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The Collage Workshop: Exploring the Image as Argumentative Tool
No full textThis article describes a pedagogical approach to collage based on the work of art historians John Berger (1926–2017) and Aby Warburg (1866–1929). Its aim is to understand how images can be used to develop critical visual thinking skills within the context of architectural education and architectural theory in particular. Drawing on the notions of ‘visual literacy’ and ‘visual learning’ familiar from educational theory, the article proposes collage as a means to challenge the predominantly verbal modes of assessment prevalent in contextual and critical studies, where ‘contextual’ refers to the wider contexts (cultural, social, historical, theoretical) within which architecture is situated.The Collage Workshop, which the author has developed over the last five years whilst working closely with students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, is a concrete attempt to implement visually oriented forms of learning and reduce the reliance on written assignments across the curriculum. By analysing some examples of collages produced by students who participated in the workshop, the article hopes to show how images can be used in the construction of an argument and, perhaps more crucially, how seeing assumes meaning in an image-saturated world
The Home I Carry With Me: Utilising drawing practice to map the changing spatial concepts of home in the context of unprecedented human migration
Get PDFHabermas locates the distinction between the public and the private spheres in ancient Greece (Habermas, 1989, p.3). By the 1700s, the term home was commonly applied to the private sphere which was also seen as the domestic. This shift generated extensive critical debate during the 20th Century with the development of feminist discourse. In the 21st Century human migration and globalisation added a new dimension to the debate. As perceptions of home continue to shift, the two levels of debate are yet to be fully integrated. My research seeks to contribute towards bringing these two debates closer together by attempting to visualise home through my drawing practice. I appropriate methodologies utilised by feminist artists and theorists; specifically, the strategic use of autobiographic construct. A strategic autobiographic methodology allows me to address home within the context of globalisation and integrate both levels of debate.
In HOUSE, I utilise architectural drawing modes to test conceptions of home as housed by a physical building, only to find that I have no rest, retreat or home of my own within it.
In VIEW, I move around the interior, my defiantly time-consuming lines mapping household activities and tasks. These vision-based methods map the house but not home.
In BODY, I look for home through multi-sensory approaches and embodied inhabitation. What emerges is still the house.
In HOME, my drawings map the fluid experiential entity constituted by social interrelations and encounters. Familial obligations and responsibilities are presented textually and sorted repetitiously. In this way home is materialised as the ties, relations and duties today’s woman carries with her
'Perpetuation of the Picturesque’ and ‘Chicken Run: My Part in the Great Escape’
Get PDFHerein you will find a fascinating variety of material. The ways we perceive the landscape, and what it means to us, reflect the diversity of our humanity… From the slums of Beijing to the rich urban spaces of Barcelona, from the Malvern Hills to the Green Belt – landscape in poetry, planning and art – you will be captivated.
Merrick Denton Thompson, OBE. Former President of the Landscape Institut
(In)Animate Semiotics: Virtuality and Deleuzian Illusion(s) of Life
Get PDFIt is well known that, despite his close engagement with cinema, Gilles Deleuze was less concerned with animated film, being somewhat dismissive of its capabilities. In recent years, however, a number of attempts have been made – most notably by William Schaffer, Thomas Lamarre and Dan Torre – to construct Deleuzian positions in animation theory. This article outlines some of these approaches, whilst engaging critically with Torre’s writings. In particular, it foregrounds Torre’s neglect of the post-structural, political dimension of Deleuzian thought through an examination of the concepts of faciality, the close-up, and relation as they occur in Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy. This is in part facilitated through a comparison of Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) – a work directly addressed by Torre, and Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) – a work which he largely passes by. It is claimed here that, despite a number of apparent similarities, the animations of Cohl and Blackton express a radically divergent series of ontological commitments. Cohl offers the audience an experience of chaotic, mutable, relational complexity that revels in its incoherence, whilst Blackton presents a series of more straightforward set pieces, dwelling for the most part upon object-centric representational form. The tension between representation and becoming that occurs between these works is employed to facilitate a critical engagement with Torre’s process-cognitivism. It is suggested that Torre’s work, though exceptional in its pedagogic value, is likewise expressive of this tension, and that in its effort firstly to combine a series of process-philosophical and cognitivist ideas, and secondly to unpack the radical ideas of Deleuze through the more conservative philosophy of Nicholas Rescher, it runs the risk of falling back into a quasi-Kantian philosophy of generality and representation
Mining the Aesthetico-Conceptual: Deleuze, Derrida and Artistic Research
No full textDespite their many political and philosophical allegiances, Deleuze and Derrida might— in accordance with Deleuze and Parnet’s dictum—be best described as the opposite of a couple. While their mutual hostility towards conceptual stasis, overly linear approaches to temporality and excessively centred notions of subjectivity targeted a number of common philosophical opponents, this apparent unity of purpose arose out of some seemingly incommensurable tensions: Deleuze’s mode of ontological enquiry squared poorly with Derrida’s rejection of metaphysics; Deleuze’s positive engagement with the sciences, and his prioritisation of material-sensation sat awkwardly with Derrida’s more pervasively textual and somewhat idealist orientation; and Deleuze’s development of an impersonal concept of Husserlian expression served to check Derrida’s rather more stringent and single minded rejection of phenomenological presentism.
It is important to remember, however, that like Derrida, Deleuze was predominately a writer—albeit a writer with an at once affective, performative, and corporeal agenda. Indeed, when taken at face value, it would seem to have been Derrida who more directly explored the graphic potentialities of experimental writing. Deleuze’s emphasis upon performativity, emergence, and onto-genetic construction nevertheless serves to extend and supplement the Derridian account of textuality by exposing its neglect of the process of writing. In so doing it foregrounds the potential for Deleuzo-Derridian philosophy to instantiate a genuinely aesthetico-conceptual image of thought
Mining the Aesthetico-Conceptual: Deleuze, Derrida and Artistic Research
No full textDespite their many political and philosophical allegiances, Deleuze and Derrida might— in accordance with Deleuze and Parnet’s dictum—be best described as the opposite of a couple. While their mutual hostility towards conceptual stasis, overly linear approaches to temporality and excessively centred notions of subjectivity targeted a number of common philosophical opponents, this apparent unity of purpose arose out of some seemingly incommensurable tensions: Deleuze’s mode of ontological enquiry squared poorly with Derrida’s rejection of metaphysics; Deleuze’s positive engagement with the sciences, and his prioritisation of material-sensation sat awkwardly with Derrida’s more pervasively textual and somewhat idealist orientation; and Deleuze’s development of an impersonal concept of Husserlian expression served to check Derrida’s rather more stringent and single minded rejection of phenomenological presentism.
It is important to remember, however, that like Derrida, Deleuze was predominately a writer—albeit a writer with an at once affective, performative, and corporeal agenda. Indeed, when taken at face value, it would seem to have been Derrida who more directly explored the graphic potentialities of experimental writing. Deleuze’s emphasis upon performativity, emergence, and onto-genetic construction nevertheless serves to extend and supplement the Derridian account of textuality by exposing its neglect of the process of writing. In so doing it foregrounds the potential for Deleuzo-Derridian philosophy to instantiate a genuinely aesthetico-conceptual image of thought
Downstream
No full textDownstream was a solo exhibition held in London during September-October 2019. The research question explored the divinatory powers of water through the process of painting as actual, metaphorical, symbolic and magical source. Utilising his immediate locality and family as visual material, Shepherd uses methodologies of ritual, trance, enactment and prediction as means of visualisation; the intuitive and unknowing are decision-making tools. The act of painting and the painted are where the intuitive is constructed into the concrete, a process of revelation through the act of making. Although seemingly of a very personal nature the finished outcomes are made as universal cyphers that act upon the audience; wider social; historical; cultural; political readings float to the surface. Through his lines of enquiry, painting becomes a scrying tool akin to water, reflection, surface and depth are synthesised through the mediating act of painting.
The exhibition was accompanied by a publication with written contributions by Professor Gavin Parkinson, Tim Russell and a commissioned poem by Miranda Peake. A public discussion between Parkinson and Shepherd on insights garnered in the creation of Downstream took place at the gallery during Frieze week London, drawing an international audience. Ongoing insights into the methodologies and context of the research were questioned through meetings and discussion with publication contributors, resulting in a joint conference paper at Painting Now at the Royal Academy, London (June 2018) and book chapter Dominic Shepherd and Richard Waring, ‘Head, Heart, Hand: Painting in a Post-Digital World’. Painting Now’, which was linked to the Black Mirror Research Network, of which Shepherd is a founding member
Turbulence, Conflict and the Garden of Remediation, Charles Green, Lyndell Brown, Paul Gough and Jon Cattapan
Get PDFWithin and Between: Women, Bodies, Generations
Get PDFWithin and Between: Women, Bodies, Generations took the form of four sculptural installations staged jointly in 2019 with Janice Howard and Clair Chinnery at Glass Tank Gallery, Oxford Brookes University, UK.
The work drew on auto-ethnographic research which aimed to interrogate and reframe female bodily ageing. Each of the four large-scale works explored different stages of the artist’s life initiated by an active and embodied reworking of feminist paradigms and informed by thematic methodologies of practice-based and theoretical enquiries of women artists who have also addressed rites of passage, puberty, menstruation, pregnancy and representation (Kiki Smith, Womanhouse, Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Carolee Schneemann, Julia Kristeva, Lucy Lippard, Luce Irigaray).
Representations of women’s bodily function have historically constructed women as subjugated by their embodiment, so incapable of rational thought. This has resulted in negative associations of menopause as problematic, barren, dried-up, unproductive and issueless. Through her work, Richardson raises questions about what remains unresolved and hidden as science, legislation and culture fall short of fully understanding and articulating ‘the change’.
Through her chosen methodology, Richardson responds to the urgent need for a fuller articulation by addressing and redefining the intergenerational space of maturing children and diminishing parents.
By generating positive connectivities, relations and exemplars, the research project offered a more dynamic perspective and associative visual language. Proposing the menopause to be a potentially rich and liberating developmental phase of life, the outcomes contribute fresh understanding that can be usefully acted upon through future cross-disciplinary collaboration and enquiry.
The exhibition was funded by Oxford Brookes University, and accompanied by a series of talks, gallery events and a bespoke website: lisarichardson.m
‘Flower Power’: the importance and critical value of the landscape in memorial and mnemonic spaces
Get PDFI want to explore the potency of gardens, trees and flowers to evoke and stimulate memory. I would like to
start with two opposing provocations about nature as a place of commemoration: the first provocation which forms the opening section of my talk today is framed in the diction of protest. It contests the notion that the garden is a place of rest and repose; a view expressed so provocatively by Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay who asks why should certain gardens be described as retreats when in fact they are really attacks. To do so, I’ll briefly draw on some notions of horticountercultural politics, which can best be presented here through a number of visual images framed within the rhetoric of radical gardening.
The second section of my talk embraces the idea of the garden as a place of recovery, remembrance, even redemption. I will reflect on the huge enamel wreath, Flowers of War, made by my RMIT University colleagues and installed in the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. This will offer an opportunity to offer some thoughts about the value of gardens as enclaves of a temporal peace, and I’ll also explore the idea of surrogate gardens through guerrilla tactics and the roadside floral tribute, which will also introduce the uncomfortable concept of ‘recreational grief’. So, I’ll be taking a rather binary approach; on the one hand the garden as attack, as place for dissent and intervention; on the other hand the land as memorialised space, with its manicured turf and strict taxonomy of plants. But my overarching question comes straight from writer-gardener Jamaica Kincaid who asks, ‘Why must people insist that the garden is a place of rest and repose, a place to forget the cares of the world, a place in which to distance yourself from the painful responsibility with being a human being?