Wednesday, 10 April 2024

Intimus/Spatial Practices : Drawing, Body Specificity, Space-Time, Place.

Outpost 300124

The Dematerialized Space of the Image.





Drawing does not proceed from the object of perception, because the drawing 'itself' is desperate to keep hold of an absence – it all began with a silhouette of a shadow – on the wall.


The act of drawing dismantles consciousness and plunges the self into a zone of sensation and experience. No longer expressing the history and intentions of a subject, or the closures of representation. The work/drawing becomes thought that thinks itself through the material. 


What drawing produces/proposes is a confrontation with the real of experience, prior to signification or the subject. It induces a 'sense'/'feeling' that stands in critical and often destructive relation to pre-existing codes of visual language or modes of interpretation.


To draw becomes to embody and manifest movement, which is neither the rhetoric of motion nor a parody of eros, but rather that what keeps the imaginary in the state of possibility and allows it to be both diachronic and synchronic, markings in times feeling.


In drawing there is no distinction between inside and outside. 

In drawing we are no longer in the realms of distinctions.

There is no inside-out and vice-versa, because the threshold and its distinction was never passed.


The harmony of marks touches body and matter. Harmony determines transparency; it maintains the  metonymic character of desire because it temporarily annuls the distinction between imaginary and image, between the labyrinth and elaboration. The imaginary keeps its own status of impalpability and moves in the interstitial where it loses the confines of here and now, inside and outside. 

Stella Santacatterina.


Drawing into a corporeal sense of place.

Marks in 'times' feeling.

An image that adequately expresses both the efficacy and the temporiness of the phenomenon joining a diffuse invisible flow of energy that wends its way ceaselessly through the world, animating it as it goes.

Vital Nourishment.

Departing from Happiness.

Francois Jullien.


Nonsense drawing is about remaining in the simplicity of our origins, free from concepts and representations that veil things. The nonsense drawing is becoming thought.

Inside This Clay Jug.

Jackie Leven.


A vessel that still contains a quantum of energy.

The Egyptian Pot.

Hans Coper.


Samsara, a beauty fed on emptiness.

Sadhana, bearing the difficulties of existence.

Butades on loss, her lyrical and indexical inscription.

The awakening of inert objects (a table, a forest, a person that plays a certain role in the environment) which, emerging from their stability, transform the place where they lay motionless into the foreignness of their own space. 


Stories thus carry out a labour that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. 

They also organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces.

A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.

The Practice of Everyday Life. 

Michel de Certeau. 1984  


Drawing as actualizations of spaces, a spatializing frenzy of inscriptions becoming a textual place.

Drawings on narrative actions that organize feeling and their perspectives determined by a phenomenology of existing in the world; producing a graphic of actions and findings that are indicative to a situated body within the space of a practiced place.


INTIMUS.

Interior Design Theory Reader.

Drawing On Body Specificity/Space-Time/Place

What is explored as distinct spatial experiences, how is text narration explored as a negotiator between that which is seen, mapped and stable, and that which is experienced, toured and individuated.


Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.

Georges Perec. 1999.

The Apartment.

Georges Perec, renowned for his literary work, takes time to question the banal and mundane activities occurring in the spaces of our inhabitation. In 'The Apartment' he discloses the ordinariness of space when considered alongside functionality of room requirements, particularly when mapped through a slice of time. Against this method of narration, Perec proposes several other spatial layouts generated by either functional relationships between rooms, or the functioning of senses, or days of the week, or thematic arrangements.

Every apartment consists of a variable, but finite, number of rooms.

Each room has a particular function.

It would seem difficult, or rather it would seem derisory, to question these self-evident facts. Apartments are built by architects who have very precise ideas of what an entrance-hall, a sitting-room (living-room, reception room), a parents' bedroom, a child's room, a maid's room, a box-room, a kitchen, and a bathroom ought to be like.

It's not hard to imagine an apartment whose layout would depend, no longer on the activities of the day, but on functional relationships between the rooms. It takes a little more imagination no doubt to picture an apartment whose layout was based on the functioning of the senses.

In sum, a room is a fairly malleable space.

I don't know, and don't want to know, where functionality begins or ends. It seems to me in any case, that in the ideal dividing-up of today's apartments functionality functions in accordance with a procedure that is unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral. The activities of the day correspond to slices of time, and to each slice of time there corresponds one room  of the apartment.


Inside Fear : Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings.

Anne Troutman.

I do not believe the house is a safe place. For me, it is a collision of dream, nightmare, and circumstance, a portrait of the inner life. The primal shelter is also the site of primal fears. Its interiors are a map of the conscious and unconscious, with conscious securities and insecurities visible in the main rooms, and unconscious ones lurking in smaller, peripheral spaces. There is danger in the house.

In this semi-autobiographical account of childhood spaces, Anne Troutman suggests that dwelling holds an intimate, mirror-like relationship so that we dwell in the home and the home dwells in us. This Freudian connection, dividing and connecting inner and outer selves, gathers hidden spaces with visible house, and cloaks the visual with other senses such as fear, terror, fright and anxiety. Discussed this way the storyteller's relived world is contingent on conscious and unconscious associations that redefine the interior through psychological space.

Intimus, Interior Design Theory Reader. Mark Taylor and Julieanne Preston.

Spatial Stories.

Spatial practices concern everyday tactics, they are part of them, from the alphabet of spatial indication, the beginning of a story  of which the rest is written by footsteps, to the daily news, to legends and myths. These narrative adventures, simultaneously producing geographies of actions and drifting into the commonplaces of an order, do not merely constitute a 'supplement' to pedestrian  enunciations and rhetorics. They are not satisfied with displacing  the latter and transposing them into a field of language. In reality, they organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it.

Michel de Certeau.


Drawing Space/Discourses of The Body.

Enunciative Focalizations ( the indication of the body within discourse).

Markings, utterances and graphic gestures caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a form dependent upon many different conventions, that are situated by the act of the present, (nowness) and modified by the translations/transformations caused by successive inscriptions and their contexts.  

Situated selves, of being situated by desire, indissociable from a direction of existence and implanted in the space of a landscape.

There are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences, the perspectives of which are determined by a 'phenomenology' of existing in the world.

M Merleau-Ponty.


Michel de Certeau establishes 'Spatial Practice' as the proliferation of metaphors/spatial trajectories (stories that traverse and organize places, that link and select, that can make sentences and itineraries). He is interested in the role narrative plays in both reading and acting in space as a theatre of actions that accumulates meaning and relevance over and through time, and that spatial experiences are specific to each body, time and place.


A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated/performed by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. 

In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way , an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.


Printed Drawing.

Figural markings and frottage on cyanotype surface.


Languages that inform on/and interrogate drawings.


DRAWING FORMAL ELEMENTS and vocabulary.

Found document, hand-out for students AS/A2 Brockwood Art Barn.


1. Format: portrait, landscape.

2. Scale and Proportion: Systems of measurement:

Calculating relative size by counting.

Outstretched pencil covered by thumb.

Linking up with markers suggested by other objects and intersecting lines within the environment.

3. Dynamic relationship: The straightness or curve of the central axis; relative angles of neck, limbs, to the rest of the body or surrounding furniture etc.

4. Composition and design: point of focus (close-up, distant view) featuring human figure in space. The whole sheet of paper must be owned - even where there are no marks, this is still part of the composition – positive and negative space.

5. Perspective: When drawing from life we translate what we see as 3D spatial relationships onto 2D picture plane. Recessional space or depth in a drawing is achieved through correct calculation of: Vanishing Points, Horizontal Line, Foreshortening, Volume.

6. Line quality: Outline is only used where a shadow is visible, very often not necessary.

7. Pattern: Mark making; repeated elements that contribute to the structure of the whole; organisation of the elements or parts, in the way that feathers are arranged in a bird's wing, or the leaves on branches of a tree.

8. Tonal values: Greyscale; highlight, shadow; colour of ground; distribution of weight in terms of light and darks.

9. Colour: Wet and dry media; combining complementary, secondary, tertiary relationships; also (as with tonal values) hues, tints and shades.


Helgate Proposal Review.

Anglian Potters.

Why clay?

How has clay shaped you?

Ceramics

Visual Fine Art.

Teaching in Art Education

Praesentia/Drawing and Assemblage : Cyanotype Exposure/Trace.

Drawing is an art of presence and transparency, of phenomena close at hand unfolding.



The Primal Scene of Drawing.

Monday, 8 April 2024

Between the Shape of Light and the Shape of Things.

Outpost 220324

Japanese Pottery/Raku Bowls.








Drawing, the layers create an aggregate, they are generative rather than descriptive.

Carlo Scarpa.


Between the Shape of Light and the Shape of Things.


I believe that it is art that makes us grasp the reality of the world. It is the effort that human beings have made since the beginning. To make clear for themselves through forms, their own existence.

Carlo Scarpa. 1978


Scarpa finds rhymes/waves, conversations between the structural forms and the shapes of the objects, he designed with transformation and decay in mind. He knew how to wait, how to let ageing and patina complete their work.


The creative consciousness of collapsing time and of death marks all Scarpa's strategies and narratives. At Castelvecchio he leaves great distances between objects allowing them to converse with one another solitarily. His job he believed was not to show himself but to show the works and lend them sight, intensifying their resonance with one another and setting up dialogues between them and the architecture.


Light as a Mutable Presence.


Scarpa needed a light that moves, to give depth to the surface of the casts and to lead them into conversation. I set up my work by pairing like images, to show the different character of pieces as the fall of light changes, not to show light is brought in, but to account for its effects. Each work becomes solitary, tranquil but together they engage in a distant conversation, a little distracted as if in a world of their own. They look at one another from their private pools of illumination.

Guido Guidi.



And what of the present?


The present has no duration, when I measure time, I measure impressions, modifications of consciousness.

Saint Augustine.


Few architects have dealt with the kind of luminosity, reflection and the sheen of materials as  that which preoccupied Scarpa.


The Chapel of St Ignatius.

Steven Holl.


Architecture holds the power to inspire and transform our day-to-day existence. The everyday act of pressing a door handle and entering into a light washed room can become profound when experienced through sensitized consciousness. For Holl to hear, feel and see these physicalities is to become a subject of the senses.


Goethe, one should not seek  anything behind the phenomena, they are lessons themselves.


The spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola argues for a philosophical interpretation of the senses. This work preceding later writings on phenomenology by 300 years, critically re-orders the hierarchy  of the five senses. Hearing becomes the most refined sense, while sight the traditionally dominant sense comes third after touch.


A Gathering of Different Lights.

Vision.

Realization.

Radiance/Illumination.

The Haptic Realm.

Studies in Light.








Steven Holl in 'Questions of Perception' describes a phenomenology of architecture that argues for a heightened development of spatial and experiential dimensions through individual reflection on the senses and perception. Holl comments on the need to open ourselves to perception, we must transcend the mundane urgency of 'things to do'. We must try to access that inner life that reveals the luminous intensity of the world, only through solitude can we begin to penetrate the secrets around us. An awareness of one's unique existence in space is essential in developing a consciousness of perception.

Sunday, 7 April 2024

Architectural Abstracts/The Works Subject/Conceptual Resonance







 


Outpost 070723


On The Plane of Feeling.

The Aesthetic Dimension of Individual Human Experience. 

We Are Moved To Think.

Incipient Expressions.


Feeling-with is a force for thought.



A work creates a force for rethinking as much as a force for the experience of sensation's relays towards prearticulation.


One work can have many dynamic forms, many concepts, many feelings or thoughts.


The artist is not the subject, rather prearticulation is.


The Work's Subject

Is Its Dynamic Form

Its Valuation

Its Conceptual Resonance

Its Diagram.


Activating new parameters for thought.

The force of feeling-things becoming into existence.


To posit a subject for feeling means, engaging with the creative from the outside. This taking form is less the formation of a concrete identity than the culmination and residue of a process.


The Work creates its own subject, its subject is the force of becoming it proposes.


Feeling is power's compulsion of composition.

Whitehead 1929/1978.


The compulsion to compose is an aesthetic drive, a will towards sensation, a will to power-feeling.


Becoming-Bodies Feel-With The World.


Amanda Baggs feels-the-world. Watch her reading a book, she touches it, puts her face into it, listens to the pages rustling, smells it, looks at it. Through her the book becomes conjunctive, valued within a complex responsive environment. By culling the bookness from the book, Baggs makes the field of its musicality felt, its texture, its force of becoming not only as an object to be read but as a relation to be lived.


By feeling the book, Baggs brings the book into relation with a force of prearticulation that exceeds the book-as object.


Erin Manning.



Concepts appear/manifest-themselves as forces of expression in its incipiency.


The Multiple Sense Of Concepts.


There is no event,

No phenomena,

Word,

or Thought 

Which Does Not Have Multiple Sense.


A thing has many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it.

Deleuze. 1993.


Concepts value the rhythmic pressure of feeling/thinking with the work/world.


The concept is a gear-shift mechanism that acts on blocks of sensation, oscillating between thought and articulation, it pulsates between the actual and virtual realms. On the virtual stratum concepts propel the becoming event of thought, they feel its force of creation. On the plane of composition concepts articulate the dynamic form of prearticulation, they express the feeling of force.


The theoretical object as a concept to express the force and feeling of inquiry.

The Stick Thing, Canterbury School of Architecture/Spatial Practice/Oren Lieberman. 2009.



Robert Irwin

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

2011/2017.


Editor's Note to the Reader.

Beatrice Hohenegger.


The fact that so many manuscripts have until now remained unpublished reinforces Irwin's characterization of his writing as motivated not by communication or publication, but rather by a desire to examine and clarify core questions that he was pursuing at key moments in his career.


Introduction 

Irwin's Writing.

Matthew Simms.


In a statement published in 1998, Robert Irwin emphasized that his essays, were not written in order to communicate, I am a visual artist, not a writer, or to refute criticism, writing was for me a means to examine the questions that were turning in my head concerning the 'why' of art, with the intention of clarifying the process of making. Together, they reflect relatively well the development of my thinking and the guiding idea of my work: the potential of each person to perceive the surrounding world from a unique aesthetic perspective. 


Notes toward a Conditional Art brings together for the first time Irwin's published and unpublished writings. While the texts span a wide range from letters to project proposals, the vast majority are personal ruminations, sometimes set down in draft form and other times worked up into fully developed essays. They cover a diverse conceptual terrain including, among other things, Irwin's philosophy of teaching, the lessons of modern art, and the artist's understanding of art as a form of pure inquiry. Above all, this book makes clear that starting in the 1960s and continuing up to the present, writing has been and remains an integral element of Irwin's multifaceted art practice.




White Washed Spaces:

Hungate/Water.


Provisional Objects/Architectures.

Porous Fired Clay-Drawings as Spaces.

Thinned Gesso, Sanded/Abraded Surfaces.

Lead  Sheet/Glaze/Slip/Batt Wash/Opal Glass.

Compositional Tilt-up Pieces/Vessels.


Figural Body/Water on Chinese Paper.

Hybrid Body-Trace Drawing.

Indian Ink/Cyanotype Process.

Mounted/Inter-hanging/Canvas/Screen Mesh.

White Conduit/Nylon Line.


Re-Visiting The Human Outline.

Chinese Paper/Thinned Gesso/Wax/Lime


On The Plane Of Feeling.

We are moved to think through a conceptual unfolding a reaching towards-expression.

Through feeling, thought begins to take form as a conceptual force.


The complex interplay of the transversal passage between thought-concept-articulation-


For Whitehead, feeling is the pulsion that transduces thoughts into becoming concepts.


Feeling is a pulsion to think, a sensitivity that situates thought in the world. Through feeling, thought's affective tonality is foregrounded.


Affective tone is an environmental resonance of a  feeling-in-action, as a vibrantile force that makes a resonant milieu felt. (The Hungate, Norwich, Propositional Workings)


Feeling Is Affect Bleeding Into Thought.

Activating complexities on the verge of expression. At the threshold of thought as creation, feeling provokes an aperture for that which has not been thought.


Thought is a lure for feeling that prearcticulates the virtual inflections of its incipient expression.


Feeling-with is not without thought, it is a force for thought.


Sunday, 31 March 2024

A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment : Assemblages/Relationscapes/Things exist rooted in the flesh (R. S. Thomas)

Blueprints,Texts and Materials/Building on Concerns
Toward a New Interior.

Relationscapes
Movement, Art, Philosophy. Erin Manning. 2009

What Moves as a Body Returns as a Movement of Thought

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














Curatorial Architectures/Assemblages : Transactive through interventions/a sensorium for display.

Matter/Making in Space : Passages in Sculpture

Working Notes 2018/19

Curatorial Architectures/Assemblages

Speculative Spatial/Curatorial Practices incorporating Fine Art and Architecture.


The Studio is no longer a retreat but it now integrates.

It is all exterior.

Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist








Constructing active research material that becomes transactive through interventions and installations of display.


Blurring art and the everyday rituals of creative enterprise and survival.


Seeking to create innovative and immersive exhibition formats/situations that seek to engage a discursive and informed audience.


Building Relationscapes

Movement, Art, Philosophy 


Sensorium

Embodied Experience

Technologies and Contemporary Art 


Erin Manning

Caroline A, Jones


Playing with INTERTEXTUALITY

Setting the Stage MAKE SPACE

Immersive

Alienated

Interrogative

Residue

Resistant

Adaptive



Interactive Workshop

Exhibition

Presentation

Open Texts


RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS

ARCHITECTURE, ART and Design Interiors


URBAN FALLOW (10 Days in the Laundry)


OPERATIVE DESIGN

CONDITIONAL DESIGN


ON MAKING SPACE

THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS

BODY, EMOTION and the Making of Consciousness


Art Practices : the chaos of subjectivity and the organisation of  a creative environment.