Drawing as Diffractive Research : Mind/Hand/Media/Wayfaring, all in the thick of material existence.

Diffractive Research.

Tim Ingold's concept of "diffractive research" emphasizes a dynamic and iterative approach to inquiry, where researchers move between different lenses and perspectives, exploring the interplay between diverse elements. This method, rather than seeking a definitive conclusion, aims to enrich understanding by embracing the "emergent difference" and "variation in commoning" found within the research object. 

Elaboration:

"Diffractive" as a Metaphor:

Ingold's use of "diffraction" draws an analogy to the physical process of light being bent and spread when it encounters an obstacle. This process reveals the nature of the obstacle and the light itself, highlighting the complexity of their interaction. 

Iterative and Relational:

Diffractive research is not a one-time process but a continuous engagement with the research subject, moving between different perspectives and interpretations. This iterative approach emphasizes the relational nature of knowledge, recognizing that understanding emerges from the interplay between the researcher and the object of study. 

Embracing "Emergent Difference" and "Variation in Commoning":

Instead of seeking to define or reduce difference, diffractive research celebrates the "emergent difference" that arises from the interactions between diverse elements. It also emphasizes "variation in commoning," recognizing that individuals and things can contribute to a shared understanding even when they have nothing in common. 

"Wayfaring" as a Method:

Ingold's concept of "wayfaring" (a way of traversing the world, constantly engaging with its details) is closely linked to diffractive research. Wayfaring involves actively engaging with the world, paying attention to the details and nuances that emerge along the way. 

Examples in Practice:

This approach can be seen in research that explores:

Materiality and Agency: How materials shape human action and how humans, in turn, reshape materials. 

Knowledge and Memory: How knowledge is not simply transmitted but actively generated and shaped through experience and interaction. 

Social and Cultural Practices: How social and cultural practices are constantly being re-interpreted and re-created through interaction. 

Beyond Objectivity:

Diffractive research challenges traditional notions of objectivity by embracing the inherent subjectivity of research. It recognizes that knowledge is always produced within specific contexts and through particular relations. 

In essence, Tim Ingold's concept of diffractive research offers a powerful framework for understanding how knowledge is generated and how we can engage with the world in a more dynamic and nuanced way. 

AI Overview/Google

Outpost 180424

The Body of Drawing/Butades.

Thinking Matter : Cosmologies/Constellations/Assemblages/Apparatuses. 

Matter (as interlacing interplay that is dynamic and mutually defining) has its own nature.

In the thick of material existence.

Merleau-Ponty.

On The Hospitality/Intertwining of Lines

Making/Moving Matter/Theoretical Objects for Spatial Practises.

In and Out of Material/Matter/Matters of Concern/Sculpture

Tony Cragg.

Situated Practices/Architectures of Care/Concern.

Oren Lieberman.

The searching line proposes/launches visual observations/haptic responses, and conversely what is seen determines how the next line is to continue in a perpetual and recursive interaction that unfolds in ongoing time. 

Relationscapes of/with/for Drawing.

What is drawing?

What is the nature of the drawn line?

Un-Learning Drawing.

The drawn line is raw, on permanent view of its emergence into the world, an open zone that operates in real time. Corrections to the line, challenge perceptions and build intimate relationscapes with the mind, body, media and surface.

'In drawing' we are perceiving the evolving process of thought and perception.

Avis Newman.

Praesentia, being present, a presence that is close at hand to the present moment or time.

The phenomena and its nowness/nearness in the light of day. 

Drawing is driven from the outside.

The agent/agency of drawing admits that the process leads, the mind follows.

First the material signifier, marks on paper, then afterwards the signified, the depicted scene and its nominal referent. For Cozens the random application of splashes and patches of ink would at first appear a chaos, yet with a little skill, out of that chaos forms could be encouraged to appear. Blots might become clouds or the silhouette of hills. For Bryson, Cozens 'anti method' clarifies what the official ideology of drawing-as-transparency habitually mystifies. That the relation between subject matter and line is not at all a question of before or after.

Though far from being a work of philosophy Cozen's method/manual anticipates the broad outlines of Merleau-Ponty's description of the intending consciousness as always already in the world, in the thick of material existence.

Drawing the line involves an interlacing of outside and inside, a permanent cross-over between interior (the artist's mind, sensations,sensibilities) and exterior (paper, pigment,stylus).

A Walk For Walk's Sake.

Norman Bryson.

Studio Silences of  Space-Time Phenomena/Phenomenology.

Existential becomings in the thick of our material existence.

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

The Primal Scene of Drawing/The Trace of Butades.

Is all about preserving loss/the blankness of paper and a hand that is about to make its first trace on the surface. Drawing enacts the very moments of trepidation when a new image is about to enter the world. 

Drawing is an art of presence and transparency of phenomena unfolding, a fusion between the artist's mind, the artist's hand, and the beholder's gaze.

On Drawing.

The work of observation is necessarily shaped by the line it leaves behind.

The drawn line conditions or models the selections from the field of observation. It launches observation along a particular direction or path.

Sunlight enters into architecture and sensations of bodily presence/perception.

Vessels unfolding through durations of light and dark.

Flesh/Sensation/Paint/Francis Bacon.

An Unconditional Body from Social Objectivity to the Extremes of Subjectivity.

Acts of both presence and transparency.

Mapping Subjectivity/Gathering Matter.

Organism-Person-Environment.

Architectural Body.

Art works and artists, all manifests themselves at the social interaction and reading/rendering of subjectivity.

The Stage of Drawing.

Gesture and Acts.

Like the drawings themselves, the exhibitions loyalty is to the immediate experience of the individual image rather than to the totalizing logic of art history complete with its grand narratives of social and cultural change. The exhibition reveals the convergence of real time operations (realities) the artist's visual idea in the time of its coming into the world, and the always ongoing work of viewing.

Pathways of difference, of the brush and pencil as they move through their respective spaces.

For The Brush.

Before it can touch the surface of the canvas, the bush has to orient itself according to the four sides of the frame, and then according to the total sum of the marks that have already appeared on the surface of the picture. It has to hover, to hesitate, to sense as though by dowsing where a channel in space may now open up, a groove in the total surface that the brush may now enter.

For The Pencil.

In drawing the presence of the 'reserve' frees the pencil from this complex calculus of the totality, reducing the scope to an area that can be taken in at once. A local area, that lies where the hand is now in praesentia. For Bryson this introduces the possibility that the drawn line, maybe closer to the immediacy of the artist's thought and perception than the line made on canvas. 

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

Drawing Is An Immediate Art/of presence and transparency/phenomena 'unfolding'.

 Outpost 130524

The Primal Scene of Drawing.

Drawing as Gesture.

Coda : Coded Imprints/Mediality

Contemporary drawing tending towards graphism, illegible writing, that can be seen as a regression from image and coded sign to what could be described as states of the 'pre-sign', of moments of inscription and the emergence of the signifier from the gesture or act of making a mark.

Drawing Is An Immediate Art/of presence and transparency/phenomena 'unfolding'.

A fusion between the artist's mind, the artist,s hand and the beholder's gaze.

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.

The raw drawn line at its emergence into the world.

Line can no more escape the present tense of its entry into the world than it can escape into oil paints secret hiding places of erasure and concealment. This fundamental condition can bring it therefore much closer to the viewer's own situation than can the image in paint.

The drawn line in real time with its own momentum, its own trajectory.

A walk for a walk's sake, the mobile agent is a point shifting its position-forward.

Paul Klee.

The present of viewing and the present of the drawn line, hook onto each other, mesh together like interlocking temporal gears. They co-inhabit an irreversible permanently open and exposed field of becoming, whose moment of closure will never arrive.

Though it is impossible to reconstruct with any real accuracy the precise sequence whereby drawn lines on paper finally come together as a completed image. The permanent visibility of each unit of production, of each individual line on its own, means that there is no escaping the sense of the line as emerging from an initial state, blank paper to the state we eventually see.

The drawn line in a sense always exists bin the present tense, in the time of its own unfolding. The ongoing time of a present that constantly presses forward.

The blankness of the paper exerts a pressure that cannot be reduced or done away with, relentless its blankness forces everything into the open into a field of exposure without shields or screens, with no hiding places, a radically open zone that always operates in real time.

If painting presents being.

The drawn line presents becoming.

Line gives you the image, together with the whole history of its becoming-image.

However definitive, perfect, unalterable the drawn line may be, each of its lines, even the last line that was drawn is permanently open, to the present of a time that is always unfolding. Even that final line, the line that closed the image is in itself open to a present that bars the act of closure.

A Walk for a Walk's Sake.

Norman Bryson.

Cy Twombly.

Works on Paper. 1979.

Such gestures do not ask to be interpreted.

Making marks that open-up a space where in which the distinction between human and non-human is undecidable. How are we to respond to gestures that do not ask to be interpreted since they are meaningless, or more precisely they are gestures in meaningless.

If drawing is to be taken as just such a gesture, how are we to respond to it?

It it is not directed to meaning or interpretation, what does it demand of us?

Instead of considering what its meaning is, we could place the emphasis on the fact that a gesture has been made, the fact that something has been left for us. A mark inscribed on a piece of paper, perhaps by someone. We would thus receive the gestural mark as the trace of the other without any need for that mark to be meaningful. We may well do so without reverting to the 'what' and interpreting the gesture as an expression.

We need to say nothing more than the other has left this mark.

The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing.

Michael Newman.

The gesture is communication of a communicability.

Means Without Ends.

Giorgio Agamben. 2000

The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them. What is relayed to human beings in gestures is not the sphere of an end in itself, but rather the sphere of a pure and endless mediality. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality. However because being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language. It is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term.

For Michael Newman, the drawn mark could be taken as a 'gag' in precisely the way Agamben outlines. Its relation to language lies not in language as a goal, but precisely in its turning back on itself to expose its mediality, which is the condition of language.

Materiality and Mediality

Materiality and Mediality takes as its focus the reciprocal relationship between the facture of objects and the making of meaning. The questions addressed in this focus build upon ongoing research on textility. Material observations of textiles from Gottfried Semper onward have played a special role in the historiography of our field, and the study of textiles demands both new economic, social, and material approaches to the history of art, from canvas painting to tapestry, while also emphasizing global movements of materials, techniques, and makers.

More broadly, the study of materials encompasses both the complex negotiation of human makers with material resistances, and the way materials change physically and in terms of their reception over time. From the extraction and procurement of raw materials to the sensual qualities of finished products, the study of an object’s materiality brings forth histories of labor, trade, technology, and the environment that have been traditionally considered beyond the remit of art history. Concomitantly, media theory is a useful tool to examine how medium shapes the behavior of works of art, which becomes especially pronounced when new media emerge and spread. Both materiality and mediality impact the aesthetic, social, and ritual understanding of works of art. The study of materials and media invite approaches to the history of art that span geographies and chronologies in new and challenging ways. Materiality and Mediality serves as a broad framework to examine visual culture using sets of methodological tools that can shed new light on canonical works of art while simultaneously integrating overlooked objects into larger art historical narratives.

https://www.biblhertz.it/en/dept-weddigen/materiality-mediality

We are thus left with the question of how the mark received as trace of the other relates to the mark as gesture, even if the trace necessarily withdraws from the mark. How does the mark-as-gesture not reduce the trace to its mediation to expression in a medium and thus reduce the other to being a figment of my world, an actor on the stage that I project. The other is reduced to the same if the medium is conceived as a common substance, a kind of thing that joins two entities, communication as exposure breaks with this ontology.

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.

Praesentia/Drawing and Assemblage : Cyanotype Exposure/Trace.

Drawing is an art of presence and transparency, of phenomena close at hand unfolding.

The Primal Scene of Drawing.