Outpost 090124
Indexical and Sensate Bodies
Drawing(s) on the sensate perceived and interiorities~affect of other bodies.
I am interested in the sensate nature and social interiorities that are surfacing through drawing.
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The Tentative Trace ~ From Living Body to Ceramic Body
Moreton's Indexical Bodies as Spatial Research.
In Moreton's later ceramics, the gathered interiority of reading and spatial collage begins to become unstable. The opening emerges not simply as an aperture within an object but as a force~middle: a material event through which accumulated relations can escape their enclosure. In Shivering Openings: The image is not an object but a process, the ceramic is understood through changefulness, painted light and the force gathered to make voids and bore holes.
Here the image is no longer understood as a representation of a ceramic object but as another stage of its becoming. The photographed ceramic enters a further process of reading, where surface, light, opening, withdrawal and spatial tension produce another body of correspondence. “Shivering” names the instability of this threshold: an opening between interior and exterior, image and object, memory and forgetting, language and its exhaustion.
The ceramic consequently gathers and releases at once. It is a chamber, but also a perforation; an interior, but also an escape; an alluring body that simultaneously withdraws from possession. What has been gathered through years of reading, collage and spatial research does not finally become a unified form. It becomes a material force capable of generating further openings.
And perhaps the most concise proposition emerging from this particular work is:
Moreton gathers bodies until the material needs to open.
That feels very close to what we have been circling around.
The force~middle isn't simply where things meet.
It is where what has gathered becomes too alive to remain contained.
The opening shivers.
The image becomes process.
The ceramic withdraws.
And the research, rather wonderfully, escapes again.
Different chambers of the same spatial research.
How can a spatial condition gather bodies sufficiently for something to happen between them, while allowing what happens to remain partially unknown?
That question seems to be present in the 2010 chamber, the spatial collages, the Scriptorium, the reading archive, the ceramic chambers and now your institutional propositions.
And perhaps this gives us an even stronger definition of Moreton's interiority:
Moreton's interiority is the space generated when a body enters an apparatus of correspondence and leaves something behind that another body can encounter.
The trace, the collage, the ceramic, the archive and the institution are therefore not different subjects.
They are different chambers of the same spatial research.
Drawing/Poetry/Images.
Sensing/Drawing Energy.
Water/Clay/Fire.
The mental energy of engagement in drawing and how 'markers' of an action translate the murmurings of the mind.
Empirical evidence carries emotional connections, through a synthesis/reciprocity of reverberations of matter and its mental movement.
Gaston Bachelard illustrates how images bridge the sensate perceived world and the interior affective life.
Bachelard's seminal philosophical and phenomenological interests are always connected to matter. To what he calls the psychology of the familiar, the rapprochement with real objects, and the friendship of things.
Matter sparks inner images which in turn imbue matter with memory and values. He creates an ever renewing reciprocity of the reverberations between inner and outer qualities, which obliterates any absolute separation between objective and subjective experience, a perspective recognized by modern physics. Bachelard explodes the potential imprisoned in an image. It is the quality of the 'livingness' of the flame that triggers Bachelard's musings of correspondences.
Joanne H. Stroud.
The Flame of a Candle.
Student Work.
Charcoal on paper.
Drawing Course, Michael Grimshaw.
Winchester School of Art. 2003.
Drawing The Line.
Affirmations from a Primal Site.
Corollaries between being and becoming.
The Mirrored Self.
Coded Imprints.
Invented Bodies.
Chronicling Space.
The Moment/Instants of Engagement.
The conditions of making where the image was not a priori to its making.
The Simultaneity of Effects.
A 'Graphism' In A Corporeal Field.
I am concerned with the movement and process of articulation, of marking and sensing of things across the works surface/duration. I would definitely identify drawing with the infinite space of sensation, both the sensations of the body and the sensations of the mind.
So what is it that one actually makes in such circumstances?
For Newman, it seems to me that the thing made becomes like a temporal spatial/sensate matrix, composed of a continuous repetition and elaboration of individual, but similar inscriptions, and that the series of thoughts and judgements connected to those separate acts, are only subsequently reflected on the image. Marking the image, these marks suggest an endless repetition and while also existing as a series of relations. The marks suggest the thing could fall apart at any moment.
Acts Of Inscription.
Drawing on Bodily Impulses.
Images from the mind.
The Psychic Gaps In Drawing.
Primary Forces : Marks of no particular visibility.
Drawing on the sensation of seeing and sensing that always seems to register the endless repetition of remaking, as such drawing constitutes the space of anxieties.
I understand the page to be a mobile space in the physical presence of its weightless surface and as such it is a place of time and movement. The evokes the consciousness of that limitless space that is embodied in the reality of the white page. Which I would say is a place of fragmentation that has since Modernity been an interminable potentiality, symbolically the dreadful place of boundlessness.
In a drawing the page keeps open the gaps between the marks. It refuses closure and is an active participant in conjunction with the mark. It is part of a negotiated reality of void and presence. The limitlessness white space of the page disperses the notion of its body as substance, its body is phantasmic and intangible space/surface.
The notion of the white page as being boundless, also alludes to that space of our inner reality, where the immaterial world of dreams/imagination and the mental impressions that run through us and evaporate into other thoughts. They dissipate in the fragmented world of our senses and defy any totalizing.
Avis Newman
Mark Making : On the fascination and the fear of the white page.
For Avis Newman, the paper is an undifferentiated space in that it references the primitive undifferentiated space of the infantile body that has to be claimed by the self.
Drawing is a site in which one enacts differentiation, as soon as a mark or sign is made, it changes the non-ness and establishes a place of action, as soon as that act occurs the paper becomes something, it moves towards, moves with its potentiality into language.
Could we state that one aspect of drawing tends to be more linked to the bodily impulse and the other to the mind?
Catherine de Zegher
The image that Antonin Artaud conjures when he says 'There is a mind in the flesh, a mind as quick as lightning,' situates it well for me. I have the impression that the act of inscribing opens a fissure through which some staged psychic event, operations of consciousness, take existence. They are primary forces with no particular visibility.
Avis Newman.
Marks both coded and uncoded originate in an urge from a space of uncertainty to participate in language. The potentiality of even a blank page is in itself the unbounded space of language. Drawing is both a system and a method of a sensing inquiry. To draw is often a paradoxical act in which two extremes of practice can exist in the same space.
When we come to look at another's markings in the world. We see an extraordinary event. We see attempts at articulating the unbounded space that momentarily binds that aspect of us that is eternally fragmented. Essentially in the very act of drawing we have a wish to externalize thought and communicate existence.
Avis Newman.
From Life : Extending The Speculative Drawing Process.
Bodily Boundaries : Transactions between body-intimate and the social body image.
Organism-Person-Environment.
Body-Fragmented-Memory-Architecture.
Propulsions/Propositions into and through the visual.
In drawing some marks escape their visibility, because there is no dynamism to underpin the possibility of internal cohesion. There is no pressure from the outside inwards; in drawing, it is all pressure from the inside outwards.
Conduits of perpetual potentiality.
The articulation of marking thoughts, which by definition are open-ended, in a state of flux in which things can pass through and are suggestive of a perpetual potentiality.
Some marks are seeing, some are feeling, some are for thinking, some are from memory, others from a blindness when seeing.
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Gestures and Acts.
Conversation/Correspondences.
Drawing is thus not to do with perceptual illusionism, but with the infinite space as mental possibility. Is the drawing itself, the ground, a space of transience?
In drawing, the space is open-ended and unframed, while the marks are articulated over time and in time. Can you elaborate on this different notion of boundary?
Catherine de Zegher.
The physical structure of a drawing is always conditional to the boundary we project onto the work. When one looks for example at the drawing by John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17' ' 2002) (Time Signature 5: 1) the work itself defies any possibility of framing because the action is embedded in the pure sensation of time. We are left with only the effect. So the idea of framing as a way of 'confirming' the space, this is not part of drawing's language. The condition of boundaries is that they are dissolvable.
Avis Newman.
In Drawing : One is not so much looking at the thing itself, as at its suggestion, at the possibility of a formation that has yet to occur. In that sense, drawing is both fugitive and embodies a lack, it is implying qualities of incompleteness and that which conjures to be only a trace of a thing.
Drawing/Corresponding to a mobile field of properties that only during the process of marking is a cohesion found, a somewhat precarious frame constructed, almost as a byproduct of the articulation of marking thoughts.
Drawings are beyond the conceptual anxiety found in connection to the frame of painting.
In drawing the surface maintains its separate existence. There is an ambivalence of status between the mark and its support, consequently the lack of integration has always been more complex, corresponding as it does to a mobile field of properties.
Drawing as a site, a meditation of a self regarding consciousness. Where consciousness is understood/expressed as a process that 'figures/thinks' a state of existence. Drawing and the drawn become a site of inquiry, response and invention, and in that sensing space it becomes a philosophical activity.
Drawing, even in the most fragmented of forms there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me, but also the activity of sensation. The fractured, open-ended, and incomplete that are inherent characteristics of drawing practice seem very pertinent as materializations of our present experience of the world.
It is that space of anxiety and fragmentation in contemporary practice that offers a potential of infinite diversity. Drawing is a record of the working of thought, that we see embedded in the drawn.
Conversation, Avis Newman. Catherine de Zegher.
The Stage Of Drawing : Gesture And Act.
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