super energetic system

1. The body moves simultaneously through space (geography) and time (history). The space of the body is a constellation, mapped, a geography of points. Whilst the time of the body is linear, drawn, in history, from a beginning towards an end.

2. In physics, when two or more objects touch they transfer charge. They 'influence’ each other, sometimes ‘significantly’. Working backwards, therefore, the art historian who is significantly influenced by their object of study also experiences a sensation of touch. It is often a haptic encounter, because it concerns how we experience touch on the inside and outside of our bodies, as sense and emotion. It is an encounter that ignites change through experience, which is also the process of research, of “revolt…in the sense of return, displacement and contestation”, of learning.

3. Every year the Earth completes a total revolution of the Sun. It circulates. All energy in the universe circulates. Energy flows between forms but the total energy of the universe remains constant. In certain instances, the amount of energy in a discrete system increases, generated by a new encounter between bodies. This encounter produces an excess of energy, ‘excitation energy’, and occurs when the art historian discovers a new idea, object, artwork or artefact. No more energy is released into the universe during this encounter. Rather, the potential energy of the object is released as it moves into a new body of research.

collaboration // meeting in one dimension // almost meeting in two

Georgiana Houghton, reverse of drawing with automatic inscription

the con - the appearance of meeting

1. image speaks in place of the gesture, but the gesture in the image speaks of history, as held in the body

2. mimomap - an evolving map - a topography of gestures rather than a map that guides gestures

3. maps that follow rather than guide

4. mimomap is an intuitive and breathing body of accumulated traces

5. where words do not correspond

6. captions and images (numbered and linked)

two white butterflies stumble, held each to each, as if by elastic, and pass

Danny Abse, Imitations, 1997

LANGUAGE

to look back at us - informed and informative at once - the symbol stands in place of the gestures - the appropriated space of the body

where the body is live and transforming - language as pupae - seeing the link is the generative gesture that animates change

captions and images (numbered and linked)

Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power

Joseph Beuys, ICA, London, 1974

The Palmer Method asked children to write in flowing circular motions to a fixed rhythm. It was initially introduced to institute discipline in children, in a Foucauldian sense to somatically inscribe the authority of the letter, the word, the teacher and the school into the child’s muscle memory and movement. Like all organic energies upon which the pressure of a grid or regiment is placed, the loops in Cy Twombly’s blackboard paintings, which are drawn by hand with wax crayon, begin to pulse, diverge and overflow, directly informed by the visual and kinetic aesthetics of his own education.

speaking together – dialogue – is a performative form of pedagogy that holds ideas in open, collective space, to enable students and teachers to share and produce knowledge together. Speech can animate history and ideas and personalise the learning environment, because it is conferred with a certain vitality, a stemming from the body. Indeed, the specificity of speech, rather than, say, the written word, is that it involves ‘the affective power of sound and voice, combined with the intimacy of the listening process...when an informant narrates an experience in an affecting way (i.e., with palpable emotion), listeners will register the emotion through the prism of their own lived experiences; we can infer that this personalization will confer added impact’. (McHugh, 2012). In the classroom, the affect, or energy, conferred by the speaker, aggregated through their own lived experience, is processed by the listener in a way that touches them on an intellectual and an emotional level.