Art and Architecture : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Jane Rendell

Art and Architecture. 2006

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 – the conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event. 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. Situatedness, then, is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or being situated.

 ‘Critical spatial practice’ came to my mind back in 2003 as a helpful way of describe projects located between art and architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated. In Art and Architecture (2006), I argued that such projects operated at a triple crossroads: between theory and practice, between public and private, and between art and architecture, and I was keen to stress three particular qualities of those works: the critical, the spatial and the interdisciplinary. 

Other practitioners and theorists have since worked with the term, evolving it in different directions. For example, there was the reading group and blogspot initiated by Nicholas Brown in the early 2000s, which came out of discussions around Brown’s own artistic walking practice. In 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Marcus Miessen started a book series with Sternberg Press called Critical Spatial Practice which focused on architectural discourse and practice, and in the first publication they asked the question: ‘What is Critical Spatial Practice?’.

But as this website shows a whole multitude of practitioners and theorists have been developing work in an ‘expanded field’ such as this, quite different perhaps from the one Rosalind Krauss identified in 1979. This is work that overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel, and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond; from transparadiso’s ‘direct urbanism’ to Steve Loo’s ‘sites of perdurance’, these practices incorporate ‘event scores’, ‘insertions’ even ‘banalities’ and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation, as well duration.

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

The artwork in the image consists of slab-built ceramic sculptures created by the visual artist Russell Moreton. 

His work often explores the intersection of architecture, spatial practices, and ceramics, using clay as a medium to investigate themes of construction, silence, and architectural space.

These specific pieces feature a rugged, structural appearance, incorporating textures and forms that evoke architectural elements.

Moreton's practice is deeply rooted in process-based inquiries, where the material and the act of constructing the sculpture are central to the final expression.

The artist is based in the UK and his sculptural work is frequently described as a meditation on materiality and existence.

Artistic Practice: Moreton is known for his work that explores ceramics through an architectural lens, often creating pieces that evoke the feeling of interior spaces or structures where the "drama of the building has now ceased". 

Style: His work frequently features weathered, structural forms with muted, monochromatic palettes and textured surfaces. 

Focus: His practice often investigates the interconnectedness of materials and the creation of interior, spatial structures. 

This image shows a field containing several poles, which are often used in environmental or ecological studies as Robel poles. These poles are typically used to measure visual obstruction, which helps estimate the density of vegetation or the amount of biomass in a specific area. 

The poles are placed at various locations within the meadow or grassy area to collect observational data.

In studies, these measurements are often combined with other techniques to assess habitat quality or vegetation growth.

Research collage with objects (Shoa) appears to be a mood board or an artist's research wall, heavily focused on the themes of film, memory, and decay. It features references to seminal filmmakers and philosophers who explore how time and history are captured or lost.

Key References in the Image

Andrey Rublev (1966): The central black-and-white photograph is a still from the film Andrei Rublev, directed by the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The text box explicitly identifies "Andrey Rublyov: The painter-monk on his journey." The film follows a 15th-century icon painter through a turbulent period of Russian history.

Bill Morrison: On the far left, a vertical strip of text quotes the experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison: "maybe what the ruins of Cinema, patiently and violently are tracing, is disappearing." Morrison is best known for his film Decasia (2002), which uses decaying archival film footage to create a haunting meditation on the fragility of the medium and human memory.

Marc Augé: On the right, there is a quote from the French anthropologist Marc Augé: "Ruins, as a notion and phenomena are slowly disappearing from our cities. Out of a lack of time, we are condemned to preserve the past." Augé is famous for coining the term "non-places" and writing extensively on the relationship between time and space in the modern world.

Themes and Context

The collection of these specific quotes and images suggests a deep interest in "The Ruins of Cinema" and the physical or conceptual disappearance of history.

Tarkovsky is often associated with the concept of "Sculpting in Time," where the filmmaker uses the medium to fix and observe the passage of time itself.

Bill Morrison's work literally shows "ruined" film, where the chemical emulsion is melting or rotting away, yet creating something new and beautiful.

Marc Augé's quote reflects on how modern society lacks the "slow time" required for ruins to form naturally, instead opting for immediate, artificial preservation.

The architectural drawing and the physical cardboard model (possibly a "section" or "maquette") visible on the right suggest this board might belong to a student or professional in architecture or film production design, exploring how physical spaces can embody these abstract concepts of memory and decay.

Making/Matter/Material : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Claywork/Correspondences : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Drawing Participation : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Indexical Awareness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Mechanisms of Mutuality : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Viewing Assemblage : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

A Process of Consciousness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

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

Restless Objects~Fictioning : Sheltering Spaces~Studio Practice : A space between, movable and nomadic.

Making matter(s) of correspondences with the continuous weather-world.

Studio Practices : Speculative spaces between organism~person~environment

Studio Works : Between body and architecture

Clay Based Making.

Clay+Ceramics.

Folded Readings~Heuristic Spatial Forms from Fired Clay.

Ceramics from clay constructions of indisciplined spaces where experiential markings and imaginative readings between theory and practice develop new material discourses.

Possible Outcomes~Clay Based Ceramic Propositions

Architectures~Making Spaces in Abjection.

Bodies, Spatial Bodies and their Relations.

A place between is spatial. It is a mapping of the topographies between here, there and elsewhere. It is also social, an articulation of the place of dialogue, of the ongoing discussion between one and another. A place between is temporal, it pays attention to time, to the ways in which we locate the then from the now, the now from the yet to come. 

Jane Rendell.

The Experience of Existence.

Fired clay meditations on a materiality, a willingness to survive and endure.

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

Clay~Making : The Analogous Atmosphere of  Experience.

Asking how making is a thinking in its own right, what else that thinking can do?

Erin Manning.

AI Overview

This artwork is a sculptural assemblage by Russell Moreton, featuring ceramic vessels and forms. 

The work explores themes of reverberation, innerness, and volume through a processual approach to clay. 

Moreton's practice investigates the interconnection of making interior spaces, demarcating and folding material into spatial forms. 

These pieces are described as 'extreme atmospheres' or 'fired clay labyrinths,' utilizing textural surfaces and industrial-like perforations

This image features mixed-media ceramic artworks by artist Russell Moreton.

These sculptures are part of an exploratory research project titled "Clay/With Fire," focusing on architectural themes.

The artist explores the concept of "making" through the interconnectedness of interior spaces, using clay as the primary medium.

The pieces are processual in nature, meaning they evolve from the direct experience of working with the material.

The works incorporate the artist's imprint, exploring the metaphysical and immersive nature of creation.

These images feature exploratory, architectural-themed ceramic sculptures by artist Russell Moreton. 

Artist: Russell Moreton.

Medium: Clay.

Theme: Architectural structures and spatial practices.

Focus: The imprint of the artist and the material itself.

 

Interdisciplinarity~Spatial Collaboration.

Spaces between Forms for Speculative Creative Outcomes.

Making Spatial Stories : Over time and through space.

Restless Objects~Fictioning : Sheltering Spaces, Movable and Nomadic : Slab Built Ceramics

The objects in the image are architectural-themed ceramic sculptures created by the artist Russell Moreton. 

These works are part of the artist's exploratory research into materials, often incorporating themes of "making," spatial perception, and site-specific installation. His practice frequently involves building with slabs of clay to create forms that engage with their architectural settings. 

Littoral Environments : Arts and Subjectivity (the making of things)

Text Extract/Inclusion. "Pure Presence"

The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics : Jane Bennett 2001.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

The making of things and discovering relationships.

Constructing site and situation based methodologies.

Playing out in the public realm, exploring through spatial engagements the "virtues" of courage, caution, confidence and risk.

Circulating Objects/Assemblages : Making Spaces/Creative Strategies

Outpost 091124

Occupant Spatial Relations 

Sites centred around interactions of creative practice and architectural theories of making spaces.

Architecture understood as a collection of collective parts.

A diagrammatic art of lived abstraction and lived-in abstraction.

A space for inhabiting experience.

Attention to material : Architecture as the excitement of building/dwelling/becoming

An inhabiting event is the medium of architecture.

Garden : Spatial Markers/Bodies/Paths.

Spatial Practices : Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies. Tate Modern. #7

Zuzana Kovar, notes that the shortcoming of Tschumi's event is that while it introduces a processional understanding of architecture and mobilizes the body in space, space it self remains static.

Equation becomes a spatial assemblage for occurrences.

For Deleuze, an 'assemblage' extends the understanding between bodies and spaces.

Program is determinate.

Event is indeterminate.

A program gives a fixed outcome, a fixed spatial experience. An event does not, critically the 'notion of event' is that it activates potentialities. Each space, may be thought of as composed of multiple singular potentialities that lay dormant, unless activated. 

All spaces contain multiple potentialities.

Event Is Not Program.

There is no architecture without actions, no architecture without events, no architecture without program.

Architecture=Space + Event.

Tschumi.

Program is to be distinguished from 'event', a program is a determinate set of expected occurrences, a list of required utilities often based on social behavior, habit or custom. In contrast events occur as an indeterminate set of outcomes, revealing hidden potentialities or contradictions in a program and relating them to a particularly appropriate (or possibly exceptional) spatial configuration that may create conditions for unexpected events to occur.

Generating uncommon or unpredictable events through particular spatial configurations of the in-between.

Abject(ion) Studio Space.

Subjectivity/Spatial Bodies.

Discursive Objects/Architectural Occurrences/Resonances.

Assemblages, fired, raw pigments, paint, chalk, wax, plaster. 

The Enabling Constraint.

Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits.

Erin Manning.

Ceramics Speculative/Exploratory Practices.

New Ceramic Forms of Research/Theoretical Objects.

Speculative Gestures of Agencing Attention : Template and Form/Enchantments and Insights between materials

Making Objects : Of a critical and theoretical nature.

Clay : Atmospheric Interpretations.

Ceramics~Abstract Painting : Re-Consolidations/Abstract Vessels.

https://www.curatorspace.com/artists/russellmoreton

THE BODY AS A TERRITORY IN RAW CLAY

Developing Formative Histories/Indexical and Involuntary Markings 

Observational essay/account whilst work is resident in the Yard,

Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry and Craft

Temporality. The state of existing within or having some relationship with time. A clay form with its pre-performative drawing used as a template.

These distinctively different yet closely related works are arranged with the clay piece on its custom made trolley with its calico material that acts as a sheet on which the clay work rests. The drawing is placed behind it fastened to a wall with the drawings bottom edge just making contact with the floor adjacent to the castors that grant the clays supportive trolley mobility. The clay work has a direct relation to this adjacent drawing, the drawing is revealing the traced female that is just discernable on the surface of the clay. On closer inspection of the drawing it is just possible to see a rubbing taken from the periphery of the clay form. Both the paper and the clay seem to be in some reflective mode of mutual intimacy, marks transferred between one another during the manufacture of both are subtly replicated on the form of one and the surface of another. The pierced clay slab (vessel) is the first visible casualty of the entropic process of shrinkage. A significant crack separates the clay vessel into two separate but unique entities that share the same defect as if they were still whole. This division through the continent of the body has been subtly marked by the raised furrow of silica deposited when the clay bodies were in closer proximity. The calico has also rendered a new visual territory around the entire periphery of the form, created by the deposited silica sand and the resultant shrinkage that is taking place. There is the sense of this form moving in two dimensions, creating an extended footprint of previously covered territory whilst continuing to shrink bodily within the details and markings on its surface. This phenomena seems to give the piece a strange complexity of both temporality and a duration on which that temporality is directly charted, the calico is instrumental in registering this perception. The agencies of both the silica sand and the calico sheet between them regulate and guide our understanding of the observation of the clays infinitesimal shrinkage. The compression of the clays structure due to its shrinkage increases its density and visually alters the arrangement of the piercing that are mapped over its surface, the concise circles and holes cut through the clay have now blended into the overall tension imparted by shrinkage, there is a sense that precision of the marks, their machined appearance which contrasted to the locality to the clay around them has been lost, reclaimed by the inner natural torsions taking control of the piece as a whole. The clays surface with its sandy granular deposits whose particle size has become visually larger at the expense of its hosts shrinkage now auger for a territory, a land mass devoid of water, the sense of this territory becoming anhydrous, giving rise to thoughts of thirst and fragility, even the once precise holes give the impression of barren watering places isolated within a landscape in a state of drought. The once visible markings are now obscured by the action of the shrinking territory and its granular coating as it now gains in its ability to obscure features. The traced and drawn female form is still harboured somewhere under this obscuring sand. Yet she now resides as a brittle uncompromising inscription of her former self, the plasticity that once gave her a sensuality into the yielding and pliable surface has succumbed to the unstoppable internal shrinkage of the clay particles starved of moisture. The clay is acknowledging the atmosphere of its given surroundings, our environment.

The Draught, J G Ballard 

The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe

The Disposition of the Body, Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman’s Contract)

The clay suffers, dehydrates as its moisture is absorbed by the surrounding atmosphere, giving up its plasticity and its almost inhuman sensuality and tactility. Presented amongst us, it is rendered into a state of its own homogeneity Conversely the working drawing which has evolved from being a simple template to aid the registration of celestial information within the territory of the body. Has itself become involved in its own creation as an art object. On completing its initial purpose, the task of transferring details onto the surface of the embryonic clay form. It has now become embroiled and entangled as it were with the creative issues of the clay form; “they” have become members of the same intuitions the same creative flux, sisters. The drawn “sister” contains the origin of their shared inscription, the originating female trace. The gesture and act still remains, visible only by physical impression of transference; which is left proud, raised and projecting passed the original flatness of the paper. These material read together render insights into superimposed temporalities shared by the art object, they question and reveal the reverse side of origins, of the work or its working drawing, they all underline the complexities and multiplicities of contemporary art practice.

The Drawing strangely or ironically displays values in a state of stasis, now lost with its sister. The cyanotype “sea” with its fluidity bleeding into the porosity of the news print. The “ streams” of residues washed from other areas are now deposited into the interior space where they have collected finally to evaporate leaving their watery remains. Only the clarity of the “permanent” marker pen remains untouched by any entropic activity. Objectively the drawing materials has slowed down to the point when one might grant it a measure of completeness. Its particular temporalities now exist within the interactions it can manifest from others, other things, other situations that are drawn into its proximity, its particular field of intuitive reverberations, its unique dwelling place.

The clay form seems to have gathered up its history of temporal acts that culminate in its present form. This presented object, with temporalities marked on site has become a vehicle, a vessel for its own entropic voyage, another temporality that itself adds a spatial dimension. This object for me appears to be totally contingent yet relational to aspects of space and time, it exists uniquely “once” in the present, presence it creates with its observer. The result of this contingent object is that “we through it” are constantly travelling away from its point of origin, we as a result feel the passage of the entropic value of time through the human condition. Whereas the drawing does refer to a now and a past, an elsewhere ,it seems locked between these two comprehensions.

The clay form has clearly an entropic element which seems to give rise to phenomenologically driven inquiry which in turn helps to creates our sense of a spatiality. Uniquely formed between observation and our own movement, we are in effect made to sense that the object heralds our own becoming.

Material Agency : Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

Visualising Environmental Agency

"Agents are defined as persons or things, which have the ability and intention to "cause" something "in the vicinity" or "in the mileau" to happen ( Art and Agency, Alfred Gell 1998)"

"These latter artefacts are described with the term "index", to remove the appellation "art" and to imply that they are indexes of agency."

Some Stimulating Solutions, Andrew Cochrane.

Drawing intervention and speculative sculptural environment. 

Speculative Learning Environment : Russell Moreton.

Re- Imagining Education, Brockwood Park School. 

Teacher Education Manual

Insight-Bohm-Krishnamurti. 1979

David Bohm, Are we saying that insight is an energy which illuminates the activity of the brain, and that in this illumination the brain itself begins to act differently?

Krishnamurti, You are quite right. That's all-that is what takes place. That is -this flash has altered completely the pattern which the material process has set.

a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine

The book, as described above, is a jumbling together of discrete parts or pieces that is capable of producing any number effects, rather than a tightly organized and coherent whole producing one dominant reading.

The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.

Christopher Wilmarth : Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity

Light : Drawing into Sculpture
Archive Material/Folders 2008/2013



The sense that glass provides an opening, a means of passage through to something else, is as central to Mallarme's Poetry as it to Wilmarth's Art.
Steven Henry Madoff


Christopher Wilmarth
The Museum of Modern Art
May25-August 20, 1989

The exhibition features glass and steel constructions that manipulate light and shadow and suggest poetic, even romantic content through a constructivist, geometric idiom.

Other Architecture
Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE
Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION
Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS
Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION
Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION
Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE
Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE
Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."
Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.

Artists Book, "Leylines" an art based inquiry.

Artists Book, "Leylines" an art based inquiry., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Artist’s Book: white and coloured pages, card covers with cyanotype of Winchester Cathedral.

A hand bound book comprising of five signatures each with four folios. This book contains a collection of postcards made from contact prints and photograms from Tidbury Ring using the cyanotype process. Other pages contain some cyanotype paintings/abstracts around the theme of dwelling and hut. Silver gelatin images of St Catherine’s Hill are present as are some experimental pinhole photography.     

Writing has nothing to do with signifying, it has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.

Deleuze, Guattari. 1988.