Spatial spheres of influence
Posted on: 16/11/2017Schema 1 # a picture says a thousand words....
"Space is the breath of Art " Frank Lloyd Wright
"Like the house of breath, the house of wind and voice is a value that hovers on the frontier between reality and unreality. No doubt a realistic mind will remain well this side of this region. But for a poetry lover who reads with joy and imagination, it is a red-letter day when he can hear echoes of the lost house in two registers. The old house, for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry of echoes. The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little bed chamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound. Among the most difficult memories, well beyond any geometry that can be drawn, we must recapture the quality of the light; then come the sweet smells that linger in the empty rooms, setting an ariel seal on each room in the house of memory. Still farther it is possible to recover not merely the timbre of the voices, " the inflections of the beloved voices now silent, " but also the resonance of each room in the sound house. In this extreme tenuousness of memory, only poets may be expected to furnish us with documents of subtly psychological nature. ". Gaston Bachelard . P60-61. 'The Poetics of Space' .
"The truth is found in the ignored, and the forgotten, and the left out" . Judy Chicago [Per hyperlink please note: Background music slightly jarring in first few seconds of video but then settles to mainly talk]
'Many people relate to the experience of sensing others, emotions and the environment around them. In fact many of us simply take this as a natural part of who we are, now studies on mirror neurons, empathy and neurodivergence support the experience and give it a much needed lense inside of Academia.' Divergent Mind. Jenara Nerenberg
" There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it" Bill Viola . *This quote was brought to my attention at ' States of Wordlessness: Exploring Neurodivergent Space through Creative Practice'. [2023] Recommended viewing.
"Music is the space between the notes".*This quote is heavily attributed to the French composer Claude Debussey but also similar words are attributed to musician Miles Davies. I continue to look for the source(s).
"Art is poetry, critism, and the transcendent. There are two different paths that lead to it. One is the embodiment of one's internal images. The other is the combining of one's inner thoughts and other reality. There is also a third way, the exact reproducation of reality , but this approach precludes intimations and leaps of imagination, so I cannot accept it as art.
I have chosen the second path, the path of encounter between inner and outer. What is important in this kind of art is to limit the parts of work I make, accept the parts I do not make, and create a dynamic relationship in which these aspects both inter penetrate or repel each other. I hope that this relationship will lead to to the opening up of poetic, critical, and transcendent space.
I call this the art of yohaku - emptiness (resonant space).
What I mean by yohaku is not simply the space that is left vacant in the paintings of many painters. Such a space is lacking reality. For example, if a drum is struck, the sound reverberates into empty space. The space of this vibration, including the drum, is what I call yohaku." - Yohaku - Emptiness. Lee Ufan, 1999 . From Lee Ufan 'Open Dimension' catalogue. P 101.
Artist Agnes Martin created her own space declaring 'I paint with my back to the world'. Guarding her private space to create an extensive body of work.
'Conceiving of space as a static slice through time , as representation, as a closed system and so forth are all ways of taming it. They enable us to ignore its real import: the coeval multiplicity of other trajectories and the necessary outward- lookingness of spatialised subjectivity. In so much philosophy it is time which has been a source of ecitement (in its life) or terror (in its passing). I want to argue (and setting aside for the moment that we should not separate them like this) that space is equally exhilarating and threatening. P 59 'for space'. Doreen Massey
Doreen Massey, the late, Social Geoographer, discusses space, it's multiplicity, our spatial relations, geography of power in this Youtube video Doreen Massey on Space_Social - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Quj4tjbTPxw. There is 'More than one story of development' .
'A mind seeks what is meaningful to itself in the universe' .'The book of Minds'. Philip Ball
Podcast conversation exerts between Antony Gormley , Alaistair Campbell and Rory Stewart from 'Leading: 66 Antony Gormley: Art, Relgion, and the Battle for Culture.'[2024]
'Campbell: You already know by then [school] that you were an artist?
Gormley: Well, they were incredibly encouraging............Well, I knew that I wanted to make things, that was so important to me that, that I realised very early on that making was a form of thinking. That making was a form of communicating. That maybe I implicitly trusted more than words. I, I know that we are exchanging words now and I guess our listeners are listening through the agency of words. But in the end, I don't trust words as much as acts and acts that are embodied into material mean the most to me.'
'Gormley: ........ being sent up for an enforced rest after, after lunch. And being a good Catholic boy, being told not to move, being told this is, but not not being able to sleep and just having this experience of lying completely still and becoming aware of the space within the body. And it would start with this claustrophobic red kind of hot space, but behind closed eyes. And as I got more familiar with it, because this was a repeated discipline, it became cooler and bigger until it became this space in which there was no objects, there was no edge, there was no bounding condition.'
'It had infinite extension.'
'Gormley: I'm going to say something that may sound totally counterintuitive. I, I think of my work as being about space, not being about objects, but how, how can you activate space? I, I want to use the density of mass as a catalyst for making these fields in which your movement, your, your space time experience is amplified. I, I can't think of a better way of doing it.
'Gormley: ...........this comes from what I'm doing in the studio. So what's happening in the studio then gets translated into this [indicating small sketchbook] and then I'm thinking, how can I push it further? So this is, this is, this is, believe it or not a body, but it's a body as a zone of energy. We are making this, but at the same time, I'm trying to push it, I'm trying to say, how can we lose the body entirely or lose the body enough so that you don't know whether the energy field is created by the body or the body created by the energy field.'
'Gormley: .............Existance as a form of examining existance'.
'Gormley: ....... I think probably the model of my work, which is field where I go and ask people to repeat this action of taking a lump of clay, allowing the space between their hands to become a generative womb out of which form arises, stand it apart from them and make it conscious by giving it two eyes. Simply pushing the point of a pencil or a piece of wood into its head that then multiplies and becomes this landscape that completely fills whatever space it's in.'
Podcast can be watched/ listened to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx8JgZb999w&list=PL_6zDbB-zRef_M7eXuSLUlGnt7qk66hJq&index=3
Words taken from transcipt. Transcribed by Podscribe: https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/98246231
From 'Unspoken Spaces'. Studio Olafur Eliasson book Eliasson notes:
"The Icelandic Parliament is called the 'Althing', meaning 'a space for all things'. As the French sociologist Bruno Latour has written, which derives from Old English and German, denotes not so much an object as a case, a controversy, or even a strife. A thing implies negotiation; one should therefore look at the Althing as a space for all negotiations. For me, the most the most important issue is not the outcome of negotiation, but the fact that a dialogue takes place in which engagement and critical reflection are ends in themselves and not just means."
I have a differing view but respect this and think it is/has premise but differing configurations.
I am less interested in fractiuos spaces (fellow Autists and Neurodivergents are often 'processing on average 42% more information on average at rest') as I am in tender and nurturing spaces.
The Japanese concept of Ma describes the 'interval' between things, the 'space inbetween', 'the pause', the 'concept of space and time'.
The Japanese concept of Wabi Sabi is a spacious aesthetic and philosophy and which provides space from perfection.
How we occupy space(S), how we perceive space(S), how we interact with space(S), how they/it are/is taken from us, how spaces are kept, how space(S) are claimed and reclaimed- both flexiably and infexibly, how space is devalued, how it is given, how it provides freedom, how it can be a comfort, how language augments it, how it can be a release, how personal space demises, how it can be made negative, how space is temporary and active are major drivers throughout this practice.
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