Russell Moreton : Matter(s) in Correspondence

Spatial practices of clay, ceramic, drawing, bodies, places and making.

Spatial Practice

Architecture, sites, spatial situations, bodies, inhabitation, installations, spatial propositions.

Ceramic Bodies

Clay, ceramic sculpture, vessels, apertures, surfaces, firing, ceramic interiors, ceramic atmospheres.

Drawing / Image

Drawing, cyanotype, photography, diagram, mapping, collage, visual experiments.

Interiority / Atmosphere

Bachelard, refuge, reverie, innerness, thresholds, chambers, light, shadow, atmosphere, sensing.

Making / Materiality

Studio practice, making, material resistance, gesture, process, firing, construction, surface, force.

Research / Working Texts

Reading, theoretical writing, notes, research propositions, older texts being re-entered, speculative learning.

  • Sunday, 6 June 2021

    Spatial Agency/The Arts and the dance of thinking : The body is open to the intensities of the present.

    BIOSPHERE
    And all of our thinking, for its part, forms its own ecosystem as well. Mind is an ecological phenomenon, the result of a collective dance.
    Gregory Bateson was fascinated by the fact that the relational networks between  root hairs and  mycelial filaments,  between  predator and  prey,  partners and  competitors,  have a form similar to  the neural pathways between the different hubs of our brains. Bateson drew several conclusions from this: that the landscape is also capable of thinking—not in  ideas and  words,  but in  forms,  colors,  tones,  and  scents.  Its thinking has no  object,  and  it therefore knows nothing  of either accusations or reproaches.  The natural world  thinks by  transforming  itself as a subject. The relationships within  an  ecosystem thereby  constitute something  like the synapses of a landscape’s nervous system (a very  specific nervous system,  which  has the form of a very  specific landscape).  In  this,  an ecosystem resembles a brain. Like a brain, it is capable of cognition. The way in which vegetation changes as the climate around it becomes more dry, for example, could be imagined as the way in which that ecosystem imagines a drought.  The biosphere is a system that constantly  produces new relationships by  responding  to  existing  ones.  Our brain  does the very  same thing.  Moreover,  since it resides within  a body,  it does not just map  the relationships from the outside,  but is itself a part of the relational network within an ecosystem.
    Matter and Desire, an erotic ecology, Andreas Weber. 2017
    The mind is always embodied, always based on corporeal and sensory relations.
    Elizabeth Grosz.

    Categories and things may make it easier for us to grasp reality, but they also hide its underlying complexities.

    Peripheral Vision, Relationality. Robert Cooper. 2005
    Oxford Dictionary of Geography: spatiality

    The effect that space has on actions, interactions, entities, concepts, and theories. Physical spatiality can also be metaphorical. It is used to show social power—thrones are higher than the seats of commoners, and ‘high tables’ for university teachers in most Oxbridge colleges physically elevate the teachers over the taught. People use proximity to show how intimate they want to be with others (See personal space), or orientation; we may face someone or turn away from them. Institutions and governments have used large architectural spaces to invoke awe, while restaurateurs may create ‘cosiness’ in small spaces.

    FILMIC COLLAGE : Veiled Melancholy/Book Narratives

    “He rubbed his eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his mind was quite clear – evidently his sleep had  benefited him. He was not in a bed at all as he understood the word, but lying naked on a very soft and yielding mattress, in a trough of dark glass. The mattress was partly transparent, a fact he observed with a sense of insecurity, and below it was a mirror reflecting him greyly. Above his arm- and he saw with a shock that his skin was strangely dry and yellow – was bound a curious apparatus of rubber, bound so cunningly that it seemed to pass into his skin above and below. And this bed was placed in a case of greenish-coloured glass (as it seemed to him), a bar in the white framework of which had first arrested his attention. In the corner of the case was a stand of glittering and delicately made apparatus, for the most part quite strange appliances, though a maximum  and minimum thermometer was recognizable.”

    H. G. Wells : The Sleeper Awakes. 1899/1910

    “Spatial turn” The increased attention to matters of space, place and mapping in literary and cultural studies, as well as in social theory, philosophy, and other disciplinary fields.

    Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. Routledge 2013.

    Immediate Architectural Interventions, Durations and Effects : Apparatuses, Things and People in the Making of the City and the World. Alberto Altes Arlandis, Oren Lieberman. 2013

    Preface (1921) ” The great city of this story is no more than a nightmare of Capitalism triumphant, a nightmare that was dreamt a quarter of a century ago. It is a fantastic possibility no longer possible. Much evil may be in store for mankind, but to this immense, grim organization of servitude, our race will never come” H.G. Wells. Easton Glebe, Dunmow,1921.

    EMULSION : Photographic Landscape

    I do not start with the idea but with the experience
    Peter Lanyon

    The Experience of Landscape
    Paintings, Drawings and Photographs
    South Bank Centre

    An Anthropology Of Landscape
    Christopher Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum

    ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE
    Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
    Timothy Morton

    Matter and Desire, An Erotic Ecology
    Andreas Weber
    BLUE SPACES : White Absences #2. Silence/Void : Gap/Reveal

    Ordinary Lives
    Studies in the Everyday
    Ben Highmore

    RUINED INTERIOR : Consumerism and Culture.
    The Art of Survival?
    Jacqueline Rose
    Essay for ‘Elsewhere’ Therese Oulton

    Hermeneutic Philosophy and The Sociology of Art
    Janet Wolff

    Hermeneutics
    Jens Zimmermann

     

    BIOSPHERE And all of our thinking, for its part, forms its own ecosystem as well. Mind is an ecological phenomenon, the result of a collecti…

    Source: Spatial Agency/The Arts and the dance of thinking : The body is open to the intensities of the present.

  • Saturday, 5 June 2021

    Body Politics : Drawing Geographies

    Figure/Foreground : Drawing/Sensing

    In drawing the moments of choice have been kept visible.
    John Berger, Berger On Drawing.

    A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artists own needs.
    The Drawn Line-A Recession-A Past Statement Brought Forward

    The Body of Drawing
    Drawings by Sculptors
    South Bank

    Drawing registers the transforming effects of the imagination and the memory.
    Drawings are images of flux; flux both imaginative and physical.

    Drawing is a verb.
    There is no way to make a drawing-there is only drawing.
    Richard Serra

    The Drawing Book
    Tania Kovats
    Drawing is something where you have  a really direct-immediate relationship with the material. You make a mark, and then you make another mark in relation to that mark.
    Kiki Smith
    The Body
    Rodin’s lines dont just represent carnality; they are themselves carnal, invasive, sexy. Uninterrupted by the space between the material and the body; the line made by the drawing hand stands in for other haptic things. The body is where drawing begins and where it ends.

    Looking at images does not lead us to the truth, it leads us into temptation.
    Marlene Dumas

    Sexuality and Space
    Beatrice Colomina

    Drawing and Random Interference
    From Chaos To Order And Back Again
    Sally O’Reilly

    Quantum Chance
    Janna Levin

    AFTERIMAGE : Drawing Through Process
    Cornelia H. Butler

    Fiona Banner
    Life Drawing
    Performance Nude

    Marking Time
    Examining Life Drawing as Methexis
    Margaret Mayhew

    Rather than regarding life-drawing as an event of realism, it may be more productive to
    explore it as an assemblage of events, a field of practices, or as a cluster of performances.

     

    Figure/Foreground : Drawing/Sensing In drawing the moments of choice have been kept visible. John Berger, Berger On Drawing. A drawing …

    Source: Body Politics : Drawing Geographies

  •  

    Teaching Drawing Concepts : Oskar Schlemmer/Calvin Albert

    Oskar Schlemmer, Man.1971
    Lund Humphries/MIT, London,

    Oskar Schlemmer’s conception of man
    Syllabuses/Teaching Schedules
    Drawing from the nude
    Measurement and proportion
    Natural sciences
    Figure drawing
    Philosophy
    Psychology
    Question and answers to the preliminary course ‘man’
    Postscript

    Figure Drawing Comes To Life, Albert Seckler. 1957
    Reinhold Publishing Corporation, New York

    A series of experiments in drawing the figure conducted by Calvin Albert

    Interpreted in a text by Dorothy Gees Seckler

    New concepts of architecture
    Existence, Space and Architecture, Christian Norberg-Schulz. 1972

    Anthropometrics for designers, John Croney. 1971

    Oskar Schlemmer, Man.1971 Lund Humphries/MIT, London, Oskar Schlemmer’s conception of man Syllabuses/Teaching Schedules Drawing from th…

    Source: Teaching Drawing Concepts : Oskar Schlemmer/Calvin Albert

  • Bodies in Spaces : Interiors and Outposts

    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.

     

    Drawing into the contemporary sociological imagination Intermezzo : Nomadic Photographic Assemblage a thousand plateaus Deleuze, Guatta…

    Source: Bodies in Spaces : Interiors and Outposts

  • Researching Bodies/Discursive Collages : Theoretical Objects/Desiring Machines/Diversions/Anomalies/Contradictions

     

    OUTPOST STUDIO 3.16

    Sensations in Space and Time (the experience/entanglement of phenomena and idea)

    Agency/Foraging/Making/Gathering

    Subjectivity is relational (always in process)

    A Species of Making Spaces

    Tentativeness, attentive to situatedness

    A diffractive methodology enables a critical rethinking of science and the social in their relationality, moving beyond separate entities, separate sets of concern.

    Karen Barad

    Organism

    Person

    Environment

    For Merleau-Ponty, Experience can only be understood between the mind and the body or across them in their lived conjunction.

    The mind is always embodied, always based on corporeal and sensory relations.

    Elizabeth Grosz.

    Richard Serra : Verb List Compilation

    Actions to Relate to Oneself, 1967-1967

    Drawing in its frameworks and dimensions/presence and absence/its here and elsewhere

    Exploring the fragility of a painting in the landscape

    Canvas as sheltering construction, Raveningham Sculpture Trail

    Diagram-Map-Chart, is a symbolic depiction emphasizing (mapping) relationships

    Diagrams For The Imagination : Arakawa

    Semper Femina : Laura Marling

    Apokatastasis : Jim Jarmusch, Jozef Van Wissem

    Litany Of Echoes : James Blackshaw

    New Music, for old instruments : Paul Metzger, Jozef Van Wissem

    Brilliant Trees : David Sylvian

    Body As Cultural Product

    Both psychic and social dimensions must find their place in reconceptualizing the body, not in opposition to each other, but as necessarily interactive.

    Volatile Bodies/Chaos-Territory-Art : Elizabeth Grosz

    Spatial Asperity/Mesh, Membrane and Gauze, Möbius Strip, Pattening,

    Actuality : Robert Mangold

    Paintings around the particles/flows of things/boundaries/intervals of presence and absence

    Induction/Capacitance/Encapsulated Layers

    Drawing and its attempts to map out/make visible contingent things

    Contingency, is what remains, as it comes up against causality/constantly passing through

    Objects/Things conceptualized by the exploration of drawing (intervals of blindness)

    Linking Surface to the Aesthetic Experience of Space.

    Experiences incorporating interests with environmental textures into Art.

    Points of Contact/Confluence of Circumstances

    Materials bound by contact/canvas

    Patina, absences, gesso, textile wrappings, field chalk, exhumed oyster shells, yellow ochre,

    A philosophy of Reading/Matter/Rooms,

    The Lake of The Mind

    Stochastic Thinking, Steven Holl

    Solitude/Libraries : Cell/Court/Domain

    Capacitance, relationships between intensities and movements

    Clay, Waxed Surface, Liquid Rust, Calico,

    Sensate Bandages/Windings/Armatures : Corporeal Landscapes/Assemblages/Things

    Flesh, elementary pre-communicative, subject and object develop.

    Making as Growth : Tim Ingold

    Social Architectures/Anthropologies/Imaginary Projects/Interfaces/Screens

    Timothy Morton : Realist Magic

    The elasticity of sensation, affective and wonderous

    Sally Mann : Matter Lent/Collodion wetplate negatives

    Corpus, liquid light, flesh, spirit, trace, outline, human body, performative,

    Paintings/Enactments : Canvas as a spatial verb

    Espace-Milieu, painting as environment/entanglements and situations

    Ceramic/Process and its theoretical objects

    As a series of practices, making reality by bringing things together or separating them into their singularities, or making machines/desiring machines

    Desire can be seen as an Actualization

    Gathering Notations : Bernard Tschumi

    Both presence and absence are coupled in this framework

    Deleuze/Guattari

    Glass/GLAS : Resistivity/Inclusions, A Field in England.

    Translucent aesthetics, beyond the opacities of the sensible the rational.

    An image that adequately expresses both the efficacy and the temporariness of the phenomena ( joining a diffused/invisible flow of energy, a breadth that wends its way ceaselessly through the world). Animating it as it goes.

    Vital Nourishment, Departing from happiness, Francois Jullian.

    What is a body capable of –

    Spinoza

    Building/Making, into the theoretical performative object (that does theory)

    Albers/Clarke : Interactions, Counterpoints, Intervals between colour/forms,

    Membrane, Discursive, Diffractive, Sensory, Layered and Filtered Light,

    Body, Movement, Mind, Assemblages, Exploratory, Speculative, Choreographic,

    Deleuze/Guattari, understand the body more in terms of what AFFECTS it is capable of, instead of the consequences of having a body.

    Peter Zumthor : Thermal Baths

    Human Agency/Temporal transitions between matter and movement.

    Immaterial/Concrete/Water : Bodies in contact/the corporeal social human body

    Manifolds/Theory of Temporality/3 Synthesis of Time

    Memory Past Preserved Condition

    Present Habit Instants Agent

    New Future, actual/virtual Creation of The New

    Multiplicity, purality of contemplating souls.

    Asymmetries between particular past and general future.

    Temporality involves multiple interacting processes.

    Architecture becomes Spatial Agency

    We all make space : Jeremy Till

    Paintings, space, volume, surface, passages, actualizations, claddings/camouflage

    One conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences, both phenomenological and filmic, reading a space by its depth of field, its thickness.

    Turbulence House, New Mexico, Steven Holl.

    Aesthetics/Asperities : Resultants that incorporate the friction (asperity) of their trajectories through a medium. Tilt-up concrete construction, Chapel of St, Ignatius, Seattle. Steven Holl.

    Navigations and Vectors/conduits/intervals and traces between discursive practices.

    Wrapped Silences : Assembled Sectional Elements/Thresholds

    Surfaces on Mourning/Samsara, a beauty fed on emptiness

     

    OUTPOST STUDIO 3.16 Sensations in Space and Time (the experience/entanglement of phenomena and idea) Agency/Foraging/Making/Gatherin…

    Source: Researching Bodies/Discursive Collages : Theoretical Objects/Desiring Machines/Diversions/Anomalies/Contradictions

  • Life Drawing : An Emotional History of The Performative/Rhizomatic Body

    Humanity : An Emotional History
    Stuart Walton. 2004

    Fear
    Anger
    Disgust
    Sadness
    Jealousy
    Contempt
    Shame
    Embarrassment
    Surprise
    Happiness

    Oxford Dictionary of Geography: spatiality

    The effect that space has on actions, interactions, entities, concepts, and theories. Physical spatiality can also be metaphorical. It is used to show social power—thrones are higher than the seats of commoners, and ‘high tables’ for university teachers in most Oxbridge colleges physically elevate the teachers over the taught. People use proximity to show how intimate they want to be with others (See personal space), or orientation; we may face someone or turn away from them. Institutions and governments have used large architectural spaces to invoke awe, while restaurateurs may create ‘cosiness’ in small spaces.
    LIFE DRAWING : Phenomenological Reductions
    The body is not an object, but the condition and context through which I am able to have relations with others.
    Merleau-Ponty
    A study of one body in front of another body.
    Our body is our connection with the world and all its phenomena, it is fundamental in our communication and interactions.
    The body is a force of creative action and a site of resistance.
    An exploration in various forms of physical dialogue between performing bodies.
    Energetic flows from others, what energy and phenomena will these relationships bring about on these bodies and the space they inhabit.
    Personal and public boundaries of others, a being towards things through the intermediality of the body.
    For Deleuze and Gauttari the body is rhizomatic (containing multiplicities, intensities and flows) and in active connection and interaction with its becomings, surroundings and situatedness.
    What a body can do, what a body is capable of
    The body without organs (BwO) is an attempt by Deleuze and Gauttari to denaturalize ‘human bodies’ and place the body in direct relation and connection to flows and particles of other bodies and things, creating constellations from its modes of organization of disparate substances.

    “Spatial turn” The increased attention to matters of space, place and mapping in literary and cultural studies, as well as in social theory, philosophy, and other disciplinary fields.

    Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. Routledge 2013.

    The origin of “True Humanity” : Tim Ingold

     

    Humanity : An Emotional History Stuart Walton. 2004 Fear Anger Disgust Sadness Jealousy Contempt Shame Embarrassment Surprise Ha…

    Source: Life Drawing : An Emotional History of The Performative/Rhizomatic Body

  • Visual Poetics/Bricolage : The Studio/Space of Real Situations

    Spatial Collage : Research/Discourse/Apparatus

    Farnham University of the Creative Arts

    rhythmanalysis : Space, Time and Everyday Life.

    Lefebvre

    Jannis Kounellis

    Carlo Scarpa

    Translates the painterly relationship of figure and ground into the space of real situations

    The Visual Poetics of Jannis Kounellis, Suzanne Cotter and Andrew Nairne.

    Modern Art Oxford, 2004-2005.

    bricolaged notes  from STUDIO UNBOUND : Lane Relyea

    Institutional Critique : Studio/Post Studio Activity

    SPATIAL AGENCY : Spaces of Fluid Interchange Between Objects, Activities, People.

    Today studio and museum are superseded by more temporal, transient events.

    The Function of the Studio

    Daniel Buren

    The Studio is no longer as seen as belonging to a system.

    No longer a retreat but it now INTEGRATES

    It is all exterior.

    Material Flows 2007/2017 Towards Disentanglement

    Social behaviour is trapped in inescapable patterns of interaction coded by techno-linguistic machines, smartphones, screens of every size, and all of these sensory and emotional devices end up destroying our organism’s sensibility by submitting it to the stress of competition and acceleration.

    Franco “bifo” Berardi

    The Network places the artist as a ‘like item’ within an integrative inventory or database.

    Networks are both integrative and decentralizing in that they privilege casual or weak ties over formal commitments.

    Being part of a network that privileges itinerancy and circulation over fixity, that diminishes hierarchies and boundaries in favour of mobility and flexibility across a more open extensive environment.

    ‘The Studio made into a showroom display’

    Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. 2004

    Claire Bishop

    The Individual and The Social

    A place where meanings, properties and behaviors fluctuate radically.

    Bennett Simpson. Can you work as fast as you like to think. 2003

    The hosting/re-created artist’s workspaces, like a threshold between private and public actuality and potentiality.

    The Notion of the Evolutionary Exhibition.

    Placing greater emphasis on INFORMATION, DISCUSSION and GATHERINGS

    Establishing NETWORKS, fluctuating between highly specialized work by scientists, artists, dancers and writers

    Obrist/Vanderlinden, Laboratorium, Antwerp. 1999

    MODULATION, Deleuze

    Immaterial Social Acquaintances/Information

    Along with the rise of Networks comes a new Ideology, one that Advertises Agency, Practice and Everyday Life.

    The Dividual (The New Mobile Creator) Deleuze

    Someone who is ‘UNDULATORY In ORBIT, in a CONTINUOUS NETWORK

    Colour Nexus : Promiscuous Mobility

    OBSCURED MATERIAL

    OUTPOST STUDIO 3.16

    Notes from sketchbooks

    Apokatastasis : Jim Jarmusch, Jozef Van Wissem

    Spatial Asperity/Mesh, Membrane and Gauze

    Drawing and its attempts to map out/make visible contingent things

    Contingency, is what remains, as it comes up against causality/constantly passing through

    Objects/Things conceptualized by the exploration of drawing (intervals of blindness)

    Linking Surface to the Aesthetic Experience of Space.

    Experiences incorporating interests with environmental textures into Art.

    Points of Contact/Confluence of Circumstances

    Materials bound by contact/canvas

    Patina, absences, gesso, textile wrappings, field chalk, exhumed oyster shells, yellow ochre,

    A philosophy of Reading

    Solitude/Libraries : Cell/Court/Domain

    Clay, Waxed Surface, Liquid Rust, Calico,

    Sensate Bandages/Windings/Armatures : Corporeal Landscapes/Assemblages/Things

    Social Architectures/Anthropologies/Imaginary Projects

    Timothy Morton : Realist Magic

    The elasticity of sensation, affective and wonderous

    Sally Mann : Matter Lent/Collodion wetplate negatives

     

    Corpus, liquid light, flesh, spirit, trace, outline, human body, performative,

     

    Spatial Collage : Research/Discourse/Apparatus Farnham University of the Creative Arts rhythmanalysis : Space, Time and Everyday Life. Lefeb…

    Source: Visual Poetics/Bricolage : The Studio/Space of Real Situations

  • Reflective Narratives around The Instant Art and Aesthetic Patterns The theme of the human body as landscape and the biological link bet…

    Tarkovsky filming the Instant : Flux and Quality in Nature’s Time

    Reflective Narratives around The Instant

    Art and Aesthetic Patterns

    The theme of the human body as landscape and the biological link between humanity and nature

    Filmic Modalities

     

    An Ecology of Mind

    We are so accustomed to thinking of aesthetic phenomena as a discursive or representational construct, that we often forget that without arousal of perception, no aesthetic experience is possible.

    Going beyond what it may represent into the important psychic information it contains

    Bateson credits art with playing the role of confronting the quantitative limit built into consciousnesses

    Art assists mind in recognizing that the potentiality of heightened consciousnesses exist and that it resides in you and in me

    Flux and Quality in Nature’s Time

    Perception of Environment/Relational Situations

    Tim Ingold

    Each thing framed dwells in the world differently.

    The frame and framing, through its configuration, must never offer a gap or a bridge through which as it were, the world could get in, or from which the picture could get out.

    The picture frame reminds us that the work of art, while it hangs in our room, does not disturb our day-to-day sentient and perceptual ecologies.

    It is like an island in the world that waits until one approaches it and which one can as well pass by and overlook.

    On The Picture Frame, Simmel

    Art becomes art by virtue of literal and institutional framing

    Aesthetic contemplation blurs reals and emotional space in a way that produces tangible affects in the world

    The thinking hand that mediates a haptic bridge in which creating and holding, becoming and grasping are all practical everyday activities extending the thinking body

    Objects that stand in two worlds at once and becoming drawn into the movement of practical life through the virtue of being held in the hand

    The intermingling of persons and objects in pictorial space and the aesthetics of the intermingling of function and form in everyday things

    The pictorial space is one in which persons and images intermingle and passions can be aroused.

    Art and Agency, Alfred Gell

    Nature as “Comfort Zone” in the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky by Donato Totaro

    Volume 14, Issue 12 / December 2010  18 minutes (4324 words)

    In this essay Totaro analyzes the unique thematic and aesthetic import of Tarkovsky’s use of nature.

    Tarkovsky relies on nature and natural phenomena to underscore and often dictate the time-pressure (rhythm) of a shot. The movement of time, its flux and quality, flows from the life-process that is recorded in the shot. Even though the fires, downpours and gusts of wind are staged, re-shot or recreated there still remains the spontaneous element of “nature’s time” within the filmic time. Each of the natural events and elements (water, wind, fire, snow) have their own sustained rhythm. Tarkovsky uses these natural rhythms to express his own, that of his characters and the temporal shape of the film (23-24).

    I would like to conclude this analysis of Tarkovsky’s unique use of nature as a ‘comfort zone’ by saying a few things about his two science-fiction films, Solaris and StalkerSolaris is based on the great same-titled science-fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem. The many philosophical and ethical differences between the novel and film can be summarized by the fact that, whereas the novel begins in space on the Solaris space station orbiting the planet Solaris, the film begins with a 45 minute prologue on earth, which establishes the importance of home, family, and ‘mother’ earth to the psychologist Kris Kelvin (and by extension all humans), who is soon to leave for outer space. The theme of the human body as landscape and the biological link between humanity and nature is established right from the opening, a (second) slow motion close-up shot of plant life swaying under a crystal clear stream that slowly pans right to reveal the hand of a man wearing brown trousers and a dark leather coat standing amidst waist high reeds.

    http://offscreen.com/view/nature_as_comfort_zone

    Waverley Abbey
    Reflected ruins in flooded interior

    Photogram formed from a design collage for The Reading Room, Waverley Abbey.
    Intuition of the Instant : Gaston Bachelard

     

    Source: Tarkovsky filming the Instant : Flux and Quality in Nature’s Time

  • MAKING : Spatial Agency/ Mutual Knowledge/ Discursive Consciousness. Social apparatuses and agents that explore the possibilities of space. Russell Moreton

     

    Sketch Books/Strange Loops : Drawings, Materials, Annotations, Collages and Constructions 2018-20

     OUTPOST STUDIO 3.16

    Agency through sketchbooks

    Apokatastasis : Jim Jarmusch, Jozef Van Wissem

    Spatial Asperity/Mesh, Membrane and Gauze

    Drawing and its attempts to map out/make visible contingent things

    Contingency, is what remains, as it comes up against causality/constantly passing through

    Objects/Things conceptualized by the exploration of drawing (intervals of blindness)

    Linking Surface to the Aesthetic Experience of Space.

    Experiences incorporating interests with environmental textures into Art.

    Points of Contact/Confluence of Circumstances

    Materials bound by contact/canvas

    Patina, absences, gesso, textile wrappings, field chalk, exhumed oyster shells, yellow ochre,

    A philosophy of Reading

    Solitude/Libraries : Cell/Court/Domain

    Clay, Waxed Surface, Liquid Rust, Calico,

    Sensate Bandages/Windings/Armatures : Corporeal Landscapes/Assemblages/Things

    Social Architectures/Anthropologies/Imaginary Projects

    Timothy Morton : Realist Magic

    The elasticity of sensation, affective and wonderous

    Sally Mann : Matter Lent/Collodion wetplate negatives

    Corpus, liquid light, flesh, spirit, trace, outline, human body, performative,

    Source: Sketch Books/Strange Loops : Drawings, Materials, Annotations, Collages and Constructions 2018-20