DSC_8759 Discursive Documents : Enchantment/Somantic Affects, Jane Bennett Assemblage : Aesthetic Convergence Cultivation Field/Vibrant Matter Becoming complicit with materials Realist Magic, Objects, Ontology, Causality. Timothy Morton. 2013 Matter and Desire, an erotic ecology. Andreas Weber. 2017 Vibrant Matter, a political ecology of things. Jane Bennett. 2010 Therese Oulton Paintings and new digital prints Lines of Flight. 2006 Being Alive Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description Tim Ingold. 2011 MAKING vibrant gaps/assemblages between the texts/images/objects and everyday things LANDSCAPES OF AFFECTIVE AESTHETIC ATTRACTION MATERIALS THEMSELVES become the TOOLS of PERCEPTION Enchantment from the potential of things. The Fabric of thoughts The invisible within the visible (energy,magic,causality) RELATEDNESS, connected to the Place and Function of Things within a Field. Texts, form their own contexts/reflexivity, breaking down phenomena into meaning, conclusions and critique, they render phenomena and its psychic information redundant. We think we know how we should feel sociologically, yet in doing so we deny ourselves the direct affectiveness of people and objects that can provide different perceptual relationships. EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE=ECOLOGY Lygia Clark : A Space open to time. Cornelia H. Butler The World is a Collage Collage and montage are quintessential techniques in modern and contemporary art and filmmaking. Collage combines pictorial motifs and fragments from disconnected origins into a new synthetic entity which casts new roles and meanings to the parts. It suggests new narratives, dialogues, juxtapositions and temporal durations. Its elements lead double-lives; the collaged ingredients are suspended between their originary essences and the new roles assigned to them by the poetic ensemble. Juhani Pallasmaa Hapticity and Time Notes on a fragile Architecture The Perception of the Environment Essay in Livelihood, dwelling and skill Tim Ingold See Yourself Sensing Redefining Human Perception Madeline Schwartzman STILLNESS IN A MOBILE WORLD Bissell, Fuller

Inquiry is essentially the way of learning

SENSORY THEATRE

Contents List from a folder in the Theatre of Research

Saturnian Form : Lead and Library Dates
Russell Moreton

Emilio Prini
The filter and welcome to the angel, 1967
Environment with participants, doves, artificial green grass, socks, ultra-violet light.
Dimensions variable,
Installation, Studio Bentivoglio, Bologna.

Artist-run exhibition space

Emilio Prini well illustrates the spirit of Arte Povera: the artist is not the creator of artefacts, nor even of a documented ‘happening’. In the transferral of energy and subjectivity into matter or an event, the work exists in the instant it comes into being and is simultaneously received.

To document his work in photographs and present these as a record of it contradicts the very basis of Prini’s art.
Arte Povera, Themes and Movements
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Intermedia Chart
Dick Higgins
Molvena, Italy. 1993

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour
This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but improvisational act.

Land : Antony Gormley, Clare Richardson, Jeanette Winterson.

Temporary is human. We don’t live long. Our ancestors lived less long. Graveyards and ruins remind us of the atom and jot of our span. Against the reality of temporary, humans stage heroic battles for permanence : Archives, museums, endowments, societies.

Wandering is “not purposeful”. A lot of art is made while wandering about either in your mind or on foot, Its a necessary aimlessness.
Jeanette Winterson

Anarchism : A Very Short Introduction, Colin Ward.

It is possible to discern four principles that would shape an anarchist theory of organisations: that they should be voluntary, functional, temporary and small.

The Rings of Saturn : W.G.Sebald.

I pressed on to towards Dunwich, which seemed so far in the distance as to be quite beyond my reach. It was as if I had been walking for hours before the tiled roofs of houses and the crest of a wooded hill gradually became defined.

Inside Phenomena/Catching The Light
Layered drawing : Sensuality, Drawing and Astronomical Space.
Locality/Social Complexity- Works on Paper
An ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse : The Book of Tea/A Hut of Ones Own
Reading Into the Visual : Exploratory Images
Littoral Zone

Concept of the Body : Merleau-Ponty

Fundamental assumption that the body was not an object, the body is the condition and context through which I am able to have relations with objects.

The mind in its insertion in (creating/becoming) corporeality creates the ambiguous relation with our body, and correlatively with perceived things/superimpositions/entanglements.

Understanding the material/body image in discursive terms

The body generates and presumes interpretations, perspectives which serve its needs in the world, its will to power and its drive towards self expansion/self overcoming, the movement of becoming, vigorous, free, joyful activity. (Nietzsche)

Francesca Woodman explores the spatial relationship of the body in space and time.

These performative images and her relationship to the pictorial space, her body traces, are witnessed and further manipulated/annotated by drawn lines enclosing and creating other spaces.

Barad: Thinking with intra-action

There is an important sense in which practices of knowing cannot hilly be claimed as human  practices,  not simply  because we use nonhuman  elements in  our practices but because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part. Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain  knowledge by  standing  outside the world; we know because we are of the world.  We are part of the world  in  its differential becoming.  The separation  of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inher­ent difference between  human  and  nonhuman,  subject and  object,  mind  and  body, matter and discourse. Onto-epistem-ology—the study of practices of knowing in being— is probably a better way to think about the kind of understanding that we need to come to terms with how specific interactions matter.

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 141.

Antony Gormley, states, that one of his central concerns has been to recover a sense of being in the conditions of today’s increasingly materialist and mediated social environment. He uses sculpture, via the intimate process of the body cast, to construct surrogate forms, derived from an almost sacrificial process. A rehearsal of death of an absent body, recorded as an enclosed volume of air, entombed in a lead sarcophagus of fragmented body sections, soldered to reconstruct a new wholeness. He creates, within this sculptural volume, an “infinity of space within the body.” His works are embodiments of the body. They are literally body cases. The use of lead with its own alchemical and historical contexts and its particular non­ aesthetic further adds to the tomb like qualities of the work.

Each sculpture invites occupation; it is complete when the imagination or the mind inhabits them.

Gormley’s body cases are almost orphans, cast adrift from their symbolic maternal mother. They have become shells; empty humanoid spaces, awaiting an identity in the mind of the post-modern witness. In return their identification identifies the witness. The experience of metaphysical inhabiting this surrogate human space might allow us to lose all sense of the present and our identity with ourselves. Gormley’s sculptures, with this lack of identity or questioning of identity with the space they are placed in, prompt a different mode of questioning the purpose of their presence. The viewer becomes more interrogatory, more concerned, almost asking the sculpture to confirm its placement, not its actual identity. We see in them something of ourselves, externalised for scrutiny, a dialogue of intervention caused by a bodily proximity to something unknown, which can compound meaning, or conversely it can fragment it.

An investigation into a disembodied physicality, inducing elements of fetishism and narcissism, with the search for an identification of the feminine, within the confines of spaces, loaded with tactility, dust, dilapidation and decay?

Some of  Francesca Woodman’s work involves herself and female characters in staged film, feminised melodrama. Stills with an unknown and possibly convoluted narrative, together with ambiguous relationships amongst the characters. The images are shot as straight documentary stills and seem to be searching for the identity of the partially hidden women, as seen through the response and body language of the other characters facing us. These works are full of conceptual ambiguities.

Photographs are indexical; they point to something else; a mirror with a memory; a stage for an inquiry.

Francesca Woodman’s use of the camera’s ability to witness and document, is subverted into a personal language of aggressive tactility and the notion of the body’s identification being partially hidden or even lost; just its trace remains recorded in the latency of the camera’s recorded time.

Her work seems to have an inherent almost codified, femininity, probably due the semiotics and symbolism of early surrealist influences. She performs, re-enacts and exposes her body for the witnessing of the camera. She seems to, fleetingly, seduce and then disappear, just leaving a trace of her being, her sexuality and its actions, entrusted to the fragility of the light sensitive gelatin. (extracts from The Body, Francesca Woodman and Antony Gormley, WSA Russell Moreton 2006)

Reading The Landscape

This Enchanted Isle : Peter Woodcock 2000

Radio On by Chris Petit.

The film has a hallucinogenic noir-like quality, a weird hybrid of Fifties Americana and a displaced Britain. It is a seismographic disruption of British culture in a limbo land of displaced dreams, elements of an almost mythical Britain fleetingly appear.

What distinguishes Neo-Romanticism from traditional romanticism is the feeling of danger, the juxtaposition of the urban with the countryside, the element of darkness, dissolution, an almost pagan reverie breaking through the ruins of post-industrialism (Woodcock,2000:55)

England Dreaming : Primordial Memory/Dreaming

The darkness is a silent solid, the light etches its surface, it is simultaneously sign and cypher. The light etching itself on the dark surface is akin to a revelation, an epiphany before the building is transformed by its users and movement. (Daniel Libeskind)

The Drought : J G Ballard

The Tempest : Alchemy, Prospero.

The Neo-Romantic Vision from William Blake to the New Visionaries.

‘A new alchemy is being formed which encompasses traditional methods of art, the new technology, and the revolutionary new scientific discoveries.’

Re-Enchanting the Land. (Woodcock,2000:140)

‘When one lacks outer space one creates inner space. Invention becomes more complex, cup and circle markings on stones, intricate Celtic spirals and knots, illuminated manuscripts, gothic architecture with its inherent story telling.’ (Woodcock,2000:131)

Throughout John Piper’s long and prolific life he remained fascinated not only with churches, country houses and landscapes but also ancient sites. He comments on the landscape of Snowdonia, each rock lying in the grass had a positive personality, for the first time I saw the bones and the structure and the lie of mountains, living with  them and climbing them as I was, lying on them in the sun and getting soaked with rain in their cloud cover and enclosed in their improbable, private rock-world in fog. Piper never dismissed the archaic spirit of place.

(Woodcock,2000:31)

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are in the status quo remaining unchanged. It is to be in complicity with what makes a subject interesting.

Cameras consist of small voids, the ‘camera’, a lens and photographic film. They are camerae obscurae  that collect light and allow it to meet the surface of the film. But in fact the light comes from the larger void outside the camera. The moment the light has registered on the light-sensitive surface of the film, memories are constructed. The memory is literally conceived in this meeting and is added to life as an additional layer of being. The process through which void meets surface is therefore also about love—the love of ancestors and relatives, but also of life and its conception.

The camera records subjects considered disreputable, taboo and marginal. Sontag notes Times relentless passage and photographs as a pause of evidence, Together with the camera’s ability to turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. She recognizes the inherent pathos in .objects being photographed, and the compulsion to take photographs. Sontag realizes the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as a daily activity in our consumer society. Photographs do not explain themselves, they just acknowledge.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston, Psychoanalysis of fire, New York, Beacon press 1964

Benjamin, George, Antony Gormley: critical mass, London, Royal Academy of the Arts 1998

Curtis, Penelope, Sculpture in 20th Century Britain, Leeds, Henry Moore Institute 2003

Deneuve, Catherine, Bettina Rheims, Munchen, Schirmer-mosel, 1989

Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, London, Ark Paperbacks, 1984

Gormley, Antony, European Field, Museum of Modem Art, 1994

Greenaway, Peter, The Physical self, Rotterdam, Museum-Boymans, 1992

Israel, Deborah Turbeville: Wallflower, London, Quartet, 1978

Karabelnik, Marianne, Stripped Bare, London, Merrell, 2004

Krauss, Rosalind, L ’Amour fou, New York, Abbeyville, 1985

Moszynska, Anna, Antony Gormley Drawing, London, British Museum, 2002

Sollers, Philippe, Francesca Woodman, Paris, Foundation Cartier, 1998

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, Francesca Woodman, Photographic work, New York, Hunter College, 1996

Thewelt, Kllaus, Antony Gormley, Germany, Kerber Verlag, 1999

Articles

Riches, Harriet, A disappearing Act; Francesca Woodman’s portrait of a reputation, Oxford Art Journal, 27.1 2004 95-113, Oxford university press

Rus, Eva, Surrealism and self-representation in the photography of Francesca Woodman, http://www.palazzoesposizioni.it/schede/woodman, 2004

ROLAND BARTHES MYTHICAL SPEECH, LANGUAGE-OBJECT:

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.

Roland Barthes states in his text titled Myth Today in Mythologies that “myth is a system of communication that is a message.” And that it “allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea.1” Put simply it is as Barthes confirms” a mode of signification, a form.” The interesting thing about myths is the fact that this “mode of signification” is then assigned to a form. It is onto this form that further conditions are then placed and the form then becomes loaded with historical values, and conditions of use that will reintroduce it back into society.

Barthes acknowledges that “mythology can only have a historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the “nature” of things.2” Myths therefore have particular qualities as Barthes assigns them as being created from a “semiological chain which existed before it.” Their historical situation is such that it forms their first contextual space which is simultaneously placed in the present. This creates a sense of a portal or window into a mythological space of reflection, whilst at the same time acknowledging our immediate surroundings. The myth appears like a projection from these historical origins and has the ability to illuminating itself and the moment into a contemporary mythical experience. Barthes illustrates the myths ability to attach itself to any material that can arbitrarily become endowed with significance by stating.

It can consist of modes of writing or of representations; not only written Or representations; not only written discourse, but also photography, Cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity, all these can serve as a support To mythical speech. Myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its Material.3

Barthes denotes myths as having three components, the signifier, the signified, and the sign. Myth having been created by used materials has “a second-order semiological system.” Barthes clarifies this by stating” that which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system (signifier and signified becomes sign) becomes a mere signifier in the second.4” The raw materials that make up mythical speech, its very language, rituals and objects are all “reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth.5” The myths ability is that it is able to project language as an language-object that can be reconstituted by our contemporary sensibilities into mythical language .

Barthes again notes that the important issue here is that myth wants to see these “raw materials” only as “a sum of signs, a global sign, and the final term of a first semiological chain. “ Barthes further states that it is this “final term” that will become the “first term of a greater system.” Myth is stationed in a historical situation yet their reappropriated content is able to be projected into the anthropological situation that surrounds us. Barthes recognizes that “myth shifts the formal system of the first significations sideways.” It is this almost lateral shift that gives myths their complexities within what appear to be concise simplifications. They appear to be able to just inhabit the very surface of things, creating associations that can arise almost indiscriminately.

Barthes states that myths are derived from a speech chosen by history. Mythical speech appears both like a notification and like a statement of fact. Barthes quotes “Mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication: it is because all the materials of myth presuppose a signifying consciousness, which one can reason about them while discounting their substance.6”

Myth has something of an imperative message woven around its character which can exist in any space or time; it also has an inherent contingency that allows its message expediency. This notion that myths exist on a material that presupposes a signifying consciousness gives them their complexities when we re-examine the material which the myth adheres to.

Barthes philosophical perceptions surrounding myths could seem to have an affinity with the notion of the photographic negative. Both share a sense of a historical situation, onto which other signs of signification can be placed on their representation. They both have the ability of projection or rather the ability to be used to project language-object narratives. All of which makes them synonymous with bringing the past into the present. Myths and negatives seem to surround their reinterpretation with a feeling that they are auguries brought from another time to confirm or question values. Strangely the projected values of the negative have something of a mythical resonance, the evidence however of the negatives materiality a known origin casts exactitude of death. Myths don’t have and don’t require this witnessing origin. The notion of a photographic projection that marks a material surface in the situation of an installation is perhaps as far as photography can aspire to the sense of myth.

Barthes in Camera Lucida comments on what he terms “flat death” whilst contemplating pictures of his mother shortly after her death.

The horror is this: nothing to say about the death of one whom I love Most, nothing to say about her photograph, which I contemplate with out ever being able to get to the heart of it, to transform it. The only “thought” I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed; between the two, nothing more than waiting; I have no other resource than this irony, to speak of the “nothing to say.7”

Barthes comment on his inability to transform the exactitude of his mother’s image with its sense of “an asymbolic death” perhaps illustrates the differences between the mythic language and photography? Does the exactitude in the representation of the photographic image petrify and simultaneously create an imperious sign of a future death? The mythical sense of some semblance left in some old photographs seems to be in fact, that some mythical language has not been totally terminated by the exactitude and witness of the photographic process. Myths on the other hand as noted by Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the New Millennium, possess “concise exactitudes of details yet creative reception in their telling.” This “creative reception in their telling” is what sets them far apart from the petrifying gaze of photography, they are in fact more gesture and act, and myths are re-drawn as living experiences. This further quote by Calvino sums up the magical quality inherent in mythological language.

I know that any interpretation impoverishes the myth and suffocates it. With Myths one should not be in a hurry. It is better to let them settle into the memory, to stop and dwell on every detail, to reflect on the without losing Touch with their language of images. The lesson we learn from a myth lies in the literal narrative, not in what we add to it from the outside.8

1  .Roland Barthes, Myth Today, A Roland Barthes Reader (Reading: Vintage, 1993), page 93.

2  .Ibid., page 94.

3  .Ibid., page 94.

4  .Ibid., page 99.

5  .Ibid., page 99.

6  .Ibid., page 95.

7  .Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Reading: Vintage, 2000), page 93.

8  .Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), page 4.

Moreton, Russell. The Daughter of Butades. Winchester School of Art 2008

Susan Sontag, on photography

Photographs are, of course, artefacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects, unpremeditated slices of the world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. There are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information.

Susan Sontag examines photography’s relationship to art via conscience and knowledge. Her analysis done before the advent of digital photography embraces the notion of the negative, the witnessing document. The picture may be distorted but there is always a presumption that something exists or did exist.

Her probing phenomenology into photographic practice and the way it influences our perceptions are based on monochromatic film images. She reads the photographic image as an image taken from reality, but recognizes the attitude and sensibilities of the photographer, in the portrayal of that reality. She recognizes the camera’s ability to democratize all experiences, by translating them into images. She recognizes that photographers are haunted by tacit imperatives of both taste and conscience. They produce undiscriminating, promiscuous and self-effacing interpretations of the world.

Sontag recognizes the aggression of the photographers capture, and its ability to subvert by freezing time segments and replaying them dislocated from their original experience. Sontag also notes that taking photographs has setup a chronic voyeuristic relationship to the world, which levels the meanings of all events through the camera.

Photographs can also refuse experience simply by the limited nature of looking for the photogenic image. The camera has become a compelling interface between ourselves and what we encounter.

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are in the status quo remaining unchanged. It is to be in complicity with what makes a subject interesting.

The camera records subjects considered disreputable, taboo and marginal. Sontag notes Times relentless passage and photographs as a pause of evidence, Together with the camera’s ability to turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

She recognizes the inherent pathos in .objects being photographed, and the compulsion to take photographs. Sontag realizes the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as a daily activity in our consumer society.

Photographs do not explain themselves, they just acknowledge.

A photographic contemplation dislocated from its original moment of reality, and as such allows thought not tied by cause and effect of that moment.

Tarkovsky, Sculpting in time/The architecture of the image

The architecture of image explores both architecture and cinema through the notion of existential. Cinema projects experientially images true to life, whereas architecture attempts to frame both human existence and the human condition as it inhabits space. The poetics of image Andrei Tarkovsky illustrates this director’s ability to use architectural settings to evoke and maintain a specific mental state in the viewer. They illustrate the poetic potential of space and light. Tarkovsky is able through images of space matter light and time to evoke the experience of being reflected by the metaphysical nature of the poetic situation. Tarkovsky emphasizes the importance of the singularity of experience, because of this perhaps his images resist interpretation, a sort of poetic riddle to distance them from any conventional reading, yet maintain their sense of flight. His images derive from a sense of a poetic logic/filmic phenomenology interwoven into a situation out of equilibrium.

He creates a constellation of associations and possible meanings and utilizes space for emotional impact. There is a sense of imprinting, acknowledging the unseen space, he achieves this by giving the viewer a sense of spatial awareness of the situation not of visual realization, and he creates a mental sensation of the environment.

Tarkovsky uses to four pre Socratic elements, fire , air, water and earth, together with their various mixtures and dissolutions, smoke, rust, clay, mud, slime and dust. He also records time by its action on things its erosion, and its scars. Tarkovsky affirms ruins are buildings which have lost their function and have turned into instruments for measuring time.

Ruins have a special hold on our emotions because they challenge us to imagine their forgotten faith