COLLAGE and
ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICES
THE TRANSPOSITION AND ABDUCTION OF PLACE
What protects us against delirium or
hallucinations are not our critical powers but the structure of our
space.
The Phenomenology of
Perception, Merleau-Ponty
The
Field-Fieldwork-Ethnography-Anthropology
The
Body-Spatiality-Creative Practices- Arts and the Humanities
A PAINTING IS BOTH CONCEPTUAL AND SENSATE, Robert
Mangold
TRANSFORMATION AND
PROPHECY
JACOB’S
LADDER----Robert Fludd
The Spatial Practice of Humans
The idea of the human
being as both transmitter and receiver of energetic forces on
spiritual, physical and emotional levels.
Beuys, Klein, Rothko “
Paintings as Presences”
The Ruin as a facilitator in the search for
forms and patterns of Spatiality.
Environments,
emotional states, late capitalism and its technology as it feeds into
the posthuman predicament.
Materiality(creative
speculative response to the found situation), the innovative presence
of building processes and their subsequent spaces.
PRODUCTION
COLLAGES TO ILLUMINATE DESIRES AND CONCERNS.
Colour, Space,
Building and the Multiplicity of Dwelling in Place.
Contextual creative
content through research material, collages and site based
qualitative drawings and experiences with materials and the sense of
place.
CREATIVE STRATEGIES
DEEP ECOLOGY : FINE
ART, ARCHITECTURE, PLACE STUDIES
Extracting,
Abstracting, Subjectivities from the experience of Place
ABBEY : INTERPRETIVE
SITE FOR EXPORTING INTERIOR DESIGN THROUGH RELATIONAL AESTHETICS
ART WORKS AS IDEALIZED
MODELS FOR GENERATING FORMAL STRUCTURES AND THEORIES
A UNIQUE UNIT OF
PRODUCTION WITHIN A DEVELOPING DESIGN PROCESS (Mangold 1996)
SECTIONAL UNITS THAT
COULD BE ADDED
THE CRITICAL
DISTINCTION BETWEEN OBJECT AND UNIT.
A section is part of
something concretely physical, but a unit is merely an independent
entity, equal in existential status to others of its kind , perhaps
nothing more than an element within a conceptual system, a digital
unit (value).
Richard Shiff 2000
MEANING IS NEVER MEANT
IN ANY WAY TO BE AN EXPLANATION OF THE PAINTING OR A REPLACEMENT
OF THE VIEWING OF THINGS
(Mangold 1987)
Mangold uses writing
to ponder the mystery of his own visual production, within the
privacy of his studio, long periods of ‘looking and thinking’
about his paintings are followed by a ‘third activity’, as if it
were, if not an equal, then at least an essential part (catalyst) of
the complex of his creativity. (Mangold 1994 Lecture notes)
NATURALISTIC
ABSTRACTIONS FROM THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
CONCERNED WITH THE MAN
MADE LANDSCAPE IN PARTICULAR THE GAPS IN THE MASS OF STRUCTURES AND
THEIR RUINS THAT DOMINATE THE HORIZON.
One of the things that
used to fascinate me was those architectural sections between
buildings (Life between Buildings/Spatial Practices), sections of
air that would glow. Sunsets or mornings … you’d see these
incredible areas of light, and they were architectural shapes and yet
they were nothing, because they were the voids of architecture. I
used to think about them, and I used to think about a painting that
would be atmospheric and architectural. (Mangold 1978)
Robert Storr, Betwixt
and Between, 2000:81
VISUAL
ACUITY/ACCUTANCE IS BEING REPLACED BY THE EXPLICIT RENDERING/ACCURACY
OF THE SIGN/DISPLAY AND ITS IMAGE
Tensions between
aesthetic appreciation and objective measurement can occur even
within the realm of measurement and calculation.
The analogue slide
rule and the miniaturized digital calculator ( both handheld devices)
(Shiff 2000:56)
MEANING THROUGH
IDEOLOGICAL VALUES OF AUTONOMY ACTUALITY AND EXPERTISE.
THE FACT PRESENTED IN
THE LIGHT OF ITS PRESENCE
BEYOND APPEARANCES:
ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION
CONSTRUCTING ELLIPSES
BY EYE
A LIBERTY DEPENDANT ON
A SPACE OR MOMENT OF ACTUALITY which is in itself inhospitable to
anything ’scheduled’,’ calculated’ or ‘controlled’.
THE SILENT RECEPTION
OF A TRANSLATION NOT ON OFFER
THE LACK OF
RECOGNIZABLE REPRESENTATIONAL IMAGERY
Krauss as
critic is concerned with meaning.
Mangold as
artist is concerned with experience.
Little common ground
can be established, except to ask: what is the meaning of aesthetic
experience itself, experience without ‘meaning’?
Can an artist strive
to increase the directness or intensity of experience without also
attempting to communicate ‘meaning’? (Shiff 2000:17)
Having assigned no
meaning in advance, Robert Mangold presents his works to his viewers’
experience without guarantee of conceptual payback.
The paintings exist to
record consciousness and underpin the subjectivities, timbre and
shape of conversations through the soul into a personal knowledge./
ARCHITECTURE as
becoming formal exercises in aesthetic problem-solving.
Society lacking the
resources to locate the significance the work was creating.
AUTONOMY AND
ACTUALITY:
TOWARDS A SPATIAL
INQUIRY.
A THEORY OF MAKING
LAYERED SPACES.
The painter probes
into the situation of his paintings, an art of ‘answers’ that
lack articulated questions, or maybe the questions have not yet been
‘realised’ enough to be asked.
Finding significance
and situation in the art/activities of others
ACTUALITY
Between moments of
‘meaning’ lie spaces or blanks of immediate experience. Such
blanks are actuality. Usually the blank, the actuality, goes
unnoticed because it works so efficiently to differentiate one
meaningful event from another.
THE SHAPE OF TIME,
George Kubler 1962
Actuality is when the
lighthouse is dark between flashes. It is the interchronic pause when
nothing is happening. It is the void between events. Yet the instant
of actuality is all we ever can know directly. The rest of time
emerges only in signals relayed to us. The nature of the signal is
that its message is neither here nor now, but there and then. (Kubler
1962:17)
Meaning is always
differentiated, dependent on what cannot be co-presented. Meaning,
distanced from the thing it purports to interpret, resemble, identify
with, has the problematic structure of de Man’s realization that
‘I’ cannot say and cannot mean ‘I’.
THE VOID ALLOWS
DIFFERENTIALS TO CO-EXIST
THE BODY IN SPACE AND
TIME
MEMORY AND THE FATE OF
PLACE
Blankness, the void,
the ‘dark’ between flashes, generates meaning by distinguishing
events, separating one moment from another. Or simply marking time;
but it has no form or structure in itself and therefore no ‘meaning’.
STILLED SENSE OF
ACTUALITY- SLOWED TIME
CULTIVATING STILLNESS
EXTENDING THE DURATION
OF ACTUALITY
DEEPENING THE DENSITY
OF THE VOID
CHORA
Imagine the blanks
between constructs. Committed to preserving his independence and its
autonomy, Mangold has achieved an art outside articulated critical
discourses, neither Formalist (Greenberg) nor Minimalist (Morris),
neither picture nor object- an art that moves ‘outside’ by
becoming ‘between’.
The meaning of this
no-reference, no-meaning art is actuality (the condition of being
between) as much as it is autonomy (the capacity to move outside,
unbounded).
(Shiff 2000:47)
PRACTICAL DEFINITION
OF AUTONOMY
He sees perhaps the
very best evidence of his own autonomy, achieved in making an object
devoid of ‘meaning’, one without a fully determining discourse to
enframe or fix it.
GESALT AND VARIABLES
REFERENCES TO AN
ABSTRACT UNIVERSE
The painting, whatever
it was, was actual?
ACTUAL, What have I
done?
Rather than a relay or
reference to something belonging to some other moment or situation.
CRITICAL EVALUATION :
VISUAL SYNERGIES
formed from FORMAL and PERSONAL SUBJECTIVITIES
THE PAINTINGS OF BRIAN CLARKE and ROBERT MANGOLD.
Brian Clarke, On Polarities of Experience.
Decoratively speaking
these amorphs introduce a sense of oxygenating randomness into the
experience. (Clarke 2010:5)
Robert Mangold, The Correlative of Active
Intuition is Passive Contemplation or The Assessment of Rightness.
The success of a work
by Mangold must continually be reaffirmed though the artist’s
prolonged encounter with it. The artist needs a great amount of time
alone with each and every painting, taking in the ‘oxygen’, which
becomes for him an expansive experience (as it should be for his
viewers). (Shiff 2000:47)
ABBEY SITE
SUBJECTIVITY BECOMES A GESALT/ORGANISATIONAL MOTIF (LEITMOTIF, small
signs or shapes that constitute the basic building blocks of the
design, its intervals, spaces between figure and ground)
Robert Mangold :
Studio Notes (29 April 1993)
Painting and Seeing and Being.
A camera cannot see,
it can only record.
A person can only see,
he or she cannot record.
When you view a
painting, you exist in relation to it.
The relationship is
one of seeing and being, not seeing along, since it is impossible to
separate seeing from being.
It is the experience
of seeing and being in front of a work which affects us.
Artists are always
struggling against history and the moment, to propel themselves
forward, not forward as in progress, but forward as reaching for
oxygen, or as a plant reaches for light. You struggle both on behalf
of and against what you have already accomplished. (14 March 1994)
AN ART DERIVED FROM
EMPIRICAL EXPERIENCE: OF ARRANGEMENTS AND RE-ARRANGEMENTS OF CONCRETE
ELEMENTS.
‘Thrusts of the
moment’ it approaches neither a limit nor a totalising conclusion.
Open, it seeks its fortune rather than attaining some aim.
RECEPTIVITY IN
ARCHITECTURE
Robert Mangold
speaks of an architecture that is not conducive for the contemplation
of art.
Mark Rothko
said a picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in
the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is
therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world.
RECEPTIVE SPACES IN
ARCHITECTURE FOR PUBLIC INTIMACY
In confronting a
Rothko, the viewer becomes acutely sensitised and conscious of his
own receptivity on many levels. He also seems to dematerialise in
response to the nature of the painting in front of him, identifying
with it almost to the extent of becoming it (dwelling within it). But
while the receptivity is part of it, the viewer also loses the
intrusive sense of self as he feels the emotion the painting
contains.
(Seymour 1987:12)
Beuys, Klein, Rothko, Transformation and Prophecy.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF
SCIENCE IN ART
THE ANATOMY LESSON
SPECTATORIAL
ARCHITECTURES AND EXHIBITIONS DEDICATED TO CORPOREALITY.
The Anatomist is the
allegory of curiosity and the invader of private spaces. He could
reveal to the world not only the superficial misdemeanors of the
exterior of the naked corpse that he pawed and trawled alone in his
nocturnal morgue, but also its interior felonies. (Greenaway
1998:221)
THE BUILDERS: Peter
Greenaway, 100 Allegories to represent the World
The Architect, the
Gardener and the Greenman are a small family concerned with the
building and the protection of a sense of place.
BUILDING AND
CONSTRUCTING VOID SPACES
Green Tilted
Ellipse/Grey Frame 1989
Acrylic and pencil on
canvas
256.5x424cm
The centre space, the
void, had to be large enough for a big expanse to be there. It isn’t
like a hole, but an actual area of wall (Mangold 1989)
I’ve always had the
desire to make the work a unity, to make all the elements-the
periphery line and the internal line, the surface, colour-equal,
totally locked together.
(Mangold 1990)
A beautiful thing
about a quarter circle is that it is a fragment that implies a
circle, but is also a complete thing in itself. (Mangold 1993)
‘Red Wall 1965’
was almost like a revelation to me. I understood the essential nature
of what painting is: painting is surface, painting is edge - and
painting is flat. (Mangold 1993)
In Mangold’s hands,
colour and its shaped support acquired neither illusion nor allusion,
nor any general theory that could explain that colour and shape. He
had his own way of letting materials and forms remain mere matter-as
matter-of-fact as the edge of a building or the distant horizon, no
explanation necessary. (Shiff 2000:29)
Robert Irwin was
concerned to preserve the direct experience of a physical form, one
that would dissipate into second-hand worlds of exchangeable
‘meaning’ or ‘identity’ if distributed by photography, verbal
description, or any other means of representing what the artist had
already presented. Mangold shared Irwin’s concern for material
specificity and physical ‘fact’, as well as his apprehensiveness
regarding reproduction.
(Shiff 2000:34)
I am concerned with
specifics and reject the generalities of photographs. Every element
in painting has had both an identity and a physical
existence-identity has always lent itself to being transferred in
both photographic and literary terms. The physical existence never
has. (Irwin1965:23) Artform 3 June 1965.
GORDON MATTA-CLARKE
CONICAL INTERSECT,
1975
FOUR GELATIN SILVER
PRINTS
42x42x3in each,
framed.
GORDON MATTA-CLARKE
SPLITTING 32, 1975
FIVE GELATIN SILVER
PRINTS, CUT AND COLLAGED
41x30.5in, framed.
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