What is a material? : Readings of Movement and Attention : Slow Philosophy/Clay/Ecology of Material Thinking

Land Forms/Architectures from marking movement.

Clay, Greenware. Studio Space.

Orange School Graph Books 

Harleston 2020-2021

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

A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy

Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations

Tim Ingold 2010

The social life of making

Making speaks in vivid dialogue with two associated themes, material and skill

Creativity involves not merely a spark of innovation or the execution of artistic inspiration. But the capacity to respond to unfolding iterations with materials. To use slowly accrued haptic knowledge to manipulate processes on the fly, and to judge how to counteract error and seize opportunities as they evolve 

Making becomes a process of iteration, and a maker works with this iteration prolifically 

Matter and materials are lively and require attention, materials continue to thwart in unpredictable ways, decaying and breaking down or wearing or breaking under force

Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett 2010

Attending to the process of making opens up prospects for following the lead of the material, where the properties of the materials themselves shape the direction in which making proceeds

Tim Ingold 2010

New Urban Adventures in Collaboration/Conceptual Ceramics

Ceramic Practice as a form of research engaged in a process/ecology of inquiry, an exploration of ideas predicated on and exploiting the characteristics of clay

The transformation of the material is a central concern and semiotic significance unfolds with making

Seeking a symbiotic relationship between idea and object 

Materials are substances in becoming

Karen Barad

Towards an Ecology of Materials

Tim Ingold 2012

From the 'objectness' of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. It means to think of making as a process of growth or ontogenesis

 

Materials-Centered Perspective

Making, almost defies precise definition

The composition and/or manipulation of materials that bring into being new or revised objects

Tim Ingold 2010

Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair

Making encompasses the ingenuity of fluid, locally situated and adapted technologies

Materials carry on overtaking the formal destinations that, at one time or another, have been assigned to them

Sensibilities and dispositions that are centred on a deep and considered relationship with materials

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett 2008

Crafting, often reconnects mind and body in the sites and processes of production, thereby potentially reconstituting labour processes in ways that ascribe agency to workers

Makers finding ways to resist norms of gender and neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities, finding ways and spaces for ethical practice to predominate

Contemporary conceptual ceramics operates at the permeable boundary between art and craft, partaking of aspects of both, and ultimately demonstrating (or performing) that permeability

The emergence of the museum as proactive laboratory of social evolution

Extradisciplinary Investigations/Operative Principle

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice

Microtopias, small contained sites of functioning democracy

Tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline

The New Institutional Practice

Projective Enterprises (should unsettle, activate, and raise questions)

The exhibitions to emerge through new institutionalism are considered as points of exchange and collision, made through intersections of social, economic and political relations, it follows that the predominant forms of artistic practice included are the social, the spatial, the interdisciplinary 

So our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed , physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social-economic-cultural and political processes

Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity

Miwon Kwon 2002

Collaborations and its Discontents

Claire Bishop 2006

The motivating factors for participatory projects is its critiquing of the essentialising of site and community in context-specific activities/exhibitions

A complex environment, awash in affect and subjectivity

When subjective and analytic processes mesh together to form a new productive and political 'contexts' of communicational labour  

New curatorial initiatives must unpack the terminologies we use to distinguish one project from another

A playful psychogeographical situation, that resists the representative, illustrative and thematic narratives

Unsettling-Complicit

Provocative-Strategic

Interventionist-Collaborative

Perforative Curating/Prescribed Participation

Creating new/more coded patterns of behavior/conventions/role play for visitor's

New Institionalism and the Exhibition As Situation/Social Experiment

Claire Doherty 2006

Participation

In which people constitute the central artistic medium and material

In the manner of theatre and performance

Participatory art is both a social activity and a symbolic one, as it is both embedded in the world and at one, remove from it

The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects, than as a collaborator and producer of situations

The contemporary artwork is finite, portable, commodifiable product, and is reconceived as an ongoing or long term project with an unclear beginning and end

Artists are more interested in the creative rewards of participation as a politicised working process, than the relational aesthetic which renders discursive and dialogic projects more amenable to museums and galleries

Artificial Hells (exposing the political and aesthetic limitations in the work)

Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Claire Bishop 2011

Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997

Whilst temporary exhibitions can expand the scope of medium-specific discourse, they can also impose alternative, but equally restrictive frames

Participation, creating a bridge between socially engaged practice and the permanent collection

Expressing itself expressing 

Creating a conceptual and linguistic dexterity between absolutes, certainties, definitions

Dissolving the intellectual relevance, with its symbiotic relationship with utility to create 'vessels' beyond art and artifact

The strategy of making artworks as response

The Ceramic Object, by means of preservation and display becomes a vehicle/vessel for a social and historical narrative/entanglement/engagement

Making vessels, beyond the examining and intellectually impoverished questions 

A vessel is identified as such by its physical disposition, giving shape to the contents and clarifying what is inside and what is outside

Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce

Like the vessel, the house shapes and nurtures the life contained inside

The Factory I build in the Tate is a place to discuss the transactions and transformations of Labour that Create Knowledge and Community

In the Factory we will examine skills and how we form Exchanges at Work , with ourselves and with others

Clare Twomey, Lead artist at Tate Exchange 2017

Post Studio Ceramics

Interfaces between Making-Makers-Museums

Exploring object engagement beyond the known historical models of clay practice

'Generate' Historical Material and Spatial Relations as they interacted with the work, and reflected on the role of the Museum/Hospital

Clare Twomey

Ceramics In The Environment 

An International Review

Janet Mansfield 2005

With Fire, Richard Hirsch

A Life Between Chance and Design (invites the unknown)

Scott Meyer 2012

Hirsch takes us to the heart of the interface between ageless earth and the spare evidence of the rhythm of human utility 

Raku as an Ideology

Breath-Energy-Immanence

Raku, A Review of Contemporary Work

Tim Andrews 1994

The Poetry of The Vessel

A calm invitation to thought and imagination

Chris Tyler

The vessel (making, thinking, subject) as both a historically grounded form, and a vehicle to examine abstract aspects of the physical body and the natural world

Arte Povera/Germano Celant, an aesthetic-philosophical movement

An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields, that emerges into a total space where disparate categories can meet; a art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen

Wanderlust : Visual Feelings of Anarchism and Beauty

Wanderlust : A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit.

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour
This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but improvisational act.

Land : Antony Gormley, Clare Richardson, Jeanette Winterson.

Temporary is human. We don't live long. Our ancestors lived less long. Graveyards and ruins remind us of the atom and jot of our span. Against the reality of temporary, humans stage heroic battles for permanence : Archives, museums, endowments, societies.

Wandering is "not purposeful". A lot of art is made while wandering about either in your mind or on foot, Its a necessary aimlessness.
Jeanette Winterson

Anarchism : A Very Short Introduction, Colin Ward.

It is possible to discern four principles that would shape an anarchist theory of organisations: that they should be voluntary, functional, temporary and small.

The Rings of Saturn : W.G.Sebald.

I pressed on to towards Dunwich, which seemed so far in the distance as to be quite beyond my reach. It was as if I had been walking for hours before the tiled roofs of houses and the crest of a wooded hill gradually became defined.


Inside Phenomena/Catching The Light
Layered drawing : Sensuality, Drawing and Astronomical Space.
Locality/Social Complexity- Works on Paper
An ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse : The Book of Tea/A Hut of Ones Own
Reading Into the Visual : Exploratory Images
Littoral Zone

Reading Project/Emergent Evolutions/Small Perceptions : Waverley Abbey/Architectural Body

Relationscapes : Erin Manning.

Perceptions in Folding.

Contrast is the activity of foregrounding or backgrounding that makes certain qualities stand out, creating what Whitehead calls emergent evolutions.

Contrast in Whitehead does not mean the equal juxtaposition of two extremes. It is 'that particularity of conjoint unity that arises from the realized togetherness of eternal objects' (Whitehead 1929/1978, 229).

Emergent evolutions are the individuation of relational fields composed by the activity of small perceptions folding.

Small perceptions are like what Arakawa and Madeline Gins call imaginary landing sites.

Small perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another as they are components of each perception.

Deleuze.

Pinhole Camera/10 Days in the Laundry, Winchester : Blueprint, text and place.

Blue print, text and place., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Russell Moreton : Spatial Practices/Fine Art/Architecture/Performance : Reflective Journal 2013

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

Reflective Journal 2013

Collage/abstracts (Heuristic Fragments) Reflective Material #1

Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?

— Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 2005

A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.

Heuristic Material : Collage 

1. encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems on his or her own, as by experimenting, evaluating possible answers or solutions, or by trial and error: a heuristic teaching method.

2. serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation.

Reading Collage : Spatial Drawings/Documents/Analogue Photography

A Hut of One's Own, Ann Cline

Texts,Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines, 

Herzog  and De Meuron

NATURAL HISTORY

Jana Sterbak

Remote Control 1989

http://art-history.concordia.ca/eea/artists/sterbak.html

Russell Moreton : Research Journal. 2013

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/24370355922/

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.

The Thinking Hand

"It is precisely where the reach of the imagination meets the friction of materials, or where the forces of ambition rub up against the rough edges of the world, that human life is lived"

The Sighted Watchmaker : Making, Tim Ingold .2013
Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Joseph Beuys : Table with Accumulator 1958-85

In this work, an accumulator – a kind of rechargeable battery in which energy can be stored - is attached by wires to two pieces of clay, as if drawing power from the earth itself. For Beuys, the production and storage of energy was a metaphor for the creative and spiritual energy that he wanted to foster both in the individual viewer and in society as a whole. This was one of the works that Beuys included in the 1982 Zeitgeist exhibition, accompanying the various elements of Lightning with Stag in its Glare.

TheThinking Hand : Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture.

Juhani Pallasmaa

Collage, fragments from pinhole camera, Atelier of Jean Dominique Fleury, glass work by Pierre Soulages.

Art and Agency : The Evolving Curriculum (axes of coherence/amongst motifs, Alfred Gell )

Without the agency of time and light, there is no record.

Drawing/Mapping : Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices

Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices

Lightness
Quickness
Exactitude
Visibility
Multiplicity
CONSISTENCY/Guattari
The Three Ecologies

Italo Calvino
Six Memos for  the Next Millennium

Reaserch Collage/Interior Design

Life Drawing/Fine Art

Stained Glass/Architectural Art

Life Drawing/Fine Art

Montage/Photography