Aesthetics of the Everyday : A Creative Human Praxis

Working Praxis into Creative Research
Clay, Paint, Matter/Everyday Landscapes

The Subject Matter of Lived Experience

The Potter's wheel creates cognitive enactments (materiality) through encountering clay.

The Heideggerian Roots of Everyday Aesthetics
A Hermeneutical Approach to Art
Cristian Hainic

The mere aesthetic experience of understanding one's being-in-the-world as made up by everyday phenomena, is in itself overwhelmingly sufficient to constitute a foundation for an aesthetic of everyday life. 

Textuality/Interpretations (Texts and their inherent lack of perceptual immediacy)

Everything in language belongs to the process of understanding

Human understanding/interpretation takes place not in the immediacy of representational thinking but rather in the lack of  objects and experiences available for direct confrontation. 

John Dewey
Live Creature, an aesthetic experience comes to be defined as active and alert commerce with the world. Life does not merely go on in an environment, but rather because of an environment and because we interact with it. 

Up, Across and Along
Tim Ingold

J.M.W. Turner (1775-1853)
Dunwich, Suffolk,c. 1830


THE ART OF SURVIVAL
Jacqueline Rose's catalogue essay on Therese Oulton

How to paint the earth lovingly but without false solace,a world in which love might be impotent?

But then, at the very moment you have ceded such intimacy, she manages to give you the sensation of a world hurtling to the point when there might no longer be anything, or anyone there.

The Art of Jeremy Gardiner
UNFOLDING LANDSCAPE

LANDSCAPE, MEMORY, AND PLACE
Robert Ayers

Often for these painters the experience that they concern themselves with most directly, is that of nature, which in its vast and enormously inflected range can act as a metaphor for lived experience.

They are concerned more with how nature feels than how landscape looks. They share too an awareness that it is the translation of that feeling into paint mark, the achievement of an equivalence, that is of crucial importance. It is in the consummation of paint and experience that picture-making finds experience.

Paint marks flicker as we look at them between substance and illusion.

CONTESTED SPACE
Urban/Social/Landscapes

Landscapes are contested, untidy and messy, tensioned, always in the making. Our landscapes of modernity are frequently on the move and peopled by diasporas and migrants of identity, people making homes in new places.
An Anthropology of Landscape

Christopher Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum

ORDINARY LIVES
Studies in the Everyday
Ben Highmore

Lukács’s Literary Cartography:
Spatiality, Cognitive Mapping, and The Theory of the Novel
Robert T. Tally Jr.






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The Shape Of LIGHT : DISCURSIVE CONTENTS

Writing and Seeing Architecture/Performativity/Intertextuality

Originally Published10/02/2019.

RELATIONSCAPES
Movement, Art, Philosophy
Technologies of Lived Abstraction
Erin Manning

Playing with INTERTEXTUALITY
Setting the Stage MAKE SPACE

STUDIES FOR SPACE

Urban Fallow, 10 Days in The Laundry, Winchester UK. 2009.
Sculptural interventions by Nicola Saunderson

RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS
ARCHITECTURE
ART AND DESIGN


THE SHAPE OF LIGHT
WRITING AND SEEING ARCHITECTURE
DRAWING,Line, Shape, Volume, Light Values



Time as a Structure and an Event

Transparency, Time and Matter.

Sculptural Space
Sculpting in Time
Filmic/Photographic Narratives/Poetics of Place


Francesca Woodman
Tarkovsky
Christian de Portzamparc
Philippe Sollers
Scott Doorley
Scott Witthoft
Natalie D'Arbetoff
Lucy Bullivant

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Working Notes : Sensing Space a camp within a creative landscape

WORKING NOTES

IMMATERIAL ARCHITECTURES

MAKING IN THE LANDSCAPE

The House-sheds : Camping

There's more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvising builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don't need permission for them. There's more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we're just passing through.

Roger Deakin

WILDWOOD

A Journey Through Trees

Russell Moreton, Speculative Spatial Practices

A reflective building is an echo not a statement.
Haptic devices/seating/dwelling in the landscapes of the mind.
Landscape assemblages and the significance of solitude.
The immensity/intimacy and its immediacy to the imagination.
Immensity is within ourselves  Bachelard 

The site a Raveningham offers the spatial practice of a social event and the opportunity to playfully engage with architectural forms, fine art surfaces and textures.

The sensing space, a sculptural assemblage created at Raveningham is an inquiry into 'making' and 'reflexivity' amongst a social landscape.

Supportive Material/Texts/Cyanotype Drawings from found objects

AFFECT

SENSATION / CAUSALITY

LIVING

THINKING

LOOKING

DRAWING and THE LAW OF STRATIFICATION, the inevitable results of the working of GRAVITY

STRATIFICATION OF RECOLLECTION / MEMORY OF THE WORLD. (A Land, J Hawkes )

FACTORING THE TACTILE CONDITIONS OF THE REAL WORLD into perceptual awareness

PERCEPTUAL psychologist, J.J. Gibson departs from 'the classical approach to depth or space' in favour of an ECOLOGICAL approach to VISUAL SPACE PERCEPTION, which take SURFACES and TEXTURE as its starting point.

Mediating the experience of LANDSCAPE

SITE / COLLAGE / COMPONENTS working/walking, developing a creative spatial syntax

COLOUR AS CONDUIT / PERCEPTUAL ENVIRONS / CRAFT MEDIA / IMPROVISATION

PIERCED / DAPPLED NATURAL LIGHT

DIFFERENTIATED SHADOW / SURFACE

EXTRAORDINARY MATERIALS / TECTONICS AND TEXTILES

INDEXICAL / GESTALT / VISUAL PERCEPTION

NETWORKS / RESOURCES / AGENCY for the potential of BUILDING

SCAFFOLDS / GAUZE / POCHE solids of a building/architectural plan

ABSENCES / INTERSECTIONS / GRIDS / MESHES / SPRAYS / MOTIFS

ACTUALITY

IMMATERIAL / REPETITION / SINGULARITY

ENCLOSURES / ITERATIONS / THINKING FORMS

MINIMALIST SPACES / INTERVALS, tuning objects to construct environments

A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

Dwelling, Reverberations, Epiphanic Instant, Gaston Bachelard.

Tidbury Ring, field drawings with cyanotype liquid on paper.

A Hut of Ones Own.

Heidegger for Architects.

Immaterial Architectures.

SENSING AND SPATIAL PRACTICE

EXPLORING THE LANDSCAPE, through the CORPOREAL EXPERIENCE of OTHERS

A STRUCTURE INTERPOSED between the sunlight and the interior space it encloses.

Poetic abstractions/Physical experience

Soft/Blurring boundaries between art and the everyday making/becoming

REFLEXIVITY / TRANSLUCENCY surfaces into an architectural presence

TEXTURES / LIMINALITY on the absence of material

STATIC ENVIRON / ANIMATED THROUGH THE BODY

THE ARCHITECTURAL SKIN / SURFACE, Blurring, revealing, masking, filtering,

ARCHITECTURAL FEATURE / WALL / ARCH / PASSAGE /

VISUAL TOOL / POCHOIR, hand coloured through stencils

SCULPTURAL ASSEMBLAGES, towards Speculative Forms/Expression

TECTONICS IN MAKING, and the tectonics of immateriality/traces hidden by building.

Concerned with bringing the material from its physical form into the meta-physical world.

PAVILION

FUSELAGE

THE CAMP/HUT

represents the true reality of things, Deakin.

The building as nothing more than an exposition of itself.

A subjective hypothesis, a drawing developed into an objectivity for experience/learning.

SITE, the undoing of PLACE

BRICOLAGE / HEURISTIC PRACTICE, Using things at hand, temporal, self constructions, becomings, mind forming explorations.

MOBILITY

MOVEMENT

TEMPORAL CONSTRUCTED SPACE

A building component, scaffold, joists and fixings, a surface of absences and the movement of others come together.

MAKING, from form to programme.

ABSURDITY

POLEMIC POETRY

CONFLICTING

DYSFUNCTIONAL

TETHERED FOLLY against a fabric of time.

ART AS INDETERMINATE, able to arrest perceptions into different states (becomings)

Stone Worlds

Narrative and Reflexivity in Landscape Archaeology

Architecture and Ritual, how buildings shape society.

Bought to Light

Photography and The Invisible 1840-1900

CURATORIAL / DEVICE / BENCH / INTERLOCATOR

Jannis Kounellis, Theatre, stage crew shifting actors during a performance.

Interconnected, between contexts, opening places between the social fabric.

Making spaces, expanding vision to create spaces 'between' in which to write ourselves.

CONTEXT AND CONSIDERATIONS / MAKING, EXHIBIT, VIEW

ART MUSEUM CULTURE

THE CONTEXT FOR CONTEMPORARY ART IS THAT WE MAKE, EXHIBIT AND VIEW

MUSEUM DIRECTOR, CURATOR, COLLECTOR, ARTIST

None of that means anything anymore. Artists are now more DIVIDUALISTIC. They discover themselves not by securing a role within the historic narrative of a chosen medium. But by INTERGRATING into a more DIFFUSE ECOLOGY that involves not only making art, but also putting on shows, publishing, organizing events, teaching, networking.

THE STUDIO is no longer a retreat, but it now INTEGRATES, IT IS ALL EXTERIOR.

THE NETWORK places the artist as a 'like' ITEM within an INTEGRATIVE INVENTORY or 

DATABASE.

Borderlands/Parallel Texts : Artist and Archivist

Parellel Texts : Interviews and Interventions about Art.

Victor Burgin.

Working Notes

Art for me is a way of thinking.

Precisely its difference.

'a sympathetic resonance'

Sociological definition of the artist.

Art can be politically dangerous and subversive.

'artists' who play the kind of roles that make them attractive to the media – their work takes the form of similarly media-friendly 'provocations'.

Suspicious of the definitions of the artist, and of political art.

Encountering the world, to bring 'things' into representations (failed attempts that become the impetus for the next work).

That kind of pandering to money and Sunday-supplement sensibilities has almost entirely sucked the meaning out of art displayed in museums, where all art is now expected to provide a crowd-pulling spectacle.

Contemporary manifestations (zeitgeist/biennial), cultural formations of late money-market capitalism.

'Fashioning' conceptual art : The 'idea' is the alibi for the high price.

The confluence of the art world with the worlds of fashion and popular music: worlds of money, youth, beauty, celebrity, a 'zeitgeist' that changes as the wind blows.

The creative use of a neurosis.

Introducing semiotic concepts as analytical tools so that we could talk about the meaning of the work outside of a purely aesthetic framework.

Wild Analysis/Deflecting Transference

Object Relations Theory

Whatever makes one depressed also makes one work.

17 : 2005

From Sarah Thornton, 'Zeitgeitst and Transmission; Interview with Victor Burgin' (26 April 2005)

previously unpublished.

What is an artist?

One can answer that question in an essentialist or a materialist way.

I prefer a materialist answer : an artist is somebody who is recognized as such in the society in which he or she lives. 'Art' is their occupation. It may not be their only occupation, bit it is the occupation which is taken as defining them. They produce certain kinds of objects - written , performed, painted, sculpted, film or photographic - within recognized 'art' institutions. These can be literally 'concrete' institutions - such as museums, galleries and art schools – but more fundamentally they are discursive institutions: art criticism, art history, art theory and so on.

And what is the essentialist definition of the artist?

It is someone of a particular heightened sensibility, who sees the world with a clarity – or in terms of a vision – that is denied to lesser mortals, and generously gives the benefit of their vision to others, generally in exchange for money.

It seems to me important not to take oneself for an 'artist', as this invites alienation in an image given from outside, and can lead to the worst kinds of compliant bad faith.

What kind of artist are you?

I'm a 'realist', but not in the nineteenth-century sense. I'm more a 'phenomenological' realist. There is some 'thing' in my encounter with the world, something that seems to have no place in the field of representations. I try to bring that 'thing' into representation. The history of my work is a series of failed attempts, with each failure the impetus for the next work.

Art for me is a way of thinking – a way of thinking about one's experience, a way of thinking about the world – and therefore unavoidably discursive.

But the other kinds of art you mention – the soundbite, market-friendly, not-too-far-from-popular-culture-that-you-have-to-make-a-great-effort-to-understand-it . . that kind of work – is no less embedded in language; it is dependent on the language of art criticism, publicity and promotion, salerooms and auction houses. It is embedded in those variously interdependent discursive formations, but it doesn't critically engage with them. It surfs on those discourses.

What is the opposite of surfing?

Boat-building?

Should art be part of the entertainment industry?

What do you expect of art that makes it different from entertainment?

Precisely its difference. The art I value is often judged 'difficult'. But the supposed difficulty of the work comes merely from the fact that it cannot be understood in terms of the established categories and conventions on which entertainment relies.

With, art there is more work to do, it takes time, but you are prepared to give the time because there is something that touches you in some way – a sympathetic resonance between yourself and the work.

Most of my generation of 'conceptual' artists rejected the material object commodity form of art. So the fact that this object, having returned with a vengeance, now wears a sash printed with the word 'conceptual' is poignantly ironic. A concept is not something in a wrapper, like a cheese on a supermarket shelf; it is part of an intellectual system. Ideas belong to contexts of ideas, to processes of thinking. What we have now are gestures masquerading as ideas, and ideas for stunts.

Do you think that your success as a writer and critical thinker has, in anyway, undermined your success as an artist?

My writing is a reflection upon issues arising in my work, an articulation of those issues otherwise. I suppose most artists find that they work in a coming and going between intuition and critical reflection. All I'm doing is making that process explicit. One of the main reasons for doing this is that I long ago decided, on political grounds, that teaching was an integral part of my practice. I wanted to produce texts that would be useful to my students. So I wrote essays that arise out of interests I have in my visual work, but which reflect on issues that are sufficiently general to apply not only to my own work but to be of use to other people.

I think there is increasing intolerance of role transgression, and a higher expectation that you should observe your role. The idea of a Renaissance man, the fact you could be an artist/writer/photographer/theorist/teacher, is not credible for many people.

I am in the art world but not of the art world. An increased distance from the art world has not made me feel more distant from my work as an artist; on the contrary, I feel closer.

I agree with Theodore Reich, who said: 'Every artist should be analyzed, but not too much.' I also agree with Winnicott's notion of the 'creative use of a neurosis'. He did not see the problem as being one of 'curing' a neurosis, but rather one of making it positively productive.

I was concerned to get students to think about their class position as artists, and about the place of their art activity within a broader socio-political setting. For example, I would ask them if they knew who cleaned the room they were sitting in, and when, and how much the cleaner was paid. Then when we came to the work itself, I insisted on what might then be called a 'scientific' criticism – that's to say, a way of discussing work that doesn't rely upon individual response and personal opinion, but rather draws on a shared and testable interpretive language.

In a pluri-discursive and multi-subcultural context the 'one to one' is probably the only way of engaging with an individual student's particular preoccupations.

Why are value judgements inappropriate?

Because they say less about the artwork than they say about my personal sensibilities or taste. I have to allow for the fact that I may be completely blind to the merits of the work. My job is to try to enlarge the scope of their critical thinking about the work – whatever my opinion of its merits.

Russell Moreton Axisweb: Contemporary Art UK Network :

Alternative photographic photograms and collages for the CD artwork to promote the ambient music of Kontakte.

Limited edition CD artwork, and booklet.

Russell Moreton,  | Axisweb: Contemporary Art UK Network

Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry, Art and Craft

Material Agency : Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris
Visualising Environmental Agency

"Agents are defined as persons or things, which have the ability and intention to "cause" something "in the vicinity" or "in the mileau" to happen ( Gell 1998)"

"These latter artefacts are described with the term "index", to remove the appellation "art" and to imply that they are indexes of agency."

Some Stimulating Solutions, Andrew Cochrane.

Transformative Drawing Processes
Sun Printed Cyanotype

The sun has gone mad and stripped the earth of its ionosphere. For decades blasting radiation has poured upon earth, melting the polar caps and turning permafrost into streams, rivers, oceans. Huge deltas have been built, lakes formed, seas have risen.

The Drowned World, JG Ballard.

Artists Book : Leylines. Pages from the chamber (776)

Artists Book : Leylines. Pages from the chamber (776), a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Pinhole Photograph 21 Oct 08 : Immaterial Presences.

Pinhole Photograph 21 Oct 08 : Immaterial Presences., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Working Practice 2010

Working Practice 2010, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Occurrences,consciousness, body and space.

Occurrences,consciousness, body and space., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Research Collage : 10 June 2012.

Research Collage : 10 June 2012., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Collage marking visually current research interests and intersections amongst some of the accumulated materials of the practice.

Drawing as a structural component #1

Drawing as a structural component #1, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Material Odyssey, ideas around space and structure.

Ritual,drawing and installation.

Ritual, a set on Flickr.

Creativity/Odyssey, ritual and place.
Drawing used to "entangle", space,time and consciousness.