Art and Architecture : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Jane Rendell

Art and Architecture. 2006

If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time – the conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event. The associated verb to situate describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective situated defines something’s site or situation. Situatedness, then, is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or being situated.

 ‘Critical spatial practice’ came to my mind back in 2003 as a helpful way of describe projects located between art and architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated. In Art and Architecture (2006), I argued that such projects operated at a triple crossroads: between theory and practice, between public and private, and between art and architecture, and I was keen to stress three particular qualities of those works: the critical, the spatial and the interdisciplinary. 

Other practitioners and theorists have since worked with the term, evolving it in different directions. For example, there was the reading group and blogspot initiated by Nicholas Brown in the early 2000s, which came out of discussions around Brown’s own artistic walking practice. In 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Marcus Miessen started a book series with Sternberg Press called Critical Spatial Practice which focused on architectural discourse and practice, and in the first publication they asked the question: ‘What is Critical Spatial Practice?’.

But as this website shows a whole multitude of practitioners and theorists have been developing work in an ‘expanded field’ such as this, quite different perhaps from the one Rosalind Krauss identified in 1979. This is work that overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel, and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond; from transparadiso’s ‘direct urbanism’ to Steve Loo’s ‘sites of perdurance’, these practices incorporate ‘event scores’, ‘insertions’ even ‘banalities’ and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation, as well duration.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

The artwork in the image consists of slab-built ceramic sculptures created by the visual artist Russell Moreton. 

His work often explores the intersection of architecture, spatial practices, and ceramics, using clay as a medium to investigate themes of construction, silence, and architectural space.

These specific pieces feature a rugged, structural appearance, incorporating textures and forms that evoke architectural elements.

Moreton's practice is deeply rooted in process-based inquiries, where the material and the act of constructing the sculpture are central to the final expression.

The artist is based in the UK and his sculptural work is frequently described as a meditation on materiality and existence.

Artistic Practice: Moreton is known for his work that explores ceramics through an architectural lens, often creating pieces that evoke the feeling of interior spaces or structures where the "drama of the building has now ceased". 

Style: His work frequently features weathered, structural forms with muted, monochromatic palettes and textured surfaces. 

Focus: His practice often investigates the interconnectedness of materials and the creation of interior, spatial structures. 

This image shows a field containing several poles, which are often used in environmental or ecological studies as Robel poles. These poles are typically used to measure visual obstruction, which helps estimate the density of vegetation or the amount of biomass in a specific area. 

The poles are placed at various locations within the meadow or grassy area to collect observational data.

In studies, these measurements are often combined with other techniques to assess habitat quality or vegetation growth.

Research collage with objects (Shoa) appears to be a mood board or an artist's research wall, heavily focused on the themes of film, memory, and decay. It features references to seminal filmmakers and philosophers who explore how time and history are captured or lost.

Key References in the Image

Andrey Rublev (1966): The central black-and-white photograph is a still from the film Andrei Rublev, directed by the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The text box explicitly identifies "Andrey Rublyov: The painter-monk on his journey." The film follows a 15th-century icon painter through a turbulent period of Russian history.

Bill Morrison: On the far left, a vertical strip of text quotes the experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison: "maybe what the ruins of Cinema, patiently and violently are tracing, is disappearing." Morrison is best known for his film Decasia (2002), which uses decaying archival film footage to create a haunting meditation on the fragility of the medium and human memory.

Marc Augé: On the right, there is a quote from the French anthropologist Marc Augé: "Ruins, as a notion and phenomena are slowly disappearing from our cities. Out of a lack of time, we are condemned to preserve the past." Augé is famous for coining the term "non-places" and writing extensively on the relationship between time and space in the modern world.

Themes and Context

The collection of these specific quotes and images suggests a deep interest in "The Ruins of Cinema" and the physical or conceptual disappearance of history.

Tarkovsky is often associated with the concept of "Sculpting in Time," where the filmmaker uses the medium to fix and observe the passage of time itself.

Bill Morrison's work literally shows "ruined" film, where the chemical emulsion is melting or rotting away, yet creating something new and beautiful.

Marc Augé's quote reflects on how modern society lacks the "slow time" required for ruins to form naturally, instead opting for immediate, artificial preservation.

The architectural drawing and the physical cardboard model (possibly a "section" or "maquette") visible on the right suggest this board might belong to a student or professional in architecture or film production design, exploring how physical spaces can embody these abstract concepts of memory and decay.

Making/Matter/Material : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Claywork/Correspondences : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Drawing Participation : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Indexical Awareness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Mechanisms of Mutuality : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Viewing Assemblage : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

A Process of Consciousness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality.

Outpost 180624

The cell of myself fills with wonder.

The white-washed wall of my secret.

Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.

Bachelard comments, once we have been touched by the grace of super-imagination, we feel in the presence of the simpler images through which the exterior world deposits virtual elements of highly-coloured space in the heart of our being. The image with which Pierre Jean Jouve constitutes his secret being is one of these. He places it in his most intimate cell.

An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.

Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.

The room in which the poet pursues such a dream as this is probably not 'white-washed.' But this room in which he is writing is so quiet, that it really deserves its name, which is, the 'solitary room! It is inhabited thanks to the image, just as one inhabits an image which is 'in the imagination.'

Here the poet inhabits the cellular image. This image does not transpose a reality. It would be ridiculous, in fact, to ask the dreamer its dimensions. It does not lend itself to geometrical intuition, but is a solid framework for secret being. And secret being feels that it is guarded more by the whiteness of the lime-wash than by the strong walls.

The cell of the secret is white. A single value suffices to coordinate any number of dreams. And it is always like that, the poetic image is under the domination of a heightened quality. The whiteness of the walls, alone, protects the dreamer's cell. It  is stronger than all geometry. It is a part of the cell of intimacy.

The Dialectics of Outside and Inside.

Gaston Bachelard.

The Poetics of Space demonstrates Gaston Bachelard's ability to bridge scientific logic with poetic analysis. As a phenomenological reading of the poetic image, it probes the geometrical divide between inside and outside through an analysis of the imagination of matter. It resists simplification, engaging with both physical and psychological body-space relations, and describes an exchange between interior and exterior in which the latter might be 'an old intimacy'. The dialectical condition of 'interior immensity' and the 'immeasurable outside', attests to the spatiality of being as a reflexive inquiry on interiority, what Bachelard calls intimate geometry grounded in imagination.

INTIMUS

Interior Design Reader.

Unlearning Conceptual Frameworks/The Inconceivable.

Dante, like any traveller who knows that the first step, that of abandoning the familiar paths is the most difficult.

White Holes

Inside The Horizon

Carlo Rovell. 2023

Every place in the universe has its own time, different places can send each other signals, like the 'hiss' sent to us from the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. But time passes at unequal rates in different places, and no single one of these times is 'truer' than any other.

There is no universal time, rather there is 'temporality' which is the network formed by many local times and the possibility of exchanging signals.

The Distortion of Time.

Bringing into doubt something that seemed self-evident to us.

Einstein, General Relativity.

Rovelli asks, how did an idea as bizarre as the relativity of time come to be devised and accepted?

In order to digest new ideas there lies a difficulty, not so much with the new concept, as it does with becoming liberated from old ones that seem so obviously to be true. To bring them into doubt seems inconceivable. We  are always convinced that our natural intuitions are self-evidently right, and it is this that prevents us from learning more. The difficulty lies not in learning, but in unlearning.

Conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality.

Practices that are all about the continual reorganization of our conceptual space, of what we call meaning.

Art/Science/Philosophy, all have within them the capacity to change the organization of our thoughts , that allows us to leap forward. To produce singularities by re-conceptualizing reality. Our conceptual structures are neither  the definitive ones, nor the only one possible, rather they are the ones that  evolution has led us to cobble together in order to negotiate our daily needs, and often they do not work beyond that.

Making clay+ceramics, taking liberties, playing with and through a creative analogical reasoning.

Situated Practices/Theoretical Objects that develop a conceptual structure through analogy and recombination.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa. 1994

English translation, Steven Snyder. 2019

I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first, among all the things that have vanished from the island.

In those days, everyone could smell perfume. Everyone knew how wonderful it was. But no more. It's not sold anywhere, and no one wants it. It was disappeared the autumn of the year that your father and I were married. We gathered on the banks of the river with our perfume. Then we opened the bottles and poured out their contents, watching the perfume dissolve in the water like some worthless liquid. Some girls held the bottles up to their noses one last time-but the ability to smell the perfume had already faded, along with all memory of what it had meant. The river reeked for two or three days afterward, and some fish died. But no one seemed to notice. You see, the very idea of 'perfume' had disappeared from their heads.

It doesn't matter, she said. To you, this is no more than a few drops of water. But it can't be helped. It's all but impossible to recall the things we've lost on the island once they're gone.

It seems strange that you can still create something totally new like this-just from words-on an island where everything else is disappearing, he said, brushing a bit of dirt from one of the pages as though he were caressing something precious. I realized then that we were thinking the same thing. And what will happen if words disappear? I whispered to myself, afraid that if I said it too loudly, it might come true.

Figuring it out : Display and Process : Conceptual Frameworks/Contexts

 Outpost 010323

https://www.flickr.com/people/russellmoreton/

The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists.

Figuring It Out.

Colin Renfrew.

Archaeologists/Artists, intuitively working with materials that are local and quotidian.

New insights into the way humans use things/people/the earth.

Encounters.

Art as archaeology, archaeology as art.

What is Art.

The tyranny of the renaissance.

Off the plinth.

Display and process.

The human condition.

Being and remembering.

The (al)lure of the artefact.

Baneful signs.

The archaeology of now.

Figuring it out.

The Indexical Body.

Corporeality/Aesthetics.

Contemporary Fine Art/Working from/with the body

Francis Bacon.

The figural body.

Manuel Neri.

The sculptural body in relief.

The Body/Spatial/Temporal

Rituals/Places/Vessels

Awareness/Repetition/Ritual can give meaning to existence.

What Are We?

Where Do We Come From?

The Anthropology of Art.

Constructed as a theory of agency or of the mediation of agency by indexes understood/conveyed through material entities which motivate/create inferences, responses and interpretations.

For Gell, art is not 'axiomatic' about a 'matter of meaning communication' but rather it is about doing that is theorized as agency in a process involving indexes and effects. Art, its actions and their effects are similarly not discrete expressions of individual will, but rather the outcomes of a mediated practice in which agents and recipients are all implicated in complex 'participations, ways of relations and their diffractions.

Artists/Prototypes/Things/Recipients/Affect/Generative Relations.

Practical Experience/Cognitive Knowledge/Analysis.

Art and its complex participation/phenomena is distributed by an agent with other agents, the artist attempts to distribute elements of their own efficacy amongst others. 

Artists are those who are considered to be immediately causally responsible for the existence and characteristics of indexes, artists/a person both distributed and implicated may also be vehicles of the agency of others.

Alfred Gell. 

Conceptual Frameworks/Context

Axes of Coherence/Indexes/Formal Analysis/Repetition/Improvisation. 

Resultants that incorporate the friction/asperity of their trajectories through a medium.

Tilt-up concrete construction, Chapel of St Ignatius, Seattle, Washington, USA.

Steven Holl.

Cathected, Aesthetic Phenomenon, Aesthetic Causality, Sensual Object, Allure,

The Projects.

Hungate.

Water, niche, Priscina, font, vessel, grounding body/spirit, apparatus, scaffold, un-doing of Place, Site, Reading the existential qualities of architectural spaces into the corporeal/haptic body, plaster, lime, canvas, whitewash, yellow ochre, water becomes a sacred conduit running through the architectural body.

Raveningham. 

Ground Marking, ceramic spheres, Fontana, clay/raku. Movements/Durations on grass to leave temporal traces. String line, shadow sticks, involuntary markers, found objects, collected phenomena,  

Undercroft Anglian Potters, Norwich.

Ferini Gallery, Lowestoft.