The Centrality of the Human Body to Architecture : Quotidian Aesthetics/Interventions

Outpost 270125

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

In-Transit

The Complex Process of Knowledge Production.

The Narrative of Theoretical 'Unravelling'.

What Is An Artist?

Irit Rogoff. 2006

Robert Morris

Catalogue Entries.

Columns, 1961

Passageway, 1961

Box For Standing, 1961

Portals, 1961

Box With The Sound Of Its Own Making, 1961

Early Minimalism

Measurement, 1963

Imprints And Body Casts, 1963-64

Site, 1964

Leads, 1971

Felts, 1967-83

Dirt, 1968

Continuous Project Altered Daily, 1969

Observatory, 1971-77

Rubbings, 1972

INFRA-THIN

Sensations between objective knowledge, difference and truth.

Post-structuralism, A very Short Introduction.

Catherine Belsey.

The Architecture of Emergence.

The Evolution Of Form In Nature And Civilisation.

Michael Weinstock.

The Architecture Of Continuity.

Lars Spuybroek.

The Body.

The Lived Body.

The Flesh of Things

Donn Welton

Written On The Body.

The World and Other Stories.

Jennette Winterson.

Painting for Bacon was a visceral event a sensation, driven by emergent behaviours and phenomena.

Ceramic spatial inceptions with circulating totems. 

Slab built, Stoneware. 2025

Tentative/Theoretical/Speculative Landing Sites.

Between Organism-Person-Environment and its Spatial/Architectural Body.

Preface.

Stefan Fichtel

Well-made animated information graphics are based on clear decisions about what matters and what should be left out.

Human Body/Indexical Trace on dot-matrix paper.

The Centrality of The Human Body to Architecture.

Undone/Assemblages of Concern.

Collage as the third aesthetic.

Ranciere argues for collage as 'third' aesthetic: it can combine two relations and play on the line of indiscernability, between forces of sense's legibility, and the force of non-sense's strangeness.

The Dark Monarch.

Magic and Modernity in British Art. 2010

The Bricoleur/sweeping the floor/movements in matter/spatial layering, thought in motion.

Embodying Emotion Sensing Space:

Introducing emotional geographies.

Joyce Davidson, Christine Milligan. 2004

Studio Floor Material.

The Artist's Reality

Philosophies of Art

Mark Rothko.

Culture, Creativity and Environment.

New Environmentalist Criticism.

Fiona Becket, Terry Gifford.

Ecology Without Nature.

Towards a Theory of Ecological Criticism.

Timothy Morton.

Visual Ecology

Transparency : Expressing the Unseen.

Transparency-the ability to see into and understand the inner workings of a landscape-is an absolutely essential ingredient to sustainability. In a world where more and more of the technology controlling our lives is not only beyond our individual control but is also invisible and incomprehensible to the average person, the landscape sreves not only as the foundation for our only genuine 'tangible' reality, but as the only mechanism by which we can really know where we are-and how and why as well. It can be argued that as humans we have a right to know where we are, how we are connected, and how we are doing.

Gray World, Green Heart.

Robert L. Thayer, Jr. 

Julia Kristeva

Black Sun.

Depression and Melancholia.

Susan Sontag

Under the Sign of Saturn

After Hiroshima

elin o'Hara slavick

On Pictures and the words that fail them.

On An Image Of A Bottle

James Elkins

A Field Guide to Melancholy

Melancholy and The Landscape

Locating Sadness, memory and reflection in the landscape.

Jacky Bowring

Who Comes after the Subject?

The essays collected in this volume present the current research of nineteen contemporary French philosophers on one of the great motifs of modern philosophy: the critique or the deconstruction of subjectivity.

Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy.

The Enchantment Of Modern Life.

Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics.

Jane Bennett

Ordinary Lives.

Studies in the Everyday.

Ben Highmore.

Everyday/Quotidian Aesthetics.

Ranciere is perhaps the contemporary writer most alive to the productive and necessary confusion between aesthetics as a general field describing the realm of sensate perception, and the more limited meaning relevant to the field of art that has taken shape in the West in the last two hundred or so years. And it is this confusion (a confusion that infuses both the general and the limited economy of aesthetics) that we can find the materials to help us build a quotidian aesthetics.

The Politics of Aesthetics.

The Distribution of the Sensible

Jacques Ranciere.

Emergent behaviours/phenomena to generate buildings.

Screen-shot CCTV.

Fire exit intervention WSA. 2008

The Centrality of the Human Body to Architecture.

Framing/Temporal Containment/Instances and Immediacies : Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

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.   

 

Site Specificity : Camouflage

Site is anti-place hovering precariously over the abyss of no-place.
Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place

Introduction : On Installation and Site Specificity
Erica Suderburg

The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct as possible.
Allan Kaprow, 'The Event'

Box For Standing, 1961
Robert Morris

Body and Building
Essays On The Changing Relation Of Body And Architecture
Dodds, Tavernor

Observatory, 1971
Robert Morris

Rethinking Architecture
Neil Leach

There is at the core of contemporary existence a transcendental homelessness which Kracauer evokes so lucidly in his description of the hotel lobby, the quintessential space of modernity.

Camouflage
Neil Leach