A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing

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A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing

Matters of Concern/Fact.

Drawing/Contingency/Sensing/Seeing

Drawing away from descriptive depictions that illustrate preconceptions/aesthetics.

Julian Stair.

Quietus. 2012.

The Vessel.

Death and The Human Body.

There is an alchemy to making ceramics. We take an inert material, fashion it, dry it and expose it to heat and flame. The practice of cremation, of exposing the body to fire, going through an alchemical change, echoes and parallels the process of firing.

Julian Stair.

The materials he works, lead and clay are dense, both physically and emotionally. But Stair's use of these materials is not representational. These objects do not depict or illustrate, instead they enact and embody.

Stair's achievement in this cyclical exhibition is to have expressed both the universality and the specificity of death, each as an aspect of the other.

The great hand-thrown jars that stand at the heart of the exhibition exemplify this doubleness. Though completely abstract, they exist at the scale of the body. They invite a tactile response, visitors might stroke the ridges circumscribing the jars or tap them, or even give them a gentle hug.

Glenn Adamson.

Life drawing on the psychology of  nakedness and the human body in contemporary art.

Life-Class/Anatomy/Pathology.

The practical and theoretical problems of the confrontation with the human form.

Georg Eisler.

Herbert Boeckl.

His nudes speak a physical language, interpreting life and death in terms of human bodies, of functioning muscle and bone and the tactile aspects of flesh, and the knowledge of what lies beneath/behind it. 

Alfred Hrdlicka. 

A Group. 1973.

Proximity does not read as intimacy, the entangled naked bodies convey a sense of insecurity.

The Posed/Nakedness/Social Scrutiny.

The Life-Class.

Isabel Bradshaw/Michael Grimshaw

Drawings/Sculpted lines that bring sensations onto the surface of the paper.

Lines of Movement/Vectors

Lines of Static Forms/Boundaries

Mark-making, rendering the spatialities of the human form.

Form-Movement

Mass-Volume

Skin-Surface

Line is only the visual interpretation of an extremity of a volume. Mark-making on a drawing becomes a conduit for a sensation of seeing others.

The concept of anthropomorphism is central to the identity of pottery. We use bodily terms such as a neck, shoulder, hip and foot to describe the constituent parts of a pot. And the very nature of the vessel as a container, a holder of things, is analogous to the idea of the body as physical container for the soul or spirit.

Julian Stair.

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue : Colour as substance/the transubstantiation of matter.

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Cyanotype Durational Sun Print.

Charcoal and Clay trace drawing.

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue

Magdalena Broska.

The Transubstantiation of Matter.

Beuys's materials are not to be understood literally, by their outward appearance.

Beuys emphasises that the brown floor paint is not just a colour but also a plastic substance.

I have chosen brown so as to present a plastic substance and thus express something that relates to every form of substantiality, just as I am trying to do with this superimposed red. I simply want to bridge the gap between a discussion about colour and the problem of substantiality.

Joseph Beuys, Drawings. 1979

For Beuys the real and the concretely employed material is only seemingly real, fully in a philosophical sense: a phenomenon from some essential being that is hidden behind appearances, and that is to be elicited by a kind of counter- image process.

Conceptions of Counter Images/Transformation.

The Homoeopathic Method/Like cures like.

Beuys's brown and Klein's blue form a pair of opposites: according to the hermetic-alchemical world view, such opposites contain the arcane power of polar dissimilarity that seeks to be augmented and joined together, a polar way of thinking that seeks resolution.

With his brown oil paint, Joseph Beuys assumed a counter-position to Yves Klein and his blue, which stands for immaterial manifestations, the sky, the sea, and the light of the south, and which conveys space and wide vistas.

In terms of consistency, Beuys's brown is purely coating paint, as commonly used for rust proofing.

Its visual appearance links it with earth, heaviness, darkness, and also blood.

The Great East Window: Brian Clarke | HENI Talks 'Perspectives'

Echo Chamber: Listening to La Jetée

The Spatial Practice Laboratory : Canterbury School of Architecture UCA 2009.

The Laboratory , Canterbury 2009, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Pinhole photograph used as a negative to produce a cyanotype print.image includes a photogram of sound recording equipment that was set-up inside the camera.

Spatial/Diffractive Bodies Situated in Place : Matters of Fidelity and Precariousness.

 

Bringing Things To Life.

Creative entanglements in a world of materials. 

The Environment Without Objects.

Tim Ingold. 2008

Intermediaries within the cyanotype process.

Trace drawings on paper with organic and material from the built environment.

Drawing/Making Processes.

Architectural Body : Organism, Person, Environment. Arakawa and Gins. 

 "[...] the body [...] continually transforms itself and is already not, at the moment when I speak of it, what it was a few seconds ago." (Laplantine, 2015:13)

Laplantine, F. 2015 [2005]. The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic.

Through the choreographing of our learning processes we create the conditions for engagement/entanglement and production/transformation, which are all modalities of movement and action. So we see pedagogical, architectural and professional practices as potential practices of transformation and co-learning. Dance – somehow both connected to and different than choreography – brings with it a whole set of values which we consider significant for the architectural pedagogy we enact. 

Lepeki lists the 'constitutive qualities' of dance as 

"ephemerality, corporeality, precariousness, scoring and performativity" (Lepecki 2012:15) 

He goes on to say that "[t]hese qualities are responsible for dance's capacity to harness and activate critical and compositional elements crucial to the fusion of politics and aesthetics …"(Lepecki 2012:16)

His 'compositional' and 'critical' elements echo the event/discourse relationships within our pedagogy and in our use of choreography as dance/writing. These qualities allude to specific modes of engagement and making, and state particular values. We will use them to underscore our pedagogical modes, and develop them as necessary in a teaching practice which desires students' engagement, empowerment, and caring.

In that sense, ephemerality can be related to immediacy and an engagement with the here- and-now which cares about effects and duration. Corporeality speaks of a body, but if we ask whose body or what body, then we can expand it to be any-body, in order to speak of matter or, more precisely, of mattering and bodying. Other names for precariousness can be fragility or vulnerability, somehow always already a condition of our impossibly immediate interventions. Scoring, which can be both a ‘writing’ and an unfolding, creates spaces and times and modes for and of improvisation. And performativity always returns us anew to movement, multiplicity, effects and life.

Performative Intraventions and Matters of Care: Choreographing Values

OREN LIEBERMAN

ALBERTO ALTÉS

Abstract

Thinking through choreography as dance/writing – both the doing and the score for that doing, the event and the discourse - we propose to shift the focus of architectural practices and pedagogies from an emphasis in the attainment of competencies and  static  knowledge,  to  a  privileging  of  processes  and modalities of learning that nurture the values of engagement, empowerment and  caring  responsibility.  Choreography  situates  our  work  in  the  realm  of performative action and transformation, and it does so with and through our bodies; also, it helps us frame the power of our intraventions, which aim at transforming the world through immediate, responsible and often fragile acts of engagement with matter, movement and life.

Keywords: 

Intravention, matters of care, choreography, architectural pedagogies, modalities of learning.

More on ’intraventions’ can be found in:

Altés, A. and Lieberman, O. 2013. Intravention, Durations, Effects: Notes 

of Expansive Sites and Relational Architectures. Baunach: Spurbuch Verlag.

2023

Drawing/Building Scripts : Collage/Photography

The peculiarity of the ruin is defined in that it demythologises the impression of seamlessness and linearity. In the ruin, we are at once removed from dichotomised and levelled down space by entering a place at the threshold of experience. At the threshold, we return to the pre-spatial, if primordial, landscape, yet to submit to the suppression of space and site. Instead the place of ruin creates protrusions, which desolates the category of clean space.

The Aesthetics of Decay, An Uncanny Place. Dylan Trigg 

With The Drawing Board : On the transitiveness of going along with things.

The Drawing Board, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

The Granary Studio, Brockwood Park, Bramdean. 2013

The Body and Spatial Boundaries~A Spatial Inquiry into Skin, Surface and Subjectivity.

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The World on Edge

The Body and Spatial Boundaries.

russellmoreton.com

Tim Ingold.

From science to art and back again: The pendulum of an anthropologist.

https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/2237/2055

Merleau-Ponty, intertwining of vision and movement into an embodied knowledge.

The body and space are reflexive/diffractive and interdependent, we need spatial contexts/entanglements for our physical bodies and the intangibles of our inner beings.

The un-doing of place/sites of making

Responses to place and interventions on temporal space.

A spatial practice cannot be divorced from its response to the specificity of place.

Acts of exploratory dissection, in which one is un-making/making into a space with new realms of sensory engagement.

Architecture comes from the making of a room, a room is not a room without natural light.

All spaces need natural light, That is because the moods which are created by the time of day and seasons of the year are constantly helping you in evoking what a space can be if it has natural light and can't be if it doesn't. Artificial light is a single tiny static moment in light and can never equal the nuances of mood created by the time of day and the wonder of the seasons.

Louis Kahn, 1959.

Light forms a real presence in empty space, and even within/between physical things, its vibrant intensity stemming from a complex interaction of light with matter and the way in which solid volumes could throw attention to the flowing energy they trapped and displayed.

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer, 2009.

She rarely used artificial lighting and instead relied on the often sharp geometries of a room's natural daylight.

He created new openings, that welcomed new infiltrations of light, sound and smells all revealed through the previously unseen materials and their structural layers. 

It was the urgency of the forthcoming demolition that Matta-Clark inserted himself in order to artistically deconstruct, while also reconstructing to produce radical spatial interventions. 

Beyond privileging her body as subject and ruinous spaces as sites, Woodman made certain methodologies and technical approaches characteristic aspects of her spatial practice in furthering the effects of the body and the space it encounters. 

Spaces to be activated by her performative body, offering new photographic carnalities of flesh, taken from imprints of the bare, textured concrete walls of the factories interior.

Exploring the surfaces and movements of her own body, by transferring traces of the surrounding architectural material onto her skin by pressing her skin into the wall. 

Francesca  Woodman's work, although performative, is explicitly photographic, her work is not only informed by a history of photography, but it is also actively engaged with addressing some of the medium's limits and possibilities. 

The relationship between self and objectified image through a re-staging of the drama of the photographic medium process on her own skin.

Skin, Surface and Subjectivity

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

A generation of young photographers were becoming more and more interested in how the photograph sees than what it sees. Woodman's method of exploring and exposing the process of image making itself also resonates with the critical framework in which photography was being interpreted at the time. Her work is a critique on the way in which the photographic medium is itself a means through which meaning is fixed, identity lost and subjectivity de-formed. 

Woodman's work could be read as a post-modern project of appropriation and de-familiarisation.

Woodman draws attention to the way in which the subject always evades the frame/framing of the photographic representation.

Using the terms of the medium, to draw attention, to evasion or disappearance, to using and re-situating the cropping edge onto her body, and ultimately diffusing her image by the light on which the photographs visualisation depends.

Movements/thinking, staged within photographic moments of capture, producing, entangling and amalgamated, overwritten subjectivities presented on the photographic surface.

By frequently configuring the photograph's relationship to her body as one that is tenuous or fragile, fleeting in which a subject is captured in flight, as if slipping from its surface reality, its situation.