Colouring Light : Brian Clarke : An Artist Apart/Unframing Architecture

Don't Forget The Lamb : Brian Clarke

Filtered Light/Boundary Transgressions.

Between art and information/photography and the invisible

Vectors of Subjectivation

The excitement that accompanies the darkroom/laboratory genesis in which something entirely unexpected is bought to light and comes across undiminished.

Colliding Particles of Reality : Darkroom Alchemy.

An affective in-between that activates an intermediary of relations.

Wim Delvoye : Gothic Works

Brian Clarke

Lead/Lamb

Glass/Lamina

Stained Glass, Painting, Appropriation or/and Collage.

Lead Based Drawings/Lead as the ground of the work.

A lot of people are interested in skulls, but not nearly as much today as in the past.

The skull is not only a memory of who we were but also an image of what we will be.

I think it will probably engage artists as a subject for as long as art exists.

You realize that in the midst of living, death is with us, and I wanted to stay with the skulls.

Brian Clarke.

The Passage of Flesh : Ann Mandelbaum

Whispers of Immortality, the skull beneath the skin, TS Eliot.

Layers Of Meaning : Martin Harrison.

Only colour-happiness with glass culture.

Light permeates everything and is alive in crystal.

Glass brings usthe new era; brick culture is a burden...

Paul Scheerbart, Glasarchitektur, 1914.

Immateriality and Transparency

Technique and Expression in Glass Architecture

The Poetics of Glass

Lightworks : Layered Constructions/Interspaces and Transitions

Simulacrum : Installation in the New Building E. ON Eergie AG Munich.

Andreas Horlitz, 2006.

What thrills me about light is the involuntary subjective response that one has to its expression against the engineering of a building, against a tree, against skin.

But more than anything else it's the way light passes through the membranous filter of leaves.

I suppose I wanted to engage the same kind of disciplines that an architect has to deal with when he's building, because I feel what I do is so integrally married to architecture.

In a way what I'm doing is coming as close as I can to creating my own architectural experience without the interference of an architect.

Lamina : Brian Clarke, 2005.

A thin layer of bone, membrane, a thin plate of tissue, the expanded portion of a leaf

Don't Forget The Lamb : Brian Clarke, 2008.

Lead and Stained Glass

Oil on Canvas

You see stained glass by virtue of the passage of light through it, whereas you see a painting by the light reflected off it. So, in contrast to the static condition of a painting, a stained glass window is in a constant state of change as the day progresses, the clouds move, traffic or people pass by behind it.

Immaterial, Ultramaterial : Architecture, Design and Materials.

Substance, Ron Witte, 2002.

Bodies in Space

Spatial Practice

Spatial Representations

Francesca Woodman : becoming-woman, becoming-imperceptible, 

becoming-a-subject-in-wonder

Lone Bertelsen

We are not in the presence of a passively representative image, but of a vector of subjectivation.

Guattari, 1995.

The figures in Francesca Woodman's photographs often leave the ground, and the photographs themselves seem strangely ungrounded. 

Both the figures and the photographs themselves are mobilised: they become “trans-situational” 

(Massumi,2002) and open up towards “a new space-time” (Irigaray, 1993).

As part of this mobilised opening, Woodman often camouflages the body and/or moves it in front of the lens during exposure.

Camouflage : Neil Leach, 2006.

A Theory of Camouflage.

Camouflage is not restricted to the visual domain. It can be enacted within the domains of other senses, especially smell and hearing.

Camouflage can therefore be read as an interface with the world. It operates as a masquerade that re-presents the self, just as self representation through make-up, dress, hair style etc., is a form of self re-presentation.

Camouflage refers to both revealing and concealing. Camouflage delineates a spetrum of degrees of definition of the selfb against a given background.

Mimesis, Sensuous Correspondence, Sympathetic Magic, Mimicry, Becoming, Death

Narcissism, Identity, Paranoia, Belonging, Sacrifice, Melancholia, Ecstasy,

Mimesis :Paradox or Encounter

Jane Bennett, 2018.

Skin-Surface-Subjectivity.

The body is the origin point for a discussion of spatial practice.

The Roman Years : Isabella Pedicini

Between Flesh and Film, 2012

Francesca Woodman

Gordon Matta-Clark

Spatial Agency and Relationscapes

Yves Klein

Works-Writings

Klaus Ottmann, 2010.

The Battle between Line and Colour.

The Performative Body

Few things are as fascinating as an imprint. An imprint is the trace of a presence-within-absence, the substratum or deposit of a being who no longer exists, the mark left by a moment beyond recall.

Such impressions pose the problem of being and nothingness, fullness and emptiness, presence and absence. Far from seeking to sidestep that problem, Klein's anthropometries address themselves to the heart of the issue.

Klein strove for dematerialization, for the emancipation from matter, in order to overcome the predicament of the art of his time. He ultimately abandoned both pictorial content and form, immersing himself in the boundlessness of pure colour.

Since re-presentation is a cultural artifice, presentation alone can sustain an 'authentic natural realism'. The imprint preserves the memory of the contact. It is a natural 'inscription' preceding writing. 

The aesthetic of the trace is opposed to the aesthetic of mimesis.

It counters the mimetic with a presence.

Body traces, traces of 'health', are records of a pristine state of life.

Seeing chromaticity arising from the modulation of light.

Pierre Soulages/Jean-Dominique Fleury : Conques 1987-1994.

The result was a translucent non transparent glass, that let the light through but not the view: a glass that diffused the light not by reflecting it on its surface but from its very texture.

This modulation of the transparency was the natural consequence of the uneven distribution of ting bits of glass of different sizes, and of their partly “deglazing” during fusion.

Maps of Interior Space

A Swimmer Between Two Worlds, Francesca Woodman.

Katherine Conley, 2008.

Extract, on the nature of  photographic light.

The Self-Representational Photography of Francesca Woodman : Harriet Katherine Riches.

Clementina Hawarden/Francesca Woodman

Both photographers' imagery centres on the portrayal of interior space in which the borders and limits of that space are constantly affirmed and re-iterated. 

Staging their female models against walls, learning against fireplaces, positioned adjacent to thresholds and doors, or gazing wistfully through the glazed panes of windows, the interiority suggested in each woman's imagery is always held in tension with what lies beyond, emphasising the boundaries of public and private space.

Riches, it is their shared manipulation of light to exaggerate a sense of physical containment that my interest here lies. In both women's work, light is not only that medium of clarification and development necessary to the photograph itself, but conversely also becomes the means through which a subject is obscured, contained or constricted.

Becoming

The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden.

Collecting Loss, Becoming Decay, Francesca Woodman, Sally Mann,

Carol Mavor

Projecting Touch

Francesca Woodman's Late “Blueprints”

Emotion, Space and Society

An intimate mode of looking

Woodman insists on the sheer impossibility of dividing the problems of the self from the problems of the medium, and in so doing it compels an intimacy, an inquiry between photograph and viewer.

Francesca Woodman's photographs, Jane Simon, 2010. 

Francesca Woodman's Dark Gaze : Claire Raymond.

The End of Art and the Question of Legibility.

Outside In : Francesca Woodman's

Rooms of Her Own

Johannes Binotto

To divert our gaze from Woodman's body and consider what is going on next to, behind, and around it. Indeed Woodman's photographs always also capture that other; she incessantly switched angles of view and photographed what was beyond her body: the scene of the action, the room itself, calling on us to turn our attention to the spatial situations in her pictures.

National Galleries Scotland

Self Deceit, Eel Series, Untitled Providence,

Francesca Woodman

The Raw Seduction of Flesh

Photographs by Connie Imboden, 1999.

Human Figure Drawing : Daniela Brambilla 

Drawing Gestures, Postures and Movements

The Artist's Reality : Mark Rothko

Philosophies of Art

Teacher's Manual Brockwood Park School

Enquiry and Investigation, Krishnamurti.

John Berger

Bento's Sketchbook

Storytelling, the invisible and the hidden, protagonists are survivors.

Their stories remain unfinished, because they involve sharing, because in their telling a body refers as much to a body of people as to an individual, for them mystery is not something to be solved but to be carried.

The arts, as technologies, are carried along in the same unpredictable history. Their very finality is uncertain. How then can one found a school of art? Perhaps precisely by bringing together artists, that is to say, technicians, who are no longer assured of disciplinary borders, who explore the frontier zones, the limit zones, the in-betweens. . . .

A paradoxical institution, to be sure, since it institutes a decompartmentalization , giving a place and a frame to operations of unframing.

Sylviane Agacinski, IN-BETWEEN (a notion which is neither a concept nor an image, Tschumi)

At some time, perhaps many times in his life , every man is likely to meet with a thing in art or nature or human life or books which astonishes and gives him a profound satisfaction, not so much because it is rich or beautiful or strange , as because it is a symbol of a thing which, without the symbol, he could never grasp and enjoy.

Edward Thomas
The Inn/One Green Field

In the course of a lifetime there are few decisive conversations: with a classmate in high school, a father or mother, a best friend, an admired mentor, a person whose newfound presence will shape the rest of our existence.
Alain Fleischer, LE  FRESNOY : WHY THAT? WHY THERE?
Bernard Tschumi : Architecture In/Between




Architecture, Light, Art,

The real drawing takes place in the mind, Brian Clarke

Drawing in a volume, Zaha Hadid

Ceramic Constructions : Fired Surfaces/Architectural Forms supporting Hidden Interiors.

 

Melancholy Landscapes : The Plague/Vermilion Sands

Film Collages, hybrid processes and temporal states
Liminality : Literature/Philosophy/Visual Art

Landscapes : entering/intruding/emerging (holga819)
Existential Gestures : Looking away from the sea
Ballard : Vermilion Sands  :  Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices

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

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

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

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

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

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

06/04/2020 

Leylines : Drawing frame, lead strip and drawings.

Leylines : Drawing frame, lead strip and drawings., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

25/10/2012 

P1213401red photogram.

P1213401red photogram., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

SPATIAL INTELLIGENCE through the conscious use of personally inflected mental space

Architecture that forces us to confront our own spatial intelligence by moving us so much that we recall the eidetic origination of our own mental space.(Schaik,2008:80)

"Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space."

Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space.

The phenomenology of space - the matter of how we experience it.

Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space (space and reverie), The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Poetics as an evolving and discursive system of dialogues that acknowledges environmental changes, of other spatial narratives and histories, and things that are not just about place and space.

Thinkers and Vessel Makers

Studio Practice : Social Sensing/Innerness Studio Practice

UK based Visual Artist using drawing and experimental photography to explore issues around embodiment and existential space. Interested in creating spatial charged architectural interventions using glass and ceramics as conductive materials to articulate introspective spaces, surfaces and structures between buildings.

Theory and Analysis

Craft and Design/Interior Design Building, Dwelling, Thinking Scripting Rooms/Spaces and Events

The pot promotes an architecture of the soul, of an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination.

Building human presence, to dwell shaped by 'the vocational' (physical and human topography)

Everyday Aesthetics

The Arts : As a Form of Experimental Psychology 

The Play Of Affect/Space and Politics 

Apparatuses and Architectures

Rethinking Materiality/At The Potters Wheel How Things Shape The Mind

Colin Renfrew 

Making

Tim Ingold

The Essential Vessel Natasha Daintry

I think that part of our problem is that it is not easy to talk about sensing, doing and being? They're not concepts as such neat little fixed shiny packages of ideas, but more existential states which shift and move as you inhibit them more amorphous, like clay.

One can speak of this duality of inside and outside but the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable.

Heidegger, Coper. Baldwin, De Waal, Zumthor 

The Potter/The Pot

Where Brain. Body and Culture Conflate Lambros Malafouris

‘Speculations about the first shelters, the relationship between our home and the universe, about spaces that we first use as surrogate houses as we form our spatial histories and our mental space. It is about the contemplative effects of the miniature, about the paradoxical way in which the scale of many of our most cherished monuments can switch in our minds from large to minute- the quality of intimate immensity. It is also about propositions around the complex relationships between inside and outside and the surface between, about the phenomenology of roundness’ (Schaik,2008:86-87)

‘We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called-Architecture, Gardens, Technology- is not important.’

Kengo Kuma.

On Anti-Object: An extended essay that is not so much history or theory as a volume of self-assessment that gives an opportunity for the author to contextualise his own body of work through considered self-reflection.

My purpose in writing this book is to criticise architecture that is self-centred and coercive. 

Kengo Kuma.

‘Like McTieman or the theorist Paul Virilio, Kuma sees new digital and information technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form.(Steele,2008:3)

Beginning as one always does in the middle, in mediis rebus, one experiences a sense of disorientation, a sort of cartographic anxiety or spatial perplexity that appears to be part of our fundamental being-in-the-world. It is an experience not unlike that of Dante, in the opening lines of his Commedia:

Introduction: Spatiality. Robert T. Tally Jr. The New Critical Idiom, Routledge 2013

Midway along the journey of our life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

for I had wandered off from the straight path. (Dante 1984:67)

As a number of critics and theorists have noted, this bewilderment has increased with the modem and especially postmodern condition.

This latest mutation in space-postmodern hyperspace-has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.

(Fredric Jameson 1991:44)

‘My ultimate aim is to erase architecture’ (Kuma,2008:3) 

How then, can architecture be made to disappear?

‘To be precise, an object is a form of material existence distinct from its immediate environment. I do not deny that all buildings, as points of singularity created by humankind in the environment, are to some extent objects. However, buildings that are deliberately made distinct from their environment are very different from those that attempt to mitigate this isolation, and the difference is perceptible to everyone who experiences them.’ (Kuma,2008:Preface)

‘A monument is a form that preserves time through the compression of space, a form in which visual perception is the parameter. A monument is a compression of time and space’ (Kuma,2008:92) Anti Object.

Procedural Architectures : Collected Texts and Diagrams/Images

Organism-Person-Environment

Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture's holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave. Architectural Body

Madeline Gins and Arakawa Working Notes/Holding in Place

Wayfinding/Movements through accumulated research Running scripts, enactments, instances, involvements Collaborative texts, complexity, emergent, discursive

From The Bookcase to The Field Table : Landing Sites of Inquiry 

Camouflage

Neil Leach

For Benjamin, the twentieth century is an age of alienation. Human beings are no longer 'cocooned' within their dwelling spaces. Architectural spaces are no longer reflections of the human spirit. Something has been lost.

Mimesis, 19.

New Concepts of Architecture Existence, Space and Architecture Christian Norberg-Schulz

A child 'concretizes' its existential space. A Philosophy of Emptiness

Gay Watson Artistic Emptiness

Everything flows, nothing remains. Heraclitus

Rethinking Architecture Neil Leach

Figure 1, Sketch by Jacques Derrida for Choral Work project. 343 Foucault, Figure 2 Bentham's Panopticon (1791). 360

Page laid in, The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard, new revised edition, annotations, commentary, illustrations and photos.

Tracing Eisenman

Plenum, juxtaposed to form/haptic values/body absences Robert Mangold

Between moments of 'meaning' lie spaces or blanks of immediate experience. Such blanks are actuality. Usually the blank, the actuality, goes unnoticed because it works so efficiently to differentiate one meaningful event from another. Kubler discussed this in The Shape of Time.

Interactions of the Abstract Body Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson/Heuristic Device

The term 'heuristic' is understood here to denote a method of addressing and solving problems that draws not on logic but on experience, learning and testing. In this regard stories and fictional narratives can be heuristic devices in acting as ideal models that are not to be emulated but which help to situate characters, actions and objects.

Space Between People Degrees of virtualization Mario Gerosa

Adaptive Architectural Design Device-Apparatus

Place Function Adaptation

The second phase of project activity acknowledges that the proposal involves two sites; the landscape of settlement and the artifice of the factory. The design is intended to be a reflection of the conditions of each, so there was a need to work directly with the manufacturing process, at full scale, as early as possible. This would provide an immediate counterpoint to the earlier representations and a necessary part of exploring the manufacturing medium in the context of architectural design. 

Building The Drawing 

The Illegal Architect Immaterial Architecture

Mark Cousins suggests that the discipline of architecture is weak because it involves not just objects but relations between subjects and objects. And if the discipline of architecture is weak, then so, too, is the practice of architects. Architecture must be immaterial and spatially porous, as well as solid and stable where necessary, and so should be the practice of architects.

Jonathan Hill

Index of immaterial architectures Herzog and De Meuron

Natural History

Exhibiting Herzog and De Meuron

We are not out to fill the exhibition space in the usual manner and to adorn it with records of our architectonic work. Exhibitions of that kind just bore us, since their didactic value would be conveying false information regarding our architecture. People imagine that they can follow the process, from the sketch to the final, photographed work, but in reality nothing has really been understood, all that has happened is that records of an architectural reality have been added together.

My studio is a piece of architecture that is silent. The things of which it is made say all and at the same time nothing. Its strength lies in its demanding silence. A stern silence in order to permit works to occur. I imagine that a painting by Newman could be hung there.

The arrival of Beuys in a world that was gradually falling asleep amidst minimalism generated a kind of confusion that was truly excellent for opening up the mind. Comfort vanished, driven away by subversive complexity. 

Speculative architecture

On the aesthetics of Herzog and De Meuron 

Without opposition nothing is revealed ,no image appears in a clear mirror if one side is not darkened

Jacob Bohme, De tribus principii (1619) Reflections on a photographic medium

Memorial to the Unknown Photographer Thomas Ruffs Newspaper Photos Valeria Liebermann

Working Collages Karl Blossfeldt

Anti Object

We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. 

What that form is called architecture, gardens, technology is not important.

Kengo Kuma

NOTE BOOKS, June 2014-January 2015 SEQUENCE OF RESEARCH

Re-Casting THE ABBEY as an INTERIOR SPACE within its own ENVIRONMENT THE EVENT CREATES A NEW BOUNDARY AROUND THE SITE

The research found in my exploratory project has been further developed into the intellectual content of the event itself. To facilitate my organisation of the abbey site I am proposing to initiate detailed design based modifications to the circulation of the site. The project will be made functional from the proposal of an exhibition on-site that would act as a precursory event to gauge interest, support and possible funding partners, whilst also testing out some of the logistics that are specific to this site . Further to the theme and direction of the exhibition I propose to construct components that will make up the interior building spaces of the pavilion/stoa. Whilst investigating the actual experiential sense of place, I am proposing a small number of sensitive intervention/art works that will allow me to become more in tune with the possibility' of inviting leading contemporary' artists.

Clare Tomely, Ceramic Interventions, buried and excavated objects. 

Mark Dion, Objects and Taxonomies from the River Wey

Helena Elflova, Anima and Animus, live re-presentation of the Winchester Cathedral performance.

How much of this research is really relevant to both the structure and assessment of a design orientated course/qualification and the proposal of a project brief designed to produce material to test its own suitability. In the light of these findings it would seem more beneficial to work directly with the subjectivities of aesthetics and materials that can be built into “interiors”. My working life has been centred around the craft disciplines of ceramics and glass, with a supplementary career in the construction of timber frame buildings and latterly in art education. My specialist design skills and knowledge’s rest within these experiences.

Forming and Questioning Outcomes and Outposts around Interior Design.

I create an exploratory body dedicated to things and to the world, of such sensitivity that it invests me to the most profound recesses of myself and draws me immediately to the quality of space, from space to object to the horizon of all things, which is to say a world that is already there.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Designing/Scripting interiors that are by their very nature contingent and unknowable till built.

Drawing as a thinking process towards the dissemination of the brief. 

Creating something that when finished precedes the confinement of its origins.

Clarifying the relation between space and place which contains inherent difficulties in as much as they are necessarily connected (inasmuch as place carries a spatial element within it even while space is also a certain abstraction from out of place), but there has been a pervasive tendency for place to be understood in terms of purely spatial. Jeff Malpas

SPACE- ROOM TO MOVE

or as a verb To Make EMPTY, EVACUATE, EMPTY OUT. 

The Production of Space/Human Agency/Place

PLACE-VILLAGE, TOWN, or OTHER SETTLED LOCALITY.

PLACE-HOME

PLACE-A VERY SPECIFIC FORM OF BOUNDEDNESS/GATHERING

As a gathering of elements that are themselves mutually defined only through the way in which they are gathered together within the place they also constitute.

DESIGN-TO PUT IN PLACE

Place referred to merely in the sense of position or location - usually the location or position of some already identified and determined entity .

Slippages, Anomalies and liminal spaces. Our relationships with space and place.

THE MEMORY OF PLACE

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE UNCANNY

Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape into the body and its experience of the world. Trigg analyses monuments in the representation of public memory', “transitional” concepts such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves.

STOA, a complex topology.

The Stoics took their name from the place where they met. In the stoa they talked as they walked along the long shaded alcoves. The stoa offered shelter from the sun and rain without becoming an enclosed room. It was an in-between and transitional space, neither outside nor inside. Conversations could commence through casual interruptions in a site of gossip, rumour and information

We imagine the stoa as a spatial metaphor for the emergence of critical consciousness within the transnational public sphere. It is a space for criticality without the formal requirement of political deliberation and for sociality without the duty of domestication.

The stoa is the pivot point at which private and public spheres interact and from which the cosmopolitan sense of being and belonging from the vantage point of the stoa, then the telematic linking of two screens in the public squares of Australia and Korea can be viewed in a new light.

The linking of these screens creates a new transnational public space, a space for the creation of a new discourse on the topology of the cosmopolitan imagination in contemporary art practice.

Thinking the place of art within this context is more than jumping from either the local to the global, the private/'oikos to the public/bouletrion, or even the singular to the universal. It is more like the limmal zone of the stoa.

Public Screens and Participatory Public Space. Nikos Papastergiadis, Scott McQuire

Flesh and Stone,

The Body and the City in Western Civilization. Richard Sennett. 1994

Basically a long shed, the stoa contained both cold and hot, sheltered and exposed dimensions; the back side of the shoa was walled in, the front side consisted of of a colonnade which gave access onto the open space of the agora. Though free-standing the stoas were not conceived as independent structures, but rather as edging for the open space of the agora.

Sennett: Flesh and Stone, page 50. 

Bringing Things to Life

Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials Tim Ingold

EWO= The Environment Without Objects

THINKING AT WAVERLEY, as a site of multiplicity and memory. Walking is Thinking, Richard Long

Heidegger-To participate with the thing in its thinging

Our most fundamental architectural experiences, as Juhani Pallasmaa explains, are verbal rather than nominal in form. They consist not of encounters with objects - the facade, door-frame, window and fireplace - but of acts of approaching and entering, looking in or out, and soaking up the warmth of the hearth (Pallasmaa 1996. 45). 

As inhabitants, we experience the house not so much as an object but as a thing. (Ingold 2008: 8)

Curriculum making as the enactment of dwelling in places

One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity, Miwon Kwon. 1997

Marks Gather/Drawings Reserve of Transparency and Presence.

Outpost 220424

Exploratory Practices.

Drawing

Drawing on the awareness of a spatial experiential experience not a totalizing context of framed visual analysis and information.

Life Drawing Session and Sensation.

Before The Tyranny of the Framed Subject.

The Observer and Framed Apparatuses of Display. 

Art Bodies/Pathologies of Flesh/Corporeality  in Contemporary Fine Art Practice.

The Written Nude.

Fiona Banner: Performance Nude

From 'The Birth of Venus' to art school classrooms across the globe, artists have, over time, employed life models in an attempt to capture the essence of the female nude. One such artist is Fiona Banner. As this book Performance Nude illustrates, Banner uses paint and line to portray her models; however, she renders them not in figurative gestures, but in words. Straying further from traditional methods, she specifically uses 'real' women rather than practiced life models as her subject, choosing to capture the strain and tension created in the room by the presence of a novice. Whatever discomfort is revealed in the relationship is tested further by introducing an audience to the room and filming the scene for up to an hour. The effect is at timespoetic, at others searching and critical. By portraying her nudes in this way, Banner questions the difference between looking and perceiving; the separation between experiencing something, and the language we use to describe it.

Un-Constructing the Image/Deconstructive Readings of Totality in Drawing.

Marks produce 'localized instants' of visual proposals/propulsions overcoming things.

Drawings gather 'instants into forms' that are themselves derived from alternative and recomposed durations of experience.

Drawing Surfaces/Sensations : Experiential and Conceptual.

Marks of/Marking : Nowness/Instants/Proximity/Immediacy.

It is the very nature of the 'reserve' that allows drawing to create an 'instant' that proposes the interlacing, interplay of the drawn line as a both dynamic and mutually defining.

The 'reserve' (a spatial perceptual surface) is the apparatus through which drawing actually functions it supports and manifests all of drawings phenomenological values.

Drawing 'transponds' feeling, thinking, seeing,into visual durations of sensations and experience.

Line creates spaces, sensibilities between interior (mind, sensoria, sensations) and exterior (matter, material, surfaces) both of which merge/reciprocate and underpin our existential becomings in the thick of our material existence.

The Searching Line, that proposes, demarcates, launches visual observation and their haptic responses. Schreiter/Lefebrve.

A reserved spatial surface un-folding marks/gestures of both transparency and presence.

Drawing has always been able to treat the whiteness of its surface in a fashion unique to itself. As a 'reserve' an area that is technically part of the image (since we certainly see it) but in a neutral sense. An area without qualities, perceptually present but conceptually absent.

A key consequence of the 'reserve' is that the drawn line  can be released from painting's imperative to bind each and every area into the totality or tyranny of the image as overall design.

Instead 'in drawing' the moment that the line is drawn, it can determine its nature and shape with reference only to the local area to which it immediately belongs. It produces a proximity of a different pictorial logic, that can now assert itself in which the ongoing present time of the drawn line can unfold in its own specific milieu.

Marks on clay surfaces, both plastic and fired, sculptural and pictorial.

Paper Cuts/Collage/Glass/Paint/Line/Filtered Light.

Drawings/Collages/Photography/Performativity.

Woodman/Rodin.

Communicative Space Of Drawing : Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.

 Outpost 081223

The Communicative Space Of Drawing.

Braking down research.

Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.

Re-combinent poetics/praxis.

The Architectural Scriptorium

The Photographic Darkroom.

The Observatory.

Drawing, defined variously as an extruding, a gathering and/or a pulling closer.

The paradoxical nature of drawing is that it is simultaneously a form of recording and invention, somewhere situated between unconstrained gestures and the reiteration of a point of view.

To re-examine the significance of the human body through drawing performatively and architecture.

To understand how buildings affect individuals and communities emotionally, how they provide people with a sense of joy-identity-and place.

Across The Space Of A Page.

Drawing Propositions/Propulsions from the Body.  

Landing Sites: Organism/Person/Environment

The World Opens Up In Front Of Us And Closes Behind.

The experience of our bodies, of what we touch and smell, of how well we are 'centred' is not locked into the immediate present, but can be recollected through time and memory.

Collisions with Bounded Spaces.

The Haptic and Geometric Grid/Centripetal and Centrifugal Radials. 

Haptic choreographies/circulations that create collisions with environments and bodies.

Body 'fit' and movement is affected by the haptic sense and by the tactile qualities of the surface and edges we encounter.

Patterns are composed mostly of paths and places, but it is the system by which they are related, that allows us to make sense of a bounded space.

Place and its choreography of collision that facilitate the transaction between body, memory and architecture, allowing us to dwell in them in the fullest sense.

All architecture in its beginnings was derived from a body-centred sense of space and place. The power of the home, comes from its being the one piece of the world around us which still speaks directly of our bodies as the centre and the measure of that world.

Buildings can encourage a choreography of dynamic relationships among the persons moving within their domains. 

Emily had been playing house in a nook right in the bow of a boat and tiring of it, she was walking rather aimlessly aft – when it suddenly flashed into her mind, that she was SHE.

Gaston Bachelard.

Poetics of Space.

Emily was neither particularly conscious of, nor looking at, the centre from which she was departing – nor the centre towards which she as walking. But she was able to detect her identity in the bodily act of moving from one centre to another, she recognized that SHE had been withdrawn and was now emerging.

How can the personal world of the body provide an alternative to excessive and disorienting events in the environment?

To diminish the importance of the body's internal values is to diminish our opportunity to make responses that remind us of our personal identity.

Memories at the Centre.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Bloomer/Moore.

John Latham.

Drawing/Unbounded Sensations of Time.

The Stage Of Drawing.

Gesture and Act.

Conversation : Avis Newman/Catherine de Zegher.

CdZ: What happens in the space between the gesture moving away from the body, towards everything that is outside of the self, and its landing as a trace on the page?

AN: I was thinking on the way the transmission of thought can depend on the hand and eye, and how this relates to the psychic space in which the mark exists as a potentiality. The effort of the mental and physical act of projection out from the body, away from the body, firstly into the air  -  an act that pitches the hand across the space of the page to site a mark where one intends – is quite a precise act : the most thoughtful and deliberate of acts, which I would speculate harbors a necessary thoughtlessness, in the sense that the certainty of coordinated actions is always in some way provisional and as such relies on the vigilant cooperation between eye and hand.

CdZ: Drawing may also be a recovery of the gesture that allows a discovery for the eye.

AN: To retrieve the gesture in a drawing is to translate the mark back into the action of the hand. It is very pleasurable to recover the gesture in that way and in so doing to follow the action of making. I think that experience in a drawing is very precise.

CdZ: Because the eye manages to discern what has become a trace on paper from a gesture in the air?

AN: Yes, the mind's eye. Perception becomes an act of reconstruction that moves unobtrusively between interior and exterior. I would make an analogy here between how we experience unconscious emotions in the repetition and accumulation of marks (irrespective of what is being drawn) and the intonation, hesitations, and inflections of speech, all of which hold a complexity of messages and can be at odds with what appears to be said, but which nonetheless determine meaning. It seems to me that this occurs independent of sight, as that which is generated by the mind and mediated by perception.

CdZ: In drawing, the space is open-ended and unframed, while the marks are articulated over time and in time.

AN: My concern in making images relates more closely to the conceptual space of drawing, which is less circumscribed  than painting. In particular, the manner in which the boundary or edge comes to define the work is of a completely different order in drawing. In fact, the idea of inside  and outside does not occur in the same way. The marks define a position across the surface and are not registered in relation to limits. As a result the often ambiguous nature of borders can leave a vague uncertainty as to the stability of the image.

CdZ: Can you elaborate on this different notion of boundary?

AN: The natural inclination of mark-making is a relational organisation of individual inscriptive acts, which is not an expression of a unitary world. The frame as the window on the world, which traditionally internalizes the picture. This view creates an illusion  of the unique experience of looking, in the sense that there is coherence to the image. There is not that illusory consistency in drawing, as the space and image are essentially open-ended and speculative. The unframed interferes with any anticipation we might have of ordered limits or completion, and suggests the possibility that something is missing and will always elude our attention, because it cannot be framed. It is the uncertainty of the edge and how it meets the real that I find fascinating.

CdZ: Drawing is thus not to do with perceptual illusionism, but with infinite space as mental possibility. Is the drawing itself, the ground, a space of transience?

AN: There is no pressure from the outside inwards; in drawing, it bis all pressure from the inside outwards. And the idea of boundary then becomes problematic, our boundary as we project it onto the work. The physical structure of a drawing is always conditional, and when one looks, for example, at the drawing by John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17'' 2002) (Time Signature 5: 1) the work itself defies any possibility of framing because the action is embedded in the pure sensation of time. We are left with only the effect. So the idea of framing as a way of 'confirming' the space – this is not part of  drawing's language. The condition of boundaries is that they are dissolvable.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Sense/Sensing/Feeling/Memory.

Hapticity and The Body of Memory/Experience.

Haptic drawings are composed of piece by piece responses to the situation at hand, rather than being based on any kind of visual or conceptual grand design.

The stone and wood of a house itself are embodied in these memorable centreplace's and even they belong to the body of memory, something that maybe regarded as possessing uniquely haptic properties.

The heat  from a fire, the rushing water in the fountain, and the smooth tactile objects on the mantle deliver feelings of touch and even permanence. Here in this interior space the lifetime memories of the person collaborate with the timelessness of the world outside.

Exercises on the Haptic Experience of Space.

Drawing Choreographies : Hapticity/Mark-making/The Body.

All architecture functions as a potential stimulus for movement, real or imagined. A building is an incitement to action, a stage for movement and interaction as such it is one partner in a dialogue with the body. 

Egon Schiele/Jenny Saville, drawings rendering an insistent corporeality.

Drawing marks that can be possessed, felt, touched and known, haptic drawings are memories of human experience, seeing, feeling, experiencing and exploring corporeality.

Brian Clarke, Collages/Drawing/Paper cuts and lead lines.

Outpost 010424

The adoration of the art object is in some way contrary to the nature of art, which does not seek fame or reward for its existence.

It is the nature of the artist that should be treasured, not the objects that he makes.

Dangerous Visions 1977.

Those paintings represented something really significant to me, and that was that there was something much greater than aesthetics and skill beyond making a work of art. 

Collages  2022-2023.

Sometimes there are as many as ten layers of paper. Some of them are absurdly dense and rather difficult to maintain because, before they're ready for framing they have to be disassembled and glued down with permanent glue.

The literal nature of them, the kind of objective, analytical nature of them is no longer a matter of concern to me. The world is such a rich place and whether they're literal or abstracted or positive or negative, seems to me a matter of profound insignificance.

Humility 2023.

Love.

Meekness.

Optimism.

Renewal.

No matter how beautiful, all objects ultimately perish, but the artistic spirit from which they are born does not. The artist will die, but he will be replaced by another who will create things of beauty too, that will ultimately decay. I don't propose a revolution that seeks to devalue beauty or art objects, but only to ask that we remember the virtuous nature of natural creation and quietly move our thoughts away from objects that perish to the spirit of creation that does not.

Brian Clarke.

Drawing.

The pencil for Isozaki, remains the ultimate tool for expressing early ideas about architecture.

Lead Lines/Paper Cuts.

I was painting and drawing figuratively, but I abandoned that because I was more interested in how much nervous energy a line could carry when it wasn't attempting to describe something objective.