Thinking Things : The Archi-Textual Surface.

 

Rebecca Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the post modern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this post modern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit, 2002)

We return back to the urgent need to make and experience things that in someway that lead us back to ourselves. The creative architectural work of Peter Zumthor is something that I am engaging with. He has developed architectural design practices that consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. He looks beyond the mere physical form and its fabric. He attempts to address issues of the body and how it may interact within a built environment. The use of memory as a spatial narrative to accompany the atmosphere of his spaces is realised through evocative material surfaces and densities. I feel that there is a synergy here between the opening up of the interior of a pot and the opening up of a space to dwell in.

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence. We become part of the vessel, we enter its philosophy of solitude.

Elective Affinities/Formal Structures and Sensual Properties.

 

The Geography of What Happens : Environment/Perception

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

Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture.

“ We live amongst the specta of destructive mythologies, that have been narrowly racial, ethnic, denominational and egotistic, all culminating in the condition to exalt the self by demonising the other.”

“Eliot laid bare the sterility of contemporary life, The Waste Land where people live inauthentic lives”

A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong

The Ruins, a wasteland, fragments of a spiritual integration.

The Existential Value of Design

“Design as” Tools and Apparatuses for Spatial Practices/Deeper Social Ecologies (crafting and constructing new political genres)

The responsibility of “Design” in the development of an experimental rather than a representational approach to the social sciences, the arts and the humanities.

An Architectural Interior that through “Listening to, and working in the Landscape” can produce a creative reverie, manifested by materials and acts; and through innovation and creativity produce a deeper ecology for learning that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius.

PRACTICAL ISSUES.

The Geography of what happens, Space, Politics and Affect.

DE-Fusing URBANISM

Paths and Thinking with them

The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane

“ Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:

 Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”

“To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.”

“Macfarlane has a rare physical intelligence, and his writing affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time” Antony Gormley

What do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else?

What does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?

HEIDEGGER’S TOPOLOGY

BEING, PLACE, WORLD. Jeff Malpas

The Deeper Significance of The Sensory World

Beauty, Roger Scruton

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,
Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

 

Thought In The Act : Learning through making.

 

Learning is better than teaching because it is more intensive : the more we teach/examine, the less the students can learn.

Learning and practicing techniques develops insight and dexterity, but not creative energies. Inventive construction and an attentiveness that leads to discoveries are developed, at least initially through experimentation that is undisturbed, independent, and thus without preconceptions. This experimentation is initially a playful tinkering with the material for its own sake. 

That is to say, through experimentation that is amateurish (ie not burdened by training).   

The Three Ecologies Institute

An Open Laboratory for Thinking in the Making

THOUGHT IN THE ACT

Passages in the ecology of experience

Erin Manning

Brian Massumi

Art as Experience : Interactions of Color/ Art as Experience, Josef Albers

GLASS-COLOUR-LIGHT-INTERIOR-LANDSCAPE

ART AS EXPERIENCE

WHAT IS THE CAPACITY OF THE MATERIAL

Josef Albers

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

Exploratory Practices : Archive/Collage/Mapping

Displayed Books

Part of Visiting The Archive/Waveney and Blyth Arts 2011-2018

Exploratory Workshop

Pipers Places, Richard Ingrams. John Piper. 1983

The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard. 1964

The Fate of Place, A Philosophical History. Edward S. Casey. 1997

The Experience of Landscape, paintings,drawings and photographs, Arts Council. 1987

Archaeology, Mark Dion. 1999

Kate Whiteford, Land Drawings, Installations, Excavations. 2008

Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley. 2010

This Enchanted Isle, Peter Woodcock. 2000

The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald. 1998

Land, Antony Gormley, Clare Richardson, Jeanette Winterson. 2016

The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane. 2007

A Field Guide To Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit. 2017

Contemporary Art And Anthropology, Arnd Schneider, Christopher Wright. 2006

Melancholy And The Landscape, Jacky Bowring. 2017

The Eroded Steps, Giuseppe Penone. 1989

Mapping It Out, Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies, Hans Ulrich Obrist. 2014

Strange Tools, Art and Human Nature, Alva Noe. 2015

Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist. 2014

Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, Roger Deakin. 2007

One Green Field, Edward Thomas. 2009

Claxton, Mark Cocker. 2015

The Abstracted Vessel, Ceramics in studio, John Houston. 1991

A Potter's Book, Bernard Leach. 1977

An Anthropology Of Landscape, Christopher Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum. 2017

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

Collage Cinema : Tarkovsky : Andrey Rublev the painter-monk.

 Material/Media : Landscape of Sculptural Concerns

Body and Water, cyanotype process, trace drawings : Outpost 281022

Outpost 281022

Pinhole Camera

Cyanotype Postcards

Exhibition Proposal

Monoprints/Cyanotypes on Chinese paper.

Moving Diorama.

Spiritual and Corporeal Presence.

Developing installation around themes relating to the body and water.

Baptismal Fonts, sacred sites and secular spaces.

Selected Exhibitions, Hyde 900, Space for Peace, Link Galley.

The Re-Constituted Reality : Tacita Dean/Hamburger/Sebald

The Re-Constituted Reality of Photography
Spatiality : Space over Time


Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality

All that is solid melts into air

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. 

Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

WATERLOG
After SEBALD : Essays and Illuminations

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dean-michael-hamburger-t12880

The film Michael Hamburger was created as a result of a commission for an exhibition entitled Waterlog, held at the Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery and the nearby Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in early 2007, before it travelled to The Collection in Lincoln in autumn of the same year. Tacita Dean was one of seven British artists invited to respond to ‘the wider landscape of the east of England, with the idea of the literary journey as one its overarching themes’ (curator Steven Bode in Waterlog, p.6). This literary journey is embodied in the book The Rings of Saturn (Frankfurt am Main, 1995) by the German writer WG Sebald (1944–2001), who settled permanently in England in 1970, making Norwich his home. Part memoir, part fiction and part poetic and philosophical meditation, Sebald’s book describes a meandering circular walk that begins and ends in Norwich. Dean chose to make a portrait of the poet and translator Michael Hamburger (1924–2007), whom Sebald visits in the seventh chapter of the book. She has explained:
I had a personal connection to [Michael Hamburger] and I was told he had an orchard. When I filmed him I filmed quite a lot and I talked to him about Sebald and all sorts of other things but in the end I made my film just about apples. It was in cutting the film that I realized it was the most important thing and through apples he talked about everything else as a metaphor ... My work has become about traces and capturing things before they disappear. It’s all about the recording of an atmosphere and usually it’s transient in a sort of way.


Dean’s anamorphic film is a series of almost exclusively static shots filmed in the Suffolk garden and house of her subject. Utilising natural light and unusual points-of-view – often filming either against the light or looking through windows – the looped 28 minutes of widescreen imagery constitutes a portrait whose subject is barely visible, evoking an intensely private personality. Hamburger features in semi-darkness, as a silhouette, as a pair of hands, handling apples, or seated with his back turned to the audience; in one shot only slivers of him are visible intermittently through a chink in a curtain drawn across an internal glass-paned door. This subtle visual representation is echoed in the words he speaks – a discourse exclusively focused on his apples – the different types, their origins and characteristics. Between shots of him, the camera focuses on apples on trees in the garden, rows of apples on a wooden surface in the house, and many rows and piles of books. One shot lingers on a copy, in English, of poetry by the German writer Günter Grass (born 1927). The climax of the film is a reading of one of his own poems by Hamburger, written on the occasion of the death of his friend, the poet Ted Hughes (1930–98). For Hamburger, the link of their friendship is expressed through an apple – the Devonshire Quarenden apple growing in Hughes’s garden – from pips of one of which donated by Hughes, Hamburger grew two trees. He explains that he did this, partly because he was attracted to it by its dark colour, but also because Hughes ‘was a very good friend and it was a kind of link between us if I could have this apple in a Suffolk garden where it didn’t really belong’. His poem lingers on the apple as remembrance and the notion of the fruit’s continuity in contrast with human mortality, ending with the words: ‘hardened, mellowed the fruit to outlast our days’. Dean extends the theme of mortal transience by following Hamburger’s reading with a shot of him smoking in semi-darkness, succeeded by views of a rainbow in the sky above his house. This climax is rendered more poignant by the fact that Hamburger died in June 2007, only a few months after Dean completed her film.

Michael Hamburger is the most recent in a series of film portraits Dean has made that include Mario Merz 2003 (a portrait of the artist by chance also made shortly before his death), The Uncles 2004 (footage of two of the artist’s uncles talking about the family’s relation to Ealing Film Studios, set up by Basil Dean, her grandfather) and Presentation Sisters 2005 (featuring a group of five nuns living in Cork, Ireland). All share with Michael Hamburger an elliptical approach to portraiture which functions as a kind of poetical allegory. Dean’s work is based on networks of coincidental linkages that originate – usually invisibly – with the artist, and more visibly with a person, thing or event in the world, extending outwards into the larger macrocosm of time and space. She shares this preoccupation with Sebald; her essay on him, first printed as an artist’s book as part of a seven volume publication in 2003 (Göttingen and Paris) and reprinted in Waterlog (pp.92–109), describes her personal connection to him through a series of historical coincidences. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald describes Hamburger’s emigration from Germany with his family to the United Kingdom in 1933, the fears and loss of emigration, his memories of his native Berlin and the ways in which they inform his dreams. He meditates on the question of why his identification with Hamburger, as a fellow German who has made his home in England, should run deeper than a question of national identity, writing, ‘how is that one perceives oneself in another human being or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor? ... why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain.’ (The Rings of Saturn, London 2002, pp.182–3.)

In common with all Dean’s films created since 2001, Michael Hamburger contains no titles, credit sequences or additional sound, other than what is present during filming. It is projected from a booth onto a screen on the opposite wall in a darkened room, showing on a continuous loop. It was produced in an edition of four, of which Tate’s copy is the first.

Further reading:
Waterlog: Journeys Around an Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, 2007, pp.40–7, reproduced 42–4.

Elizabeth Manchester
July 2009


Art as Spatial Practice.
10 Days in the Laundry, Winchester.

Photograph (13) Illuminated Cathedral
Photograph (350) Anthropocene

Spliced Interior : Waverley Abbey
Pinhole Camera, exposure and movements within the ruined interior.
Russell Moreton

Blue and Gray Paintings/Drawings on Glass : CELL COURT DOMAIN FIELDS

Pattern and Chaos/Liminality/Tectonics
Architectural surface for a Library,  raw materials, light, silence and solitude. 


Subjectivity and The Instant
The Numinous

In the last decades of the twentieth Century, philosophy witnessed a marked preoccupation with the discontinuous and the disruptive.
Translator's Preface, Eileen Rizo-Patron.
Intuition of the Instant, Gaston Bachelard.

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