The Inner Room~Clay/Jug and the Primacy of Being : The Potter and The Philosopher, Coper/Heidegger.

15 March 2015

UCA Farnham.

Working Notes. Visuals and Text

Extracts from Waverley Project/Research Folder, MA Interior Design.

Clay and the Primacy of Being

The Potter and The Philosopher

Innerness and Defined Space

Manifesting the everyday crafts of life in a physical form.

Ceramic Assemblage : White Spaces/The Patina of Objects.

The Potter ( Hans Coper) and the Philosopher (Martin Heidegger),

Throwing, Building, Dwelling, Thinking.

Brian Clarke, Stained Glass, Sainsbury Centre.

The innerness of a ceramic vessel can be seen to be dealing with presences and absences, as like that of a building it can demonstrate the presence of its making and the absence of that same presence.

The Philosopher. Martin Heidegger.

Building Dwelling Thinking. 1951

Heidegger “resolutely romanticised the rural and the low-tech before, during and after Nazism, skating dangerously close to fascist rhetoric of blood and soil.”¹

Architecture can help to centre people in the world; it can offer individuals places from which to inquire for themselves. Heidegger felt that this was how architecture had been understood in the past, and that the insatiable rise of technology had obscured that understanding.

Heidegger interested on centring his qualities of architecture around those of human experience, to reintegrate building with dwelling, making the qualities of its inhabitation become part of the buildings authenticity to its locality.

This almost vocational unfinished architecture finds itself more at home with the ongoing daily life than any sort of finished product.”²

Contemporary architects of which Peter Zumthor is an exemplary example utilise and readily acknowledge the influence of Heidegger’s thinking. The inner spaces, the materiality and the locality are all directly traceable to traits found in Heidegger’s notion of the value of human presence and inhabitation.

Heidegger claims for architecture “the authority of immediate experience”³

As recorded in his most architectural writings.

The Origin of the Work of Art 1935/trans 1971

Being and Time 1927/1962

Art and Space 1971/1973

“To Heidegger, proper thinking was highly tuned to the fact of being and its traces. These traces, like our own shadow, the outline of the hills or the sounds of birdsong and stream, remain reminders of our miraculous presence,”⁴

Building locates human existence,

Heidegger “ believed that building was set out around human presence, configured by it but also configuring the activities of that presence over time”⁵

This almost vocational activity of building human presence it at the heart of what it means “to dwell”, the poetics of which form the phenomenological inquiry of Gaston Bachelard’s, Poetics of Space. Heidegger acknowledges that the inhabitants lives are in turn configured by the building.

Adam Sharr, notes that “for Heidegger, a building was built according to the specifics of place and inhabitants, shaped by its physical and human topography.”⁶

Heidegger on Thinking,

The forest track, the clearing, wandering from a starting point and remaining open to findings reached on the way, it could not be readily summarised or contained by a system. It was referential, mystical model that sought to promote the authority of being.

Heidegger on the Void at the centre of the Jug.⁷

Made from earth/clay/fire connected the human experience of earth and sky. Heidegger attributed sacred qualities to the jugs ability to give/to pour. Part of his fourfold cosmology of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. This “fourfold” represents Heidegger’s attempt at what he judges to be the most primary circumstances of existence, “ the inescapable pre-requisite of the world into which humans are thrown without consent (1962,164-168).

Mythic and mystical, far from the strictures of logical thinking.

Influences on the “fourfold”

Meister Eckhart/mystic theologian.

Lao Tse/eastern philosopher.

Friedrich Holderlin/poet.

George Steiner on the “fourfold” suggests it is a manifestation of an “ideolect” a personal language offered as universal.

Heidegger would refute this on the grounds that it is our technocratic conception of the world that is unhinged not his.

Heidegger: A mysticism that seems to border onto/into the realm of site specific art?

Waverley Project 2014.

Spaces and Shadows in Architecture, Defined Light and Volumes.

In Praise of Shadows. Junichiro Tanizaki

Architectural Voids/ Spaces only assessable whilst under construction, scaffolding and specific access points, maintenance and service corridors/rooms.

Kengo Kuma on “Ma” a void or pause, a rich emptiness, it can be created in many ways: through the

effect of light, or through attention to details.⁸

Being close to things, Heidegger on Nearness.

“The thing is not “in” nearness, “in” proximity, as if nearness were a container. Nearness is at work in bringing near, as the thinging of the thing,”(1971:177-178)⁹

This spatial complexity ( Critical Spatial Practices) suggests that we do indeed think through things, this is picked up by Tim Ingold in The Perception of the Environment (Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill) 2000.

Also see, The Politics of Things/Immediate Architectural Interventions : Durations and Effects. Alres/Lieberman 2013.

On building a house. Ingold.

“The architect, then, conceives the lineaments of the structure, while the builder’s task is to unite the structure with the material”¹⁰

Simon Unwin defines architecture as “the determination by which a mind gives intellectual structure to a building”, whereas building is “the performance of physical realization”, of which “a building” is the product. (Unwin. Understanding Architecture 2007)

Inner Spaces/The Quiet Room

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.

Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.

The cell of myself fills with wonder.

The white-washed wall of my secret.

Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.

Heidegger notes that “nearness is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and as such it can be experienced and appreciated through the tactile, cognitive and sociological familiarity of things”¹¹

It is a this relationship of nearness to the daily intricacies of living, being/becoming and dwelling that Heidegger’s philosophy is appropriated into architectural theory and practice. “Nearness thus becomes a function of immediacy : in that one is near to what one finds immediate, however far away it may be.”

For Heidegger, the definite characteristic of a thing (of a pot) is its possibility to bring people nearer to themselves, to help them engage with their existence and the fourfold.¹²

Heidegger attributed both the Jug and Buildings the potential to gather up and to be able to carry connotations of meeting and assembly, the jug and the building both have a corresponding void, that has the potential to contain/embody his preconditions of existence (the fourfold). This sensing space/void/Ma, can be reflected in the interiors of architecture and can be found within innerness spaces of objects.

The pot like the building participates in daily life.

This can be further theorised into the realm of building social spaces.

In Heidegger’s reasoning by using a table we are in effect constituting ourselves in the process of dwelling, by moving the table to accommodate the needs of its users, we are in effect turning the room back into a building.

Heidegger’s building and dwelling take place together over time, forming ongoing relationships with the world. Like the Potter in his Studio, these critical spatial relations inform both the working practice and the situation and biography of their making.

“Heidegger suggested that it was this disruption of relations between building and dwelling, rather than the production of houses, that remained the most important plight in the contemporary world”¹³

Piety of Thinking. 1976 (Piety for Heidegger listened to and facilitated the world around)¹⁴

Quietude : Allow and enabling what is already there.

Silence in Ceramics. Coper/Rie.

Clay and the Primacy of Being.

Studio Spaces.

The residents’ dwelling was recorded over time in the fabric of the building and the paraphernalia of their lives placed there.

For the philosopher , buildings are rich in insight, comprising a “workshop of long experience and incessant practice. 1971,161.¹⁵

Notes:

1 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects.

2 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

3 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

4 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 7

5 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 9

6 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 10

7 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 30

8 Kengo Kuma. Sensing Spaces. Royal Academy of Arts. 2014, 65

9 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1⁰ Tim Ingold. Making. 59

1¹ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1² Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1³ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 43

1⁴ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 45

1⁵ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 71


Wallace Stevens :  Anecdote of the Jar/Vessel takes dominion/Edmund de Waal

Related 

Jackie Leven ; Clay Jug (The Mystery of Love is greater than The Mystery of Death)

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Outpost 180724

The Essential Mobility of Concepts. 

Correspondences faithful to the dynamism of imagination.

At the level of substances and their affective qualities/values.

Elemental Images.

Poetics of Air-Water-Fire-Space

A fecundity of instants, a mutative pattern rather than an additive or deductive one.

Reverie shatters frozen meanings and restores old words to their ambivalence and freedom. It reconciles the world and the subject, present and past, solitude and communication. There is only one requirement, that it seek (written) expression, whether through original creation or through an already existing encounter poem).

I should like to develop a philosophy that would have no point of departure.

Gaston Bachelard.

In those last days, she worked down here almost constantly, perhaps wondering when she would be able to sculpt again. When she gave them to us, she said she didn't see any point in just leaving them in the studio.

I carefully clipped his nails, starting from the little finger of his left hand. The nails were soft and transparent, and came away with the least effort, fluttering to the floor like flower petals. We listed to the quiet clicking of the clippers, their echoes sealing this moment in the depth of the night. When I finished, the sky-blue gloves were waiting on the table.

And that is how the Inui family vanished.

The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa.

The Outside Studio.

Roger Ackling.

Drawing as notation of an event.

To fix the sun's rays.

To unify experience.

To mark place and time.

To seal them off from loss and forgetfulness.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

Gaston Bachelard.

Colette Gaudin.

Images are incapable of repose, they must be studied simultaneously as isomorphic and unique.

The Poetics of Space.

Contradictions are the principle of aesthetic life.

Poetic language expresses the continuous tension within a substance, and as such it is by virtue of the dialectic of opposite qualities that poetic matter fascinates us.

Imagination not only sees a substantive within an adjective, it also finds a verb concealed under each word.

A value is not something already achieved, it is a becoming, an aspiration, moreover every value evokes its opposite and is in constant struggle with it. Bachelard finds in poetry an application of the philosophy of values that insist on their precariousness.

Bachelard allows his classifications to overlap, or superimpose one dialectic on another, he illustrates his unwillingness to establish a definitive system, less a structure, he is more interested  in the constant discovery of surprising poetic relationships which enrich the world.

For Bachelard, contradictions within matter are the true principles of individualization. Contradictions become alive when they require the participation of the entire subject, images that engage all our senses.

Contradictions are more than mere tolerance of judgement for unusual associations, they express the need to displace facts by value.

Bachelard rejects the role of the scholar who shares the fruit of his learning in the form of established truths, and invites us to experience with him, the essential mobility of concepts. 

CLAY/WITH FIRE : Thinking Architecture/Exploratory Research/Vocabulary

Spatial Bodies in Architectural and Contemporary Art.

Exploratory Clay/Ceramic Based Inquiry.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Thinking Poetics : Architecture and Ceramics.

Urns : Immersive Cells of Containment~Dissolution.

In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.

All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Tony Cragg, 1998.

Cutting Things Up.

Material In Space.

Scale.

Impulses through Drawing.

Working Things.

Generation/Generative/Material.

I think mass and energy need to be generated, any effective change has to be generated. It's to do with a positive directed  initiative to change things.

“Generative” for me, in terms of my work, is the fact that within my own work, within any given period the work generates itself and there is a self-generating characteristic. The work I'm making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago.

Even if it's not a linear thing, things are generating. There is a sort of self-propagating, self-generative energy that is inherent in the material, I think. And even in the  term “generative”, from “genus”, is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which “relativise” generation.

Tony Cragg.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Cragg wanted  to give the materials 'more meaning, mythology and poetry. He used the skills available to him at the EKWC residency to create ambiguities and tensions, to suggest past and present, to complicate rather than to describe.

European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands. 1990, 1992.

With the return of Cragg to studio based work in the early 1990s, when he was experimenting with clay; ideas around humanness, archaeology, and ritual were being explored within different areas of the fine arts. In addition, studio ceramics were frequently using the vessel as an initiating point to develop new forms and sculptural ideas.

Laibe, with its rich possibilities of interpretation that incorporates the past in the present and the universal aspects of human survival within the ceramic vessel form, lies at the heart of these complex and overlapping areas of practice.

Imogen Racz. 2009.  

The Ceramics Reader. 2017.

Andrew Livingstone.

Kevin Petrie.

Ceramics : Materiality and Metaphor.

Why are Ceramics Important?

The Existential Base, Philip Rawson.

Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations, Silvia Forni.

Ceramics and Metaphor.

Analogy and Metaphor in Ceramic Art, Philip Rawson.

Sculptural Vessels, Tony Cragg's  Laibe and the Metaphors of Clay, Imogen Racz.

Ceramics in Contexts.

Historical Precedents.

Studio Ceramics.

Sculptural Ceramics.

Ceramics and Installation.

Theoretical Perspectives.

Conceptual and Post Studio Practice.

Contemporary Clay, Clare Twomey. 

Extending Vocabularies: Distorting the Ceramic Familiar

Clay and the Performative 'Other', Andrew Livingstone.

Gender, Sexuality and Ceramics.

Identity and Ceramics.

Image.

Figuration and the Body.

Ceramics in Education.

Ceramics, Industry and New Technologies.

Museum, Site and Display.

Re-defining Ceramics through Exhibitionary Practice (1970-2009), Laura Breen.

With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Assemblages of movement : Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies/Body Matters

Outpost 201124

Parables for the Virtual.

Brian Massumi. 1985

When we think of space as 'extensive' as being measurable, divisible and composed of points plotting possible positions that objects may occupy, we are stopping the world in thought. We are thinking away its dynamic unity, the continuity of its movements. We are looking at only one dimension of reality.

If you know where you where you will end up when you begin, nothing happens tn the meantime.

Bergson redefined space in terms of movement, space is not a ground on which real motion is posited, rather it is real motion that deposits space beneath itself. Space comes into being through motion or event.

On Architectural Experience.

Architecture has the potential capacity on human/spatial bodies to affect or to be affected.

Relations of Movement and Rest.

The bodies capacity to enter into relations of movement and rest, to affect or to be affected.

Massumi/Spinoza/Deleuze.

Architecture still remains primarily as a discussion of distinct bodies, spatial and human with the two remaining physically and psychologically distinct.

Violated Bodies-Spaces.

Intense confrontations between body and space.

Tschumi allows for architecture to be considered as an assemblage, composed of a space and a bodily event, however, even his 'equation' retains a demarcation between spatial bodies and human bodies engaging in event and maintaining that the two function according to independent logics, but  serve to affect one another.

Bodies and spaces excrete out of themselves, they penetrate one another, contemporary architecture does not know what to do with such borderless entities. It has no mode of thinking about assemblages of this kind, where once discrete objects leak into one another creating indiscernible masses. There is a multiplicity of bodies, bodies that are forever being created and dismantled, forever in flux.

Architecture between Spectacle and Use.

Anthony Vidler. 2008

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces and their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar. 2018

For Vidler this spectacle architecturre is one that embraces the ideas of image and iconomy.

In addition to carefully placing and posing lone figures within architectural photographs, architecture is also synonymous with casting idealised bodies, Le Corbusier's athelitic figures and his 'Modulor' of an ideal masculine body. And then there are the bodies available in computer models, and the physical little white plastic figurines. These are all ideal figures, doing proper things.

Disjunction.

Volatility-Violence.

Sets in motion a particular series of potentialities that otherwise lie dormant, which can alter architectures physical, social, cultural, ethical and at times political properties. 

Creating a schism between program and space, space and program, it does this so precisely because event-space and movement each follow a distinct logic, that when they are superimposed over one another they create disjunction.

For Tschumi there is an intense confrontation that occurs between body and space, bodies violate space and space violates bodies, the relationship between the two is symmetrical.

Composite Bodies in Spaces : Drawing into the contemporary sociological imagination

Drawing into the contemporary sociological imagination

Intermezzo : Nomadic Photographic Assemblage

a thousand plateaus
Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage
Becoming
Body Without Organs
Nomad
Rhizome
Smooth Space
State
War Machine

www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html

The Uberficiation of the University
BY MARK CARRIGAN ON NOVEMBER 22, 2016• ( 0 )
sociologicalimagination.org/archives/18986

The Sharing Economy
Platform Capitalism
Uber.edu
The Reputation Economy
The Microentrepreneur of the Self
The Para-academic
The Artrepreneur
Affirmative Disruption

A fascinating short book by Gary Hall, available open access at the Coventry University repository:
curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/file/4b7671d5-371f-438b-83c7-92...

img20161120_17325939 Photographic Forms

Drawing figure/ground, documentation of work in progress.

Life "drawing" trace on paper with water and field chalk. Work submitted to Interfaith Group Show at the Link Gallery, Winchester 2010.

"This particular event invokes for me the notion of simple material relations and collaborative gestures that underpin human agency.
Art space/practice can promote these working intimations that enter into the realm of beliefs."        

Artist's Statement (archive)  07.12.2009.

Camera Obscura : Kilquhanity 2011. #4
Dark Session's : Shadowy speculations in the pottery. Kilquhanity 2011

Silver gelatin prints from a "room obscura" set up at Kilquhanity, Scotland 2011 as part of "Back to Free school, Drawing out the Archive"

Sequential Photograph : In the space around the "spatial turn" (539)
Art as Spatial Practice.
Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

"All that is solid melts into air"

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

pictify.com/user/russellmoreton

PB144997a : Mapping.

Bento's Sketchbook : John Berger

The human  body  {corpus humanum) is composed  of many individuals (of different nature),  each  one of which  is highly composite.

The  individuals  of  which  the  human  body  is  composed  are some fluid, some soft and some hard.

The individuals composing  the human  body,  and  conse­quently  the human  body  itself is affected  in  many  ways by external bodies.

The human body needs for its preservation many other bodies from which it is, so to speak, continually regenerated.

When a fluid part of the human body is so determined by an external body that it impinges frequently on another part which is soft, it changes its surface and as it were imprints on it the traces of the external impelling body.

The  human  body  can  move  external  bodies  in  many  ways, and dispose them in many ways.

The human mind is apt for perceiving many things, and more so according as its body can be disposed in more ways.

{Ethics, Part II, Postulates I-VI, Proposition XIV)

Drawing : Proximities and The Sensing Self

 Outpost 221223

Drawings re-examine, explore the 'Body Boundary' its feelings between the world of the individual and the world. Drawings attempt to establish a common boundary condition between themselves and the outside world.

We experience architecture not by aggressively seeking it, but by dwelling in it.

Drawing is always a formulation or elaboration of the thought itself at the very moment it translates itself, makes itself as an image.

Proximities and The Sensing Self.

You see and hear things figuratively and at a distance. But you touch the actual thing. You can extend haptic perception with an instrument, in which case the 'feeling/sensing' moves out to the end of the cane. But when you extend sight or sound, telescopically or electronically you continue to see and hear figuratively and at a distance. 

Kinaesthesia a property of haptic sensing that allows one to sense the body motion (haptically) by detecting the movement of joints and muscles through your entire bodyscape. No other 'sense' deals as directly with the three dimensional world or similarly carries with it the possibility of altering the environment in the process of perceiving it. No other sense engages in feeling and doing simultaneously. This action/reaction characteristic of haptic perception separates it from all other forms of sensing, which in comparison come to seem rather abstract.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Bloomer, Moore.

Organism-Person-Environment

Affect Architecture : Sociological Inquiry. 

Architectural Body. 

Awakawa/Gins.

Caloricity/Corporeality.

The Dreaming Physical Body.

Poetry as a synthesis of human existence.

Novalis, Bachelard.

I've always loved encountering a Rothko, up close, they really hum through your body.

I like the spaces that a large scale offers.

I think of each mark or area as having the possibility of carrying a sensation.

Jenny Saville.

Bodily Boundaries.

Body-Image-Theory.

The 'Physical' Body is the private property of the individual, but the individual's Body Image is developed, socially and thus has a social property. The tendency to associate the body with physicality rather than image over associates the body with notions of privacy.

Bloomer, Moore.

Paint/Haptic Fleshings.

The Bodies She Paints.

Chadwick/Saville.

If Painting presents Being, the drawn line presents Becoming.

Norman Bryson.

Drawing : Bodily Transactions/Making Public.

Displaying : Showing Possession.

Possession, like a body is a feeling that calls on all the senses, but is the direct consequence of feelings that are confirmed haptically, in contrast to the more distant and figurative feeling that are experienced visually and audially.

Bloomer, Moore.

Drawing/Sensing Haptic Relations.

Situatedness through drawing produces the hapticity of the experience of seeing/sensing/feeling with the body. 

The Anatomy of The Body.

The Exposed Interior of a Painting. 

The Space between Abstraction and Figuration.

Having flesh as a central subject (what it feels) I can channel a lot of ideas.

I need my marks to construct the anatomy of the Body.

If there's a narrative I want it in the flesh, in the body of painting.

I try to find Bodies that manifest in their flesh something of our contemporary age.

I find having the framework of a body essential.

Jenny Saville.

Elpis. Gagosian Gallery. 2021

The monumental paintings explore the human body and its fascinating aesthetic potential. Saville's bold and sensuous impressions of surface, line, and mass oscillate between rational and irrational forms, capturing a unique approach to realism specific to the twenty-first century. The publication documents the twelve paintings in the exhibition alongside photographs of the artist's studio and reference materials, including snapshots taken by Saville. It also features a poem by Anna Akhmatova, whose work Saville learned about while she was in Russia, where she photographed many of the models pictured in the paintings.