Between Thresholds/Spatial Stories : The Unbound Articulations/Gestures of Drawing.

Outpost 200224

In the activity of thinking in drawing, a drawing is not seen as a historical item, but as an embodiment of contemporary spirit unravelling before our eyes, it is always in the present tense, always a becoming.

The Stage of Drawing, Catherine de Zegher. 2003 

The Mirrored Self.

Coded Imprints.

Invested Bodies.

Chronicling Space.

To develop her project of questioning, Avis Newman returns to the initial moment of tracing and considers the genesis of the mark, from the viewpoint of the original spatial play that the hand stages and the importance given to the gestures of the hand as recorded in the traces left on the paper. She considers that the very nature of drawing is its psychic investments that are bound up in the gestures originating from the hand. The hand captures what neither the eye nor language can grasp. The gesture, its movement in space is anterior to what is drawn and articulated in the trace (Gesture, Max Kommerl).

Spatial Concepts/Paths/Places/Lines

Drawing Thresholds that we pass through.

Spatial Stories.

Michel de Certeau.

A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.

On this view, in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a 'proper.'

In short, space is a practiced place.

Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.

The essential structure of our being is of being situated in relationship to a milieu, as being situated by a desire, indissociable from a direction of existence and implanted in the space of a landscape. From this point of view there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences. Our/the perspective is determined by a phenomenology of existing in/of the world. 

Intimus/Interior Design Theory Reader.

Spaces-Between-Thresholds.

How a space of blankness of no thing is 'overcome' and 'changed' into a space of relationships and encounters.

On spaces crossed/paths taken by their particular thresholds.

A poetic spatiality on the telling of possibilities and multiple coexistences, that are solidifying into spatial allusions which remain on hold. For the viewer, observer the invitation is not to unpick this tangle which has no centre, but to take part in the game of multiplication. To set off on a journey alongside and go with its surface flows. Into its spatial enigma, its garden of abstractions and concepts, amide nascent states in nature.

Thresholds : Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa. 2017

Ina Macaione.

If painting presents being, the drawn line presents becoming.

Norman Bryson.

Threshold as a emergent liminal space between emotional, physical domains, merging and separating through spatial movements/vectors/viewpoints and paths of desire.

The Small Space of a Constructed Limit.

The concept of architecture is the crossing of a space, a volume contained in an infinite space that creates a spatial sensation that becomes physically felt as one enters the space contained by that which is unmeasurable and infinite.

On Reading Gestures/In Real Time from the Drawn Line.

Drawing Conversations.

The Blank Evolving Page/The Unbounded Self.

Working from undifferentiated spaces into spaces that have become in some way have become claimed and  formulated.

Drawing/Visual Investments/Acting through gesture and evidence of beingness.

Through the acts of drawing the image comes into being, it comes about through the accumulation of repetitive acts of marking/inscription that are not anchored and not preconceived.

Avis Newman has developed a project of questioning of what drawing is?

All writing is drawing.

For Newman, looking at drawings, one may see not the thing itself, but its possibility, its suggestion and the uncertainty as to what stage it is in its becoming.

Gesture as the other side of language, a muteness inherent in humankind's very capacity for language, its speechless dwelling in language. Gesture for Agamben is not an absolutely non-linguistic element but rather something closely tied to language. It is first of all a forceful presence in language itself, one that is older and more originary than conceptual expression. 

Potentialities. 1999

Giorgio Agamben.

The Spatial Development of the Manuscript. 1994

Serge Tisseron.

Exhibition Spaces.

In architecture we enter space and its poetics.

Wrapped Body : Ceramic/Textile/Wire and Wax on Gesso.

A complex set of 'Propositions' emerging through her/our reflection on the found material.

A curatorial practice in which the work of Art itself, and not a theory in need of illustration, generates the searching criteria for an exhibition, a creating/curating a methodology that parallels the creative process of an artist.

An exhibition that acknowledges the significance of fragmented moments of consciousness of spaces of uncertainty. The creator is the one who agrees to venture forth with no certainty and follow this thread, unwinding ahead of him like Ariadne's thread and falling behind him like a spider's web.

The Stage of Drawing. 2003

Catherine de Zegher.

Avis Newman has long approached drawing as what she calls, an act of consciousness, an affirmation that I am conscious, I exist marked in a trace left by the gesture on the page. Her conception of drawing as a generative space of thought is a the very core of her practice and her selection for this exhibition.

A page that though blank is never truly empty.

Drawing Zones/Studios/Sites of Inquiry/Concern.

 

Outpost 230124

Architectural Body.

Thresholds.

Drawing.

Confronting Bodies.

Drawing : The Indexical/To Work Inside Feeling.

Inscripting Self : The Daughter of Butades.

Kairos : The movement and its moment.

Being Alive.

Tim Ingold.

There is no stage at which humankind does not demarcate, beacon or sign his space, leaving tracers that are both symbolic and practical.

Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

Drawing on the Movements of Desire and Attention.

Empirical evidence carries emotional connections, Bachelard.

The drawing itself is desperate to keep hold of an absence, it all began with a silhouette of a shadow on the wall. In the myth of Butades, the drawing is not generated by 'loss' itself but the her anticipation of loss captured in the moment of turning away, and act that unites blindness to memory.

Derrida.

Drawing is a gaze turned inward into the task at hand, it draws on the inevitable, displacement and absence of the 'thing' and its relation, its otherness.

The 'mark' and its imaginary space are encountered as a fact of existence. In drawing it is this evidence of beingness that is invested in the work, 'drawing itself' becomes a coming-into-being into the presentness of language of the image.

The image corresponds to its own unfolding pulsion, to an obsession, to a desire to expand its own flux beyond the assigned body. Material keeps desire on the inclined plane of appearances surrounding it with its gravity, the drawing materializes a surface in which desire condenses itself and infiltrates inside the oppressive operative grids/apparatuses of language.

Drawing on the holding apart instances, moments and intervals between consciousness and self consciousness. The early formative drawings of children are not guided by a visual exploration of space, but by the hand as an exploration of movement, it is only later that drawing is guided by the eye. In children graphic expression is blind, disconnected from perception, rather it is led by muscular, tonic and plastic sensations.

The 'Stage of Drawing' is at attempt to discuss what Avis Newman believes to be a crisis in art as to how an artist deals in a non-literal way with a sense of humanity, which for her is part of the essence of the artistic project. Her selection from the Tate Collection is based on a definition of drawing not as expression, but as an act of consciousness, the manifestation of which is culture, and by extension the social and political realm. In this exhibition, drawing tends and relates to the indexical as the effect of a corporealized process. In fact the aim is partly to divest drawing of the artist, so one can see this act of consciousness.

According to Newman, this indexical definition of drawing is opposed to a materialistic one, which would be about investment/authorship in the material world and would concern itself indirectly with sociological art, for Newman on the contrary we are trying to locate the area where meaning has no economy and does not have to justify itself by purpose.

Drawing even in the most fragmented of forms, there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me but also the activity of sensation.

Avis Newman.

Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through which without colliding would provide/produce the establishment of places, localities made special for one reason or another.

In looking at drawing, one may see not the thing itself but its possibility, its suggestion and its uncertainty as to what stage it is in its becoming.

What ever the intent, the drawing is always the artist's response to whatever, draws-the-artist's attention. To what Cezanne called the 'little sensations' and for the artist it is a question of how to rescue sensation from its subordination by representation.

Drawing as experience and experimentation, demands that the artist be susceptible to and capable of taking advantage of the uncoupling of everyday space-time and with it the expansion of the field of consciousness, to engage in what Klee once described as 'polyphonic attention.'

In the end drawing is rooted in the dematerialized space of the image, indexical or imaginative, privileging more the world of shadows than the world of appearances. The drawing surface is confirming the possibility and use of a language that albeit in a fragile way, leaves open an interstitial passage through which the imaginary may realize itself as an image.

Drawing manifests the very nature of a feeling-thinking-consciousness-of-the-body.

Drawing makes visible the synthesis, its interval and split between subject and object, between the desiring subject and the subject of language.

To draw is to protect the intensity of thought-feeling, and as such the drawing is always a formulation or elaboration of the thought itself at the very moment/instant in which it translates itself, makes itself 'visible' as an image.

The material of art, any material is that which imprisons and makes definitive desire. It is the way the material is manifested in revealing what defines the split between the imaginary and the subject. Drawing becomes the apparatus, the mechanism that tends to give order to the only dimension in which desire moves, space and time.

Drawing seeks always to reveal the gesture of the artist through the space of the surface, to capture the moment that precedes the birth of the sign. The external space becomes a specular surface, a field that captures and organizes the image. The image always corresponds/is a correspondence to a pulsion of desire, a vector that puts it in communion with tactile and visual sensations.

Drawing makes reversible the movement of desire/attention suspending it in a place understood as a place of projections and reversibility. For John Berger, the drawing shows the paths taken.

Drawing/Spatial Practice.

UCA Canterbury.

Artist Statement. 2009

Zones/Studios/Sites of Inquiry/Concern.

Within my practice drawing is used to form sites which contain visual information, evidence of temporal activities and traces of actual objects. These territories within other territories create flows formed from their permeable boundaries gathered from material, relations and differences. My drawings are about and are inside this temporality of site.

Thresholds.

Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa.

Ina Macaione.

Antonello da Messina.

St. Jerome in His Study, 1474-75.

National Gallery, London.

The only figurative work in the world in which entering and crossing coincide in a unique concept of physical space, defining the specificity of the architecture by transforming the limits of solid materials into the construction of a liminal space which can be crossed by passing through thresholds.

The concept of architecture is the crossing of a space that becomes physically visible when one enters the space itself. In Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa, architecture thus becomes an art form which helps us to overcome the absence of life by expanding the horizon of our minds and hearts, freeing us from our bodies, giving dignity to the void left by the loss of living presences and emotional ties.

The spatial dimension of this small building is a metaphor for the mental workings of meditation. The pavilion is the place where we can enter the mind's empty space, where we can get away from all our passing concerns.

Small cylinders of different heights and sizes, barely visible below the surface of the water. A small, inaccessible maze. A maze through the water, a maze through time, a maze of symbols and enigmas. Here, as in the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges, the maze is an allegory for the complexity of the world, which cannot be understood merely through reason. The maze itself was created to confuse those who rely on reason alone. Its winding paths lead us to a reality that lies far beyond that existential normality which hides deeper complications.

In 'The Garden of Forking Paths' Borges describes the possible outcomes of an event, each of which leads to a further multiplication of consequences, in a continuous 'branching off' of potential futures.

The Stage of Drawing.

Gesture and Act.

Catherine de Zegher.

Architectural Body.

Arie Graafland, Michael Speaks.

Drawings and Ceramic Models.

Making-Living-Environs

Hannsjorg Voth 1973-2003.

City of Orion.

Boat of Stone.

Hassi Romi.

Lightness/Thresholds of loss and of inside spaces constituted by darkness.

Outpost 050224

Walking with Carlo Scarpa, Brion Cemetary.

Trust in the material and its 'spiritual incitement' that comes from the world.

The spatial dimension of this small building is a metaphor for the mental workings of meditation. The Pavilion is the place where we can enter the minds' empty space/stillness, where we can get away from all our passing concerns.

Thresholds, Carlo Scarpa/Ina Macaione.

Life Affirming Sentiments.

Light-Shade

Bitter-Sweet

Vital Nourishment.

Departing from Happiness.

Feeding the Body.

Feeding the Soul.

Francois Jullien

The Flame of a Candle.

Gaston Bachelard.

On the Loss of (Dark) Inside Space.

Constanze Kreiser.

Is inside space on the verge of disappearing? 

Is it being hindered by constantly improved light technology which is causing one of its fundamental qualities – darkness – to dissipate?

And for what reason?

Is it for the benefit or more outside space?

Or for the benefit of a new spatial quality?

Questioning the way increased use of artificial lighting affects interiors, architectural designer and installation artist Constanze Kreiser opens a philosophical examination of the mediating effect of light. She observes how an enclosure is gradually made lighter in the sense of weight and mass through the addition of openings that emit or filter light. Her polemic on lightness and darkness raises questions of how light measures time, space and inhabitation and the temporal rhythms of everyday existence. 

Light constitutes space in that it creates bright and dim zones, enabling the physical perception of a space.

Space does not originate with the construction of a building, but exists in the act of marking a small unit from an infinite quantity. It is exactly this process which is achieved by sunlight: that which it illuminates is outside, shadowed surfaces forming inside.

Depending on whether lightness or darkness dominates, inside space is a dark space by day and a light space at night. Thus inside space is dependent on light, it is in constant contrast to the prevailing light conditions. Inside space at night has, however, existed only as of the invention of artificial means of lighting – from pine-torches to light bulbs. By day, inside space floats like a dark island in a sea of light.

Bodies and Mirrors.

Ann C. Colley discusses the correlation between physical bodies and their surrounding, particularly  the space of nostalgia and recollection in Victorian literature. Working from the role memory plays in recalling our relationship to known environments. Her text through selected autobiographical accounts discusses the spaces of childhood through the invisible, aesthetic and ubiquitous body, and the proposal that the interior is not simply defined by objects within it, but by our movement and inhabitation around and among them.

Three distinct models of how the consciousness of one's physical being illuminates the interiors of home. John Ruskin text speaks of the invisible body, Walter Horatio Pater of the aesthetic body and Robert Louis Stevenson of the ubiquitous body.

They, Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson considered how their physical being had related to the walls and windows of childhood. Conscious of how this relation defines the sense of one's surroundings, they let their memories resuscitate the dialogue their bodies had once had with these interiors. They understood that it is the child's being that shapes and illuminates the interiors of home. Articles do not define interiors; bodies that move and feel their way among these objects do.

Intimus, Interior Design Theory Reader.

Their orientation anticipates those like Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Primacy of Perception who argues that it is not through thought, absented from the body, that one knows one's surroundings, but through one's 'bodily situation' – that one is conscious through the body's position in space. This is taken further by twentieth- century architectural theorists such as Kent Bloomer, Charles Moore and Robert Yudell, who insist that one measures and orders the world from one's own body, and that the body is in 'constant dialogue' with the buildings surrounding it.

Body, Memory and Architecture. 

Drawing Inscriptions/Spaces/Breaths.

Remaining in the simplicity of our origins.

A Breathturn.

A flow of energy that wends its way ceaselessly through the world, animating it as it goes. 

Simple pots of simple thinkings/orderings and findings/feelings attained through the privilege/practice of the beginner's mind.

Sadhana, bearing the difficulties of existence.

Working Interiors for the making of the imagination.

Marking of a small subjective space from a infinite quality.

Ceramic Volumes/Vessels and Surfaces/Openings of Light and Dark.

On Drawing/Conversation.

Twombly/Artaud.

Corporeal Acts.

Documents and Sensation.

Images 'exist' in a domain of emotional and physical extremes.

.In drawing, acts of reading and perceiving are concurrent as a simultaneity of mental factors.

I am interested in the way the inter-connectedness between inscription and representation is 'grounded' in the primitive body. I an not speaking of the language of depiction and representation, but of what constitutes the mental energy of engagement, that is so evident in drawing. How the markers of an action translate the murmurings of the mind. For both drawer and viewer the mark and its imaginary space are encountered as a fact of existence as such it is the evidence of beingness, concerning those primitive, dark, and distant moments, etched in our psychic history that exist within the framework of the image that is now being invested in the work.

Avis Newman.

The Doctrine of Introversion.

The artist struggling to conform to the patterns of everyday existence. 

I can't respond to the society I live in.

David Sylvian.

Placidity.

Condemned to the eternal silence of processes.

Zhuangzi.

INTIMUS.

Mark Taylor, Julieanna Preston.

Matrix Key/Components, clockwise.

Practical Issues

The Field of Possibilities.

The Organizing Matrix.

Date of Publication.

Time Period Discussed.

Disciplinary Orientation.