Evidencing Atmospheres/A Calling To Think.
Reading diffractively through reimagined patterns/atmospheres that penetrate the body-text-space-time compositions.
Spatial blueprints/propositional and emergent diagrams on speculative readings from The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.
Apparatuses and Intermediaries.
Everyday Practices, Harleston. 2022
Outpost 270224
In the body of knowledge, there is a mind in the flesh quick as lighting.
Artaud/Newman
Drawing ultimately corresponds with/to a mobile field of properties.
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The Haptic Engagement.
The Stage of Drawing.
Gesture and Act.
In drawing it is this potentiality and instability of the 'framed image/object' that reinforces our uncertainty of any definitive definition. We are not so much looking at the thing itself, but at its suggestion and its very possibility in a formation that has yet to occur. There is the uncertainty (and its anxiety) as to what stage of language it is, in its becoming.
Looking with the eye and touch of an artist, even to a point of scrutiny, while keeping the societal content in which they emerge in mind. What forms the overall connection between the drawings in the exhibition is the value attached to gesture, as a primordial act of consciousness and to its trace on the paper.
Catherine de Zegher, Avis Newman.
Drawing is conceived in the midst of loss and anxiety.
Within the realm of visual representation, drawing is present as an act of tracing absences.
Opened and closed by the mark, an inscriptive game that is both motional and emotional, that enables an active control/participation over separation anxiety. While at the same time unlocking the way to the child's independence.
The earliest drawings are not guided by visual exploration of space, but by an exploration of movement and spatial concerns.
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Bodily responses to drawing acts, of trying to bring about a visible language from visual inscriptions. Gestural traces in drawings evidence a continuous process of situating being/becoming.
Drawn from the body of knowledge into the/onto the surface event of experience.
Drawing for me always seems to manifest the endless repetition of remaking, and as such as a sensation it constitutes the space of anxiety, a childhood anxiety.
Moving Bodies
Spatial Thresholds
In architecture we enter space and its poetics.
St Jerome in his study.1474-75.
Messina examines 'earthly limits', St Jerome is sitting in a small study that seems to have been dissected to reveal its interior. The place, environment for his writing and any other material needed to cultivate his mind. As if to say that space can be crossed with a mind capable of entering and crossing limits. This is the greatness of the mind, and also in architecture, that it is capable of crossing/entering spaces beyond there physical limits. In transcending physical limits Scarpa is setting up a spatial poetics of liminal spaces, is perhaps the main theme of his work at Brion Cemetery, alongside of the real physical and actual architectural figures of solid material. Thus for Scarpa, every time a threshold is crossed the limits between life, humanity and nature in the landscape are traversed as well.
Brion Cemetary by Carlo Scarpa.
Ina Macaione. 2017.
Enric Mestre.
Architectures For Silence And Meditation.
Building models, blueprints for larger constructions.
Sculptures of the hidden, the concealed and the enclosed.
The work of Enric Mestre is much indebted to the principles of ancient classical form as to the vocabulary of modern architecture and sculpture. He is an artist who has a particularly sensitive feeling for massing, for the planar and spatial relationships of contemporary building, and how to size this down into pieces which possess their own particular intimacy.
His works are enhanced by the nuanced and controlled colouration of their clay fabric. Mestre produces patinas of great subtlety and variation that relate more to the fabric of a building than to traditional sculpture. Gritty open textures and smooth surfaces both soften and temper the austerity of his forms, in which he also uses sober tones and colourations to distinguish different sections, surfaces and planes.
Mestre's work echoes the sculptural beauty of expressive functionalist building, it has the same starkness, the same asceticism that shares a strong sense of memorial and of elegy. They are deeply contemplative objects, that go beyond exercises in harmony, chromatics, proportion and formalism.
They present a quietude that contains a profound sense of memento mori. For Whiting there is a sepulchre like quality about such of Mestre's work, for repositories of memory perhaps, sentinels of some unspecified commemoration. Sculptures where one's own imagination is allowed to roam in a disquieting world of urban areas and industrial like structures.
Their cenotaph like solemnity creates a sense of isolation and loneliness, and we are left to make our own narratives, our own stories.
David Whiting.
Invisible Cities.
Italo Calvino.
With cities, it is as with dreams; everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires or fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful and everything conceals something else.
What is more mysterious than clarity?
What more capricious than the way in which light and shade are distributed over the hours and over men?
Eupalinos of the Architect.
Paul Valery.
Christopher Wilmarth
Drawing Into Sculpture.
Christopher Wilmarth (1943?1987), an American artist best known for his expressive sculptures constructed from plate glass and steel, was also an innovative draftsman. This compelling book?the first to focus on Wilmarth's use of drawing throughout his career?offers fascinating insights into his artistic practice and poetic personal vision. Edward Saywell considers three aspects of Wilmarth's drawings: his student and early works; the remarkable crossover that he made between two- and three-dimensional works in a series of drawings constructed from etched glass and steel cables done in the early 1970s; and the independent drawings he made directly after or during the construction of his sculptures as a means to think through completed work and to look forward to new creative ideas. Saywell also draws on previously unstudied materials, such as sketchbooks, preparatory maquettes, and letters selected from the Christopher Wilmarth Archive recently presented to the Fogg Art Museum by Susan Wilmarth-Rabineau, in order to shed new light on Wilmarth's working process.
Outpost 070922
Radical Perspectives.
Space-time Manifolds.
Intertwined cinemas within a bottle of light.
Fissure space reflection on underside of suspended cinemas.
Concept Studies/Diagrams.
Space was perceived by the body moving through time.
Parallax, Steven Holl.
Plastic Media
Performative Apparatuses.
The Observer and The Observed.
A return via the time exposures to the unexpected and a intricate order made up of patterns, movements and constellations.
New thrilling metaphorical structures.
Beyond the purely visual, to get a flat surface to interact with physical phenomena, which would be recorded without any intervention or involvement. Photographic events in which some images recorded very determined fixed forms, and in other time-exposures the images became more about traces and about movement.
Susan Derges.
Infra-ordinary
Dust Breeding.
Giacometti's Cell/Studio.
A Species of Spaces.
Intra-acting
Contemporary Architectural Practices.
Spatial Practices/Visual Fine Art.
Quantum Superposition.
At the moment a measurement is made in Beijing, everything remains in quantum superposition with respect to Vienna. The equipment making the measurements, the scientists reading them, the notebooks in which they are written down, the messages in which the results of the measurements are conveyed, are all quantum objects themselves.
Helgoland,Carlo Rovelli.
Quantum intra-acting
The concretization of colour as substance/matter/movement/agency.
Beuy's brown and Klein's blue form a pair of opposites, according to the hermetic-alchemical world view, such opposites contain the arcane power of polar dissimilarity that seeks to be augmented and joined together.
Beuys Brown and Klein Blue, Magdalena Broska.
Elective Affinities
Susan Derges/Garry Fabian Miller.
The direct use of physical materials, the interest in systematic experimentation and a preoccupation with the fluctuating perception of events depending on the position of the observer and the nature of the light.
Through the realm of perceptual experiences.
Both art and science alter our perceptions and knowledge, whether from philosophy, science or the arts it filters down into our general awareness to affect our world view.
Wondrous essences put back into existence, through re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world.
Plastic media, time based immateriality.
Surface interactions produced from physical phenomena made visible.
Metaphors for phenomena
Patterns as either/both particles and waves.
Unknowing Expectation.
Prints of a scientific exactness.
This reduction of process down to such a simple method.
He felt amazed by the clarity of the procedure, it seemed incredibly releasing and radical, and something to aspire to.
Working series that focusses on the immense through engagement with the specific.
Homeland, the body gains access to the world as a way of living and working.
Making a garden after the making of the mornings pictures, feels like the right way to fill the hours which remain in the day.
Field Studies/Kilquhanity.
Building template for positioning of circulatory pathways.
Garden drawings and sculptural mappings of the passage of sunlight.
Shifting relationships of the real world have been assimilated into her imagery.
In particular her world view was affected by the ideas of contemporary physicists.
New possibilities for plastic media has been that phenomena are no longer seen as static entities in space and time, but as dynamic and interrelated with specific structured laws and principles.
The Darkroom as cell and workroom, a room apart from the world.
Science, Order and Creativity.
David Bohm.
The Implied Observer
Towards an understanding of how matter comes to matter.
Performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real, performativity is actually a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve.
Thingification, the turning of relations into things, entities, relata, which infects much of the way we understand the world and our relationship to it.
In Posthumanist Performativity, Karen Barad advocates agential realism as an alternative to representationist ontologies that split semiotic from material reality.
Barad argues that matter is not a substance but an intra-activity, and that agency is not an exclusively human attribute, but rather the enactment of iterative changes across macro/microscopic levels of matter.
Matter is performative in that it reproduces itself through the effects of its own intra-active dynamic material relationships. Relata do not pre-exist these relationships, but emerge through them in the fluid, diffractive boundaries that crystalize phenomenon/matter into things/thingification that are positioned in a spatial-temporal affective relation.
The subject/object dichotomy is performatively enacted through the specific spatial temporal proximity between the two necessary for apprehension, in which the approximal relationship through which subject and object emerge. The cognitive split that constitues the I is a discursive practice called the agential cut which is a conception of separability between one thing and another that grants the illusion of agency.
For Barad, discursive practices are not only linguistic expressions of human language, but extend to other material specific practices of intra-action entangled with other intra-actions that produce material phenomena. The material apparati which constrain, but do not over determine these practices find within their own diffractive limits possible dynamic reconfigurations of the world.
Because being is not a static relationality but a doing, that always entails constituting exclusions, a posthumanist engagement with performative matter must not only account for the sites of human/non human cuts, but also challenge the ethical stakes of such cuts.
Summary Notes : Karen Barad, Posthuman Performativity, S.A. Colclough.
Intra-actions produce material phenomenon.
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.
Outpost 090222
Architectural Body/Procedural Architecture
Organism/Person/Environment
Earth, House, Hold, Dwelling Places.
Unlike the sense of sight or hearing, only the sense of touch can discern space and time at once.
The skin as the harbourer of a subjects sense of touch.
Skin/Subjectivity becomes as flesh a connective tissue which both unites and divides.
The skin can judge time less well than the ear, and space less well than the eye, but it is skin alone that combines the spatial and temporal dimensions.
Maternal Skin/Subject Formation, Anzieu.
A Field in England : On the nature of Photography.
Between Art and Information.
Brought to Light : Photography and the Invisible.
The Visible/Invisibility between the potential of things.
The Photograph and The Lacanian Mirror.
In which identity is constantly shored up and broken down, but also as a persistent space invested with the paradoxical qualities of intimacy and alienation, of proximity and utter detachment all through which an offer of an encounter is held out in invitation.
Inter-Subjective Encounters, a space in which the subjectivities of the artist and the spectator might meet and mingle.
The skin is the surface through which self and other are mediated.
The mutuality of touch itself is echoed by the skins structure, it both touches and is touched and this duality is reflected in the way the skins surface is exposed to the outside world, whilst also protecting and containing the unseen interiority of the body.
Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.
Light and Spaces of Intersubjectivity.
Tactile Light.
The photograph holds out the promise of an encounter through its carnal medium.
For Riches, the self-representational photograph becomes a kind of veil or mask, a displaced surface whose skin-like relationship to the subject is always suspended, and perpetually deferred. It frames a space of contact and a fantasy of union with the original subject, the photograph's skin-like quality also enables it to be imagined as an inter-subjective space of exchange.
Light creates the spatiality/transitions that passes beyond subject/object relationships.
Skin/Surface/Subjectivity : Movements in thinking through Spatial Agency
Skin becomes a site of symbolic acts of aggression/gesture.
Surfaces of suggested pain/experience through which subjectivity is created.
Conduits of colour specificities and counterpoints
Relationscapes : Movements, created through colour temperature and spatial contact.
The phenomena of things being brought into perception/focus.
Through a body every colour creates movement and has its own/creates its own perspective/its mapping/layering/extension of spatial temporal material.
Analogies/Difference : Spaces created through mimesis,wavelengths intermingling with the spatial.
Glass/Lead/Filtered Light.
Glass Slide/Subjectivities brought into the light
Colour Subjectivities, the appearance/experience of mattering material.
