Monday, 13 September 2021

Relationscapes/Material Flows : infra Body, Personal Relations and Spatial Agency

Slow Philosophy
Reading against the institution

Troubleyn Laboratorium
Jan Fabre

Every colour has its own perspective.
Jenny Saville

Material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which images and objects reciprocally take shape.
Tim Ingold

The Dynamic Real
Vibrant Matter
Jane Bennett

infra
Max Richter
Wayne McGregor
Julian Opie

Vitality
Difference
New Materialisms
Elizabeth Grosz

Diffraction attends to specific material entanglements, a discursive phenomenon that makes the effects of different differences evident.
Performativity, subject and image do not pre-exist as such, but merge through intra-actions. 
Karen Barad

Collage, Superimposition, Bounded and Un-Bounded 



















Space and Place
THE PERSPECTIVE OF EXPERIENCE
Yi-Fu Tuan

1959 : Patti Smith
Peace and Noise

Lingering at the threshold between word and image
Cy Twombly
Claire Daigle

https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/lingering-threshold-between-word-and-image

Although his work resonates strongly with generations of younger artists, ranging from Brice Marden to Richard Prince to Tacita Dean to Patti Smith, it has a general propensity to polarise its audience between perplexity and unbridled admiration.

Certainly, the fortuities of a name are being pushed too far here, but what does Twombly do but offer up words in all of their resonance: literal, metaphoric, corporeal, material? His citations often have the vanitas effect of graffiti: ‘Cy was here’. Lingering at the threshold between word and image, Twombly renders visible those things – experience, emotion, the body’s share – that lie beyond the reach of verbal articulation.

Existential Gestures : Looking away from the sea

Albert Camus : The Plague, 1947. (Penguin Fiction)

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.

Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.

Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus's magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.

'Camus represents a particularly modern type of temperament, a mystic soul in a Godless universe, thirsty for the absolute, forever rebellious against the essential injustice of the human condition'
Shusha Guppy, Sunday Times








Sunday, 12 September 2021

On The Beach : Photographic Clouds of Potentialities/Boundary Based Agency

Inside Phenomena/Catching The Light
Wind Turbines : Coastal Geometries/Machines
North Sea Rim
Sea Palling
Visual Device : Textual Intervention

Albert Camus : The Plague, 1947. (Penguin Fiction)

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.

Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.

Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus's magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.

'Camus represents a particularly modern type of temperament, a mystic soul in a Godless universe, thirsty for the absolute, forever rebellious against the essential injustice of the human condition'
Shusha Guppy, Sunday Times

Existential Gestures : Looking away from the sea
Low Tide
Lightness
Quickness
Exactitude
Visibility
Multiplicity
CONSISTENCY/Guattari
The Three Ecologies

Italo Calvino
Six Memos for  the Next Millennium

Locality/Social Complexity- Notebooks
Flux : Consciousness
In and Out of Material
Beach






















Wednesday, 8 September 2021

Hortus Conclusus : A Serious Place

Hortus Conclusus : Enclosed Garden
Often translated as meaning “a serious place”
To construct a contemplative room, a garden within a garden.
Pavilion as both a monumental physical structure and as a site of emotional encounter.





With a refined selection of materials he has created a contemplative space that evokes the spiritual dimension of our physical environment, in so doing he is successfully emphasising the role the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture. (Zumthor 2011: 15)

Enclosed all round and open to the sky.
A garden in an architectural setting.
“ Sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smells and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora.

A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.

There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.
(Zumthor 2011: 15)


Illustration of “Orchard” from Bible of Wenceslaus IV,Vienna, Austrian National Library

Depicts in the manner of an illuminated manuscript, the husbandry and community of the medieval workforce in the secure and sheltered space of a walled garden. This pastoral craft/gathering is evocative of Zumthor’s Hortus Concluses.

Working with ones hands, with the earth in sheltered spaces of a pastoral community.

Zumthor underscores this pastoral setting when he places a pavilion at the centre of the garden; he talks of future meeting there, of looking forward “to the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

The Vintner’s Luck, Elizabeth Knox.
Tasting the soil in the wine, the soil and the wine are of the same substance, from the same locality; they are bonded together by the landscape.

Gardens Are Like Wells: Alexander Kluge
Inside every person (however serious or playful) lies an “enclosed garden”

Monasteries in medieval Europe were wells in which the clear waters of antiquity mingled with the dark waters of faith. At the centre of these monasteries was a garden, the most important part of which was enclosed. It was here that the most beautiful plants and medicinal herbs were concentrated. (Kluge 2011: 19)

Interestingly Kluge notes that these gardens were not everyday places, they were “timeless” because they were not subject to the general daily rituals of monastic life. These gardens were dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, but exposed perhaps to other texts, Homer, Ovid or the Gnostics. This relationship of literature finding a place of contemplation in the enclosed garden speaks perhaps of an “innerness”, an ability to unite mind and eye in the confusing realities of our age.

Civilisation and societies need ground that is uncultivated, gaps that are not subject to the principle of unity, something that is sufficient unto itself, which we do not consume: a sacrifice. Cities need spaces of piety. (Kluge 2011: 21)

“We need places in which we can engage in acts of mourning” Richard Sennett
(Sociologist)



Gardens of Information: DCPT (Development Company for Television Programmes)


Using the emblem of the Hortus Conclusus/The Enclosed Garden to stand for the relationship between the barren wastes on the one hand, and the happy isle on the other.

“To rescue facts from human indifference”

“To make gardens out of raw material and the bare bones of information.”

“A precursor of individualism, but has unmistakable traits in a way individualism never can.” (Kluge 2011: 21)


Spatial Practices for the Next Millennium.

Forming relationships not through superstructures, concepts or societies, but through inclusive structures/practices and localities. The Hortus Conclusus could stand for this type of concentration of identity (an inquiry, a person and a practice) within an intimate setting or situation.










Tuesday, 7 September 2021

Ecological approaches/affordances to aesthetic perception




When I gather together the animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, interpretations, sounds, people, and images of this study, one theme emerges. The modern story of disenchantment leaves out important things, and it neglects crucial sources of ethical generosity in doing so. Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities. These enchantments are already in and around us.

Jane Bennett

Be not inhospitable to strangers
lest they be angels in disguise

Jackie Leven, The Dent In The Fender And The Wheel Of Fate
David Childers, Heart In My Soul

Sunday, 5 September 2021

Photographic Stages/Beholding of the Light : Performativity in Architecture and the Visual Arts

The beholding of the light is itself a more excellent and a fairer thing than all the uses of it

Francis Bacon 1561-1626


Is there no other ways for architecture to survive but to stand tall and arrogant?

Kengo Kuma 2004






















Heidegger's Topology
Things exist rooted in the flesh (R. S. Thomas)
Being, Place, World
Jeff Malpas. 2008

David Smith : Sprays, The Absent Object. Peter Stevens
Eidetic Image, Nearness/Proximity/Atmosphere
Temporal Structures,

Unthinking Eurocentrism
The Political Writing of Adam Kuper and Tim Ingold
Justin Kenrick. 2011

Pottery, The mindfulness of making social
Anthropological Notebooks 17

The War of Dreams
Exercises in Ethno-Fiction.
Marc Auge

The Culture of The New Capitalism
Richard Sennett.

VISITORS
a film by Godfrey Reggio

The World of The Anthropologist
Marc Auge, Jean-Paul Colleyn. 2006

The Field

The basic methodology of anthropology is ethnography. This is the famous 'fieldwork' in which the researcher shares the daily life of a different culture (remote or close), observes, records, tries to grasp the 'indigenous point of view' and writes.

Objects of Anthropology
Politics is also the art of administrating and producing subjects, citizens.


The Woman in The Dunes
Kobo Abe

Site-Specific Art
Performance, Place and Documentation.
Nick Kaye

Heidegger For Architects
Adam Sharr
Poetically Man Dwells

The Perception of The Environment
Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill.
Tim Ingold

Hans Coper
Sensations in the Vessel/Innerness
Clay and The Engagements of Mind and Body

Peter Zumthor
Thinking Architecture/ A Way of Looking at Things
Zumthor mirrors Heidegger's celebration of experience and emotion as measuring tools.
The physicality of materials can involve an individual with the world.

The Visual Poetics of Jannis Kounellis
Suzanne Cotter and Andrew Nainre
He translates the painterly relationship of figure and ground into the space of real situations
Kounellis's engagement with the social and historical content and with the material fabric of a given space is critical to his art.

The Castelvecchio in the Opus of Carlo Scarpa
Possibly until very recently Scarpa's work was still judged as anachronistic, small scale and craft intensive.
An Attitude to History, The Drawings, Formal Language,
Technical Specifications of Materials.

What is the relationship between the visual arts and 'performativity'?
Site-Specific Art. Nick Kaye

Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius
The work of art/aesthetics/ethics seen 'under the form of eternity'
Schopenhauer discusses, in a remarkably similar way, a form of contemplation in which we relinquish 'the ordinary way of considering things', and 'no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply the what'.

Spatial Practices : Thinking Sociologically

'What does it do'?
Oren Lieberman