Drawing Technicity : Lines/Choreographies for Potential Eventness.

 Outpost 010823

New Occasions of Experience.

Housing The Body.

Dressing The Environment.

Forcefields/Associated Milieu.

Individuations Dance.

Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through which without colliding would produce the establishment of places, localities made special for one reason or another. There is no stage at which  human beings do not demarcate, beacon or sign their space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space, Lefebvre. 1991.

 

Durational play, crafting of the as yet unthought, where the microperceptual and the micropolitical meet to create new movements in the making.

We land/dance into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Objectiles thrown into the world and invitations to move-with.

Propositions are ontogenetic, they emerge as the germ of the occasion and persist on the nexus of experience to take hold once more through new occasions of experience.

The proposition I am seeing on the table is a hammer, the eventness of the proposition now persists in my hand, what moves a body, returns as a movement of thought.

Objects exist in the between of a proposition and its eventness, in so doing they are inciting co-constellations of movement-moving.

Technicity and its choreographies for potential eventness.

In this strange time-loop, what is lived is less the encounter with space pre-formed or objects pre-existent than a direct experience of relation.

William Forsythe/Erin Manning.

Making Divides Fluid.

Fielding Differences With Curiosity.

Kairos, the movement and its moment.

Being Alive, Tim Ingold.

Much of our thinking happens across various kinds of divides.

Choreographic Thinking.

Choreography has the capacity to craft an associated milieu of relations that extends far beyond the stage.

Experiencing environment as gradually taking form, using choreographic objects to help shift the everydayness of time, towards the durational time of play. The choreographic proposition begins with the folding of space more than the form-taking of bodies.

A Lure For Feeling.

Like his choreographies Forsythe's choreographic objects are created with very precise conditions for the movement experimentation. They insist on the precision of parameters for movement (technique) without divesting the movement of its potential for eventness (technicity). They are carefully crafted towards generating certain kinds of participation and yet unforeseeable in their effects.

Erin Manning.

An Attitude to History.

At Castelvecchio, Carlo Scarpa embarked on a much more far-reaching idea of not only cleaning the building but attempting to clarify and expose the layers of history by selective excavation and creative demolition. He attempted to cut and then disentangle one epoch's construction from another so that the building itself becomes a giant exhibit revealing its growth and change in nature.

Scarpa was primarily interested not in any concepts of restoration but an idea to do with historical clarity, making history visible by the co-existence of overlaying fragments of construction.

Ceramic Testing/Prototyping/Making

Hungate Glass Assemblages.

Drawing/Diagrams/Choreographies into the Architectural Body.

Relationscapes/Propositions/Organism/Person/Environment.

Arakawa, Gins, Manning, Forsythe, Irwin.

Shotesham SPAB.

Bayfield Hall Sculpture Trail.

Propositions into the Figural.

The Social/Private Body on Display.

The Physical Self, Peter Greenaway. 1992. 

As we draw the human figure we both reveal and hide ourselves and it.

The Life Room is a peculiar place and Life Drawing is a bizarre activity.

How you draw is contingent on why you are drawing.

What you bring to the Life Room defines you.

Before embarking on a program of Life Drawing, you need to ask yourself how and why you are doing it. Your answers to these two questions should qualify each other.

We do not dispute that Life Drawing is an important aspect of an art education. But if it is to be significant, it must extend into the rest of life and begin to touch upon things that matter to you, otherwise it is an empty activity, the development of a skill with no purpose.

Peter Stanyer, Terry Rosenberg. 1996.

What is the occasion and purpose of the drawing?

We need to be aware of what it is we need to reveal.

Is the nude as a form of art still valid?

The curious and uneasiness of the psychology of nakedness.

The practical and theoretical issues of the confrontation with the the unclothed human form.

Collage : Solar Pavilion/A Philosophy of Solitude/John Cowper Powys : The Hut as a projection of self/Ann Cline

As my dwelling took shape, it began to shape my life as well. And when I sat inside reading the recluse poets, the terse simplicity of their record framed my own perception, one I likened to a camera recording a world of pure experience.

Ann Cline

Architecture is not made with the brain. 

The labour of Alison and Peter Smithson.

Architectural Association 2005.

Smithson’s on modernity, not as a goal but as an established reality that needs to be interpreted.

Articulation of the volumes based on rigorous rules that derive from the ordering capacity of the necessities of daily life.

Holistic Practices.

The way person and work fit together so seamlessly.

Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker, 2005:85)

Transitions between spaces.

‘Building relationships to relate to what already exists.’ Herzog and de Meuron The Parallel of Art and Life

Aesthetics about Perception Poetics about Production

‘The approach leads from the static object of the mere picture to the dynamic process of imagining.’(Schregenberger,2005:82)

‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ (attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place) Peter Smithson 2001 

‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction and a concern for that which exists.’ (Schregenberger,2005:81)

Complex Ordinariness Bruno Krucker

Urban Structuring.

Importance of urban planning, specific responses to the surroundings generated different shapes. Testing out spatial bound volumes and aligning them with the site or urban fabric/passages of use and existing features.

‘As Found, is a small affair: it is about being careful, the as found (is) where the art is in the picking up, turning over and putting with.’ (Smithson.)

‘The essence of ‘as found’ as a concept lies in accepting the value of the everyday. Any aspect of the built environment can be interpreted and employed as a trigger for architectural propositions. To consider ways in which the ‘ordinary’ can be harnessed through reinterpretation.’ (Sergison’2005:98)

The Everyday.

Life between buildings.

The necessities of daily life (the repetition of basic sequences) giving shape and layout to the architecture.

Heavy Prefabrication: Whole wall sections used to a homogeneous expression that emphasises their tactile qualities.

John Cowper Powys hopes to create a new level of discourse that will appeal to the common person, that person who desperately needs a philosophy of life, a means of comprehending the world around him or her, while at the same time being a person who is receptive and curious.

‘The Solar Pavilion, is both a lookout over the distant landscape on the north facade, sitting on top of the existing cottage wall, and a garden pavilion mediating between two types of controlled landscape. It aims to provide a minimal enclosure that allows as immediate a relationship between interior and exterior as possible.’

(Sergison’2005:97)

The hut addresses the core of ritual as a part of nature versus the supposed freedom of modernist thought and the architectural contrivances it pursues. The hut represents the convergence of ritual and naturalness, at the same time addressing cultural issues and practices.

To systematise transitions of both components and internal spatial orderings. The sizes of elements are determined by the inner spatial ordering in an almost organic, non-schematic way.’

We developed elements that embrace the entire thickness of the wall.’ (Krucker, 2005:85)

The search for directness while avoiding too much design, but still ensuring that our buildings look right in their surroundings.

Cultural Background.

Fitting in with the ordinariness of the environment, an ordinariness that only reveals its strength over time.

Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker, 2005:85)

The anonymous settings of settlements and agglomerations create documents/cinematic presences of familiarity within these architectural contexts. It is important to go beyond any superficial fascination with the ‘periphery’.

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) created an attractive and congenial meditation in his best non-fiction book: A Philosophy of Solitude.

Writing in the early 1930's in his adopted United States, where he was living and working as a free-lance lecturer, a popularizer of intellectual themes barnstorming the country, Powys' book is prompted by his experiences, his insights, and his disappointments. He sees the United States as a slave of modem technology — of megalopolis, pandemonium, noise, of "the Gargantuan monstrosities and Dantesque horrors of our great modem cities."

The situation, he declares, is too far gone for the inspiration of American writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, with their facile optimism and their confidence in the virtues of an American character now lost in the twentieth century.

The only thing that can really help us is a much more definite and drastic philosophy ... a real, hard, formidable, unrhetorical introspection ..."

And this is the philosophy of solitude that Powys sets out of construct.

To Powys, solitude is the necessary social, psychological, and intellectual state of the individual. It is social in pulling away from the life and tumult of the crowd (Powys lived for decades in New York City, finally moving to a small town in upper-state New York before returning to Wales a few short years after this book's publication).

It is psychological in the sense of identifying and pursuing a frame of mind for the personal pursuit of solitude. And it is intellectual in offering a philosophy calling upon a variety of classic thinkers and using the tools of plain everyman logic.

Powys sees this simplicity of mind and desire as a key to self-control and understanding. His elementalism is based on the solitude that is evoked by this self-knowledge, which allows a person to make and define a life for themselves based not upon the tempo and rhythms of the crowd and technology but on the unspoken wisdom that wells up from solitude itself.

The hut has a sense of immediacy that no room-filled house can achieve. The hut focuses its dweller on immediacy and meaningfulness. I had found the commodity of my dwelling through the poetry of its use.

Structural Thinking. Anti Object: Kengo Kuma.

Identity out of structure/layers of latticed structure.

Character-forming ability of structures, through the transitions of interior to exterior spaces. ‘Our approach was to act decisively at an urban and a spatial level and to create precise alignments that would strengthen existing elements. Within the structure, it becomes possible to give specific places an individual identity and to create an awareness of the relation between repetition and difference. Seen in this way , the facades are less a surface around a volume, and more the outer edges of the structure itself (importantly the structuring becomes independent of the programme, which can change over time).’ (Krucker, 2005:87)

The power of a building originates from its structuring (a character of a building that is not wholly subservient to its programme).

The book is an extended essay, not a history, but it does call for a close sense of identity with the subject and with those who have come before. The author dives into the subject of primitive huts, skimming the surface with Po-i and Shu-ch'i, the recluse archetype brothers of Chinese antiquity, with modems like Gaston Blanchard and Thomas Merton, classics like Lao-tzu and Heraclitus, plus the great Japanese hut-dwellers Kamo no Chomei and Hoshida Kenko. The hut, she notes, has always been a projection of the self. When Heraclitus was chided on why he lived in such a small and humble abode, he responded, "Even here, the gods reside."

Ground Notations, the need to find an existing physical structure, see ‘Shifting the Track’ (Smithson.)

‘The Smithsons’ search for a strong existing element that could be added to and adjusted, if necessary, ensures that a project is grounded in its place. Successful ground notations operate at varying scales, ranging from large pieces of infrastructure (roadways,etc) to natural, seasonal landscape infrastructure (trees and meadows). Once absorbed into an existing situation, new ground notations begin to refocus a place and act as the basis for subsequent actions’ (Sergison’2005:97)

Drawing on an existing topographic ground notation (earth-bunds) matrices of bundways that help irrigate the marshlands and define land ownership. 

‘New topographical features containing the infrastructure necessary for development, with roads on top and supply conduits inside them. Public buildings were located on top of swollen bunds, for visibility and orientation, while the spaces in between bunds became serviced fields for new settlement.’ (Sergison’2005:98)

Could it be that where a human settlement seems structureless, without purpose, we invent and build ‘ground-notations’ to offer an analogous power to that offered by strong natural landforms?

Neutrality and Character.

‘This kind of structural thinking supports the search for a more anonymous everyday architecture that can nevertheless develop a character of its own.

The prefabricated parts generate complex volumetric forms that remain only partly visible after assembly. The effect is similar to that of Japanese timber construction, in which the simplicity and clarity of appearance belie the complexity of the joining techniques involved.’ (Krucker, 2005:89)

‘The Smithson’s embraced an architecture that was not purely driven by formal intensions but by questions regarding content. This is an architecture that results from an attitude of openness towards the world (of worlds) and an acute awareness of the impact of the architect’s actions. Such an architecture insists on addressing the nature of real conditions and how they fit into the fabric of a larger context.’ (Krucker, 2005:90)

Lessons Learnt from Alison and Peter Smithson 

With an agility larger structures can never match, huts bring together the physical environment with such disparate aspects of culture as necessity, fantasy, faith, and "life-style." The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.

‘I remember finding the work awkward, even ugly in its removal from architectural conventions. ’

Research Contexts/Materials

The Shift/Italian Thoughts, both became pivotal in the understanding of the intensions behind their work.

What does it mean to be an English architect? The lessons presented as six themes.

Strategy and Detail, as a design concept and method.

A manual for negotiating our way through the development of a project. 

‘All our projects begin with an interpretation of the specifics of the programme and a response to the place we are adding to, either as a series of sketches or a model exploring a building form. A dialogue then begins about the ‘feeling’ of the project, its material presence and its language of construction; this provides a framework in which to take decisions and a structure that can be referred to.’(Sergison’2005:92) Trying it out, testing its placement in place, its on-site feelings.

A detailing of open brick perpends (a breathing building envelope) that is overlaid on all three elevations, giving a quiet expression to the building’s tectonics.

Conglomerate Ordering, as an overall interconnected building solution. 

‘A bold simple form adjusted by the forces of the site, thereby containing an equivalence, an overall tonality through the concrete frame as a structural solution and the block infill and their aluminium dressings. The building form and plan arrangement were adjusted according to the particularities of the site and to rhyme with the geometries of the neighbouring industrial buildings.’ (Sergison’2005:94)

Ways, (a spine providing a variety of spatial experiences coupled with the means by which circulation is distributed) sometimes Ways are employed in a manner that is latent and discreet; in other instances they are the most public part of a project. 

‘The concept of Ways as a means of organising circulation and supporting activity.’ (Sergison’2005:94)

A simple organising circulation element that can be read, at one level, as a street or lane running the length of the plan, linking the apartments. This space is given a strong material intensity, entirely timber-clad on floor, walls and soffit. At selected moments views of the city are framed or the sky is revealed.

Janus Face, origins in Italian Thoughts, teaches us to understand how mediation is possible between inside and outside, or between one side of a building and another; as all faces are equally engaged with what lies before them.

By focusing attention on the enclosing envelope and how the building should engage with the conditions around it.

The opposing forces of a site and its relationships to the different faces of the building can become multifaceted, through scale, the choice of material or even the layering of its construction; a discreet link is sought which connects rather than confronts.

Outpost 021222 Thinking Forms/Haptic Collisions

 Outpost 021222

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

Lo-Fi

Alternative Construction.

Contemporary Natural Building Methods.

Lynne Elizabeth, Cassandra Adams.

Earthbag.

Experimental earthbag structures at Cal-Earth.

Nader Khalili.

The beauty of the earthbag technology lies not just in its low cost, but in its freedom of form.

The use of soil-filled sacks (earthbags) for construction has received growing interest as a natural alternative building technique. Earthbags are textile or plastic casings packed with soil, and sometimes sand or gravel, used to construct foundations, walls, and domes. The technique is essentially a flexible form variation of rammed earth construction.

Earthbag construction is one of the most inexpensive building methods on the planet. It uses locally available site soil and common sacks. The technique requires few skills, is significantly faster than earth building methods such as adobe or cob, and unlike equipement-intensive modern rammed earth, requires few tools other than a shovel.

Working Cyanotypes/Vectors/Clusters of Movements.

Spatial Verbs/Durations.

Drawing on a light mediated surface.

Abstracted notations on the verge of visibility.

Traces on the canvas.

The Inclusion of Absences.

Mapping surfaces, from transparency to occlusion.

Abstract Circulation Diagrams.

Diffractive Intermediaries in Architecture.

Alternative Photographic Processes.

Subjectivity in forsaken spaces.

Resistivity/Photographic Decay : Inclusions in the order of time.

Theory, Placemaking, Trigg

Francesca Woodman, Deborah Turbeville.

Photographic Collages.

Place Studies.

Locating practice/inquiry.

In the darkroom with the flesh of the film.

Building on the impossibility of the specific. 

Everyday correlations, living with making place.

The recording apparatuses spatial practice.

Learning with phenomena, presentia the light in its moment. 

Spatial cyanotype drawings and exposures. 

Daylight weather observed and recorded.

Red Gas Kiln, external dimensions, 1.2m x 1.2m x 1.0m, plus stand 0.5m.

Joseph Beuys, clay accumulator and table, Tate Modern.

Joseph Albers.

Karen Barad.

Intra-Activity, Performativity, Bodies.

Colour Intermediaries, induce spatial relations between objects and processes, they create, set in motion diffractive phenomena.

The Mind's Eye.

Bridget Riley.

SPAB, Working Parties.

What Remains.

To preserve something from the continuum of time.

Materials bounded by contact and context.

Plastic Architecture/Lime and Flintwork.

Linking built surfaces to the aesthetic experience of place.

Asperity, in materials science, is defined as unevenness of surface, roughness, ruggedness, that can create frictional interactions between the relationships of materials. 

Site is a temporal undoing of place.

Architecture taken back into the domain of  building. 

Scaffolds for learning, access, practices and preservation. 

On Reading.

Cell-Court-Domain.

Apokatustasis.

Jim Jarmusch

Jozef Van Wissem

John Cowper Powys.

A Philosophy Of Solitude.

Reading Powys one finds no belief, no system of dogmas or doctrines, just an insight gathered from experience.

He  is a walking philosopher, who develops his thoughts on the character of solitude, the walker formulates his words out of an inner heuristic development. A preparation in order to be able to relate to other people. 

A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Rebecca Solnit.

The wonderlust of learning for profound and complex inquiry.

The creative, hopeful philosophy of emotions that colour, illuminate our worlds.

Sculptor's Drawings/Sculpting in Time.

Outpost 231123

Using the line as a graphic means to probe/navigate elementary structures and  three-dimensional frameworks.

Giacometti : Realities of Perception.

Drawings on the difficulty of the 'Figure In Space' and its representations.

The Creative Imagination.

Gaston Bachelard.

Rendering visible the essential enduring dimension of reality through energies of matter and confusion, being and becoming. 

The Radical Nude.

Transfiguration and Masking.

Egon Schiele.

Schiele's fears of death, sexuality and disease, and his ambivalence about beauty and ugliness, both his own and that of the world he was part of, all of these conflicts play out across the surface of the skin and are transformed in Schiele's radical nudes.

What mattered for both Schiele and Nietzsche was not the fact of suffering, but how it could be transformed.

The pots/surfaces of Hans Coper endure the suffering of the artist.

Confronting The Naked Human Body.

Female Nude. 1910

Everything is living-dead.

An artistic corpus of a dangerous sexuality.

This female nude embodies the sinister complicity between sex and death.

Sneering Woman. 1910

An embodiment of Nietzsche's imperious and domineering free spirit, who with a not altogether innocent readiness to deceive and to dissemble, enjoys the cunning and multiplicity of its masks.

Uneven washes of white paint applied to the surface of Gerti's skin, which give her a sickly appearance. Her sneer, 'masks' signifies her own criticism and protects her from others, as she transforms herself into something greater than negation.

Alberto Giacometti.

Drawings and Watercolours.

The Bruno Giacometti Bequest.

Kunshaus Zurich. 2014

I realised that my vision changed daily, either I saw a volume or I saw the figure as a blob, or I saw a detail or I saw the whole. Given that models only posed for a very limited period, they left even before I had begun to capture anything at all.

Giacometti was asked to put his drawings with notes into chronological order. After making several attempts the artist declared that it was impossible to give the sort of chronology that was intended, because all of these copies take their place today as if on the same plane, without any chronological order.

Drawings and their nearness, a nowness/revelation of spatial proximities.

Drawing into the deeper ecology between things/matters of concern.

Drawings that struggle at the unknowing flux of things.

Drawing, Gathering Situatedness, nesting into the process of mark-making between the indeterminacies of self and others across the domain of a surface on paper. 

The differing execution of the figures, some in heavier outline, others in a lighter stroke alludes to the appearance of the figures in space and their proximity and distance in the relationship to himself.

Views of the artist's studio executed sometimes in fleeting strokes and at other times in dense linear structures. They testify to the creative dialogues battling for artistic insight and understanding. 

Drawings characterized by a fine network or net-like structure, containing intricate connective lines of matter and the layering of visual tissue/flesh.

Drawing into the corporeality of the architectural body.

Organism-Person-Environment

Arakawa, Gins.

Reticular Drawings.

Interconnected, Interrelated, Reciprocally Connected.

Reticulate, cancellate, cancellated, clathrate, having a lattice like structure, pierced with holes or windows. 

Working/Making from within and with visual material.

Sculptor's Drawings/Sculpting in Time.

Martin Collis/Tarkovsky. 

Drawing Nomadologies between points, paths and territories, producing forms derived from the movement/relay across surfaces and things. 

Deleuze, Guattari.

Drawings on the phenomenal qualities of things and the  relations with space between things, becoming into time through movements of spatial/temporal matter.

Giacometti, drawing out perceptions from swirling and reticular strokes and breaths.

Making exteriorises and extends internal capacities and conditions

 Outpost 161123

The process of making is a magical act, organic and physiological. 

Making exteriorises and extends internal capacities and conditions.

Tim Ingold.

The new virtual social spaces are changing actual physical space.

The virtual world continues to overlap with the real one, further weakening of the boundaries between the two domains is inevitable.

Drawing Concepts/Identities.

Gathering Situatedness.

Nomadology on the relay between points, paths, territories, boundaries, borders and lines.

 

The drawing acts/re-enacts through the forces and flows of materials/matter/media and experience.

 

The Space/Situation of Art as a Sociological Phenomena.

The Drawing Class

10 Days in The Laundry

Winchester 2009.

Drawing-Traces-Bodies-Movements.

The Production of Space/Spatiality.

Line as a Graphic Inquiry.

Johannes Schreiter.

Wellbeing and Mediated Spaces within Drawing.

How I was drawing was far more important than what I was drawing. I decided to abandon figurative representation and actually focus on my own body as a producer. My interest in space mediation is materialised in site-specific works, where the combination of the performance and the specific features of the site, its architecture, history, etc of a particular context determine decisively the appearance of the work.

M. Lohrum.

Resonances/Reverberations (Bachelard) as the performativity between things and of the innate reversibility of inside and outside, such that intimate spaces loose their clarity, whilst exterior spaces loose their sense of void.

For Bachelard, inside and outside, as experienced by the imagination can no longer be taken in their simple reciprocity, consequently by choosing  more concrete, more phenomenologically exact implications/inceptions, we shall come  to realize that the dialectics of inside and outside multiply with countless diversified nuances.

All matter vibrates, causing correspondences between people, things in movement with each other.

Making/Matter/Intervening.

Drawings that are intimately tied/underpin/inquiry/situate into your emotions/sociological self.

Social Contexts Making Artistic Creation.

During the act of drawing, the artist focuses on the physicality, movement, and gesture of their body , or the bodies of others. The resultant drawings work as documentation of the performance, they retain the indexical trace of the performance that produced them.

Drawing practices that are performative, inspired by the uncertain and changeable nature of both our social context and artistic creation.

Performative Drawing explores drawing as a consequence of a residue of a performance or event, as such it is very process oriented, doing things with unknown or unfolding outcomes.

The experiences and knowledges of the body.

Drawings that remain in the  exploratory realm of drawings.

The Drawing needs to be 'read' forward into an ongoing generative movement that is once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic. 

Corporeality  in Drawing.

Situated Awareness/Attraction.

Drawing onto the openness of the resonances of bodies.

The Radical Nude, Egon Schiele.

A creative corpus of extreme representations of the human body that  show an ambivalent treatment of sexuality, creation and death.

The Nietzschean Perspective.

Nietzsche explains that ever art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the  service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers.

A Philosophy of The Body.

Schiele experimented to see how he could represent the experiences and knowledges of the body by using his own body as an object and as a tool for experimentation.

For Nietzsche, to what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question, that is the experiment. This evokes both gleaning the truths of the fleshy and making something lived corporeally, truth is now of and in the body. The body is the source of the soul and of our most valuable forms of knowing.

The naked, primal vulnerability that has been socially and culturally manipulated turning the naked into the nude. 

Marie's body was dedicated to a dance of death, masquerading as the cycle of life. By the time she bore Egon, Marie had already given birth to no fewer than four babies, only one of whom would survive beyond childhood. Egon the male heir was bought into a world in which sexuality, disease and death were not only inextricably intertwined but also oppressively omnipresent, and his art evinces this fearsome reality most memorably in his brutal treatment of the naked body.

Dioysian Ugliness and Radical Beauty in Egon Schiele's oeuvre.

Kathryn Simpson.

Vienna, was saturated both with Nietzsche's actual writings and with the multiple and various Nietzscheanisms. Every educated person was familiar with Nietzsche's Philosophy, indeed the ubiquity of Nietzschean influences can barely be overstated.

Breathing/Drawing : Inhalation and an exhalation of being.

Outpost 091123

Situated Practice Live.

Critical Spatial Practices.

The conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event.

Making/Living in the matrices of situatedness.

Seated nude, 1958 Oil 116x89cm.

Alberto Giacometti devoted much of his career to the struggle between matter and meaning, engaging in an extended exploration of how to reduce the figures's mass as far as possible while imbuing it with essential force. Up until his death in 1966, Giacometti pushed the limits of representation, setting into motion ever-unfolding phenomenological investigations that remain at the core of art making today.

How can matter-bronze, plaster, charcoal, paint-embody truth? And how, if at all, can art preserve the essence of the living?

Nothing disappears completely.

In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows. Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.

Production of Space.

Henri Lefebvre. 1991

Spatiality-Space and the Object.

Of or relating to space, existing or occurring in space, having extension in space.

The Multiplicities and heterogeneous nature of space and spatiality.

Abstract and concrete, produced and producing, imagined and materialized, structured and lived, relational, relative and absolute.

Concetto Spaziale, Lucio Fontana.

The protean nature of space and its ability to bring the unconscious into the open. 

Merleau-Ponty.

Lived Body and Space.

Situatedness and Place, multdisciplinary perspectives on spatio-temporal contingency in human life.

Hunefeldt/Schlitte. 2018

Sites, Situations and other kinds of Situatedness.

Fields of Care.

Interactions between bodies and our habitats.

What is outside eventually comes inside.

The irreducible fact of the human condition is that we are open. The bodies we house are open bodies, dependent on interchange and communion with surrounding life. Surfaces are two-sided like the skin, we cannot touch without being touched in return, and because we are open , we need boundaries strong and flexible enough to also close. Complementarily and interdependence belong to this openness. 

Architecture is a Verb.

Sarah Robinson. 2022

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.

The way we inhabit our everyday spaces, reveals the extent to which our bodies extend into and integrate with the features of our surrounding.

The Architectural Body.

Organism/Person/Environment.

Arakawa and Gins.

Making, is a question of surrendering to the wood, then following it where it leads, instead of imposing a form upon a matter. Matter so shaped informs the processes of its shaping.

Deleuze and Guattari.

Making is not a matter of imposition or a hylomorphic process. But of intervening in the fields of force and flows of material. What this understanding entails is that rather than interpreting the creative process 'backwards' from a finished object to an idea in the mind of an agent, one must rather 'read it forwards' in an ongoing generative movement, that is once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic.

Sarah Robinson, Tim Ingold. 

The mutual shaping of body and place is captured in the Greek word Choros. The root of choreography referred not only to dance, but also to the dancing place, and the group that dances.

Chora, closer to the meaning that Suzanne Langer articulates is the space of forces, a generative place that depends on participation, a territory that appears through continual remaking and reweaving. 

Topos, like its modern usage in topography suggests, was space that can be mapped.

Notion of a Place-Ballet.

The 'Spanish Steps' are not only crystallisations of movement, but generators of movement. We can navigate our living spaces in the dark, because we have already integrated the locations of our furnishings into our repertoire of movement. We create a zone of familiarity, with its integrated gestures, behaviours and actions that sustains a particular task or aim.

The reciprocity between one's body-routine and the environment supports these integrated movements, resulting in a fusion of interpersonal and communal exchange and effective attachment.

Places/Public Spaces become meaningful because they support our personal body-routines in an inter personal setting. 

David Seaman.

Place-Ballet, propositional movements of dancers around objects and the exhibition space.

10 Days in The Laundry, Winchester. 2009 

Bodies/Interchange/Communion with Surrounding Life.

Breathing, a balancing act of sustaining openness.

There really is an inhalation and an exhalation of being.

We not only breathe in and out, we breathe in a certain rhythm, our heart beats in rhythm, our perceptual experience oscillates in rhythms. Our experience of colour once again lays bare the facts of this unending rhythm.

We speak of 'inspiration' and the word should be taken literally. There really is an inspiration and expiration of being.

My flat is, for me, not a set of closely associated images. It remains a familiar domain round about me only as I still have 'in my legs' the main distances and directions involved, and as long as from my body intentional threads run out towards it.

Phenomenology of Perception.

Merleau-Ponty.

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.

Practitioners and theorists whose work overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond. 

Practices that incorporate, event scores, insertions, even banalities, and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation as well as duration. 

Projects located between Art and Architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operate. Such projects operate at a triple crossroads, between theory and practice, between art and architecture, between public and private, Jane Rendell is keen to stress three particular qualities of these works, the critical, the spatial, and the interdisciplinary.

Situatedness then is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or/and being situated.

Outpost 090222

Architectural Body/Procedural Architecture

Organism/Person/Environment

Earth, House, Hold, Dwelling Places.

Unlike the sense of sight or hearing, only the sense of touch can discern space and time at once.

The skin as the harbourer of a subjects sense of touch.

Skin/Subjectivity becomes as flesh a connective tissue which both unites and divides.

The skin can judge time less well than the ear, and space less well than the eye, but it is skin alone that combines the spatial and temporal dimensions.

Maternal Skin/Subject Formation, Anzieu.

A Field in England : On the nature of Photography.

Between Art and Information.

Brought to Light : Photography and the Invisible.

The Visible/Invisibility between the potential of  things.

The Photograph and The Lacanian Mirror.

In which identity is constantly shored up and broken down, but also as a persistent space invested with the paradoxical qualities of intimacy and alienation, of proximity and utter detachment all through which an offer of an encounter is held out in invitation.

Inter-Subjective Encounters, a space in which the subjectivities of the artist and the spectator might meet and mingle.

The skin is the surface through which self and other are mediated.

The mutuality of touch itself is echoed by the skins structure, it both touches and is touched and this duality is reflected in the way the skins surface is exposed to the outside world, whilst also protecting and containing the unseen interiority of the body.

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

Light and Spaces of Intersubjectivity.

Tactile Light.

The photograph holds out the promise of an encounter through its carnal medium.

For Riches, the self-representational photograph becomes a kind of veil or mask, a displaced surface whose skin-like relationship to the subject is always suspended, and perpetually deferred. It frames a space of contact and a fantasy of union with the original subject, the photograph's skin-like quality also enables it to be imagined as an inter-subjective space of exchange.

Light creates the spatiality/transitions that passes beyond subject/object relationships.

Skin/Surface/Subjectivity : Movements in thinking through Spatial Agency

Skin becomes a site of symbolic acts of aggression/gesture.

Surfaces of suggested pain/experience through which subjectivity is created.

Conduits of colour specificities and counterpoints

Relationscapes : Movements, created through colour temperature and spatial contact.

The phenomena of things being brought into perception/focus.

Through a body every colour creates movement and has its own/creates its own perspective/its mapping/layering/extension of spatial temporal material.

Analogies/Difference : Spaces created through mimesis, wavelengths intermingling with the spatial.

Glass/Lead/Filtered Light.

Glass Slide/Subjectivities brought into the light

Colour Subjectivities, the appearance/experience of mattering material.

Space for Peace : Aerial Composition (movements inside Winchester Cathedral) : Cyanotype and Sunlight.

Aerial Composition (movements inside the Cathedral) : Cyanotype and Sunlight., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

2013

A Body of Relations/On The Drawing Process.

Outpost 051023

The Process of Production

Seeing beyond concepts of looking.

The Dematerializing of the Art Object.

The process rather than art object as the primary site of the artist's creative output.

Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of The Art Object from 1966 to 1972.

 

A Body Of Relations:

Reconfiguring The Life Class.

The reconfigured life class provides a performative, discursive, social space to empower the life model to actively engage in the production of his/her own self-image. In addition the research re-frames the life class as a site in which the discourses of contemporary art as 'relational' and 'performative' can reach its apotheosis as a de-materialized performance event, whose trace exists in the dispersed materiality of the artist's body and whose silenced subject, the life model, becomes a full individual subject.

Yuen Fong Ling. 2016

2.5. Black Market, Pawel Althamer. 2007

In the artwork titled Black Market by Pawel Althamer, the exhibition sees participants making an effigy of the artist. The work neither focuses on the reference or the final outcome, but on the process of production. Polish Africans are trained in basic skills of carving and sculpting by the artist; they demonstrate their skills in a workshop environment presented as an installation in the exhibition. 

This active delegation of skills passed on by the artist to his participants, begins to fold traces of the artist in a process of transferral, where participant's subjectivities are merged with that of the artist. 

This framework for open contingent and non-scripted outcomes are rooted in Althamer's education under the tutelage of artist Grzegorz Kowalski, who was in turn influenced by Oskar Hansen's theory of 'open form' a form of architectural practice that encompassed 'collective thought' to dislocate any singular vision or use in the production of building design.

Artworks produced under these conditions meant that artworks were co-authored restrained  by time scale and the given situation. The artist in the role of teacher or tutor, to facilitate participant's ideas inflected in the production of the artwork. Althamer highlights intimate and often emotional inter-subjectivities. Rather than the distanced, silenced, objectified mode of temporary  participation.

The result is a sculpture that is a receptacle of negotiation, a choral self-portrait that depicts Althamer's as much as it captures an image of those who created him. 

Gioni, Massimiliano, The Hero with a Thousand Faces : Pawel Althamer. 2008

For Yuen Fong Ling, Althamer's image, as surrogated in figurative sculpture, through a delegated performance of participants, both united in a personal and political struggle with society and the realms of its reality.

Althamer's use of the open form methodology aims to democratize the formation of authorship in the artwork. Through the inclusion and collaboration of participants, Althamer has gradually developed the participant's active role and position. 

This 'delegated performance' as described by Claire Bishop allows Althamer to exercise his personal politics and his participants right to choose to partake in an art event, furthermore Althamer begins to physically manifest an object containing the participant's innate subjectivity. Bishop comments an agreement with the artist's own intent versus the participant's own inherent being. Participant's as active producers, influenced, even taught by the artist, potentially conditions the participant, in view of a pedagogic project of the artist.

Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art  and the Politics of Spectatorship.2012

The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn.

John Elderfield.

To reveal what has been discovered.

Subjects enlarged across a surface as a condensation of carnal knowledge.

Thinking In Drawing.

Drawing from life, at the threshold of painting.

When we talk of drawing as spontaneous, we refer not only to the sense of immediacy produced by the finest drawings, but also to how a drawing's very identity presents itself to us, to an extent beyond that of any other work of visual art, as the direct record of the movement of the artist's hand.

A drawing is intrinsically the record of movement in time. Hence, it can indeed be more purely impulsive than any other work of visual art-unless another such work partakes of drawing as its very structure. More often, of course, a drawing comprises a network of recorded movements, which tend usually to slow in their accumulation. And our appreciation of a drawing like this requires that we retrace these movements, their duration and their accumulation, from the evidence they have left behind.

Diebenkorn is always composing his subjects, ordering their shape. Forms are overlapped by other forms to weld everything together in that particular pose. If the model is shown  performing some action, she performs it very slowly indeed. Usually, she is immobile. The eroticism of the body reveals itself simply by holding a pose-in its intermittence: in the intermittence of hands brought together and held for that moment in that  particular pose: in the intermittence of that part of the body suddenly revealed by limbs as they form that particular pose.

We should notice at this point that, by and large, Diebenkorn's best figure drawings are frontally composed. He faces his subjects and enlarges them across the surface, sacrificing proportion if necessary for pattern, thereby discovering a sequence of contours-some arabesque, some geometric, that read almost autonomously as condensations of carnal knowledge. 

We should also notice that while Diebenkorn faces his subjects, they are generally do not have him. His models usually look down or away. They seem self-absorbed. Part of the reason for this is that Diebenkorn does not want to make psychological contact with the face. He wants us to grasp the meaning of the work from the whole composition and not have it filtered through the personality of the model.

This is also why he spreads a sense of corporeality beyond the contours of the model: to give the sheet as a whole living vibrancy. But there is another reason. It can be discovered in the kind of self-absorption his models display. They are not melancholy, or secretive, or brooding, or even bored. They seem quietly contented, self-assured, harmonious, at peace of mind. They may look distorted, altered from what we expect to see. But  they tell of the harmoniousness of their condition.

But drawing, unlike painting, picks out the artist's preferences at once. His means are immediately at hand and therefore his meanings are given immediately, the artist is forced to deal with the model's reality, to emotional reactions to particular things.

The drawings in question include a great series in charcoal, heavily worked and extensively revised until they comprise condensed symbols for the body of the model; some works in pencil and crayon where an almost geometric scaffold of echoing severe lines composes the body of the model and some boldly designed, extremely flattened studies of this drawing studio itself.

Each work on paper is a prolonged meditation on what drawing can accomplish at the threshold of painting. 

The drawing insistently designs or divides the field, which partakes of the density of drawing.

Firstly, something done on paper cannot be worked quite as long as something on canvas. There will be a point beyond which the surface can be bruised no more and will actually collapse in final failure. Some of the works on paper, therefore are extremely spare: the smallest possible number of notations that will suffice to realize their composition. However since the bruises do show more on paper than on canvas, perhaps the work on paper should not dodge them after all but, instead accumulate them, making such work far more explicitly a record of their accumulation than a painting can be. Diebenkorn prefers shiny, coated paper and he also uses masking devices to preserve the sections of a drawing he likes while scrubbing out others. Often this generates new imagery.

Secondarily, something done on paper, however need not be wiped clean if it is not working. Neither does it have to be painted out. It can be patched. This option is not available to painting: not Diebenkorn's painting. Some of his works on paper therefore comprise dense sandwiches of paper. But they are never collages that draw attention to the disparate character of their parts. For the point is always to adjust each fragment until the parts disappear into the whole. In the works of this kind, the artist does physically, materially, what he does more often by adjustment of linear boundaries: amalgamate a corpus of parts. At times, he will thus enlarge a work in its making, something impossible for him in painting.

Thirdly, the different scale of the small size is the scale of things close to hand. It is the scale established by the hand and the wrist and by the arm bent rather than extended. Everything is closer and more enclosed. Everything is therefore more intimate as well. And yet, the intimacy of these small works is that of research done privately but for publication, almost like scientific experiments. They do , in fact, test ideas. And while no painting will duplicate what a work on paper discovers, parts of paintings will remember parts of works on paper. Images discovered in these independent drawings are constantly cross-bred, hybridized and new drawings are grown out of them. Diebenkorn's images on paper are constantly dissected and reassembled from one work to the next, altering in the process.

Clay based inquiry around  practice led/speculative making.

Filling the Red Kiln, re-visiting/re-presentation of 'clay works'.

Making Thresholds/Dialogues between the container and the contained.

 Outpost 260823

Clay-Drawings at Bayfield.

Observatory/Propositional Assemblage.

Animacy, surfaces/things that have opened up their surroundings.

The living body is only sustained thanks to continually taking in materials from its surroundings, and in turn discharging them, in the processes of respiration and metabolism. 

Yet as with pots, the same processes that keep it alive also render it forever vulnerable to dissolution. That is why constant attention is necessary, and also why bodies and other things are poor containers. Left to themselves, materials can run riot. Pots crumble; bodies disintegrate. It takes effort and vigilance to hold things together, whether pots or people.

Bodies on the run, Tim Ingold. 

Itinerant Correspondences/Drawing and Telling. 

Thinking From Things.

To think from materials, to find the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow.

Deleuze and Guattari.

The living work of art, however, is not an object but a thing, and the role of the artist is not to give effect to a preconceived idea but to follow the forces and flows of material that bring the work into being. To view the work is to join the artist as a fellow traveller, to look with it as it unfolds in the world, rather than behind it to an originating intention of which it is the final product. The vitality of the work of art, then, lies in its  materials, and it is precisely because no work is ever truly 'finished' (except in the eyes of curators and purchasers, who require it to be so) that it remains alive.

Tim Ingold.

The Telling of Stories is an Education of Attention.

Making Through Anticipatory Foresight.

To tell, in short, is not to explicate the world, to provide the information that would amount to a complete specification, obviating the need for would-be practitioners to inquire for themselves.

It is rather to trace a path that others can follow. Thus the hunter, educated in stories of the chase, can follow a trail; the trained archaeologist can follow the cut; the competent reader can follow the line of writing. Making their ways in the company of those more knowledgeable than themselves, and hearing their stories, novices grow into the knowledge of their predecessors through a process that could best be described as one of 'guided rediscovery' rather than receiving it ready-made through some mechanism of replication and transmission.

Tim Ingold.

In place of specification without guidance, the story offers guidance without specification.

Sensing Spaces

Making

Thresholds

The Materials of Life

Are you interested in the idea of threshold?

What is interesting in the world are the grey areas. So what I have designed is a threshold. It's not possible for an architect to design a space – such a concept does not exist. Instead, we design the thresholds and the limits: the walls, windows, doors and so on. And people have feelings about these elements and put them together and create the sensation of a space. I'm interested in designing the elements that give the impression of a space – which is why I like doors.

The dialogue between the container and the contained, the boundaries and the space within them, is an obsession in contemporary culture, where the node is more important than the object. That's why architecture must work at the limits, not invent the shape and language but straddle two worlds, on the knife edge.

A door is usually part of a wall, but you have extracted this element from the wall.

Kate Goodwin, Alvaro Siza. Sensing Spaces. 2014.

Telling By Hand.

The Humanity of the Hand.

The Eyes of the Skin.

Jacques Derrida holds that the proper function of the eyes is not to see but to weep. Behind the veil of tears that blurs the vision of the sighted, the eyes can tell of grief, loss and suffering, but also of love, joy and elation. Even the blind can weep.

Figure 2.3 Consciousness, materials, image, object: the diagram

Making/Flow of Consciousness/Materials into and across Image/Object

Experience can only be understood between mind and body or across them in their lived conjuction.

Merleau-Ponty. 

Telling By Hand.

The Tacit Dimension : That we can  know more than we can tell.

Polanyi is primarily interested in what it means to know, his reflections of personal knowledge assume that telling is tantamount to putting what one knows into words, in speech or writing, and that this entails two things: specification and articulation.

Michael Polanyi.

Tim Ingold, interested in 'performativity' what it means to tell, going beyond the 'predictive' nature of  what it means to know.

Ingold argues that we can tell of what we know through practice and experience, precisely because telling is itself a modality of performance that abhors articulation and specification.

The figure of the silent craftsman who is struck dumb when asked to tell of what he does, or how he does it, is largely a fiction sustained by those who have a vested interest in securing an academic monopoly over the spoken and written word.

Specifications provide information about the specified, about the materials to be used, about parts and their dimensions, about movements to be made. They define a project. But stories issue from moving bodies and vital materials, in the telling. They lay down an itinerary. It is precisely because both their knowledge and their practice have the same itinerant character that ,in storytelling, practitioners can bring them into correspondence with one another.