Spatial Interventions/Problems/Praxis of Method : Novalis/Bachelard/Arte Povera.

Outpost 131223

Body Movement.

Robert J. Yudell.

The interplay between the world of our bodies and the world of our dwelling places is always in flux. We make places that are an expression of our haptic experiences even as those experiences are generated by the places we have already created. Whether we are conscious or innocent of this process, our bodies and our movements are in constant dialogue with our buildings.

Problems of Method.

Novalis/Bachelard.

No vision invites him to do so, it is the very substance he has touched with his hands and lips which summons him. It summons him materially by virtue of what seems to be a magical participation. The dreamer undresses and enters the pool, only at this moment do the images appear. They emerge from matter, they arise as if from a seed out of a primitive sensual reality. A rapture which cannot yet project itself on the feminine substantiality of water. Water becomes woman against his breast.

Gaston Bachelard would like to develop a philosophy that has no point of departure, and a philosophy that is not a point of departure. Bachelard in his books, attempts to systematize formal material and dynamic imagination.

Space contains compressed time.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

The Autobiography of Lost Possibilities.

Gaston Bachelard.

A dispersed philosophy that must constantly operate on its very edge, at the very limit where its systematizing impulse is challenged by the actual creations in other domains of human activity. Bachelard becomes a 'hinge' between totalizing metaphysical systems and polyphilosophy.

Bachelard does not develop a fully fledged philosophy of values, rather his books offer lessons for working, reading, breathing and dreaming well, all of which constitute an art of living poetically. Throughout his work he developed the paradox, that the primitiveness of poetic consciousness is not immediately given, it can only be a conquest. Images reveal nothing to the lazy dreamer.

Colette Gaudin. 

Guiseppe Penone.

Souffle 6. 1978.

A large earthenware jar on which the artist has stamped the imprint of his own body. This process shows a sensorial conception of art, a concentration on the organic and the original, reasserting the permanent nature of myths and an animist conception. A vitality of matter, material and object.

The National Museum of Modern Art.

Georges Pompidou Centre.

Arte Povera as an artistic praxis, highly critical and anti-cultural. An art that explores a 'strange area' that is interested in elemental human situations. It was the art critic Germano Celano who in reference to the research done by the polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, outlined in his book 'Towards a Poor Theatre' proposed the notion of Arte Povera in 1967.

Epicurean Asceticism.

The Phenomenological Approach.

Problems of Method.

Reading as a dimension of consciousness.

For Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, the essence of life is not a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space.

Poetry as a synthesis of human existence.

Bachelard's auditive metaphor 'reverberation' for the poetic image brings together through sound, both time and space. In its reverberation, the poetic image will have made a sonority, a situatedness of being.

Science and Poetry.

Concepts and images develop along two divergent lines of spiritual life. The image cannot give matter to the concept, the concept by giving stability to the image would stifle its existence.

Nascent Material/Media.

Drawings rendering an insistent corporeality.

Drawings loosing their haptic senses of mark-feeling and becoming increasingly camouflaged into an image based on representation of an objectified art form/context. 

Life Drawings subdued by visual representation.

Is the initial situation/situatedness/awkwardness of drawing process becoming overwritten.

Drawings feeling the body marking its presence in the space /stage of drawing.

A Body Of Relations : Knowledge Production/Creative-Embodied-Practices

GILDENGATE HOUSE

*STUDIOS UPDATE*

Due to redevelopment of the area, OUTPOST Studios will be closing in February 2025. Founded in 2010, we are thankful for 15 years in this fantastic space! Home to 90+ artists at any one time, hundreds of artists have benefited from studio space over this timeframe.

OUTPOST STUDIO 181121

Organism-Person-Environment/Architectural Body, Arakawa and Gins.

Haptic slippages between subject and object, between what is alive and what is animate.

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

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton

https://www.anglianpotters.org.uk/members/russell-moreton/

Glass/Skin/Permeable/Translucent, Diaphanous and Wondrous.

The Sensation of Flesh/Skin, Surface and Subjectivity.

Material Thinking and the Agency of Matter.

Barbara Bolt. 2007.

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

An ecological view of cognition, knowledge of the world comes from engagement with things.

Rather than studying the world as an object, we  correspond with it in its own movement of growth or becoming. This correspondence sets up a relation with the world which opens up our perception to what is going on so that we can respond to it.

Tim Ingold. 2013.

Making as a process of thinking.

Making involves the socialised, skilled artist body labouring with materials, responding constantly to tactile, visual and emotional feedback from the emerging form. 

I am exploring emergent objects as landscapes, inhabiting them and of making sense through them.

Barbara Bolt. 2007.

Creative 'practice' and the embodiment of the 'social'.

The Life Class/The Artist's Studio.

Knowledge is emergent as the artist engages with the environments and processes of practice.

Adopting a conception of cognition as ecological assumes thinking and perceiving occur as an organism moves through its environment.

The artwork and the work of art produce a knowledge that is performed in the moving interactions of body, material, and social actors in space and time of which the artwork is a trace.

Tim Ingold. 2000.

Event Spaces, as an experience of distributed artistic subjectivity and shared art-of-inquiry. 

A Body Of Relations

Reconfiguring The Life Class

Yuen Fong Ling. 2016.

Intermediaries and happenings between my body and other bodies and their technologies, where their performativity is revealed offering new perspectives on the roles within the life class.

In my fixed physical position as the life model, the notion of the 'pose' reflects a union of the conscious and unconscious, instilled by the act of being looked at, and the ways to record this through optical devices and machines.

Modelling Subjectivities

Life Drawing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Art Education.

Margaret Mayhew. 2010.

Drawing is important because it delineates between elements in the physical, visual, psychological and cultural field, it also delineates between bodies and spaces, art and fashion, and present uncertainty verses timeless tradition.

The act of drawing itself involves considerable self control on behalf of the drawers, not only in mastering hand-eye coordination, but in concentrating on the present moment, the present action and in the immense discipline of looking at a naked body, culturally marked as sexually available, and not displaying sexual interest.

Margaret Mayhew. 2010.

The body is never isolated in its activity but always already engaged with the world. 

Merleau Ponty. 1999.

Through the configuration of the body as potentially transparent, against which the human being can only push with her hands at the limits physical and psychic geographies that are between inside and outside. 

Photography and the permeability of time evoking a physical experience of observing and examining other worlds.

Aesthetics of intimacy, photography and bodies of desire, the gaze of the passionate camera.

The intimacy and equivalences created through the photographic experience.

Her inert body both inside and outside the vitrine.

Potentially something dangerous about the  experiments with her body, with and into its layering and embodiment within speculative spacetime dimensions.

Here the viewer has the sensation of seeing through a double protective layer of glass and skin.

Art Practice/Building Distant Realities/Wonder

Like glass and within the glass, with the skin that separates the body from outer/other space as well as inner geographies and selves.

Written on the body, maps and navigations of interior spaces. Winterson/Woodman.

Her poetic image of a space that presses psychically on her from the outside.

The earthbound, partial female body, transgressions of the everyday limitations on the body.

The psychic geography manifested within frames of spatiality that becomes an inner space that flips outwards and defies limits.

Through and beyond the drawn/sculpted and painted body.

Site for psychic inner explorations, a corporeality for others rooted in the body's present moment of experience.

Diffracting Drawing and Painting.

Mattering as a reconfiguration of its own making, understanding and encountering.

Atmospheres : Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects. 

Peter Zumthor. 2010.

Manuel Neri, Studio, Benicia, 1980

Francesca Woodman, Untitled contact sheet, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

Studio Works : In art we conceive and combine new forms that enrich our lives.

Outpost 281123

Studio Works.

Human beings are unique in retaining the capacity for play.

In art we conceive and combine new forms that enrich our lives.

To live more intensely than usual, inhabiting the whole of our humanity.

Mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, and as such it (myth) helps us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and perhaps allows a glimpse at the core of reality.

A Short History of Myth.

Karen Armstrong.

The Haptic Sense of Making.

Doing and feeling at the  same time.

The physical/spiritual/corporeal sense of being/becoming.

The Spatial Dimension.

Defining Self/Organizing Experience.

The human body its feelings at the centre of the architectural form.

Making Atmospheres/Environments. 

A Place Set Apart.

Mark Rothko.

WORK, volumes 1-6.

Don't Forget The Lamb.

Lamina.

Brian Clarke.

NOT FOR RESALE.

BOOKS FOR EDUCATIONAL USE ONLY.

Sowing the seeds of knowledge.

Dawson Books.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

In the hands of a brilliant craftsman like Mies van der Rohe, a spatiality of alienation may still provide its rewards through the elegance of material and construction. But the more extreme applications of Cartesian space present an insidious threat to our identity as individuals. The other extreme to alienation of the body is over-manipulation of the body. Our bodies are circuited out of existence as our world is realized in electonically stimulated sensation.

To help people inhabit the world, we feel, the basic act is not organizing but caring; the architect's client is not undifferentiated society but caring individuals. In the rhetoric of the past decades, the difficult act of dwelling , based on the act of caring, is elitist. It requires effort, and that sets some apart from others. 

The architects' proper role, it seems to us, is an accepting and absorbing one, to encourage others to make the effort and to develop the physical surrounds that make dwelling possible and attractive. Curiously, the wholesale inhuman 'social' manipulation of urban form by twentieth-century architectural and planning offices has put a disproportionate emphasis on originality, on the unique.

 

Rather, we believe, the design of the environment is a choreography of the familiar and the surprising, in which the familiar has the central role, and a major function of the surprising is to render the familiar afresh.

Kent C. Bloomer, Charles W. Moore. 1977

Alternative Construction.

Contemporary Natural Building Methods.

Prototyping For Architects.

Sensing Spaces.

Marking The Line.

Ceramics and Architecture.

Drawing Into The Human Form/The Architectural Body

 Drawing Into The Human Form.

Its conceptual frameworks, aesthetics and contexts.

Inclusions/Enclosures/Involuntary Mappings and Erasures.

Figuring it out, sensuality through making the drawing heard.

Drawing from a blindness, a memory of seeing.

Derrida.

Drawing into the perspectives and  sociological relationships of the Architectural Body, organism/person/environment.

Gins and Arakawa.

Explanations/Gestures of Looking and Mark Making.

Scale/Proximity/Seeing Distance/Situatedness/Environment/Art Work.

Haptic Seeing/moving over the surface of the sociological subject.

Frottage, life drawings with involuntary textures and marks derived from their particular locality and working methods, concrete floors, wooden floorboards, graphite sticks, charcoal, pencil and wax crayons.

The body and its nakedness becomes the instrument of our emotions and our sensuality.

The Psychology of Nakedness.

Naked to Nude, Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century.

Georg Eisler.

Refractive Phenomena : Site Circumstances, Water/Glass/Film.

 Outpost 141022

Water : A Phenomenal Lens.

Refractive Phenomena.

Void Space Water Gardens.

Steven Holl.

The haptic realm of architecture is defined by the sense of touch.

When the materiality of the details forming an architectural space become evident, the haptic realm is opened up. Sensory experience is intensified; psychological dimensions are engaged.

The psychological power of reflections overcomes the science of refraction.

As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them, for when he does not understand he, becomes them by transforming himself into them.

Vico, New Science.

One of the tragedies of modern urban life is that a complex of urban constructions often puts us out of touch with the poetry and unpredictability of the everyday change in the weather.

Patti Smith

Baptised by the New World 

Site : Circumstance and Idea.

Phenomenal zones function life a manifold of parts, presenting the question of a whole more substantial than any of its components. 

Each challenge in architecture is unique; each has a particular site and circumstance or program, and for each to fuse sit, circumstance, and a multiplicity of phenomena, an organizing idea .. a driving concept is required.

The unity of the whole emerges from the thread that runs through the variety of parts; whether it be one discrete idea or the interrelation of several concepts.

To find a balance between the science of water and the exhilarating qualities of experience, consider the many states and transformative properties of the substance. We might consider water a 'phenomenal lens' with powers of reflection, spatial reversal, refraction, and the transformation of rays of light.

The 'void space' water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These 'void spaces' containing three inches of water over black smooth stones from Ise, are analogous to a sacred space within the every day world of domestic urban life.

Hungate Medieval Art.

Water, Working Title.

Exhibition, St Peter Hungate, Norwich. 2023.

Sculpture, Installation, Sonic Art, Performance and Film Screenings.

The live reflection of echo and re-echo within a stone cathedral increases our awareness of the vastness, geometry and material of its space.

Water, its use in Christian rituals, baptism, confirmation, confession, ordination, matrimony and anointing of the sick.

Responding to the physicality of stone fonts as objects to hold holy water.

Objects produced according to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church before the Reformation.

An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions. Refraction phenomena produce a particular magic in architecture that is adjacent to or incorporates water.

Of Sound.

Quieting the mind

deep in the forest

water drips down

Hosha.

The brevity of a Japanese haiku poem isolates the 'thing-in-itself' of experience and perception of material and detail.

Space brings the resonance of the acoustic near to life.

John Cage.

In some European cities, the regular sound of the church bell's community call creates a psychological space. Its perceptual associations are tied to the materiality of the bell, its resonant tower, and the adjacent square. This kind of 'sound space' cannot be accurately recreated with electronic speakers.

Sound is absorbed and perceived by the entire body. A sequence of sounds can have a mesmerizing effect on the psyche.

John Cage went into an anechoic chamber over sixty years ago in order to 'hear sounds' and found that experience gave his life direction. Cage's radical and poetic experiments with sound bridged the conventional gap between musical phenomena and the physical and psychological effects of sound.

Electronic music has increased the ranges available to composers and changes in thinking have reframed sound and time.

Scripting Aural Phenomena.

The architecture of music, the structure of aural phenomena might have a graphic parallel in architectural notations; plans sections, axonometrics, etc. Many composers have used time-space notations in order to compose with irregular rhythms. Notations which allow for accidental chromatic notes, microtones, clusters of vertical bands between marked pitches all appear different from conventional notation.

Accordingly we consider a re-framing of space, light and time in architecture.

Paul Valery suggested the closeness of music and architecture, that sculpture and painting one can turn way from, but music surrounds us as does the space of architecture.

Detail : The Haptic Realm.

Today the industrial and commercial forces at work on the 'products' for architecture tend towards the synthetic; wooden casement windows are delivered with waterproof plastic vinyl coatings, metals are 'anodized' or coated with a synthetic outer finish, tiles are glazed with coloured synthetic coatings, stone is simulated as is wood grain. 

The sense of touch is dulle or canceled with these commercial industrial methods, as is the texture and essence of material and detail displaced. 

The total perception of architectural spaces depends much on the material and detail found and experienced through the haptic realm.

The texture of a silk drape, the sharp corners of cut steel, the mottled shade and shadow of rough sprayed plaster or the sound of a spoon striking a concave wooden bowl, all reveal an authentic essence which stimulates the senses.

Fields.

Diagrams of Field Conditions.

All grids are fields, but not all fields are grids. 

On of the potentials of the field is to redefine the relation between figure and ground. If  we think of the figure not as a demarcated object read against a stable field, but as an effect emerging from the field itself- as moments of intensity, as peaks or valley within a continuous field, as the figure and field become more enmeshed.

Rather than considering photography as a means to capture an instant, some artists subverted this practice to express duration in time. Sometimes through collages, sequences and superimpositions, in some cases through a single long exposure.

Photographers are exploring different methods to synthesize the fourth dimension within the bidimensional range of the frame. The results provide a wide variety of unexpected solutions, some extremely synthetic while others very fragmented, pushing further the boundaries of the practice.

Speculative Images : Weathering between art and architecture #2

 Art as a Spatial Practice.

Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

"All that is solid melts into air"

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,

(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

Speculative Images : Weathering between art and architecture #1

 

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