Russell Moreton : Matter(s) in Correspondence

 OPEN TEXTS.

Allow readers to have multiple interpretations, they allow for the possibility of  “determinations”.

Intertextuality fundamental concept “that no text much as it might like to appear so, is original and unique in itself. Rather it is a tissue of the inevitable , and to an extent unwittingly references to and quotation from other texts.”

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES

Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998 )

Juhani Pallasmaa, Eyes of the Skin, Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: Wiley, 2005 )

Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self (Rotterdam: Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, 1992)

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000)

J. G. Ballard, High Rise (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967)

David Wood, The Deconstruction of Time (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001 )

Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Space (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006)

Vilem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000 )

Robert Cooper, Peripheral Vision: Relationality (London: Sage Publishing, 2005)

Jonathan Murdoch, Post Structuralist Geography ( London: Sage Publishing, 2006)

Markus Miessen, Did Someone Say Participate, an atlas of Spatial Practice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006)

Russell Ferguson, Francis Alys, Politics of Rehearsal (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2008)

Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (London: Routledge, 1996)

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

Francois Dagonet, Etienne-jules Marey: a passion for the trace ( New York: Zonebooks, 1992 )

Colin Rowe, Transparency ( Basel: Birkhauser, 1997)

Avis Newman, The Stage of Drawing, Gesture and Act (London: The Tate Drawing Centre, 2001)

Giuseppe Penone, The Eroded Steps (Halifax: HMST, 1989)

Glen Onwin, The Recovery of dissolved substances ( Halifax: HMST, 1992)

Carolyn Bakargiev, Arte Povera (London: Phaiden Press, 2003)

David Green, Stillness and Time, Photography and the moving image ( Brighton: Photoworks, 2006)

Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker, memories of the future (London: Reaktion, 2004 )

Martin Amis, Times Arrow (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991)

Yve Lomax, Sounding the Event: escapades in the dialogue and matters of art, nature and time (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005 )

John Wood, The Virtual Embodied, presence, practice, technology (London: Routledge, 1998)

Lucy Bullivant, Responsive Environments, Architecture Art and Design { London: V&A, 2005)

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994)

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the next millennium (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992)

Douwe Draaisma Metaphors of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Paul St George, Sequences: Contemporary chronophotography and experimental digital art ( London: Wallflower, 2008)

Hans Christian von Baeyer Information, The new language of Science (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003)

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

Susan Broadhurst, Liminal Acts ,a critical review of contemporary performance and theory ( London: Cassell, 1999)

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

Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy ( London: MIT press, 2007 )

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the body (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992)

Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture, a place between (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006 )

Thierry de Duve, The Definitively unfinished Marcel Duchamp ( Cambridge, mass: MIT Press, 1991 )

Always fascinated by the “return shelves” in a library, its like a barometer of specific activity, it holds within it occurrences and possibilities that are un-calculable to predict It concurs traits of other events/projects happening outside, it reflects those items of the libraries resource have been selected and those not. It is perhaps the curiosity, the reading between what is presented that prompts speculation and ultimately one forms/registers a subjectivity and an opinion based around ones own particular space of time. These shelves “sample” my potentialities amid a on-going field of relations of which I am part as my “returns” configure a new abstraction of data.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES:

Fluctuating networks of existential events.

Emergent state of continguences that create materials for relationality.

TRANSPARENCY: LITERAL AND PHENOMENAL. COLIN ROWE AND ROBERT SLUTZKY.

Space-time, simultaneity, interpenetration, superimposition, ambivalence. Transparency has a material condition that is pervious to light and air. Together with an “intellectual imperative” this has an “inherent demand for that which should de easily detected, perfectly evident, and free from dissimulation.”1 Transparency allows things to interpenetrate. Things can become masked and ambivalent by this superimposition but the things themselves remain authentic and unabridged.

Transparency can grant us a “simultaneous perception of different spatial locations.” These values of being able to interpenetrate simultaneously and thus create a potential threshold that is in a state of in-betweeness.

Transparency by its very nature confronts us with the contradiction of spatial dimensions. Contradictions that might require the physicality of the body to authenticate. There are also Contradictions centred on a linguistic transparency.

Transparency could become a site or form of temporal phenomena, granting some sort of deconstruction when viewed as a simultaneous multiplicity.

The interesting proprieties of transparency is its ability to have the quality of a substance ( glass, plastics, film, water) together with qualities we ascribe to it when we use it in the context of organisational systems. It is this literal and phenomenal spatiality that is infinitely relational. This relation allows us to invest transparency with a literal depth so as we can assume the phenomenal substance beyond it.

This sense of a spatial transparency is exploited as a filmic phenomenon, film directors by moving in and out of the framic reference of the camera, create within the mind of the viewer an illusion of a spatiality that is both transparent and virtual.

The use of transparency as a device to aid the spatial organisation of place in architecture is under investigation. Notions that “worksites” could be “assigned directional systems” which could help to engender relations of human enterprise and encounter.

The organizational transparency of the figure ground relation in architectural mapping creates a differentiation to the integral ordering of space. This opens up the possibilities of investigative ideas around poche (a drawing method showing material structure and space in relation to each other) poche is related to transparency by precise inversion (material and space).

Transparency can be used as a method of creating multiplicities through the device of superimposition.In so doing it creates surfaces that have mutuality by the nature of being able to be visually overwritten.

1.Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal (Berlin: Birkhauser Basel, 1998),page 22.

ALLEGORY, MONTAGE AND DIALECTICAL IMAGE, JANE RENDELL.

This chapter, in Jane Rendell’s Art and Architecture, A Place Between, offers a number of possibilities for the interpretation of my current investigative research. In particular, her analysis of Walter Benjamin’s discussion on the temporal aspects of allegorical and montage techniques in works of art.1

Rendell cites Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama,2 as having a particular form of a baroque theatre, where the temporal, and the corporeal body, meet the transcendental. Within the structure of these there plays a sadness of life represented as a “nature petrified in the form of fragments of death.”3

This notion of using objects as allegorical devices within the duration and place of an event, interests me.

This allegorical device within “Place” is further elaborated by Benjamin himself when he remarks, “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things”.4

This relationship with time and allegory could be performative and immersive. Benjamin notes baroque allegory to be “an appreciation of the transience of things, as well as an expression of sadness over the futility of attempting to save for eternity those things that are transient.”5 This expression could be rendered as a work of art. Joseph Beuys has used the device of vitrines that suggest the collection of relics from a museum. His work Sweeping Up 1972/85 is a vitrine containing contents originated from an “action” performed by Beuys. In this work the contents were collected after a political parade in Berlin. This work, on view in Tate Modem, has a sensibility of indexical residues suffused with almost alchemeric properties. The notion of a vitrine being able to carry a visual joke or pun is perhaps Duchampian. Peter Greenaway’s curated exhibition, The Physical Self6 explores these notions further, through static displays of both objects and human bodies presented in the context of a museum. Greenaway has in effect, attempted to use a museum setting to amplify the sense of retrospectective contemplation of our own temporality.

Rendell remarks on Benjamin’s interest in the dialectical image, explained as an image whose “moment where the past is recognized in the present as a ruin that was once desired.”7 The interesting thing is that Benjamin’s dialectical image is an “attempt to capture dialectical contradiction in an instant, as a visual image or object.”8 It is this dialectical threshold the “point at which thesis and antithesis converged”9 that could be utilized as a physical possibility (intervention) within a place. The clarification of ideas through interactions and contradictions through a performative exploration with an immersion with site might be made to occur. The uses, as noted by Rendell, of montage and Dadaist artwork in film, was admired by Benjamin for its shock tactics and are also  associative with the notion of interventions whose purpose is to “interrupt the context into which it is inserted.”10 This idea of an intervention, could work as an emergent phenomena that sets up a sense of temporal dynamics in a location or place.

A number of contemporary artists have used a wide range of physical interventions with their particular dialogues with place. Jane Prophets, Conductor 2000 was a site specific response to Wapping Hydraulic Pumping station. Prophet utilized water and electro luminescent cables in her installation. Glen Onwins, As Above So Below 1991, was again a site specific intervention, utilizing black and white dyed brine, gypsum and coal with green light, all installed at Square Chapel, Halifax. Graham Gussin, Spill 1999, was a filmic work of a situation in which a disused commercial building was infiltrated by “fog” (dry ice).

The architect Rem Koolhaas has used an intervention device in the initial design, which produces an architectural structure that is inherently “weak”, then requiring a major structural intervention to be made to stabilize the building. This in turn re-scripts the building through chance and change and produces innovative and creative possibilities through contingences now made apparent.

To bring about some sense of conclusion regarding Benjamin’s dialectical image or rather its device of using “dialectics at a standstill” that create an intervention of retrospective contemplation, is Jane Rendell’s suggestion, taken from Howard Caygill, that Benjamin’s writing was part of the “speculative effort to discover and invent new forms.”11 This speculative nature promotes “moments where the viewer is required to act as critic and to engage in a slower time.”12 The interlocutor into a site could be said to be given the dialectical task of synthesizing/theorizing what has been “present”, with what has become emergent with their own encounter .This notion of both site specificity and open text is of interest.

Further potentials within “place” for an immersive engagement that might foster an “open reading”. This scripting of ones presence as an interlocutor amongst others could create a performative gesture. Like a drawing whose informative mark is just a starting point amongst others unknowable until the intimacy of the unfamiliar is breached, so the “place “ is inscribed or known by its initial un-familiarity.

1  .Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A place Between (London: I. B. Tauris,2006), page75.

2  .Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977).

3  .Ibid., page 178.

4  .Ibid., page 178.

5  .Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977),page223.

6  .Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen,1992).

7  .Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between, (London: I. B. Tauris,2006), page 77.

8  .Ibid., page 77.

9  .Ibid., page 77.

l0  .Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006),page 78.

11 .Howard Caygill, The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998),page74-75.

12 .Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), pagel43.

Mise-en abyme “Play within a Play”

“A play within a play alludes to and explicates the plot of a larger play within which it is staged”

THE PHYSICAL SELF: PETER GREENAWAY,

MUSEUM BOYMANS-VAN BEUNINGEN ROTTERDAM.

Peter Greenaway’s work interests me with its playful and investigative attitudes to the visualization of dialogues around what he himself calls “the physical human predicament.”

His exhibition is centred on the interactions on the issue of “the physical human predicament” and the available “contents” of the place of its presentation. The situation and contents of the display of historical artefacts and naked human beings in glass cases are relational attempts to illustrate Greenaway’s sense of the dissimilarities between objects and human existence.

This work touches the territory of the allegorical. Walter Benjamin has said of the allegorical “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.”1 This relation is embodied by the physical display of living human beings being firstly dislocated/annexed and then displayed as “an equivalent”, along side with that of the artefacts objectivity.

This shared proximity prompts, as does allegory notions of the transcendental, as to what of “the human”, remains from this objectivity. This presentation is not so dissimilar from a theatrical showcase, with elements of “baroque theatre” and objects from a personal taxonomy drawn mostly with haptic associations. Artefacts could be said to be “orphans” taken out of the ruins of place.

The museum becomes their adopted orphanage, a repositoiy, where they can be viewed scrutinized. Greenaway makes this comment about the inclusion of the human, “to put an unclothed body in a glass case, to load it with the expectations and connotations of a museum object, to be deliberately contemplated, is to make particular demands on a viewer to look and see, compare and adjudicate the sensitivities of the physical self.”2

MOTHER AND CHILD

AGE

MAN AND WOMAN

MAN

WOMAN

TOUCH

FEET

HANDS

NARCISSISM

1  Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), page 178.

2 Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuingen, 1992), page 13.