Room~Clay/Jug and the Primacy of Being : The Potter and The Philosopher, Coper/Heidegger.

15 March 2015

UCA Farnham.

Working Notes. Visuals and Text

Extracts from Waverley Project/Research Folder, MA Interior Design.

Clay and the Primacy of Being

The Potter and The Philosopher

Innerness and Defined Space

Manifesting the everyday crafts of life in a physical form.

Ceramic Assemblage : White Spaces/The Patina of Objects.

The Potter ( Hans Coper) and the Philosopher (Martin Heidegger),

Throwing, Building, Dwelling, Thinking.

Brian Clarke, Stained Glass, Sainsbury Centre.

The innerness of a ceramic vessel can be seen to be dealing with presences and absences, as like that of a building it can demonstrate the presence of its making and the absence of that same presence.

The Philosopher. Martin Heidegger.

Building Dwelling Thinking. 1951

Heidegger “resolutely romanticised the rural and the low-tech before, during and after Nazism, skating dangerously close to fascist rhetoric of blood and soil.”¹

Architecture can help to centre people in the world; it can offer individuals places from which to inquire for themselves. Heidegger felt that this was how architecture had been understood in the past, and that the insatiable rise of technology had obscured that understanding.

Heidegger interested on centring his qualities of architecture around those of human experience, to reintegrate building with dwelling, making the qualities of its inhabitation become part of the buildings authenticity to its locality.

This almost vocational unfinished architecture finds itself more at home with the ongoing daily life than any sort of finished product.”²

Contemporary architects of which Peter Zumthor is an exemplary example utilise and readily acknowledge the influence of Heidegger’s thinking. The inner spaces, the materiality and the locality are all directly traceable to traits found in Heidegger’s notion of the value of human presence and inhabitation.

Heidegger claims for architecture “the authority of immediate experience”³

As recorded in his most architectural writings.

The Origin of the Work of Art 1935/trans 1971

Being and Time 1927/1962

Art and Space 1971/1973

“To Heidegger, proper thinking was highly tuned to the fact of being and its traces. These traces, like our own shadow, the outline of the hills or the sounds of birdsong and stream, remain reminders of our miraculous presence,”⁴

Building locates human existence,

Heidegger “ believed that building was set out around human presence, configured by it but also configuring the activities of that presence over time”⁵

This almost vocational activity of building human presence it at the heart of what it means “to dwell”, the poetics of which form the phenomenological inquiry of Gaston Bachelard’s, Poetics of Space. Heidegger acknowledges that the inhabitants lives are in turn configured by the building.

Adam Sharr, notes that “for Heidegger, a building was built according to the specifics of place and inhabitants, shaped by its physical and human topography.”⁶

Heidegger on Thinking,

The forest track, the clearing, wandering from a starting point and remaining open to findings reached on the way, it could not be readily summarised or contained by a system. It was referential, mystical model that sought to promote the authority of being.

Heidegger on the Void at the centre of the Jug.⁷

Made from earth/clay/fire connected the human experience of earth and sky. Heidegger attributed sacred qualities to the jugs ability to give/to pour. Part of his fourfold cosmology of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. This “fourfold” represents Heidegger’s attempt at what he judges to be the most primary circumstances of existence, “ the inescapable pre-requisite of the world into which humans are thrown without consent (1962,164-168).

Mythic and mystical, far from the strictures of logical thinking.

Influences on the “fourfold”

Meister Eckhart/mystic theologian.

Lao Tse/eastern philosopher.

Friedrich Holderlin/poet.

George Steiner on the “fourfold” suggests it is a manifestation of an “ideolect” a personal language offered as universal.

Heidegger would refute this on the grounds that it is our technocratic conception of the world that is unhinged not his.

Heidegger: A mysticism that seems to border onto/into the realm of site specific art?

Waverley Project 2014.

Spaces and Shadows in Architecture, Defined Light and Volumes.

In Praise of Shadows. Junichiro Tanizaki

Architectural Voids/ Spaces only assessable whilst under construction, scaffolding and specific access points, maintenance and service corridors/rooms.

Kengo Kuma on “Ma” a void or pause, a rich emptiness, it can be created in many ways: through the

effect of light, or through attention to details.⁸

Being close to things, Heidegger on Nearness.

“The thing is not “in” nearness, “in” proximity, as if nearness were a container. Nearness is at work in bringing near, as the thinging of the thing,”(1971:177-178)⁹

This spatial complexity ( Critical Spatial Practices) suggests that we do indeed think through things, this is picked up by Tim Ingold in The Perception of the Environment (Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill) 2000.

Also see, The Politics of Things/Immediate Architectural Interventions : Durations and Effects. Alres/Lieberman 2013.

On building a house. Ingold.

“The architect, then, conceives the lineaments of the structure, while the builder’s task is to unite the structure with the material”¹⁰

Simon Unwin defines architecture as “the determination by which a mind gives intellectual structure to a building”, whereas building is “the performance of physical realization”, of which “a building” is the product. (Unwin. Understanding Architecture 2007)

Inner Spaces/The Quiet Room

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.

Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.

The cell of myself fills with wonder.

The white-washed wall of my secret.

Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.

Heidegger notes that “nearness is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and as such it can be experienced and appreciated through the tactile, cognitive and sociological familiarity of things”¹¹

It is a this relationship of nearness to the daily intricacies of living, being/becoming and dwelling that Heidegger’s philosophy is appropriated into architectural theory and practice. “Nearness thus becomes a function of immediacy : in that one is near to what one finds immediate, however far away it may be.”

For Heidegger, the definite characteristic of a thing (of a pot) is its possibility to bring people nearer to themselves, to help them engage with their existence and the fourfold.¹²

Heidegger attributed both the Jug and Buildings the potential to gather up and to be able to carry connotations of meeting and assembly, the jug and the building both have a corresponding void, that has the potential to contain/embody his preconditions of existence (the fourfold). This sensing space/void/Ma, can be reflected in the interiors of architecture and can be found within innerness spaces of objects.

The pot like the building participates in daily life.

This can be further theorised into the realm of building social spaces.

In Heidegger’s reasoning by using a table we are in effect constituting ourselves in the process of dwelling, by moving the table to accommodate the needs of its users, we are in effect turning the room back into a building.

Heidegger’s building and dwelling take place together over time, forming ongoing relationships with the world. Like the Potter in his Studio, these critical spatial relations inform both the working practice and the situation and biography of their making.

“Heidegger suggested that it was this disruption of relations between building and dwelling, rather than the production of houses, that remained the most important plight in the contemporary world”¹³

Piety of Thinking. 1976 (Piety for Heidegger listened to and facilitated the world around)¹⁴

Quietude : Allow and enabling what is already there.

Silence in Ceramics. Coper/Rie.

Clay and the Primacy of Being.

Studio Spaces.

The residents’ dwelling was recorded over time in the fabric of the building and the paraphernalia of their lives placed there.

For the philosopher , buildings are rich in insight, comprising a “workshop of long experience and incessant practice. 1971,161.¹⁵

Notes:

1 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects.

2 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

3 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

4 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 7

5 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 9

6 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 10

7 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 30

8 Kengo Kuma. Sensing Spaces. Royal Academy of Arts. 2014, 65

9 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1⁰ Tim Ingold. Making. 59

1¹ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1² Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1³ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 43

1⁴ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 45

1⁵ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 71


Wallace Stevens :  Anecdote of the Jar/Vessel takes dominion/Edmund de Waal

Related 

Jackie Leven ; Clay Jug (The Mystery of Love is greater than The Mystery of Death)

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

Photographic Ruins/Mixtures~Materials and Dissolutions : Sontag, Tarkovsky, Barthes.

Tarkovsky uses to four pre Socratic elements, fire , air, water and earth, together with their various mixtures and dissolutions, smoke, rust, clay, mud, slime and dust. He also records time by its action on things its erosion, and its scars. Tarkovsky affirms ruins are buildings which have lost their function and have turned into instruments for measuring time. 

Ruins have a special hold on our emotions because they challenge us to imagine their forgotten faith.

The architecture of illusion, of securities built by the imagination and memories.

A city is composed of different kinds of men, similar people cannot bring a city into existence. 

Aristotle, The Politics.

Flesh and Stone : The Body and the City in Western Civilization. Richard Sennett.

Heidegger's Topology : Being, Place, World. Jeff Malpas.

RUINS : Documents of Contemporary Art. Brian Dillon.

J. G. Ballard : A Handful of Dust. 2006.

Tacita Dean : Sound Mirrors. 1999.

The Memory Of Place : A Phenomenology Of The Uncanny. Dylan Trigg.

 Ruins are buildings which have lost their function and have turned into instruments for measuring

 time. 

ROLAND BARTHES MYTHICAL SPEECH, LANGUAGE-OBJECT:

PLINY THE ELDER: NATURAL HISTORY, translation H. Rackham 1952. BOOK 35

Origins of Painting (XXXV, 5).

The question as to the origin of the art of painting is uncertain and it does not belong to the plan of this work. The Egyptians declare that it was invented among themselves six thousand years ago before it passed over into Greece—which is clearly an idle assertion. As to the Greeks, some of them say it was discovered at Sicyon, others in Corinth, but all agree that it began with tracing an outline round a man s shadow and consequently that pictures were originally done in this way, but the second stage when a more elaborate method had been invented was done in a single colour and called monochrome, a method still in use at the present day.

Plastic art. Early stages. Butades and others. (XXXV, 43).

Enough and more has now been said about painting. It may be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs until the destruction of Corinth by Mummius.

Roland Barthes states in his text titled Myth Today in Mythologies that “myth is a system of communication that is a message.” And that it “allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea.1” Put simply it is as Barthes confirms” a mode of signification, a form.” The interesting thing about myths is the fact that this “mode of signification” is then assigned to a form. It is onto this form that further conditions are then placed and the form then becomes loaded with historical values, and conditions of use that will reintroduce it back into society. 

Barthes acknowledges that “mythology can only have a historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the “nature” of things.2” Myths therefore have particular qualities as Barthes assigns them as being created from a “semiological chain which existed before it.” Their historical situation is such that it forms their first contextual space which is simultaneously placed in the present. This creates a sense of a portal or window into a mythological space of reflection, whilst at the same time acknowledging our immediate surroundings. The myth appears like a projection from these historical origins and has the ability to illuminating itself and the moment into a contemporary mythical experience. Barthes illustrates the myths ability to attach itself to any material that can arbitrarily become endowed with significance by stating.

It can consist of modes of writing or of representations; not only written Or representations; not only written discourse, but also photography, Cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity, all these can serve as a support To mythical speech. Myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its Material.3

Barthes denotes myths as having three components, the signifier, the signified, and the sign. Myth having been created by used materials has “a second-order semiological system.” Barthes clarifies this by stating” that which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system (signifier and signified becomes sign) becomes a mere signifier in the second.4” The raw materials that make up mythical speech, its very language, rituals and objects are all “reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth.5” The myths ability is that it is able to project language as an language-object that can be reconstituted by our contemporary sensibilities into mythical language .

Barthes again notes that the important issue here is that myth wants to see these “raw materials” only as “a sum of signs, a global sign, and the final term of a first semiological chain. “ Barthes further states that it is this “final term” that will become the “first term of a greater system.” Myth is stationed in a historical situation yet their reappropriated content is able to be projected into the anthropological situation that surrounds us. Barthes recognizes that “myth shifts the formal system of the first significations sideways.” It is this almost lateral shift that gives myths their complexities within what appear to be concise simplifications. They appear to be able to just inhabit the very surface of things, creating associations that can arise almost indiscriminately.

Barthes states that myths are derived from a speech chosen by history. Mythical speech appears both like a notification and like a statement of fact. Barthes quotes “Mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication: it is because all the materials of myth presuppose a signifying consciousness, which one can reason about them while discounting their substance.6”

Myth has something of an imperative message woven around its character which can exist in any space or time; it also has an inherent contingency that allows its message expediency. This notion that myths exist on a material that presupposes a signifying consciousness gives them their complexities when we re-examine the material which the myth adheres to.

Barthes philosophical perceptions surrounding myths could seem to have an affinity with the notion of the photographic negative. Both share a sense of a historical situation, onto which other signs of signification can be placed on their representation. They both have the ability of projection or rather the ability to be used to project language-object narratives. All of which makes them synonymous with bringing the past into the present. Myths and negatives seem to surround their reinterpretation with a feeling that they are auguries brought from another time to confirm or question values. Strangely the projected values of the negative have something of a mythical resonance, the evidence however of the negatives materiality a known origin casts exactitude of death. Myths don’t have and don’t require this witnessing origin. The notion of a photographic projection that marks a material surface in the situation of an installation is perhaps as far as photography can aspire to the sense of myth.

Barthes in Camera Lucida comments on what he terms “flat death” whilst contemplating pictures of his mother shortly after her death.

The horror is this: nothing to say about the death of one whom I love Most, nothing to say about her photograph, which I contemplate with out ever being able to get to the heart of it, to transform it. The only “thought” I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed; between the two, nothing more than waiting; I have no other resource than this irony, to speak of the “nothing to say.7”

Barthes comment on his inability to transform the exactitude of his mother’s image with its sense of “an asymbolic death” perhaps illustrates the differences between the mythic language and photography? Does the exactitude in the representation of the photographic image petrify and simultaneously create an imperious sign of a future death? The mythical sense of some semblance left in some old photographs seems to be in fact, that some mythical language has not been totally terminated by the exactitude and witness of the photographic process. Myths on the other hand as noted by Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the New Millennium, possess “concise exactitudes of details yet creative reception in their telling.” This “creative reception in their telling” is what sets them far apart from the petrifying gaze of photography, they are in fact more gesture and act, and myths are re-drawn as living experiences. This further quote by Calvino sums up the magical quality inherent in mythological language.

I know that any interpretation impoverishes the myth and suffocates it. With Myths one should not be in a hurry. It is better to let them settle into the memory, to stop and dwell on every detail, to reflect on the without losing Touch with their language of images. The lesson we learn from a myth lies in the literal narrative, not in what we add to it from the outside.8

1  .Roland Barthes, Myth Today, A Roland Barthes Reader (Reading: Vintage, 1993), page 93.

2  .Ibid., page 94.

3  .Ibid., page 94.

4  .Ibid., page 99.

5  .Ibid., page 99.

6  .Ibid., page 95.

7  .Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Reading: Vintage, 2000), page 93.

8  .Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), page 4.

Moreton, Russell. The Daughter of Butades. Winchester School of Art 2008

Susan Sontag, on photography

Photographs are, of course, artefacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects, unpremeditated slices of the world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. There are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information.

Susan Sontag examines photography’s relationship to art via conscience and knowledge. Her analysis done before the advent of digital photography embraces the notion of the negative, the witnessing document. The picture may be distorted but there is always a presumption that something exists or did exist. 

Her probing phenomenology into photographic practice and the way it influences our perceptions are based on monochromatic film images. She reads the photographic image as an image taken from reality, but recognizes the attitude and sensibilities of the photographer, in the portrayal of that reality. She recognizes the camera’s ability to democratize all experiences, by translating them into images. She recognizes that photographers are haunted by tacit imperatives of both taste and conscience. They produce undiscriminating, promiscuous and self-effacing interpretations of the world. 

Sontag recognizes the aggression of the photographers capture, and its ability to subvert by freezing time segments and replaying them dislocated from their original experience. Sontag also notes that taking photographs has setup a chronic voyeuristic relationship to the world, which levels the meanings of all events through the camera. 

Photographs can also refuse experience simply by the limited nature of looking for the photogenic image. The camera has become a compelling interface between ourselves and what we encounter.

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are in the status quo remaining unchanged. It is to be in complicity with what makes a subject interesting.

The camera records subjects considered disreputable, taboo and marginal. Sontag notes Times relentless passage and photographs as a pause of evidence, Together with the camera’s ability to turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. 

She recognizes the inherent pathos in .objects being photographed, and the compulsion to take photographs. Sontag realizes the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as a daily activity in our consumer society. 

Photographs do not explain themselves, they just acknowledge.

A photographic contemplation dislocated from its original moment of reality, and as such allows thought not tied by cause and effect of that moment.

Tarkovsky, Sculpting in time/The architecture of the image

The architecture of image explores both architecture and cinema through the notion of existential. Cinema projects experientially images true to life, whereas architecture attempts to frame both human existence and the human condition as it inhabits space. The poetics of image Andrei Tarkovsky illustrates this director’s ability to use architectural settings to evoke and maintain a specific mental state in the viewer. They illustrate the poetic potential of space and light. Tarkovsky is able through images of space matter light and time to evoke the experience of being reflected by the metaphysical nature of the poetic situation. Tarkovsky emphasizes the importance of the singularity of experience, because of this perhaps his images resist interpretation, a sort of poetic riddle to distance them from any conventional reading, yet maintain their sense of flight. His images derive from a sense of a poetic logic/filmic phenomenology interwoven into a situation out of equilibrium. 

He creates a constellation of associations and possible meanings and utilizes space for emotional impact. There is a sense of imprinting, acknowledging the unseen space, he achieves this by giving the viewer a sense of spatial awareness of the situation not of visual realization, and he creates a mental sensation of the environment. 

Vessels of Retreat/Dark Pots/ : The Body and its Entanglements with Things/St Ninian's Cave, Scotland.

Vessels of Retreat : Dark Pots around the Innerness of Ceramics.

2025, Ceramic, 180mmW x 265mmH x 65mmW.

Curriculum making as the enactment of dwelling in places,

Thrown ceramic vessels fired on the remote beach at St Ninian’s Cave, Scotland.

These vessels were originally thrown on a momentum wheel situated in the small niche like space of a scriptorium. The interiority of the bowls seek to reflect the quietness and openness of a ‘retreat’ through material and the muted light of its surroundings. A post firing process was employed of removing the bowls and their still molten interior into a chamber excavated on the beach to become reduced by local organic material and to cool. Once cooled the bowls were washed in the Irish Sea to reveal their glazed interiors for the first time.

Heidegger’s topology, Being Place, World.

Jeff Malpas on the concept of place and how it relates to core philosophical issues found in Heidegger’s engagement with place, his philosophical starting point: of finding ourselves already ’’there” situated in the world, in “place.”

Clarifying the relation between space and place which contains inherent difficulties in as much as they are necessarily connected (inasmuch as place carries a spatial element within it even while space is also a certain abstraction from out of place), but there has been a pervasive tendency for place to be understood in terms of purely spatial. Jeff Malpas

SPACE= ROOM TO MOVE

or as a verb To Make EMPTY, EVACUATE, EMPTY OUT. The Production of Space/Human Agency/Place

PLACE=VTLLAGE, TOWN, or OTHER SETTLED LOCALITY.

PLACE=HOME

PLACE=A VERY SPECIFIC FORM OF BOUNDEDNESS/GATHERING As a gathering of elements that are themselves mutually defined only through the way in which they are gathered together within the place they also constitute.

DESIGN=TO PUT IN PLACE

Place referred to merely in the sense of position or location - usually the location or position of some already identified and determined entity.

Slippages, Anomalies and liminal spaces. Our relationships with space and place.

THE MEMORY OF PLACE

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE UNCANNY

Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape into the body and its experience of the world. Trigg analyses monuments in the representation of public memory, “transitional” concepts such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves.

STOA, a complex topology.

The Stoics took their name from the place where they met. In the stoa they talked as they walked along the long shaded alcoves. The stoa offered shelter from the sun and rain without becoming an enclosed room. It was an in-between and transitional space, neither outside nor inside. Conversations could commence through casual interruptions in a site of gossip, rumour and information.

We imagine the stoa as a spatial metaphor for the emergence of critical consciousness within the transnational public sphere. It is a space for criticality without the formal requirement of political deliberation and for sociality without the duty of domestication.

The stoa is the pivot point at which private and public spheres interact and from which the cosmopolitan sense of being and belonging from the vantage point of the stoa, then the telematic linking of two screens in the public squares of Australia and Korea can be viewed in a new light.

The linking of these screens creates a new transnational public space, a space for the creation of a new discourse on the topology of the cosmopolitan imagination in contemporary art practice.

Thinking the place of art within this context is more than jumping from either the local to the global, the private/oikos to the public/bouletrion, or even the singular to the universal. It is more like the liminal zone of the stoa.

Public Screens and Participatory Public Space Nikos Papastergiadis, Scott McQuire

Flesh and Stone,

The Body and the City in Western Civilization. Richard Sennett.1994

Basically a long shed, the stoa contained both cold and hot, sheltered and exposed dimensions; the back side of the shoa was walled in, the front side consisted of of a colonnade which gave access onto the open space of the agora. Though free-standing the stoas were not conceived as independent structures, but rather as edging for the open space of the agora.

Sennett: Flesh and Stone, page 50. Bringing Things to Life

Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials Tim Ingold

EWO= The Environment Without Objects

THINKING AT WAVERLEY, as a site of multiplicity and memory. Walking is Thinking, Richard Long

Heidegger-To participate with the thing in its thinging

Our most fundamental architectural experiences, as Juhani Pallasmaa explains, are verbal rather than nominal in form. They consist not of encounters with objects - the facade, door-frame, window and fireplace - but of acts of approaching and entering, looking in or out, and soaking up the warmth of the hearth (Pallasmaa 1996: 45). 

As inhabitants, we experience the house not so much as an object but as a thing. (Ingold 2008: 8)

Curriculum making as the enactment of dwelling in places

Ceramic Gate/Waverley Stoa : Objects in a landscape/studio space of Gordon Baldwin

One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity, Miwon Kwon. 1997

The Reading Room (a library of subjective taxonomies on the alchemy of building)

The Listening Room (a soundscape interior in time with its environment)

The Sheltering Corridor (a modernist Stoa as a place for encounters/dialogues)

The Pot Room (a installation of thrown objects creating the interior partitions)

The Empty Studio (a adaptation of architecture through the ritual of creativity)

Kengo Kuma, Anti-Object, mindfully and experientially explores voids, vernacular materials and agency of spaces.

Utsu means nothing or emptiness, the void.

Wa means the border between nothing and something.

I want to make what we don’t see, and that means I must make what we see. My work is a container for what we don’t see.

Taizo Kuroda, Potter.

Natural Connections, Exhibition Proposal.

Humanities about the processes and experiences that map the evolving human condition.

Humanities and the Arts.

The Body and its Entanglements with Things.

The Ceramic House, 

A space of life. 

Exhibition 

Architecture of the ceramic vessel

Ideologies of Innerness 

The Archive

Flesh can house no memory of bone; only bone speaks memory of flesh. Voids, spaces between the bones, residues of the flesh

Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett

Understanding the beliefs and practices that enable Relational Egalitarianism 

Kuper, Tim Ingold

Exhibitions, Pavilions, Huts and Observatories.

The Parallel of Life and Art, Alison and Peter Smithson The Physical Self, Peter Greenaway

Thames Dig, Mark Dion

The Barcelona Pavilion, Mies de Rohm

The Solar Pavilion, Alison and Peter Smithson

Field Photography: Light on Natural Phenomena and Site.

Pinhole photography and photograms on light sensitive paper with annotations from both research material and working practices. Visual material and artefacts acquired from archaeological sites whilst participating in recording the archaeological process at St Mary Magdalene Leper Hospital, Mom Hill, Winchester. The work explores subjectivities in the recording of natural phenomena, the spirit of place and its scientific inquiry and production of fabricated forms in the realm of a contemporary art context.

Atemwende, a breathturn : Adam Gopnik and Edmund de Waal

Craft and Art : Skill and Anxiety.

Craft is logic, and art defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7)

Edmund de Waal is a maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)

Atemwende : A breathturn.

Edmund de Waal.

The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things:

About the Art Of Edmund de Waal

Adam Gopnik. 2013.

‘Actually, I still make pots, you know’ Edmund de Waal.

The Sensuality of the Clay Body.

‘You have to work quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)

The throwing of pots still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down, gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if by magic, the most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air. (Gopnik,2014:6)

Ceramics and Architecture.

Exhibition Spaces of the Enlightenment

The Porcelain Rooms

The pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)

Together these new porcelain vessels collectively produced by De Waal are an experience of possessed space.

These collections of vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a small pot.

‘ The ceramic module that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non-functional as possible.’ (Gopnik,2014:9)

‘Even if we insist on seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” 1919.

‘The Jar, the elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like. Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)

Gopnik comments that we can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.

De Waal’s work brings about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors and negative spaces.

The relations of the architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they are held hostage by their surroundings.

The empathy we feel for their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their surroundings.

Does? ‘His art takes a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory. Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots.Along each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)

Working Notes : Edmund de Waal : How the history of pottery and the philosophy of pottery has informed contemporary practice.

Working Notes: Edmund de Waal. 

Independent research for Studio Practice Theory and Analysis. 

UCA Farnham, MA Interiors. 2014.

Why does Edmund de Waal make architectural interventions through the arrangement of porcelain pots?

To what extent, if any is this Ceramist interested in the ability of the single pot to engender meaning?

How is the “innerness” of pots that he talks about so eloquently actually manifested in his architecturally staged installations and exhibitions?

Signs and Wonders: Edmund de Waal and the V&A Ceramic Galleries 2009. 

During his career Edmund de Waal has moved from that of being a domestic potter to that of an installation artist.

His large scale installations show large groups of ceramic vessels, these are often in historic architectural settings. He is both an artist and an historian of ceramics. His installation Signs and Wonders contains up to 425 pieces of wheel thrown porcelain. This site specific installation is located at the heart of the galleries. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.

Central to Edmund de Waal’s practice is the concern to offer a ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, preservation and display of ceramics.’ (Graves,2009:8)

He has further explored the use of installations and vitrines in the pursuit of framing and underpinning these intellectual concerns. The use of purpose made structures, shelves and boxes adds the aesthetics of a tightly control clean minimalist style of presentation to his assembled collection of pots.

Interpretation and display are now central to these ‘grouped works’ that have become presented as ‘cargoes of pots’ that now seem at home in the collecting environment of the museum.

‘The way in which the pots are displayed has become an integral part of the work. And increasingly there is a sense that it is about putting on a show, albeit one that might be for a private audience.’ (Graves,2009:8)

De Waal working with specific settings has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves,2009:10)

‘By altering the character of a known space, by intruding on areas within it that might not usually be associated with the display of art, the viewer’s awareness of both the changes and the space are heightened.’ (Graves,2009:10)

This methodology of display ultimately disappears as if it were never actually present, leaving the underlying fabric of the interior space as it were untouched, the impermanence of the work now resides only in its memory.

What remains of these sensing spaces (interiors) through spectacle, event and place? Proposal for the ceramics department at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Site specific work in the new contemporary ceramics gallery that responded to the architecture of the space, and that could remain in place for years. An installation or feature that could remain in place and yet allow the gallery to function as a location for frequently changing displays and exhibitions.

De Waal’s response is Signs and Wonders ‘a lacquer red metal channel tracking the circumference of the dome and housing more than 400 of his pots; is an act both of daring and of breathtaking elegance and simplicity, a magisterial achievement on a scale surpassing anything he has previously undertaken.’ (Graves,2009:10)

Signs and Wonders is in reality a major contemporary architectural adaptation into the very fabric of the historical building. Its very reality creates a physical link between the past and the present, and it represents a long term commitment that began with the redevelopment of the ceramic galleries into the new Contemporary Ceramics Gallery.

Edmund de Waal’s Signs and Wonders is an iconic statement of intent for the Contemporary Ceramics Gallery, it underpins a new platform for the expanding territory of creative practice in ceramics. Signs and Wonders actively seeks to simulate new ways of seeing ceramics.

Architectural feature that comprises of some 425 thrown pots made of porcelain by Edmund de Waal and installed under the oculus of the great dome situated directly above the main entrance hall.

Edmund de Waal reflects on the vitrines that used to be found in the old ceramic galleries (room 137) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1970s.

‘Most of the vitrines were firmly policed into taxonomies of kiln or modeller or religion, less ’pseudo-scientific’ than a slightly desperate attempt to control the vastness of the collection. Some of the vitrines had the work of a single potter. All the pots by Hans Coper used to be in one mahogany case, huge early textured vessels shadowing the fine later Cycladic forms. They barely fitted.’(De Waal,2009:16)

De Waal’s memories of the old galleries in the 1970s was that they were an attempt to compare pots from different galleries, of the strangeness of seeing through one great case into another; the tops of a row of bottles cresting a line of dishes and the layering of one series of forms or colours onto another. And of course the fact that there were very few people.

Signs and Wonders; Edmund de Waal.

‘I have made an installation of pots for Gallery l41. There are 425 vessels made out of porcelain and they are placed on a red metal shelf that floats high up in the dome. You can just see it from the entrance hall through the square aperture in the coffered ceiling if you stand in one of the mosaic circles on the floor. It is called Signs and Wonders.’

I want to make this installation part of the fabric of the V&A. (De Waal,2009:20)

‘It began with the combination of a gesture of a pen and the plans to this austere bit of Edwardian architecture.’ (De Waal,2009:22)

The porcelain vessels are on a red shelf, the colour of lacquer.

The integrity of the shelf is upheld by being made from a proper material so as to form an accord with the historical architecture.

De Waal has experimented with placing porcelain on steel shelves and by having pots placed within lead lined boxes. He is aware of how these materials can form provocative combinations from their inherent densities.

The controlling presence of the vitrine is an intervention itself of its own display, (decommissioned mahogany vitrines from the V&A, illustrate the phenomenal weight of these enclosures)

De Waal’s porcelain vessels (shape shifters) are in effect objects from memory brought into a shifting nature of influences from the Chinese porcelains, the 1800 Century European porcelains and the collections of the Modem era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists.

‘This is not a simple linear relationship, but part of a flow around into Modernism and back again. It is a perpetual rediscovery.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

On Pots Behind Glass:

The shadows of the stacked pots.

On the memory of objects, the afterimage, its distillation, and the blindness of looking away that gives it its form. What is left to be adapted or to be pared down through volume and angle into these new reflective forms?

Derrida on drawing from ‘blindness’. 

‘I wanted to work with objects that have been part of my life for 30 years, and to make sense of my memories of how pots lived in the galleries.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

‘Other sections, one run of bottles that are in different celadons for instance, are a memory of vessels from disparate parts of the ceramics collections brought into a taxonomic focus. This is the use of memory and the after-image as the intense holding of a form on the retina.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

In Heidegger’s work ‘not least in his use of etymologies, his writings are imbued with a sense of historicity; a sense of the passage of time, of destiny, and of the past as a reservoir of thinking available to contemporary life.’ (Sharr,2009:99)

The Architecture of Place :

Architects that were sensitive to site, dwelling, inhabitation and place. Form Making as a Response to Site and Inhabitation.

In The Ethical Function of Architecture 1997, Karsten Harries seeks to reclaim a sense of meaning in architecture that he feels has been lost to a scientific rationality. He sees ornament as being able to convey meaning by linking and reflecting stories and in so doing it gives us an appreciation of nature. This type of ornament has a poetic function in that it helps to locate people with their place and community.

Dalidor Vesely believes that architecture can manifest the attitudes of its builders, and that this can describe through the very fabric of the building the very thinking of the society that implemented its construction.

Vesely ‘explored what he considered to be the tensions between instrumental and communicative, or technological and creative, roles of architecture. He argued that these roles have become divided; a split which is recorded in the respective roles of architects and engineers. Vesely traces the historical origin of this division to that of mediaeval optics and the development of perspective; to the first attempts to privilege a scientific description of light over immediate experiences of the qualities of vision. This division is a crisis of representation, that that is displacing meaning in architecture from human experience to the visual qualities of surface and appearance.’ (Sharr,2009:103)

For Vesely, creativity remains the antidote to technology.

Zumthor shares with Heidegger in that he believes in architecture’s potential to evoke associations and invite meaning.

Regionalism, a critical dialogue with the site, a rapport between place and building as if it had always been there.

‘Stone and water are more than materials or phenomena for Zumthor; they’re also intellectual notions, traditions of thought with a long history.’ (Sharr,2009:104)

Critical Regionalism, see Kenneth Frampton, ‘Zumthor aligns himself with Frampton when he writes about a critical dialogue between his designs and their sites, unafraid to claim meaning from locality.’ (Sharr,2009:105)

Choreographing Experience.

Zumthor ‘I need time to create an atmosphere, I have to be careful about things otherwise I won’t have this atmosphere and the whole objective of my work somehow would be gone. That’s the way I work.’(Spier,2001:19)

‘Much of the installation uses memory in a different way to produce the blurred after­ image.’ (De Waal,2009:28)

De Waal cites the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto as being a revelatory influence on this notion of memory and the blurred after-image. In particular the series

‘Architecture’ which features blurred photographs of Modernist architecture. These images seemed to have the ability to take ‘you back to a particular moment standing in front of a particular building. It was that they seemed to be simultaneously images of a memory of place.’

Sugimoto ‘Architecture’ The German Pavilion from Barcelona, Mies van der Rohe. ‘A graduated run of whites into greys is a memory, for me, of the archive photographs of Bauhaus ceramics with their regimented attempt at teaching pottery by breaking forms down to component parts.’ 

(De Waal,2009:30)

Hans Coper builds up spatial interiors in his pots by using component parts thrown on the wheel.

The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.

‘The special historical value of pottery is due to its stillness underground. Almost uniquely, it does not corrode or disintegrate when exposed to earth and water, and so it forms the most important part of the physical record of the past. Like an invisible architecture, inverted and buried out of sight, they are our most reliable evidence of human endeavour.’ (Adamson,2009:36)

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer 2009 

Procession, the choreography of light for the moving eye.

Iconic works of space in motion: The Perceptual Flow.

‘Related concepts relevant to architecture are found in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, for whom cinematic flow is a living rather than linear experience, achieved when film is stretched and lengthened by human memory and by images that evoke something significant beyond what we see before us, allowing time to flow out of the edges of a frame. ’(Tarkovsky, 1986:117)

Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vais.

Donald Judd’s Untitled 1980.

Jean Nouvel’s Culture and Congress Centre 1999.

‘More important still to de Waal’s project is the way that Judd’s stacks use interval. These cantilevered boxes are literally, one thing after another; but they do not touch. Rather the positive steel and plastic elements are separated by negative spaces that are their exact equal in volume. The works operate according to a binary, on/off logic, suggesting temporal as well as spatial extension.’(Adamson,2009:40) see also 

Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews: Chicago, 1967/1998.

Fried recognizes the durational aspect or dimension of minimalist sculpture, but condemned it for its “quasi-theatrical presence” that by occupying the time of the viewer this sculpture became mundane and everyday rather than transcendent.

Stacking is a way for de Waal to engage with the history of sculpture. It can be thought of as a compositional tool that suggests the storeroom, the kiln or a way of just putting pots together. Stacking produces a visual syntax through ‘exploring the formal and implicitly psychological relationships that pots can have with one another. ’(Adamson,2009:38)

Simultaneous Temporal Structures: Windows or Objects in Sequence.

‘Pictures in motion have long been exploited by Parisian architect Jean Nouvel, who describes his buildings as “scenographic” with routes composed along a series of camera angles and apertures.’ (Plummer,2009:56)

‘Another technique Tarkovsky employs to loosen time from any rigid progression is the directorial power to endow not only the entire film, but also its segments and even separate frames, with simultaneous temporal structures that are not unlike William’s “ice in March” or Viola’s “parallel times”.’ (Plummer,2009:56)

Steven Holl ‘movements are threaded rather than linear, pulled vaguely along by what Holl calls sequences of shifting and overlapping perspectives. Beckoning light draws the visitor onward step by step, and image by image, through a fragmentary rather than comprehensive narrative. (Plummer,2009:56)

Gianni Vattimo, Italian Philosopher.

The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. 1991. 

Weak Ontology/Fragile Thought.

A latent learning under the safe light of the darkroom. The red pages of the signs and wonders catalogue links a narrative with spatial object of his installation by its colour, but it might also reflect the inner space of the photographic darkroom.

‘Light neither centres nor aligns space, as in the past, but appears in the periphery as a vague and marginal background event.’(Vattimo, 1991:85)

‘Filled with intricate constellations’: (Adamson,2009:34) Looking/seen from the oculus of the dome.

‘De Waal has placed his pots in circulation, but not in the sense that they can be held and passed around. They are even, to some degree withheld.’ (Adamson,2009:34)

“When they are so high up they become blurred”

Rather than the object stranded on the plinth attempting to flag you down, if you place it elsewhere there is a feeling of possibility and latent discovery, similar to the feeling that you get if you are lucky enough to see the stores of the museum. 

(De Waal,2009:30)

In between spaces/stores and other latent spaces, re Mike Nelson, photographic darkroom between rooms. London 2007.

Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919) Heidegger, The Jug, “gathering vessel”

“What is de Waal charting in these looping circles within circles?”

De Waal acknowledges the influence of Wallace Steven’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar”. Glenn Adamson remarks how the special qualities of the round perhaps thrown pot is itself both an object, brought into the being by the world and encircled by it. (Adamson,2009:34)

In so “being” the vessel brings its own order, a subjectivity that acts and takes dominion everywhere. This communion (spatial relation) between the vessel and its environment is further echoed in the lines of the poem “the wilderness rose up to it, and sprawled around, no longer wild”(Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919)

Signs and Wonders is about seeing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe as it/we gather our surroundings. This work is not about tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’ of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.

‘When potters throw a certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an archaeologist’s excavated sherd, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson,2009:44)

Temporal Zones/Re-Imagined Social Landscapes: Archaeology/Making : Pot Shard/Pottery.

See Tim Ingold the four A’s, Anthropology/Archaeology/Art and Architecture.

Working Notes : 26 February 2014

Theory and Analysis/Tutorial with Simon Olding CSC. 

COMPONENTS :

Essay 2000-3000 words and a research journal that informs the essay/texts. Interested in using this research to inform my “Object Analysis” and its exploratory  essay. 

The Object:

Ceramic Vessel made by Hans Coper.

A Level Ceramics at Farnham Sixth Form College. Workshop experience locally at the Hop Kiln Pottery, Farnham and at Grayshott Pottery. 

HND in Ceramics, Epsom School of Art and Design. 

Self employed and freelance as a ceramist until 1992.

Currently working with clay in a contemporary practice that includes Architecture, Fine Art and Performance.

Research Questions.

What “anthropological traces” remain within the vessel of the “Pot” 

What is its Symbol-Function-History.

How much of the artist’s social biography is caught up in its making. 

Does the object in question underscore a deeper humanity/ a visionary present. How does the craft of making affect the perceptions of our surroundings. 

The worn vessel/telluric values and the sensuality of humans.

Making: The Contemporary Craft Praxis. Research Texts.

Making, Tim Ingold.

The Perception of The Environment (Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill) Tim Ingold.

Heidegger for Architects, Adam Sharr. A Potters Book, Bernard Leach,

Hans Coper, Tony Birks/Contemporary Potters/Ceramic Review. The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard.

Rethinking Materiality, Colin Renfrew. (At The Potters Wheel)

How Things Shape The Mind/A Theory of Material Engagement, Colin Renfrew.

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