Water at Hungate : Architectural Body/organism/person/environment

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Hungate Installation of Works.

Making Material into Paths-Of-Difference.

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

Working Fables/Visual Aphorisms.

The Poetics of The Pragmatic.

The Multivalence of Metaphor.

A series of three follies to accommodate the family, the on-site guardhouse and an art gallery.

Private Estate, Montana, USA, 1991.

I opted to be a fabulist rather than an ideologist because fables retain the ring of immutability long after ideologies have wilted.

Emilio's Folly as well as offering a figurative and allegorical manifesto of its author's idiosyncrasies, is also a catalogue of the metaphors that recur in his architecture: water and the earth, the house with a Mediterranean patio, subterranean architecture and the descent towards the depths. Emilio's island of folly tranforms the eighteenth century penchant for picturesque aesthetics into the narrative frame of a passage describing a private garden and in constructing a design image,  envisages a miniature theatre of memory in which the mechanism of memory is analysed and forgetfulness suspended.

Passing from the canopy at the entrance to the twilight glimmer of the misty cavity offers a didactic description of memory elaborated through cognition's subterranean strata, while simultaneously testifying to the hopes associated with the act of designing, evading paralysis by memory's repetition compulsion.

Fulvio Irace.

My work is a search for giving architectural forms to primal things: being born, being in love, and dying. They have to do with existence on an emotional, passionate, and essential level. I understand  architecture as the search for a spiritual abode. On the one hand, I am playing with pragmatic elements that come from my time, such as technology. On the other hand, I am proposing a certain mode of existence that is an alternative, a new one.

Emilio Ambasz.

Anyway, to come back to the story, yes, water plays an important role in what I do because it doesn't have a shape of its own; that is to say, it does have indeed have an immense power of its own, but the shape it adopts is the shape of the container you give it. To me water is important it can be nebulized.  I have used fog many times to evoke the presence of a building which isn't there, and its presence becomes very strong when the sun creates a rainbow. It cools you or warms you if you make those clouds of mist.

I use fog and its indeterminate form maybe because I am a prisoner of my time and afraid of making definitive statements. I seek to make statements which are constantly being reformulated. 

I always say there are two ways to cast a shadow: one is as a tree and the other as a cloud. I think that I chose to be a cloud.

Interview, Emilio Ambasz, Emerging Nature.

Working with the the force of a relational environment, expressing thought as an incipient movement being  articulated through sensation. 

Indexical Traces/The Flux of Processual Drawing.

Architectural Body/organism/person/environment

Bringing potential relations into actual experience.

Experiential experiments/proposals/inquiry expressing the force/nature of a relational environment.

Resonances that modulate her body, her own becoming, movement in tandem with the environment moving.

Hortus Conclusus, Centre Pompidou. 1989.

You always have the sense that behind the walls of these projects are absent presences or present absences. The notion of that which is in front of you and what happens behind the wall has always appealed to me. There is a certain anima or spirit behind the wall.

Emilio Ambasz.

The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and it is also the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity. 

Michel Foucault.

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

The Art Of Colleagueship

It is a shared curiosity that ties individual creative actions into a dialogue of immanence. A special feature of which is the willingness of the participants to temporary suspend judgement so as to seriously entertain the open potential of our discoveries. That nothing occurs in a vacuum is an idea which is particularly true of human actions. So while the art of pure inquiry is uniquely individual, it does not take place in isolation.

Certainly the pure void of concept beckons the curious, and the unique motive for a pure inquiry of a pure subject is curiosity and the desire to know.

The art of pure inquiry is an open interface between the pure subject-all that is out there-and the pure potential of the individual perceiver-all that is in here. Where the strength (clarity) of this inquiry lies is in its single motive-the desire to know.

What is key here is that certain ideas (possibilities) are immanent at particular moments. That in each time and place there exists a unique body of shared experiences, knowledge, and need, that marks our moment in time, and from which all inquiry steps off. Merleau-Ponty, in writing about the work of Cezanne, reflected that art may have an advantage over philosophy as a speculative thought form in that it has at once a tactile and a cerebral dimension.

Robert Irwin.

Hungate Group  Exhibition 'Water' 2023.

Russell Moreton is a visual artist interested in gathering research and responding to the historical site of St Peter, Hungate. He has explored the exhibition theme 'Water' as both a spiritual and corporeal inquiry for site-specific artworks. He has spent time developing working ideas that have an affective resonance to the architectural setting of their presentation. His  use of slab built ceramics vessels echo the stillness and muted silence experienced within the medieval fabric of the Hungate. He has used a figural drawing on Chinese paper, processed by the evident passage of water to explore the representation of the human form in this particular place.

Creative Ecologies/Drawing Concepts : Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

An Exploratory Ceramic Based Inquiry.

Propositional Drawing/Speculative Architecture.

Drawing Inscriptions : Situatedness in Ceramics

Notes Towards a Conditional Art.

Robert Irwin.

Shallow - Space Constructions

Veils

Structural Cuts : Skyspaces

Skyspaces : Autonomous Structures

Site Specifity

Dark Spaces

Autonomous Structures : Models

Perceptual Cells

James Turrell

Fundacon 'la  Caixa' 1993.

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

The House is all about the poetry of shelter and siege from the elements and cosmos.

Gaston Bachelard.

Volume And Space.

Alberto Giacometti's sculpture, 'Man Pointing,' is an important statement in Western art for many reasons, not the least of which is what it says about volume and space. The elongated and spindly form gestures vaguely in the vastness of the space surrounding it. The gesture seems more about the space opened up by it and around it than it does about the physical. There is power in space more palpable than substance. This also is the conceptual heart of the Japanese garden.

Scott Meyer.

With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.

The Psychoanalysis Of Fire.

Gaston Bachelard.

Gaston Bachelard was intrigued by the process of imagination, the way in which the pensive mind brings to any given reality a multiple perspective. About many substances such as earth, air, water, and fire, he contended, we harbour subconscious convictions which modern science may disprove in fact but cannot seem to eradicate from artistic reverie.

Northrop Frye. 1964.

Against Hylomorphism.

Gilbert Simondon. 1964-89-2005.

Individuation, the generation of things, should be understood as a process of ontogenesis in which form is ever emergent, rather than given in advance.

The Clay can take to the mould and mould the clay.

Simondon, took the essence of matter or the material to lie in form-taking-activity.

Brian Massumi. 2009.

Concepts rendered into material relations.

Making new aesthetic utilities, materialities for thinking about the world.

Making is central to our legacy as a society, materially, economically, ecologically and socially.

A modern version of hylomorphism is enacted by a culture that furnishes the forms and nature the material. In the superimposition of one upon the other, human beings create the material culture with which, to an ever increasing extent, they surround themselves.

Tim Ingold. 

Frames, Handles and Landscapes.

Georg Simmel and the Aesthetic Ecology of Things. 2016

Eduardo de la Fuente.

The tool/the thinking hand, has grown to be a part of the hand, using a tool is both a practical and aesthetic action involving the artful manipulation of material by hand.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Affordances of Things.

Affordances provide strong clues to the operation of things. A psychology of causality is at work as we use everyday things.

Donald Norman. 2002.

Ecological Approaches to Aesthetics.

Aesthetic Patterning/Matters in Everyday Life.

Organism-Person-Environment

Ecological, interested in the organism-environment relationship.

An aesthetic ecology, each thing is a mere transitional point for continuously flowing energies and materials, comprehensible only from what has preceded it, significant only as an element of the entire natural process.

Theory/Culture/Society, Simmel 1994.

Matter and materials are lively and require attention. 

Materials continue to thwart us in unpredictable ways.

Jane Bennett.

Aleatory, by chance, lots of the 'acts' of nonhuman agents are aleatory exactly because they are not directed by any intension.

In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.

All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Tony Cragg, 1998.

Cutting Things Up.

Material In Space.

Scale.

Impulses through Drawing.

Working Things.

Generation/Generative/Material.

I think mass and energy need to be generated, any effective change has to be generated. It's to do with a positive directed  initiative to change things.

“Generative” for me, in terms of my work, is the fact that within my own work, within any given period the work generates itself and there is a self-generating characteristic. The work I'm making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago.

Even if it's not a linear thing, things are generating. There is a sort of self-propagating, self-generative energy that is inherent in the material, I think. And even in the  term “generative”, from “genus”, is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which “relativise” generation.

Tony Cragg.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Cragg wanted  to give the materials 'more meaning, mythology and poetry' He used the skills available to him at the EKWC residency to create ambiguities and tensions, to suggest past and present, to complicate rather than to describe.

European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands. 1990, 1992.

With the return of Cragg to studio based work in the early 1990s, when he was experimenting with clay; ideas around humanness, archaeology, and ritual were being explored within different areas of the fine arts. In addition, studio ceramics were frequently using the vessel as an initiating point to develop new forms and sculptural ideas.

Laibe, with its rich possibilities of interpretation that incorporates the past in the present and the universal aspects of human survival within the ceramic vessel form, lies at the heart of these complex and overlapping areas of practice.

Imogen Racz. 2009.  

The Ceramics Reader. 2017.

Andrew Livingstone.

Kevin Petrie.

Ceramics : Materiality and Metaphor.

Why are Ceramics Important?

The Existential Base, Philip Rawson.

Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations, Silvia Forni.

Ceramics and Metaphor.

Analogy and Metaphor in Ceramic Art, Philip Rawson.

Sculptural Vessels, Tony Cragg's  Laibe and the Metaphors of Clay, Imogen Racz.

Ceramics in Contexts.

Historical Precedents.

Studio Ceramics.

Sculptural Ceramics.

Ceramics and Installation.

Theoretical Perspectives.

Conceptual and Post Studio Practice.

Contemporary Clay, Clare Twomey. 

Extending Vocabularies: Distorting the Ceramic Familiar

Clay and the Performative 'Other', Andrew Livingstone.

Gender, Sexuality and Ceramics.

Identity and Ceramics.

Image.

Figuration and the Body.

Ceramics in Education.

Ceramics, Industry and New Technologies.

Museum, Site and Display.

Re-defining Ceramics through Exhibitionary Practice (1970-2009), Laura Breen.

Architectural Abstracts/The Works Subject/Conceptual Resonance

 

Outpost 070723

On The Plane of Feeling.

The Aesthetic Dimension of Individual Human Experience. 

We Are Moved To Think.

Incipient Expressions.

Feeling-with is a force for thought.

A work creates a force for rethinking as much as a force for the experience of sensation's relays towards prearticulation.

One work can have many dynamic forms, many concepts, many feelings or thoughts.

The artist is not the subject, rather prearticulation is.

The Work's Subject

Is Its Dynamic Form

Its Valuation

Its Conceptual Resonance

Its Diagram.

Activating new parameters for thought.

The force of feeling-things becoming into existence.

To posit a subject for feeling means, engaging with the creative from the outside. This taking form is less the formation of a concrete identity than the culmination and residue of a process.

The Work creates its own subject, its subject is the force of becoming it proposes.

Feeling is power's compulsion of composition.

Whitehead 1929/1978.

The compulsion to compose is an aesthetic drive, a will towards sensation, a will to power-feeling.

Becoming-Bodies Feel-With The World.

Amanda Baggs feels-the-world. Watch her reading a book, she touches it, puts her face into it, listens to the pages rustling, smells it, looks at it. Through her the book becomes conjunctive, valued within a complex responsive environment. By culling the bookness from the book, Baggs makes the field of its musicality felt, its texture, its force of becoming not only as an object to be read but as a relation to be lived.

By feeling the book, Baggs brings the book into relation with a force of prearticulation that exceeds the book-as object.

Erin Manning.

Concepts appear/manifest-themselves as forces of expression in its incipiency.

The Multiple Sense Of Concepts.

There is no event,

No phenomena,

Word,

or Thought 

Which Does Not Have Multiple Sense.

A thing has many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it.

Deleuze. 1993.

Concepts value the rhythmic pressure of feeling/thinking with the work/world.

The concept is a gear-shift mechanism that acts on blocks of sensation, oscillating between thought and articulation, it pulsates between the actual and virtual realms. On the virtual stratum concepts propel the becoming event of thought, they feel its force of creation. On the plane of composition concepts articulate the dynamic form of prearticulation, they express the feeling of force.

The theoretical object as a concept to express the force and feeling of inquiry.

The Stick Thing, Canterbury School of Architecture/Spatial Practice/Oren Lieberman. 2009.

Robert Irwin

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

2011/2017.

Editor's Note to the Reader.

Beatrice Hohenegger.

The fact that so many manuscripts have until now remained unpublished reinforces Irwin's characterization of his writing as motivated not by communication or publication, but rather by a desire to examine and clarify core questions that he was pursuing at key moments in his career.

Introduction 

Irwin's Writing.

Matthew Simms.

In a statement published in 1998, Robert Irwin emphasized that his essays, were not written in order to communicate, I am a visual artist, not a writer, or to refute criticism, writing was for me a means to examine the questions that were turning in my head concerning the 'why' of art, with the intention of clarifying the process of making. Together, they reflect relatively well the development of my thinking and the guiding idea of my work: the potential of each person to perceive the surrounding world from a unique aesthetic perspective. 

Notes toward a Conditional Art brings together for the first time Irwin's published and unpublished writings. While the texts span a wide range from letters to project proposals, the vast majority are personal ruminations, sometimes set down in draft form and other times worked up into fully developed essays. They cover a diverse conceptual terrain including, among other things, Irwin's philosophy of teaching, the lessons of modern art, and the artist's understanding of art as a form of pure inquiry. Above all, this book makes clear that starting in the 1960s and continuing up to the present, writing has been and remains an integral element of Irwin's multifaceted art practice.

White Washed Spaces:

Hungate/Water.

Provisional Objects/Architectures.

Porous Fired Clay-Drawings as Spaces.

Thinned Gesso, Sanded/Abraded Surfaces.

Lead  Sheet/Glaze/Slip/Batt Wash/Opal Glass.

Compositional Tilt-up Pieces/Vessels.

Figural Body/Water on Chinese Paper.

Hybrid Body-Trace Drawing.

Indian Ink/Cyanotype Process.

Mounted/Inter-hanging/Canvas/Screen Mesh.

White Conduit/Nylon Line.

Re-Visiting The Human Outline.

Chinese Paper/Thinned Gesso/Wax/Lime

On The Plane Of Feeling.

We are moved to think through a conceptual unfolding a reaching towards-expression.

Through feeling, thought begins to take form as a conceptual force.

The complex interplay of the transversal passage between thought-concept-articulation-

For Whitehead, feeling is the pulsion that transduces thoughts into becoming concepts.

Feeling is a pulsion to think, a sensitivity that situates thought in the world. Through feeling, thought's affective tonality is foregrounded.

Affective tone is an environmental resonance of a  feeling-in-action, as a vibrantile force that makes a resonant milieu felt. (The Hungate, Norwich, Propositional Workings)

Feeling Is Affect Bleeding Into Thought.

Activating complexities on the verge of expression. At the threshold of thought as creation, feeling provokes an aperture for that which has not been thought.

Thought is a lure for feeling that prearcticulates the virtual inflections of its incipient expression.

Feeling-with is not without thought, it is a force for thought.

Propositions and Structures/Landing Sites/Event Markers : Experience in the making.

Outpost 190723

Ceramic Forms/Speculative Spaces.

The ambient wholeness of the world at large is impossible to take in.

Erin Manning/Arakawa and Gins.

Demarcations/Sensations in the Landscape of Perception.

The Apparent Blindness of Little Perceptions.

White Sticks and Subsidiaries.

The Meaning of the Tactile Experience.

Curriculum Making as the Enactment of Dwelling in Places.

The Environment without Objects.

Bringing Things To Life.

Creative Entanglements In A World Of Materials.

Tim Ingold.

Subsidiaries exist, as such by bearing down on the focus to which we are attending from them, and are integrated one to the other by the act of a person, and last only as long as a person, the knower, sustains this integration by indwelling (living in) them.

The proof of the existence of two kinds of awareness comes when we try to observe how we do all this. If our blind man shifts his attention from the tip of his cane to his hand, the meaning on the end of the cane disappears (or becomes something else). Deprived of the meaning of its actions, any description of the process is merely a description of the 'mechanics' and not perception at all.

Robert Irwin.

Relationscapes : Erin Manning.

For Arakawa and Gins.

Fielding Microperceptibility.

Suddenly we are no longer simply watching things moving, we are feeling movement moving. We are moving with our watching fielding the finding form of microperceptions. This finding form of microperceptibility that gives rise, to a quasi registering of an affective tonality rather than a particular emotion. 

We move-with the movement even as we are moved by it, 

The more ambiguous the surroundings, the greater number of Imaging Landing Sites. 

Imaging Landing Sites are virtual events in the making, they foreground the kinaesthetic flickering that propels the taking form of an event.

Landing Sites are event markers in and of the event fabric that is organism-person-environment.

Landing Sites corner the experience in the making.

Imaging Landing Sites give affective resonance to the relation between experience and feeling, they give force to the taking form of the experience.

Arakawa and Gins.

Hungate Glass Abstracts

Raveningham Site Drawing on Architectural Paper.

White Sticks/Visual Feeling/Drawing on Blindness/Feeling through Subsidiaries.

Feeling Drawing/Drawing with Trace and Inscription.

Breathing/Perceiving in the landscape through the phenomenal sensations of subsidiaries/white sticks integrating an awareness of both an indwelling (living in) and a visual demarcation of that movement of gathering sensations.   

Drawing into the phenomenal by using media/tools and sensations/experiences through the site of the situated body of the knower.

Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi.

The semantic aspect of this transformation is that the information the man gets by feeling with the cane is the meaning of the tactile experience.

Picture a blind man probing his way with a cane. While he is alert to the feelings in the hand holding the cane, the crucial distinction may be defined by saying that these feelings are not watched in themselves, but he watches something else by way of them, that is by keeping  aware of them.

He has a subsidiary awareness of the feelings in his hand, feelings which are merged into focal awareness at the end of the cane, constituting two kinds of awareness that are mutually exclusive-'from awareness' and 'focal awareness.' There is here a particularly interesting phenomenal transformation. The sensations of the cane on his hand (the surface of the cane as it touches the palm of his hand, etc.) are lost. Instead, he feels the end of the cane as it touches an object.

Being and Circumstance.

Notes Towards a Conditional Art.

Robert Irwin.

All perceptual knowing is knowing in action (change) and the equivalent of the phenomenal.

Change is the most basic condition (physic) of our universe. In its dynamic, change (alongside time and space) constitutes a given in all things, and is indeed what we are talking about when we are talking about when we speak of the phenomenal in perception. Most critically, change  is the key physical and physiological factor in our being able to perceive at all.

For Irwin, our perceptual process is a kind of 'perpetual motion' assimilator. No change, no perceptual consciousness. So while it is perfectly understandable that the overwhelming majority of our conceptual energies are spent on organizing this myriad of perceptual data into some 'familiar picture' we can work and live with, what is not so understandable is how much of those intellectual energies have been spent on trying to avoid this fact and its effects on our lives. 

LEARNING TO LEARN

On Learning

Brockwood Park School.

J. Krishnamurti.

MAKING : Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Towards an Ecology of Materials.

Knowing is Movement/Knowing from the inside.

Tim Ingold.

Transvaluation Symposium 2015.

Performative Intraventions and Matters of Care.

Choreographing Values.

Thinking Things-in-Phenomena.

Diffractive Readings.

Karen Barad.

Oren Lieberman and Alberto Altes.

LiAi : Laboratory of Immediate Architectural Intervention.

The shift we propose in architectural practices and pedagogies- towards a privileging of processes and modalities of responsible making and learning- starts with an active stance that focuses on the transformational nature of interventions performed in real times and places. 

Through the performative, we shift our attention from what a thing looks like to what a thing does, and from objects and artefacts to 'movements' as well as to the effects of our practices and actions in life. This transformational 'mode' echoes the proposed category of worlding- with its accompanying history of 'indefinition' and 'indetermination' as well as its clear co-responsive engagement in the making of the world-and locates us in the realm of 'situatedness', or inside phenomena.

We are within, and active parts of, specific situations that we encounter in relationship to a series of concerns, things that really matter and have to do with the ongoing becoming of the world. Becoming inside these situations requires a certain fidelity, a certain willingness to stay and to endure; a caring in duration. In this duration it is both possible and necessary to develop situated knowledges, which emerge as 'ways-of-doing-and-making' from our engagement in worlding practices, practices which are also, for that reason, learning experiences.

Violence of Architecture : Bodies Violating Space/Space Violating Bodies.

 Outpost 170823

The Movement of Bodies in the Space of Architecture.

White Cubes/Art Museums/Architectures of  Ritualized Display.

Violence of Architecture.

Bodies Violating Space/Space Violating Bodies.

Any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence, for any use means the intrusion  of a human body into a given space, the intrusion of one order into another. This intrusion is inherent in the idea of architecture; any reduction of architecture to its spaces at the expense of its events is as simplistic as the reduction of architecture to its facades.

By 'violence,' I do not mean the brutality that destroys physical or emotional integrity but a metaphor for the intensity of a relationship between individuals and their surrounding spaces.

Bodies carve all sorts of new and unexpected spaces, through fluid or erratic motions. Architecture, then, is only an organism engaged in constant intercourse with users, those bodies rush against the carefully established rules of architectural thought. No wonder the human body has always been suspect in architecture: it has always set limits to the most extreme architectural ambitions. The body disturbs the purity of architectural order. It is equivalent to a dangerous prohibition.

Spaces are qualified by actions just as actions are qualified by spaces. One does not trigger the other; they exist independently. Only when they intersect do they affect one another. The same occurs in architecture: the event is altered by each new space. And vice versa: by ascribing to a given, supposedly 'autonomous' space a contradictory program, the space attains new levels of meaning. Event and space do not merge but affect one another.

When spaces and programs are largely independent of one another, one observes a strategy of indifference in which architectural considerations do not depend on utilitarian ones, in which space has one logic and events another.

A ritual implies a near-frozen relationship between action and space. It institutes a new order after the disorder of the original event. When it becomes necessary to mediate tension and fix it by custom, then no single fragment must escape attention. Nothing strange and unexpected must happen. Control must be absolute. 

Bernard Tschumi.

Everyday Life/Spatial Intimacy.

The original, spontaneous interaction of the body with a space is often purified by ritual.

Concerned with the way art museums offer up values and beliefs.

Civilizing Rituals/Inside Public Art Museums.

Carol Duncan.

Art always risks the plurality its iterations, that they can become colonized, immobilized and arrested within dominant belief structures. It is always the plurality alive in the art work that always risks being overtaken by the forces of encounter it invites.

Erin Manning, Relationscapes.

The Diagram/Drawing of the Work

In-Gathers the Works Feeling.

The Dreaming's, potential to create new kinds of futures in the present.

Making works/drawings that resonate/openings into the indeterminacy of experience.

Allowing the workings of art to facilitate the opening of the present to its potential for experiential complexity through the ontogenetic plurality of sense(s). 

Napangardi's work activates the Dreaming's potential, becoming both a technology of the future and a technique for the present.

Erin Manning/Dreaming's paintings by Napangardi.

The Final Act/Fact in the Work of Art.

Landing Sites, we land into the focus of an awareness that becomes with us.

The Decision of Emphasis is how the work satisfies its becoming, this satisfaction is the present finality of its current iteration.

Alfred North Whitehead.

Creating art-work that remains open to an infinity of potential evocations.

Feeling Drawing/Spatial Experience.

Indexical Traces/Decarcations/Materiality/Media

The flow of time in the event/duration of drawing.

Figuring it out, drawings/diagrams/lines/paths of sensory inquiry.

How we feel things/phenomenology.

Uncovering unconscious things/psychoanalysis. 

Life Drawings/Propositions with/for the human body.

What the ecology of the drawings show, what is hidden, seeing naked or nude.

Naked in Norwich.

Undercroft.

Space violating bodies : Architectures of Display/Ritual/Violence.

General Ritual Features of Art Museums.

Firstly, the achievement of a marked of 'liminal' zone of time and space in which visitors, removed from the concerns of their daily, practical lives, open themselves to a different quality of experience.

Secondarily, the organization of the museum setting as a kind  of script or scenario which visitors perform. Carol Duncan has argued that western concepts of the aesthetic experience, generally taken as the art museum's raison d' etre, match up rather closely to the kind of rationales often given  for traditional rituals (enlightenment, revelation, spiritual equilibrium or rejuvenation).

In the liminal space of the museum, everything, and sometimes anything, may become art,including fire extinguishers, thermostats, and humidity gauges, which when isolated on a wall and looked through the aesthetizing lens of museum space, can appear if only for a mistaken moment, every bit as interesting as some of the intended-as-art works on display, which in any case do not always look very different.

Circumstances are everything.

Notes on the making of a conditional art.

Robert Irwin.

Art is primarily a situation.

Robert Morris. 

Like everything else in life, art is not defined by its physical description, its formal qualities or even its conceptual foundation, circumstances are everything. Something could be art or it could not be art, it all depends on the situation.

Bernard Tschumi agues that architecture is never autonomous, never pure form, not a matter of style and cannot be reduced to a language. He opposes an over-rated notion of architectural form, and hopes to reinstate the term function and more particularly, to re inscribe the movement of bodies in space, together with the actions and events that take place within the social and political realm of architecture. In Architecture and Disjunction he refuses the simplistic relation by which form follows function, or use, or socioeconomics. In contrast, he argues that in contemporary urban society, any cause-and-effect relationship between form, use, function, and socioeconomic structure has become both impossible and obsolete.