Showing posts with label Patti Smith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patti Smith. Show all posts

Wednesday, 21 May 2025

Making/Building Utility and Relevance : Works are rooted in the physical world.








 








Outpost 241122

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


Elective Affinities.

Tate, Liverpool.

Penelope Curtis.


The Liveliness of Materials.


The nature of our involvement is crucial as we begin to select our meanings, as we have to also begin to exercise personal choice. 


The starting point for this exhibition was to find art which involved the spectator, an spectator immediately and which makes the body the bridge between the art and the spectator.


Using works that elicit a reaction from us based on physical recognition.


Engendering affinities both psychological and philosophical, much of the meaning in our world relates either actually or metaphorically to the body.


Creating art works that set up a network of psychological allusion.


Drawings, maps, lists, doodles, photographs, paintings, collages,scribblings and drafts, which are the secret and unformed property of the artist. These are not to be seen as artworks so much as the wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure that bears the song or book or script along. They are a support system of manic tangential information. 


What you see in this book lives in the intricate world constructed around the songs, and which the songs inhabit. To me these pieces have a different creative energy to the formed works, they are raw and immediate, but no less compelling.


Stranger Than Kindness.

Nick Cave.


Properties do not reside in objects, they are between objects.

Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet.


Intimate Everyday Notations.

A Book Of Days.

Patti Smith.


The 'works' evoke a physical affinity that sets up a complicity in which the viewer is implicated in the work.


The possibility of identification with the 'works' is frequently assured by their liveliness.


Fundamental to this art is the fact that its viewers stand in front of it and physical experience is highlighted or becomes part of its conceptual framework.


A photographic skin neither dead or alive, it is the blemished surface which gives the work a fragility.



Ultimately it is the ambiguity of this photographic flesh, its skin of visual tenderness that is most unsettling.



This phantasmal world of quanta is our world.


Speculative Experiential Formwork.

The Nature of Matter/Liveliness of Materials.

The Primal Level of Physical Being.


The Order Of Time.

Helgoland.

Carlo Rovelli.


Cyanotype Process and Concepts of Practice.


Technically the work is more in line with that of the photogram. It is used to record light and shadow from a specific site, through the use of intermediaries, stencils and their movements across the duration of daylight.


Conceptually the use of the cyanotype process historically references architectural blueprints and the proofing of early photographic procedures.


Outpost 241121


The Artist's Reality

Philosophies of Art

Mark Rothko, 1940-41.


Without question the work I  found as incomplete and in places, frustratingly obscure, but it was a book, and a substantial one. It was clearly written as a volume, its contents speaking to a public rather than constituting an artist's private musings

Christopher Rothko, 2004.


The Artist's Dilemma

Art as a Natural Biological Function

Art as a Form of Action

The Integrity of the Plastic Process

Art, Reality, and Sensuality

Particularization and Generalization

Genalization since the Renaissance

Emotional and Dramatic Impressionism

Objective Impressionism

Plasticity

Space

Beauty

Naturalism

Subject and Subject Matter

The Myth

The Attempted Myth of Today

Primitive Civilizations Influence on Modern Art

Modern Art

Primitivism

Indigenous Art


Rembrandt discovered that his patrons were not interested in his plastic preoccupations with light when he painted The Night Watch, and that they preferred the obvious illustrative gifts of his contemporaries and followers. Monet and Cezanne discovered the same, watching Sargent and the exhibitors at the academy sell far inferior goods, succeeding because they adopted the French masters' method in its superficial aspects, while including enough familiarity so that the spectator revelled in the familiar while he was talking about the unfamiliar.


Things and Bodies/Shifting Signs

The haptic image/indexical/involuntary markings and the present instant, a body at the limit of its moment when it is most definitely intensely alive and in the present.


Beyond the body's blurred contours and indexical markers, to see through, to see sense challenged.


Time is persistently liminal, a suspended, extended present.

Mattering/Mutability,Accident, Flux

Experience/Existence/Presence 

Life Drawing/Staging Oneself/Others

Body in Space/Resilience,Endures

Organism-Person-Environment


Haptic slippages/propositions between subject and object, human and non human, between what is alive and what is animate.

Drawing/Anamorphic Perceptions, apprehended and felt, more than seen.


Drawing is not the form; it is the way of seeing the form.

Edgar Degas.


The human figure, like any animated object is alive. Even when in a seemingly static position- whether sitting or lying- it is actually in constant motion. To capture this fundamental fact, which makes the body profoundly different from a statue or a mannequin, one must learn to see both its physical structure and its actions in space.

Daniela Brambilla.


Between seeing and drawing, what is felt, hidden, made rendering visible.

Blindness, searching, instants marking the barely known phenomena between organism, person and environment.

The searching and reflexive nature of drawing, a questioning through the performative social body, and its perceptual spatial agency and with materials, environments and others.







Human Figure Drawing

Drawing Gestures, Postures and Movements.

Daniela Brambilla, 2014.

With a series of curved lines drawn quickly, without lifting the pencil from the paper, in a loose way and almost without looking away from the subject, identify the lines that make up not the outside, the external contour or the details, but the morphological whole of the figure at that precise moment- in a certain sense the internal engine, a synthesis between intentions and actions, between mind and body.

To achieve this result draw around the form's centre and at the same time beyond it, without defining volumes with closed lines.

Gesture

Seeing Contours

Superposition

Interior and Exterior

Proportions

Modelling


What It Isn't

Memory

Balance

Techniques

Light and Shadow

Chiaroscuro

Viewpoint

What to Say?


Movements of the Soul

The Forms of Age

The Sketchbook

Imagination

If you have learnt to write, you will also learn how to draw. The manual skill is the same; you are just changing your way of seeing and feeling. To understand the meaning of this statement, ask yourself:

 “Where am I when I am drawing?”


Thinking Bodies : Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-woman

Nicole Dawson, 2008.


Deleuze and Guattari have argued that we cannot reach outside of a dualistic conceptualization of human bodies simply by seeking to transcend or bypass it. They contend: “The only way to get outside the dualism is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo”. We  do not get past or move beyond the dualism. This is not a successive stage of progression. The dualism is a conceptual event whose historical and contemporary activity gives rise to consequences that cannot be invalidated or ignored, thus, the situation is not such that we put the dualism behind us, move on or forward as if unaffected. The only place to go, to move, if we are to get outside the dualism is between: “one must pass ...through binaries, not in order to reproduce them but to find terms and modes that befuddle their operations, connections that demonstrate the impossibility of their binarization, terms, relations, and practices that link the binarily opposed terms”.


A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari.


Volatile Bodies : Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Elizabeth Grosz.


 




Sunday, 1 December 2024

Reclamations/Ruins on the photographic surface : Volatile Inscriptions around the Body/Cartwheels

The Photographic Image/Volatile Bodies/Architectural Ruins




















Helena Eflerova
Interior Spaces, Waverley Abbey.



The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative. 

Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1980:145)























The Language Of Women


Volatile Bodies/Sexed Bodies : Elizabeth Grosz

1  have  attempted  to  read  the  male  discourses  dealt  with  here  as  discourses for  and  about  men,  discourses  which  have  ignored  or  misunderstood  the  radical implications  of  insisting  on  a  recognition  of  sexual  specificity,  discourses  which have  presented  their  claims—radical  as  these  might  be—without  any  understand­ ing of their relevance to or usefulness for women’s self-representations. I have not attempted  to  give  an  alternative  account,  one  which  provides  materials  directly useful  for  women’s  self-representation.  To  do  so  would  involve  knowing  in  ad­vance,  preempting,  the  developments  in  women’s  self-understandings  which  are now  in  the  process  of  being  formulated  regarding  what  the  best  terms  are  for representing  women  as  intellectual,  social,  moral,  and  sexual  agents.  It  would involve  producing  new  discourses  and  knowledges,  new  modes  of  art  and  new forms  of  representational  practice  outside  of  the  patriarchal  frameworks  which have  thus  far  ensured  the  impossibility  of  women’s  autonomous  self-representa­tions,  thus  being  temporally  outside  or  beyond  itself.  No  one  yet  knows  what  the conditions are for developing knowledges, representations, models, programs, which provide women   with  nonpatriarchal  terms  for  representing  themselves  and the world from women’s interests and points of view. This book has been a pre­liminary  exploration  of  some  of  the  (patriarchal)  texts  which  feminists  may  find useful  in  extricating  the  body  from  the  mire  of  biologism  in  which  it  has  been entrenched.  But  the  terms  by  which  feminists  can  move  on  from  there,  can  su­persede  their  patriarchal  forebears,  are  not  dear  to  me.  But  perhaps  the  frame­ work  I  have  been  trying  to  use  in  this  book—a  framework  which  acknowledges both  the  psychical  or  interior  dimensions  of  subjectivity  and  the  surface  corporeal exposures of the subject to social inscription and training; a model which resists, as much  as possible,  both  dualism and  monism; a model which  insists on  (at least) two surfaces which cannot be collapsed into one and which do not always harmoniously  blend  with  and  support each  other; a model where the join,  the interaction of the two surfaces, is always a question of power; a model that may 
be represented  by  the geometrical form of the Mobius strip’s two-dimensional torsion in three-dimensional space—will nevertheless be of some use if feminists wish to avoid the impasses of traditional theorizing about the body.


Patti Smith
Cartwheels

Come my one, look at the world Bird beast butterfly
Girls sing notes of heaven Birds lift them up to the sky
Spring is departing Spring is departing
Her thoughts are darting like a rabbit Like a rabbit 'cross the moon
Shines of light over your hair As boys croon
Pretty in pink It makes me wonder
What could ever bring you down I see tears falling
From those eyes of brown
Hearing a voice, you turn your head You vanish into the mist
Of your thoughts And I
Want to grasp What brings you down
Open up those eyes of brown
The world is changing Your heart is growing
Hearing a voice you turn your head Girls turn by ones, by twos
Notes pour bad and tender Eradicate your blues
The good world The good world
Come my one, look around you Bird, beast, butterfly
Girls sing




Tuesday, 19 March 2024

Collage: Diversions, Contradictions and Anomalies.

 Collage: Diversions, Contradictions and Anomalies.


Collage's integral methods of discordance and displacement have so insistently reflected turbulent developments in twentieth century art, science and geopolitics that our response might be to categorise the whole genre as iconoclasm or subversive fantasy.

Sally O'Reilly





















Space and Place
THE PERSPECTIVE OF EXPERIENCE
Yi-Fu Tuan


1959 : Patti Smith
Peace and Noise


Lingering at the threshold between word and image
Cy Twombly
Claire Daigle

Although his work resonates strongly with generations of younger artists, ranging from Brice Marden to Richard Prince to Tacita Dean to Patti Smith, it has a general propensity to polarise its audience between perplexity and unbridled admiration. 

Certainly, the fortuities of a name are being pushed too far here, but what does Twombly do but offer up words in all of their resonance: literal, metaphoric, corporeal, material? His citations often have the vanitas effect of graffiti: ‘Cy was here’. Lingering at the threshold between word and image, Twombly renders visible those things – experience, emotion, the body’s share – that lie beyond the reach of verbal articulation.



Research Material
Photographic Drawings


PETER ZUMTHOR ATMOSPHERES

Architectural Environments
Surrounding Objects
2006 Birkhauser, Basel, Switzerland.

Monday, 12 June 2023

Exhibition/Intervention/Civilizing Rituals : The Sensitivities of The Physical Self/Architectural Body

 Outpost Studio 130423












The Changing Culture of Display.

How things work in museums.


Body/Mind/Movement/Material/Craft

Dynamics of Display inside The White Cube.


Liminality of glass display cabinets, spatialities of object narratives, forms and materials.


Artist as 'interventionist' in specific settings, such as collections and places of distinctive architecture. 


The more 'aesthetic' the installations, the fewer the objects and the emptier the surrounding walls, the more sacralized the museum space.


A new generation of complex narratives and juxtapositions in museum displays has evolved as a challenge to the minimal installation.


Civilizing Rituals.

Inside Public Art Museums.

Carol Duncan. 1995.


The formal qualities of the 'objects' and their haptic qualities directly speak to the visitor.

Julian Stair.


Giving 'Pots' universal aims and characteristics/utilities.

Ceramics.

Philip Rawson.









In this land we placed baptismal fonts

And an infinite number were baptized

Americo. 

Patti Smith.


Refraction phenomena produce a particular magic in architecture that is adjacent to or incorporates water.

Parallax.

Steven Holl.








Site specific artworks/research responding to themes initiated by Water.


To explore 'water' as both a spiritual and corporeal source and vessel for artworks.


Gathering research and responding to the historical site of St Peter Hungate.


To further develop exploratory working ideas through site specific research using drawing, cyanotype printing, leaded glass, clay.


Hungate, Norwich. 2023











A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

Existence-Space and Architecture.

Christian Norberg-Schulz.



Architectural Body.

Organism/Person/Environment

Gins and Arakawa.


'Lever' 1989-92

Antony Gormley.


Indios Verdes No 4 1980

Manuel Neri.


Figure 2. Upright human body, space and time. Space projected from the body is biased toward the front and right. The future is ahead and 'up.' The past is behind and 'below.'


These objects are moving through time and space.

The temporal enactment/kinaesthetic relationship with how things operate/work through the body 


Key Words: Profane, Sacred, Past, Left, Right, Front, Back, Horizon, Future. Upright Human Body, Space, Time,


Experiential Values.

Responding to Quietus and the liminality that is created. 

The passage from life to death and the stillness and presence of the objects as generative of a particular kind of haptic and visual experience.


Making art that is the pivot for human behaviour.

Pots operate on so many levels.


When we appreciate/apprehend objects, touch them, hold them in our hand, somehow its a material reinforcement of our physical selves as we negotiate our way through life, both physically and intellectually. 


Pots can become invisible, so familiar that they disappear. 

My interest in pots is in making an art that one engages with, an idea of art operating in a social context, in which the experience of the everyday is important. I have come to realise is that I want to make art that shapes human actions, and is also like an active narrative through the body.


The Presence of Unglazed Clay.

Seeing Raw Material.

Working Vessels.


Quietus, 12 years in the making.

A 'Well Conceived Idea' an exhibition about pots and death.


In the mechanics of appreciation there is both the optic and the haptic.


I wanted to see if I could keep hold of that idea of a single stand-alone object that existed on its own, in its own space, form and surface colour, but on a larger architectural scale. So it was not just about holding a body, but about holding architectural space including outside areas.


I didn't even have an idea of what I was going to make. The making process is absolutely central to the evolution of the idea. If you sit down to work, in six months you can be in a totally different place, so that decisions are made in an incremental way.


Critical thinking/theory is really empowering to me, equipping myself with knowledge has enabled me to chart my way through the present.


Archaeology of an Exhibition.

Quietus-Reviewed. 2013

Julian Stair.

Monday, 13 September 2021

Relationscapes/Material Flows : infra Body, Personal Relations and Spatial Agency

Slow Philosophy
Reading against the institution

Troubleyn Laboratorium
Jan Fabre

Every colour has its own perspective.
Jenny Saville

Material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which images and objects reciprocally take shape.
Tim Ingold

The Dynamic Real
Vibrant Matter
Jane Bennett

infra
Max Richter
Wayne McGregor
Julian Opie

Vitality
Difference
New Materialisms
Elizabeth Grosz

Diffraction attends to specific material entanglements, a discursive phenomenon that makes the effects of different differences evident.
Performativity, subject and image do not pre-exist as such, but merge through intra-actions. 
Karen Barad

Collage, Superimposition, Bounded and Un-Bounded 



















Space and Place
THE PERSPECTIVE OF EXPERIENCE
Yi-Fu Tuan

1959 : Patti Smith
Peace and Noise

Lingering at the threshold between word and image
Cy Twombly
Claire Daigle

https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/lingering-threshold-between-word-and-image

Although his work resonates strongly with generations of younger artists, ranging from Brice Marden to Richard Prince to Tacita Dean to Patti Smith, it has a general propensity to polarise its audience between perplexity and unbridled admiration.

Certainly, the fortuities of a name are being pushed too far here, but what does Twombly do but offer up words in all of their resonance: literal, metaphoric, corporeal, material? His citations often have the vanitas effect of graffiti: ‘Cy was here’. Lingering at the threshold between word and image, Twombly renders visible those things – experience, emotion, the body’s share – that lie beyond the reach of verbal articulation.

Existential Gestures : Looking away from the sea

Albert Camus : The Plague, 1947. (Penguin Fiction)

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.

Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.

Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus's magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.

'Camus represents a particularly modern type of temperament, a mystic soul in a Godless universe, thirsty for the absolute, forever rebellious against the essential injustice of the human condition'
Shusha Guppy, Sunday Times








Friday, 9 July 2021

Collage Body : Diversions, Contradictions and Anomalies.

Collage : Diversions, Contradictions and Anomalies.

Body : Personal Relations and Spatial Values

Reading : Slow Philosophy


Collage's integral methods of discordance and displacement have so insistently reflected turbulent developments in twentieth century art, science and geopolitics that our response might be to categorise the whole genre as iconoclasm or subversive fantasy.

Sally O'Reilly





THE PERSPECTIVE OF EXPERIENCE


Yi-Fu Tuan

1959 : Patti Smith
Peace and Noise

Lingering at the threshold between word and image
Cy Twombly
Claire Daigle



Although his work resonates strongly with generations of younger artists, ranging from Brice Marden to Richard Prince to Tacita Dean to Patti Smith, it has a general propensity to polarise its audience between perplexity and unbridled admiration. 

Certainly, the fortuities of a name are being pushed too far here, but what does Twombly do but offer up words in all of their resonance: literal, metaphoric, corporeal, material? His citations often have the vanitas effect of graffiti: ‘Cy was here’. Lingering at the threshold between word and image, Twombly renders visible those things – experience, emotion, the body’s share – that lie beyond the reach of verbal articulation
















Research Material
Photographic Drawings

PETER ZUMTHOR ATMOSPHERES

Architectural Environments
Surrounding Objects
2006 Birkhauser, Basel, Switzerland.

The New Institutional Practice
Projective Enterprises (should unsettle, activate, and raise questions)

The exhibitions to emerge through new institutionalism are considered as points of exchange and collision, made through intersections of social, economic and political relations, it follows that the predominant forms of artistic practice included are the social, the spatial, the interdisciplinary 

So our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed , physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social-economic-cultural and political processes
Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
Miwon Kwon 2002

Collaborations and its Discontents
Claire Bishop 2006

The motivating factors for participatory projects is its critiquing of the essentialising of site and community in context-specific activities/exhibitions

A complex environment, awash in affect and subjectivity
When subjective and analytic processes mesh together to form a new productive and political 'contexts' of communicational labour  

New curatorial initiatives must unpack the terminologies we use to distinguish one project from another
A playful psychogeographical situation, that resists the representative, illustrative and thematic narratives
Unsettling-Complicit
Provocative-Strategic
Interventionist-Collaborative

Perforative Curating/Prescribed Participation
Creating new/more coded patterns of behavior/conventions/role play for visitor's

New Institionalism and the Exhibition As Situation/Social Experiment
Claire Doherty 2006

Participation
In which people constitute the central artistic medium and material
In the manner of theatre and performance
Participatory art is both a social activity and a symbolic one, as it is both embedded in the world and at one, remove from it

The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects, than as a collaborator and producer of situations
The contemporary artwork is finite, portable, commodifiable product, and is reconceived as an ongoing or long term project with an unclear beginning and end
Artists are more interested in the creative rewards of participation as a politicised working process, than the relational aesthetic which renders discursive and dialogic projects more amenable to museums and galleries

Artificial Hells (exposing the political and aesthetic limitations in the work)
Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
Claire Bishop 2011

Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice
The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate
Miwon Kwon 1997

Whilst temporary exhibitions can expand the scope of medium-specific discourse, they can also impose alternative, but equally restrictive frames
Participation, creating a bridge between socially engaged practice and the permanent collection

Expressing itself expressing 

Creating a conceptual and linguistic dexterity between absolutes, certainties, definitions

Dissolving the intellectual relevance, with its symbiotic relationship with utility to create 'vessels' beyond art and artifact