The Minor Gesture : The Diagram of the Painting/Fielding the Feeling of Force taking Form

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The plurality alive in art, always risks being overtaken, colonized, immobilized and arrested by the forces of encounter it invites. Yet paraphrasing Nietzsche, Deleuze writes, a force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the features of the forces with which it struggles. What a will wants is to affirm its difference. Through the will to power, force takes form.

Active force always risks capture by reactive force and the risk of translation, of rendering work within a stabilizing narrative of identity or representation.

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The diagram of the painting/drawing is its feeling of force taking form that is itself in movement.

Relationscapes, Erin Manning.

Propositions of Force/Appetition.

The Work's Diagram.

The force of the work is an emergent way of looking, more than an actual taking form.

Raveningham Diagrams for Sensing the Landscape. 2023.

Opening the present to its potential for experiential complexity.

Opening to the indeterminacy of experience.

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

Making works that resonate with an ontogenitic plurality of sense(s). 

The same object, the same phenomenon changes sense depending on what force which appropriates it. Deleuze.  

We become sited in the fielding of the quasi chaos of microperceptions, an experience that leaves us out of breath, our muscles tense with the twitching of kinaesthetic empathy. We move with the intensive magnitude of the micromovements moving.

Erin Manning.

Landing sites choose us, creating an associated milieu that worlds the body-environment. 

Some are perceptual, some are dimensionalizing, some are imaging. 

Organism-Person-Environment

A decision is like a hook onto the environment to gain traction on it.

Fielding how we think-feel.

Nothing happens without kinaesthetic instigation and corporeal proddings.

A landing not so much into a place, as a dancing into attendance.

Architectural Body, Arakawa/Gins. 2002.

A choreographed encounter is never, wholly what it seems, you can't really choreograph movement because we are constantly in a process of fielding our surroundings, which also fields us. How we think-feel is a space-time of experience alters where and how we can experience it. This fielding is how Arakawa and Gins define a landing site.

Erin Manning. 

The decision of the landing site is its focusing into experience.

For Whitehead a decision is a becoming actual of a virtual potential, and decision is what gives the event form and by consequence creates an individuation. The decision is the separating off, the honing in that makes a particular tonality take form.

We Land into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Actuality is the decision amid potentiality. 

A decision creates the potential for consciousness, not the other way around.

Whitehead. 1929/Erin Manning-Interlude.

For Arakawa and Gins, landing sites corner experience in the making.

A landing site is an activity that is as expressive as it is organizational.

Apparatuses/Diagrams

Holding their form, their bodies pause, the camera waits for them.

In the work's final form, the force of its potential can still be felt, this is the works diagram.

The camera focuses these sites into an in-gathering that captures them as transitory thought-feelings. We feel the shift from dances in the making to haptic experiments in the viewing.

The camera works with the tensile activity of the dancers minimal gestures, moving now to one side as though filming four bodies in one, suspending our attention in tandem with the suspended bodies.

Sculpting in Time.

Films heavy with the languor of relationships forming between bodies, ground, and partitioned space.

For Tarkovsky, the presence of the camera is felt as though it were another body, forcefully moving us to watch, constraining us to see not only a location or a dance, but the tensile rhythm of groundedness itself. The camera bis not there only for the recording, it feels the weight of the waiting, physically as we watch. These shifting affective tonalities are landing sites. They are what Arakawa and Gins call a depositing of sited awareness.

Erin Manning.

Fielding Assemblage : Trace/Diagram/Canvas/Paper/Studio Wall

Textual/Conceptual Forces/Siting Awareness.

Cultivation Field Research Collage

Geological era 1800.

The deep intervention into nature by humans as biological and geological agents.

The Anthropocene denotes a new framework of thinking and action.

A space where the individuals mental reality meets 'cultural narratives'

Social Conditioning/Underpinning Education.

Spatial Register between Consciousness and Social Existence.

Windows/Boundaries between the personal and the commonly shared. 

Confessional Animal/Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Corpus/The Individual Presence/Jean-Luc Nancy

Camera Obscura of Ideology/Sarah Kofman

Ceramic Diagram of Interlocking/Partitioned Spaces.

From Models to Drawings.

Spatial Tonalities/Affective Environments 

Filtered Light.

Architectural Abstracts/The Works Subject/Conceptual Resonance

 

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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.

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

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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.   

 

Reading Project/Emergent Evolutions/Small Perceptions : Waverley Abbey/Architectural Body

Relationscapes : Erin Manning.

Perceptions in Folding.

Contrast is the activity of foregrounding or backgrounding that makes certain qualities stand out, creating what Whitehead calls emergent evolutions.

Contrast in Whitehead does not mean the equal juxtaposition of two extremes. It is 'that particularity of conjoint unity that arises from the realized togetherness of eternal objects' (Whitehead 1929/1978, 229).

Emergent evolutions are the individuation of relational fields composed by the activity of small perceptions folding.

Small perceptions are like what Arakawa and Madeline Gins call imaginary landing sites.

Small perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another as they are components of each perception.

Deleuze.

On the property/structure of things/materials/colours : About philosophy/drawing

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On the property/structure of things/materials/colours

Drawings going beyond figure/ground relationships

The manifestation of weight derives from form along with substance.

I no longer wanted to make markings on a piece of paper, I wanted to make the drawing integral to its structure and properties.

About Drawing, Richard Serra.

Serra has questioned whether his 'Deadweight' series borders on the pictorial, because these drawings set two similar shapes against a common ground as if to construct a compound figure. However Serra's use of overlap protects against this possibility and preserves the material independence of the two sheets of paper.

Preface, Being and Becoming. C. Robert Mesle.

The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time. James Taylor

Process-Relational Philosophy. 

An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. 2008

The assumption of a moving viewer, Richard Serra in a Japanese Temple Garden.

Richard Serra believes that the physical grasp of a space must occur through time in the form of movement or effort, so he temporally extends his own working of a surface.

Tempered, measured movement such as the application of layers of paintstick, narrows the conceptual gap between the space and time we imagine to experience bodily.

Serra's program  (a temporal art of substance), to link bodily consciousness to material substance, to integrate vision and touch as well as space and time.

Movement/Sensation marks both space and time, it does so psychologically as well as physically.

The Interaction Of Color

Albers theorized the relation of space and time to weight.

The two basic quantities or substances question, how much and how often, distinguishes two kinds of quantities, one of size, extension in area, and one of recurrence, an extension in number. These measurements establish weight in space and weight in time.

Serra's accumulated, living movement, his layering of paintstick, collects weight in space and weight in time.

The human body (corpus humanum) is composed of many individuals (of different nature), each one of which is highly composite.

The individuals of which the human body is composed are some fluid, some soft and some hard.

The individuals composing the human body, and consequently the human body itself is affected in many ways by external bodies.

The human body needs for its preservation many other bodies from which it is, so to speak, continually regenerated.

When a fluid part of the human body is so determined by an external body that it impinges frequently on another part which is soft, it changes its surface and as it were imprints on it the traces of the external impelling body.

The human body can move external bodies in many ways, and dispose them in many ways.

The human mind is apt for perceiving many things, and more so according as its body can be disposed in more ways.

Bento de Spinoza : Ethics, Part II, Postulates I-VI, Proposition XIV

Bento,s Sketchbook : John Berger. 2011

Manuel Neri

Bodies of intensity, imprinted with a ghostly figural outline.

Sculptures and drawings showing ambivalence,hostile, intimate, relationships.

The contradictory shocks between form and substance are absorbed by the emotional resilience of the dialectic of pleasure and doubt. Neri proves this in the course of his own work, through his successive approaches to different materials, which make him oscillate between allusive figuration and the most direct realism.

Pierre Restany. 1988

How do things translate into lived experience?

Whatever the answer, it will be known only in relation to the particularity of a personal physical encounter with the work, never as a principle of order or composition.

Drawing Thick, Richard Serra.

Agencies/ways of doing, phenomena and research emerge with specific relationalities to things at hand.

A diffractive methodology is a knowledge making process, creating ongoing differences, states of being/becoming.

Diffraction as a tool for analysis, attunes us to the differences generated by our knowledge.

Opening up ways for greater sensitivity towards how we are part of the worlds continuous becoming.

Organism-Person-Environment : The Architectural Body.

Arakawa and Gins 

The theoretical object/body in doing/sensate built architecture

Living Spaces : Spatial Agencies/Creative Philosophies into a world of continual process and becoming, where each person relates to every other and to all of nature.

Architectural Thinking/The Interrelated Universe : Process and Reality

Mattering : Mind-Movement-Material

Spatial Interventions in Architecture

Filtered Light and the interactions of objects

Entanglements of Materials and Substances

Asperities, opacities, reflections, textiles,

Lines Of Flight : Drawing on Mattering

Steven Holl, House,St Ignatius, Scale

Place Making/Drawing/Materials/Construction

Beach Ruins : Belgium

Rutile/Yellow Ochre washes, transparent glass/glaze, texture/textile and pierced clay/concrete.

Ceramic Slab Constructions : Facades/Massing for pacemaker utilities/living spaces

Material as drawing, drawing as construction, architectural models constructed into the assemblage of the making drawing.

Painted Clay Constructions : Gesso, Cyanotype, Cotton, Wire, Glass.

Process-Relational Philosophy : Alfred North Whitehead

Vibrant Matter : Jane Bennett

Blackness is a property, not a quality, that is to say, something fundamental, not an incidental embellishment.

About Drawing, Richard Serra.