TOWARDS A NEW INTERIOR : Photography and the temporality of territory

Metaphysics/Atmospheric Cosmogonies.

Blurring divisions and drawing attention to the temporality of territory, the ongoing experience of space as changing instead of space defined by the anxiety about the presence/absence of things.

Francesca Woodman, Chris Townsend. 1999

Spatial themes of inside/outside, negotiations between the physical, phenomenal and a metaphysical world.

TOWARDS A NEW INTERIOR
An Anthology of Interior Design Theory
Lois Weinthal

EXTREME METAPHORS
Interviews with J.G. Ballard
1967-2008

PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH
The embodied mind and its challenge to Western Thought
George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

BRITISH POLITICS
A Very Short Introduction
Tony Wright

The origins of painting and the scepticism of drawing : Architectural surface for a place of study/studio

Painting as an exploratory layered drawing for an architectural surface in a library

 a shadow or an eidolen, an image without substance

Drawing Traces : Metaphysics/Atmospheric Cosmogonies

THE MYTH:

PLINY THE ELDER : NATURAL HISTORY,translation H. Rackham 1952. BOOK 35

Origins of Painting ( XXXV,5).

The question as to the origin of the art of painting is uncertain and it does not belong to the plan of this work. The Egyptians declare that it was invented among themselves six thousand years ago before it passed over into Greece-which is clearly an idle assertion. As to the Greeks, some of them say it was discovered at Sicyon, others in Corinth, but all agree that it began with tracing an outline round a man s shadow and consequently that pictures were originally done in this way, but the second stage when a more elaborate method had been invented was done in a single colour and called monochrome, a method still in use at the present day.

Plastic art. Early stages. Butades and others. (XXXV ,43 ).

Enough and more has now been said about painting. It may be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man ; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery ; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs until the destruction of Corinth by Mummius.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES: BOOKS:

Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (Boston :Beacon Press, 1964). 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Reading: Vintage,2000).

Roland Barthes, Mythologies ( Reading: Vintage,2000).

Georges Bataille, Eroticism (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 2006).

Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light (New Jersey: Princetown University Press, 1997). 

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992). 

Tony Cragg, In And Out of Material {Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications,2006). 

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1994).

Ernst Gombrich, Shadows, The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art (London: National Gallery Publications, 1995).

Antony Gormley, Drawings (London: The British Museum Press, 2002).

Tania Kovats, The Drawing Book (London: Black Dog Publishing,2007). 

Amelia Opie, The Father and Daughter (Peterborough: Broadview Press,2003). 

Pliny, Natural History Books 33-35 trans H. Rackham, (London: Harvard University Press,2003). 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

Victor 1. Stoichita, A Short History of The Shadow ( London: Reaktion, 1997). 

Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). 

Rose Temkin, Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).

Tracey Warr, The Artists Body ( London: Phaidon Press,2000).

OUTPOST Studio/Cyanotype Process Painting

EXHIBITION CATALOGUES:

Anthony Bond, Body (New South Wales: The Art Gallery of NewSouthWales,1997). 

Michael Craig-Martin, Drawing the Line(London South Bank Centre, 1995).

Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: Chicago Press, 1993).

Avis Newman, The Stage of Drawing, Gesture and Act (London: The Tate Drawing Centre, 2003 ).

Giuseppe Penone, The Eroded Steps (Halifax. Henry Moore Sculpture Trust, 1989).

 

The South Bank Centre, The Body of Drawing, Drawings by Sculptors (London: The South Bank Centre, 1993).

Michaela Unterdorfer, In Search of The Perfect Lover (Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle,2003).

JACQUES DERRIDA THE SCEPTICISM OF DRAWING:

Jacques Derrida in 1993 wrote an extensive text to accompany an exhibition of paintings from the Louvre. This text titled Memoirs of the Blind, The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins contains within it some particular references to “Pliny’s Origins of Painting." Together with the aid of illustrations of paintings on this theme, he examines and interrogates their philosophical and historical qualities.

Derrida makes particular mention and emphasis of the “state of blindness” in his analysis of the Butades myth. In particular the notion of  “scepticism” which is at the very heart of drawing. This notion of the “difference between believing and seeing”1, and what he remarks as “believing one sees and seeing between” evokes the emergence of a “glimpse” caught in a state in which “doubt ever becomes a system“2. There is a moment of delay between the gaze with its vigilance and attention, and what one reflects upon seeing. These actions will conspire to create the moment of conclusion. So by keeping the thing in sight it is being constantly examined but not reflected on, until the point when the gaze is averted to the drawing .It is a this instant, withdrawn from the sight of the object, that a “blindness” forces the recollection (the moment of conclusion to emerge) to which the drawn mark is visual evidence of that moment Derrida makes the observation that representations substitute memory for perception and that blindness is a constant withdrawal into memory. Derrida is of the view that drawings, paintings are “representations drawn most often from an exemplary narrative." This myth of Butades with its “exemplary narrative” relates directly to the absence or invisibility of (being in) the drawing process whilst in the presence of the object, that the very act of drawing withdrawals and blinds its participant. Butades daughter is “blinded” in the acts of both love and the act of drawing. Through these conditions it can be seen that Butades daughter is blind to the vision of her lover and in drawing around his projection she is forced to recollect and reflect to produce a conclusion of that action by the simple gesture and act of an inscription drawn aided by a flickering silhouette.

Derrida uses the example of the painting by J. B. Suvee “Butades or the Origin of Drawing 1791” or as it is referred in English as “The Daughter of Butades Drawing the Shadow of Her Lover ” to illustrate that it was “as if one drew only on the condition of not seeing.” The drawing in effect becomes a “declaration of love destined for or suited to the invisibility of the other.”3 Derrida comments that the origin of drawing may have become born from the desire to create some sort of surrogate mark which originates “from seeing the other withdrawn from sight.“4 The important observation Derrida continues to make is that the daughter in “following the traits of a shadow or a silhouette” who is in effect drawing on a blindness which will through recollection, initiates a sense with which she is in effect “already loves in nostalgia.”5

Derrida dwells on the very nature of drawing moving away from “the origin of drawing” to “the thought of drawing” he comments that the thought of a drawing has a “certain pensive pose, a memory of the trait that speculates, as in a dream, about its own possibility.”6 It is as if the potency of drawings is a projected development that occurs as Derrida states “on the brink of blindness.” This notion of the “trait” (a feature to a line, stroke, or mark) a visible presence that accompanies the lines odyssey, a sense of presence that can witness something of the invisible in the visible is touched upon. ’’Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible is cited by Derrida as having already made “Indications” in this respect Derrida footnote from The Visible and the Invisible seems to sum up something of the invisibility and presence of the trait acting on a drawing. This extract taken from the “working notes” section of the book it reads” One has to understand that it is visibility itself that involves a non visibility.”7

Distilled from the salient points of Derrida’s extensive interrogation Memoirs of the Blind seems to acknowledge the fact that “whether Butades daughter follows the tracts of a shadow or a silhouette or even if she draws on the surface of a wall or in a veil.”8 the resultant inscription in any event “inaugurates an act of blindness.” Derrida’s revelation is that “perception belongs to recollection.” Butades daughter’s act is in blindness, as if she was drawing a declaration of love that simultaneously that also contains her anticipation of a loss, and as a result, a nostalgia that is reflected upon before it is actually perceived.

1  . Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, The Self Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: Chicago Press, 1993),page 1.

2  .Ibid., page 1.

3  .Ibid., page 49.

4  .Ibid., page 49.

5  .Ibid., page 51.

6  .Ibid., page 3.

7   Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968),257.

8   Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, page 51.

VICTOR I. STOICHITA PLINY’S MYTH:

V. I. Stoichita in his book “A Short History of the Shadow" has analysed “Pliny’s Butades myth,” he makes the point in his introduction “that it is of unquestionable significance that the birth of Western artistic representation was in the negative,1” and that it emerged as such from the projection of the body marking it’s very presence by a projection, a shadow or an eidolen, an image without substance. Butades daughter therefore attempts to capture this intangible immaterial, the double of the one through whom she anticipates her impending loss.

Stoichita has noted that “Pliny” returns to the myth twice, first to discus the origins of painting and then further on to the production of sculpture. Stoichita elaborates further that Pliny claims that “the Greeks discovered painting, not by looking at Egyptian works of art but by observing the human shadow.” Pliny quotes” but all agree that it began with tracing an outline round a man’s shadow. “Stoichita connects Pliny correspondence as being a “three part theory” in which he Pliny uses early Greek painting, Egyptian painting, and the shadow. 

Stoichita makes the connection that “Plinys approach can be placed at the crossroads of history and artistic mythology.2” Pliny uses a fable as a myth of origin to interpret the historical existence of early Egyptian painting The evolution of painting from this “early shadow stage” is then replaced by the advancement of a mono-chrome painting which was then later replaced by relief and shading now becomes a means of expression not just a support to give a sense of form to an outline.

1  Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion, 1997), page 7.

2  . Ibid., page 14.

The Daughter of Butades : Visual Art Winchester. 2008

My research centred on various situations that owe their inspiration to Pliny’s simple concise statement in his Natural History on the “origins of painting and the plastic arts.” My initial reason for selecting this particular mythical tale is its sense of performance through the simple act of drawing. It records the daughter of Butades and her lover, collaborating to produce an intimate trace of her gesture and his presence. 

This performative action is at the heart of contemporary art practice. In some respects this trace is done with a form of blindness as commented upon by Derrida. This blindness of drawing and the blindness of love seem to stimulate the idea of a myth within a myth, one blind to the other. The notion that she is in the act of drawing in the anticipation of loss; and simultaneously she is sensing a nostalgic moment. This all transpires whilst her lover is still present. 

Andrey Tarkovsky manages to suffuse these values into his work. These “poetics” are derived from the enduring sensibilities of mythical language. They allow things of wonder to attach themselves to the everyday. Italo Calvino’s comment “with myths, one should not be in a hurry,” seems at odds with our culture of speed and its overabundance of events and information. 

But ironically this “supermodemity” with its non-places that induce a sort of solitary individuality might actually grant access to a mythical language centred by the very anonymity of these transitional sites. It is into these non-places that Butades daughter cites her act and gesture of an artist. The residue and vestige of what remains is her commenting actions, not some attempt at pictorial representation.

The inscription or mark which through an authenticity of an artist becomes captured by the place, it becomes marooned, vacated, at a standstill, time passes through somewhat stalled. This trace of authenticity of the contemporary artist becomes an absence marked, a passage and a dimension of possibilities. 

The contemporary artist is already using a language of material residues, and past events from which new languages will evolve.

Myth must be the lightest historical residue there is; perhaps that is why it can survive on the barest of traces.

White Noise

Nocturnes of Silence

Art as Experience : Interactions of Color, Josef Albers.

GLASS-COLOUR-LIGHT-INTERIOR-LANDSCAPE

ART AS EXPERIENCE

WHAT IS THE CAPACITY OF THE MATERIAL

Josef Albers

Life is change-day and night, cold and warm, sun and rain. It is more in-between the facts than the facts themselves.

I believe it is now time to make a change of method in our art teaching, that we now move from looking at art as a part of historical science to an understanding of art as part of life.

In art we can still experience revelation and wonder.

On Glass Pictures

Opaque Glass/Sandblasting

Colour Intensity

The flatness of the design elements offer an unusual and particular material and form effect.

Colour Intersection/Instant and a Spatial Flow

Colour Interaction

Square-on-square studies, of closely observed colour events staged within a controlled setting.

Oral History

Interview with Josef Albers, 1968 June 22-July 5

The role of art in society to reveal visually the attitude of our mentality

Working in Collage and Stained Glass under Itten

Collage to Montage

His belief that he teaches a philosophy (of how to see) not technique.  

Guggenheim Museum. 1994

Catalogue

32. Skyscaper 11
1929
Sandblasted flashed glass 36.2 x 36.2cm.

30. Skyscraper 1
1927/1929
Sandblasted opaque flashed glass 34.9 x 34.9cm.

28. City
1928
Sandblasted opaque flashed glass with black paint, 33 x 55.3cm.
Badley damaged with sections of glass missing.
Alber's numerical notations in white chalk or pencil are visible on the surface.

21. Frontal
1927
Sandblasted opaque flashed glass with black paint, 34.8 x 47.9cm.

https://ia800808.us.archive.org/9/items/glascoli00albe/glascoli00albe.pdf

A Spiritual Documentation of Life

Marco Pierini

Art is something that cannot be taught, what can be taught is craft

His program focused mainly on the study, analysis, manipulation, assembly and transformation of matter.

Albers structured his teaching method as a natural, consistent consequence of his unusual training.

He brought to life works of art that are never merely the result of a thorough process or of the correct application of norms and rules. Rather, they are works of art that discover their own rules in the very process of their making.

Art is not an object but experience

The Artist as Alchemist

Nicholas Fox Weber

He (Albers) saw his art as representing an ideal for the integration of the individual in society both in its tone and in the simultaneous independence and interdependence of its forms and colours. 

TEACHING FORM THROUGH PRACTICE 1928

Learning is better than teaching because it is more intensive : the more we teach/examine, the less the students can learn.

Learning and practicing techniques develops insight and dexterity, but not creative energies. Inventive construction and an attentiveness that leads to discoveries are developed, at least initially through experimentation that is undisturbed, independent, and thus without preconceptions. This experimentation is initially a playful tinkering with the material for its own sake. 

That is to say, through experimentation that is amateurish (ie not burdened by training).   

The Three Ecologies Institute

An Open Laboratory for Thinking in the Making

THOUGHT IN THE ACT

Passages in the ecology of experience

Erin Manning

Brian Massumi

Marking a Place : Land Art/Architecture/Propositional Drawings

Outpost 050923

Reticular Events/Tentative Surfaces.

Structures/Journeys/Maps/Diagrams

Buildings that include/contain areas for inhabitation, living, working, sleeping.

Marking a place in the seemingly infinite expanse of the desert. 

For Richard Serra, such a building serves as a barometer by means of which the landscape can be interpreted and known.

Architectural Fables/Unbuilt Projects, posited as ideal communities, projects living on as architectural fables long after constructed buildings have crumbled. 

Emilio Ambasz, speaks of architecture as a myth making act, my work is a search for primal things, being born, being in love, and dying. It has to do with existence on an emotional, passionate, and essential level.

Steven Holl, speaks of architecture and site as having an experimental connection, a metaphysical link, a poetic link.

Hannsjorg Voth has developed a feeling for the formal and spatial relationship between the artifact and the ideal pristine landscape, he is interested in finding traces of this 'ideal' original landscape or as he likes to call it, zero landscape, on the sea and in the desert. 

Sky Stairway, resembling the great archaic calendar structures (Jaipur) with its steps, which seem to lead into an endless distance, symbolise the link between the finiteness of earthly things and the infinity of the cosmos. Yet the symbol is transient, the clay was trodden in the traditional manner will not be able to withstand the erosive force of the Moroccan Desert indefinitely. A special place that will only live on in the tales of the nomads.   

Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art.

Udo Weilacher.

Himmelstreppe-Sky Stairway is a seemingly archaic clay structure in the Moroccan Plain of Marha. 

Voth has developed a form of dialogue with nature, landscape and civilization which clearly stands apart from works of Land Art, on account of its semantic complexity and close links with European cultural history.

Signs of Remembrance.

Hannsjorg Voth.

Voth's creativity has always been characterized by the desire to investigate the elemental relationships in nature and their their fundamental connections with humans. The artist's almost meditative treatment of the four elements, provides revealing insights into the potential force of artistic interventions in the complex relationship between landscape and natural environment. 

Christo has made a decisive contribution to making art in public space popular, my 'bindings' for The Field Marks 1975 had a great deal to do with bandaging a wound in the landscape, whereas Christo wraps in order to reveal. My work has also very clearly got something to do with escaping from people. Today people no longer seem to be capable of approaching nature and creative work with respect. The trend today is to drive to the ends of the earth and then to destroy everything there. It is difficult for me to come to terms with schizophrenic mixture of escape and dependence.

Hannsjorg Voth. 1999.

Casa De Retiro Espiritual

Spiritual Retreat.

Emilio Ambasz

Peter Buchanan.

Casa De Retiro Espiritual, makes explicit that the entire complex is conceived as a spiritual retreat and though offering magnificent views of the lake and estate, it is essentially introverted in character.

Isolated on its estate, it withdraws below the ground. At a simple remove are the bedrooms for deep dreams, and the bathrooms oozing oriental sensuality, and still further removed is the elevated balcony. Like those found throughout the Islamic world and following a traditional Andalusian pattern, this balcony is enclosed in a lattice of turned wooden spindles giving privacy and shade while admitting the breeze. 

Of the many ways of engaging with an architectural work, there are two especially pertinent to this spiritual retreat. A house devised both as a receptacle for the changing play of light and mood as well as a carefully choreographed sequence of experiences.

To move physically through the house, exploring and experiencing its spaces in sequence is the more active mode. While the other is observing patiently how slowly subtle changes of light, colour, temperature, movement and sound register and rotate through the days and seasons.

By means of these devices the viewer is gradually induced to open up to a contemplative mood and awareness of cyclical time in which even the simplest of daily rituals are now invested with a semi sacred intensity.

Emilio Ambasz

Steven Holl

Stuart Wrede

While Ambasz's work on the whole addresses the primal psychological urges in us that have been basic to humans since time in immemorial, Holl's architecture tends to address the more elusive, complex and brittle psychological states of modern urban humans.

Both architects' work reflects the schizophrenic nature of late 1960s attitudes towards engagement and withdrawal. Each has designed 'Mythic Retreats' placed below the earth's surface. Ambasz, partly sunk in the midst of open wheat fields outside Cordoda, Spain. Holl, floating underwater of the coast of St Tropez, France.

The Poetics of the Pragmatic

Emilio Ambasz

Anchoring

Steven Holl

Michael Heizer.

Nader Khalili.

Anthropological Entanglements/Emergent Landscapes : Strange Tools/The Rings of Saturn

 

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach

The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane

“ Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:

Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”

“To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.”

DSC_0585 Covehithe : Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape

Natural History : Dried Carnations

Blueprints : Anthropological Forms

Botanical traces with leper graves

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

Contexts:

Art therapy , Exhibition , Open studio , Practice-based research,

Artforms:

Film & video , Painting , Photography , Printmaking,

Laboratory of Architecture : Spatial Practices MA, UCA Canterbury.

Methodologies : Speculative/Diffractive Modes of Inquiry and Making

Derrida (Glas, University of Nabraska Press, 1986):

‘The art of this text is the air it causes to circulate between its screens. The chainings are invisible, everything seems improvised or juxtaposed. This text induces by agglutinating rather than demonstrating, by coupling and decoupling, gluing and ungluing, rather than exhibiting the continuous, and analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric.’

Marcus Doel (‘Meanwhile - Cats, Glunks, werewolves and other poststructuralists’ in Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space, Routledge, London, 2000):

‘... .to approach the text as a map, a tool kit, a record: there are entrances and exits everywhere; fold it however you want; follow whatever trajectory you fancy. It’s still philosophy. A book, a work, an event: they all vary in and of themselves.. ..hence the setting off of the variable ‘and’ in place of the constant to-ing and fro-ing of the sedentary ‘is’ and ‘is not’; identity-difference; self-other; being-nothingness. Every ‘one’, every ‘each’ every ‘a’ is packed with innumerable others that are bursting to get out for a breath of fresh air, a taste of the outside, a stroll in the open.’

Luce Irigaray, The Irigaray Reader, Margaret Whitford, ed. (Blackwell, Oxford, 

1991):

‘Everything then should be thought of as volume(s), helix(es), diagonal(s), spiral(s), curl(s), tum(s), revolution(s), pirouette(s)....An increasingly dizzying speculation which pierces, drills, bores a volume still assumed to be solid. And therefore violated in its shell, fractured, trepanned, burst, sounded even unto its centre. Or belly. Caught up in faster and faster whirlings, swirlings, until matter shatters and falls into (its) dust.... Fluid must remain that secret, sacred remainder of the one’.

Jean Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 

1993):

‘The adversary and accomplice of writing.... is language... One writes against language but necessarily with it. To say what one already knows how to say is not writing. One wants to say what it does not know how to say.. .one violates it, one seduces it, one introduces into it an unknown.’

The Laboratory , Canterbury 2009,  Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Cyanotype image from pinhole camera with sound intervention/device within the apparatus of the camera, performative material gathered from the Canterbury School of Architecture.

UCA Spatial Practices MA under Oren Lieberman.

MA Fine Art / Spatial Practices Introduction to Theory

Dr Judith Rugg 

Consider the following:

‘A metaphor speaks indirectly - it implies. To be theoretical, one has to explicate - to open the folds.’ Yve Lomax, Writing the Image (2000).

‘Time is multi-dimensional, an uneven bundle of swerves (not linear). The idea of the self as a self-conscious presence in the now, must be abandoned.’ Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology (1976).

‘To go off writing, I must escape from the broad daylight which takes me by the eyes, which takes my eyes and fills them with broad raw visions. I do not want to see what is shown. I want to see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible. I want to se the skein of the light.’ Helene Cixous, ‘Writing Blind. Conversation with the donkey’ in Stigmata (1998).

‘Cultures do not relate to the “reality” of the world but to the world as narrative and illusion. These are subtle and vital for human existence. We live in the Golden Age of the alienation and the dissolution between real and fake, true and false in the triumph of consumer capitalism.’ Jean Baudrillard, Radical Uncertainty

'Seeing red is a matter of reading. And reading is properly symbolic. ’ Trinh T Minh- ha, All Owning Spectatorship.

‘Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent to that it is performed. Certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of gender core or identity... which either confirm or contest that expectation in some way.’ Judith Butler, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.

‘A space exists when one takes into account vectors of direction, velocities and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of moving elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it... that orient it, situate it. In short, space is a practiced place.’ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

‘When it has totally disappeared, we will logically be under the total hallucination of power - a haunting memory that is already in evidence everywhere, expressing at once the compulsion to get rid of it... and the panicked nostalgia over its loss. The melancholy of societies without power: that has already stirred up fascism, that overdose of a strong referential in a society that can’t terminate its mourning.’ Baudrillard, ‘The Procession of Simulacra’ in Simulacra and Simulation.

‘...a Chinese encyclopedia in which is it written that “animals are divided into: a) belonging to the Emperor; b) embalmed; c) tame; d) sucking pigs; e) sirens; f) fabulous; g) stray dogs; h) frenzied; i) innumerable; j) drawn with a fine camel hair brush.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Introduction) 1991.

‘The walls will never be really cast down. Hence, the melancholia of all landscapes. We owe them a debt. They immediately demand the deflagration of the mind, and then obtain it immediately. Without it, they would be places not landscapes. And yet the mind never burns enough.’ Lyotard, ‘Scapeland’ in The Lyotard Reader, A. Benjamin, ed.

‘Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture, just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated - saturated, by ‘degenerate’ images and statements. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he ‘redevelops’, driving out poor families...’ Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (1989).

‘To think about the geography of the female subject of feminism is not to be able to name a specific kind of spatiality which she would produce; rather, it is to be vigilant about the consequences of different kinds of spatiality; and to keep dreaming of a space and a subject which we cannot yet imagine.’ Gillian Rose, ‘Making space for the female subject of feminism.’ In Steve Pile and M. Keith, eds, Mapping the Subject (1995)

In this age of motor cars and aeroplanes, only slight atavistic terrors still lurk beneath the blackened halls, and that comedy of farewell and reunion played out against the background of Pullman cars transforms the platform into a provincial stage.’ Walter Benjamin (see Graeme Gilloch, Myths and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City, 1996).

‘It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think in the first place. In that case, it either “expresses” some deeper irrepressible historical impulse (in however distorted a fashion), or effectively “represses” and diverts it, depending on the side of ambiguity you happen to favour.’ Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).

Tim Ingold
MAKING 2013
Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Practical Geometry

The Architect and The Carpenter

The Cathedral and The Laboratory

Templates and Geometry

The Return to Alchemy

Collage Workings : UCA Interior Design MA, UCA Farnham

Drawing Technicity : Lines/Choreographies for Potential Eventness.

 Outpost 010823

New Occasions of Experience.

Housing The Body.

Dressing The Environment.

Forcefields/Associated Milieu.

Individuations Dance.

Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through which without colliding would produce the establishment of places, localities made special for one reason or another. There is no stage at which  human beings do not demarcate, beacon or sign their space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space, Lefebvre. 1991.

 

Durational play, crafting of the as yet unthought, where the microperceptual and the micropolitical meet to create new movements in the making.

We land/dance into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Objectiles thrown into the world and invitations to move-with.

Propositions are ontogenetic, they emerge as the germ of the occasion and persist on the nexus of experience to take hold once more through new occasions of experience.

The proposition I am seeing on the table is a hammer, the eventness of the proposition now persists in my hand, what moves a body, returns as a movement of thought.

Objects exist in the between of a proposition and its eventness, in so doing they are inciting co-constellations of movement-moving.

Technicity and its choreographies for potential eventness.

In this strange time-loop, what is lived is less the encounter with space pre-formed or objects pre-existent than a direct experience of relation.

William Forsythe/Erin Manning.

Making Divides Fluid.

Fielding Differences With Curiosity.

Kairos, the movement and its moment.

Being Alive, Tim Ingold.

Much of our thinking happens across various kinds of divides.

Choreographic Thinking.

Choreography has the capacity to craft an associated milieu of relations that extends far beyond the stage.

Experiencing environment as gradually taking form, using choreographic objects to help shift the everydayness of time, towards the durational time of play. The choreographic proposition begins with the folding of space more than the form-taking of bodies.

A Lure For Feeling.

Like his choreographies Forsythe's choreographic objects are created with very precise conditions for the movement experimentation. They insist on the precision of parameters for movement (technique) without divesting the movement of its potential for eventness (technicity). They are carefully crafted towards generating certain kinds of participation and yet unforeseeable in their effects.

Erin Manning.

An Attitude to History.

At Castelvecchio, Carlo Scarpa embarked on a much more far-reaching idea of not only cleaning the building but attempting to clarify and expose the layers of history by selective excavation and creative demolition. He attempted to cut and then disentangle one epoch's construction from another so that the building itself becomes a giant exhibit revealing its growth and change in nature.

Scarpa was primarily interested not in any concepts of restoration but an idea to do with historical clarity, making history visible by the co-existence of overlaying fragments of construction.

Ceramic Testing/Prototyping/Making

Hungate Glass Assemblages.

Drawing/Diagrams/Choreographies into the Architectural Body.

Relationscapes/Propositions/Organism/Person/Environment.

Arakawa, Gins, Manning, Forsythe, Irwin.

Shotesham SPAB.

Bayfield Hall Sculpture Trail.

Propositions into the Figural.

The Social/Private Body on Display.

The Physical Self, Peter Greenaway. 1992. 

As we draw the human figure we both reveal and hide ourselves and it.

The Life Room is a peculiar place and Life Drawing is a bizarre activity.

How you draw is contingent on why you are drawing.

What you bring to the Life Room defines you.

Before embarking on a program of Life Drawing, you need to ask yourself how and why you are doing it. Your answers to these two questions should qualify each other.

We do not dispute that Life Drawing is an important aspect of an art education. But if it is to be significant, it must extend into the rest of life and begin to touch upon things that matter to you, otherwise it is an empty activity, the development of a skill with no purpose.

Peter Stanyer, Terry Rosenberg. 1996.

What is the occasion and purpose of the drawing?

We need to be aware of what it is we need to reveal.

Is the nude as a form of art still valid?

The curious and uneasiness of the psychology of nakedness.

The practical and theoretical issues of the confrontation with the the unclothed human form.

Collage : Solar Pavilion/A Philosophy of Solitude/John Cowper Powys : The Hut as a projection of self/Ann Cline

As my dwelling took shape, it began to shape my life as well. And when I sat inside reading the recluse poets, the terse simplicity of their record framed my own perception, one I likened to a camera recording a world of pure experience.

Ann Cline

Architecture is not made with the brain. 

The labour of Alison and Peter Smithson.

Architectural Association 2005.

Smithson’s on modernity, not as a goal but as an established reality that needs to be interpreted.

Articulation of the volumes based on rigorous rules that derive from the ordering capacity of the necessities of daily life.

Holistic Practices.

The way person and work fit together so seamlessly.

Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker, 2005:85)

Transitions between spaces.

‘Building relationships to relate to what already exists.’ Herzog and de Meuron The Parallel of Art and Life

Aesthetics about Perception Poetics about Production

‘The approach leads from the static object of the mere picture to the dynamic process of imagining.’(Schregenberger,2005:82)

‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ (attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place) Peter Smithson 2001 

‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction and a concern for that which exists.’ (Schregenberger,2005:81)

Complex Ordinariness Bruno Krucker

Urban Structuring.

Importance of urban planning, specific responses to the surroundings generated different shapes. Testing out spatial bound volumes and aligning them with the site or urban fabric/passages of use and existing features.

‘As Found, is a small affair: it is about being careful, the as found (is) where the art is in the picking up, turning over and putting with.’ (Smithson.)

‘The essence of ‘as found’ as a concept lies in accepting the value of the everyday. Any aspect of the built environment can be interpreted and employed as a trigger for architectural propositions. To consider ways in which the ‘ordinary’ can be harnessed through reinterpretation.’ (Sergison’2005:98)

The Everyday.

Life between buildings.

The necessities of daily life (the repetition of basic sequences) giving shape and layout to the architecture.

Heavy Prefabrication: Whole wall sections used to a homogeneous expression that emphasises their tactile qualities.

John Cowper Powys hopes to create a new level of discourse that will appeal to the common person, that person who desperately needs a philosophy of life, a means of comprehending the world around him or her, while at the same time being a person who is receptive and curious.

‘The Solar Pavilion, is both a lookout over the distant landscape on the north facade, sitting on top of the existing cottage wall, and a garden pavilion mediating between two types of controlled landscape. It aims to provide a minimal enclosure that allows as immediate a relationship between interior and exterior as possible.’

(Sergison’2005:97)

The hut addresses the core of ritual as a part of nature versus the supposed freedom of modernist thought and the architectural contrivances it pursues. The hut represents the convergence of ritual and naturalness, at the same time addressing cultural issues and practices.

To systematise transitions of both components and internal spatial orderings. The sizes of elements are determined by the inner spatial ordering in an almost organic, non-schematic way.’

We developed elements that embrace the entire thickness of the wall.’ (Krucker, 2005:85)

The search for directness while avoiding too much design, but still ensuring that our buildings look right in their surroundings.

Cultural Background.

Fitting in with the ordinariness of the environment, an ordinariness that only reveals its strength over time.

Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker, 2005:85)

The anonymous settings of settlements and agglomerations create documents/cinematic presences of familiarity within these architectural contexts. It is important to go beyond any superficial fascination with the ‘periphery’.

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) created an attractive and congenial meditation in his best non-fiction book: A Philosophy of Solitude.

Writing in the early 1930's in his adopted United States, where he was living and working as a free-lance lecturer, a popularizer of intellectual themes barnstorming the country, Powys' book is prompted by his experiences, his insights, and his disappointments. He sees the United States as a slave of modem technology — of megalopolis, pandemonium, noise, of "the Gargantuan monstrosities and Dantesque horrors of our great modem cities."

The situation, he declares, is too far gone for the inspiration of American writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, with their facile optimism and their confidence in the virtues of an American character now lost in the twentieth century.

The only thing that can really help us is a much more definite and drastic philosophy ... a real, hard, formidable, unrhetorical introspection ..."

And this is the philosophy of solitude that Powys sets out of construct.

To Powys, solitude is the necessary social, psychological, and intellectual state of the individual. It is social in pulling away from the life and tumult of the crowd (Powys lived for decades in New York City, finally moving to a small town in upper-state New York before returning to Wales a few short years after this book's publication).

It is psychological in the sense of identifying and pursuing a frame of mind for the personal pursuit of solitude. And it is intellectual in offering a philosophy calling upon a variety of classic thinkers and using the tools of plain everyman logic.

Powys sees this simplicity of mind and desire as a key to self-control and understanding. His elementalism is based on the solitude that is evoked by this self-knowledge, which allows a person to make and define a life for themselves based not upon the tempo and rhythms of the crowd and technology but on the unspoken wisdom that wells up from solitude itself.

The hut has a sense of immediacy that no room-filled house can achieve. The hut focuses its dweller on immediacy and meaningfulness. I had found the commodity of my dwelling through the poetry of its use.

Structural Thinking. Anti Object: Kengo Kuma.

Identity out of structure/layers of latticed structure.

Character-forming ability of structures, through the transitions of interior to exterior spaces. ‘Our approach was to act decisively at an urban and a spatial level and to create precise alignments that would strengthen existing elements. Within the structure, it becomes possible to give specific places an individual identity and to create an awareness of the relation between repetition and difference. Seen in this way , the facades are less a surface around a volume, and more the outer edges of the structure itself (importantly the structuring becomes independent of the programme, which can change over time).’ (Krucker, 2005:87)

The power of a building originates from its structuring (a character of a building that is not wholly subservient to its programme).

The book is an extended essay, not a history, but it does call for a close sense of identity with the subject and with those who have come before. The author dives into the subject of primitive huts, skimming the surface with Po-i and Shu-ch'i, the recluse archetype brothers of Chinese antiquity, with modems like Gaston Blanchard and Thomas Merton, classics like Lao-tzu and Heraclitus, plus the great Japanese hut-dwellers Kamo no Chomei and Hoshida Kenko. The hut, she notes, has always been a projection of the self. When Heraclitus was chided on why he lived in such a small and humble abode, he responded, "Even here, the gods reside."

Ground Notations, the need to find an existing physical structure, see ‘Shifting the Track’ (Smithson.)

‘The Smithsons’ search for a strong existing element that could be added to and adjusted, if necessary, ensures that a project is grounded in its place. Successful ground notations operate at varying scales, ranging from large pieces of infrastructure (roadways,etc) to natural, seasonal landscape infrastructure (trees and meadows). Once absorbed into an existing situation, new ground notations begin to refocus a place and act as the basis for subsequent actions’ (Sergison’2005:97)

Drawing on an existing topographic ground notation (earth-bunds) matrices of bundways that help irrigate the marshlands and define land ownership. 

‘New topographical features containing the infrastructure necessary for development, with roads on top and supply conduits inside them. Public buildings were located on top of swollen bunds, for visibility and orientation, while the spaces in between bunds became serviced fields for new settlement.’ (Sergison’2005:98)

Could it be that where a human settlement seems structureless, without purpose, we invent and build ‘ground-notations’ to offer an analogous power to that offered by strong natural landforms?

Neutrality and Character.

‘This kind of structural thinking supports the search for a more anonymous everyday architecture that can nevertheless develop a character of its own.

The prefabricated parts generate complex volumetric forms that remain only partly visible after assembly. The effect is similar to that of Japanese timber construction, in which the simplicity and clarity of appearance belie the complexity of the joining techniques involved.’ (Krucker, 2005:89)

‘The Smithson’s embraced an architecture that was not purely driven by formal intensions but by questions regarding content. This is an architecture that results from an attitude of openness towards the world (of worlds) and an acute awareness of the impact of the architect’s actions. Such an architecture insists on addressing the nature of real conditions and how they fit into the fabric of a larger context.’ (Krucker, 2005:90)

Lessons Learnt from Alison and Peter Smithson 

With an agility larger structures can never match, huts bring together the physical environment with such disparate aspects of culture as necessity, fantasy, faith, and "life-style." The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.

‘I remember finding the work awkward, even ugly in its removal from architectural conventions. ’

Research Contexts/Materials

The Shift/Italian Thoughts, both became pivotal in the understanding of the intensions behind their work.

What does it mean to be an English architect? The lessons presented as six themes.

Strategy and Detail, as a design concept and method.

A manual for negotiating our way through the development of a project. 

‘All our projects begin with an interpretation of the specifics of the programme and a response to the place we are adding to, either as a series of sketches or a model exploring a building form. A dialogue then begins about the ‘feeling’ of the project, its material presence and its language of construction; this provides a framework in which to take decisions and a structure that can be referred to.’(Sergison’2005:92) Trying it out, testing its placement in place, its on-site feelings.

A detailing of open brick perpends (a breathing building envelope) that is overlaid on all three elevations, giving a quiet expression to the building’s tectonics.

Conglomerate Ordering, as an overall interconnected building solution. 

‘A bold simple form adjusted by the forces of the site, thereby containing an equivalence, an overall tonality through the concrete frame as a structural solution and the block infill and their aluminium dressings. The building form and plan arrangement were adjusted according to the particularities of the site and to rhyme with the geometries of the neighbouring industrial buildings.’ (Sergison’2005:94)

Ways, (a spine providing a variety of spatial experiences coupled with the means by which circulation is distributed) sometimes Ways are employed in a manner that is latent and discreet; in other instances they are the most public part of a project. 

‘The concept of Ways as a means of organising circulation and supporting activity.’ (Sergison’2005:94)

A simple organising circulation element that can be read, at one level, as a street or lane running the length of the plan, linking the apartments. This space is given a strong material intensity, entirely timber-clad on floor, walls and soffit. At selected moments views of the city are framed or the sky is revealed.

Janus Face, origins in Italian Thoughts, teaches us to understand how mediation is possible between inside and outside, or between one side of a building and another; as all faces are equally engaged with what lies before them.

By focusing attention on the enclosing envelope and how the building should engage with the conditions around it.

The opposing forces of a site and its relationships to the different faces of the building can become multifaceted, through scale, the choice of material or even the layering of its construction; a discreet link is sought which connects rather than confronts.