Joanna Geldard (draft, to be completed)
Line to Line: Ex-tension between formless and form-giving
Tim Ingold refers to touching and feeling with a pen and begins the exploration of knowing, agency
and flux between the interface of touch, making and form. Touching the line, a length of twine as
Ingold concludes in The Textility of Making (2010) reveals the ontology of making and was the
beginning of the research conducted with the Aberdeen Knowing group during 2013 C14. As Visiting
Research Fellow and practitioner.
In his article The Textility of Making (2010)and his subsequent book Making (2013) Ingold
concentrates on the agency and flight line of the kite not simply understood as the line between
agent and kite. As an artist I was examining the horizon line as an architectural device and how it
might be extended and understood as the edge of a horizontal plane; a plane of subjective land that
is created and produced as a result of activity outside institutional architecture and on the edge of
organized social architecture. An architecture that produces sites, such as Lefebvre suggests in…. and
in this case a site produced by the kite line and flight.
However research was focussed upon particular areas of land that appeared to have everyday
leisure or playful activity as its modus but under threat due to new developments, and urban sprawl.
Our edgelands1 described as rural/urban imagined spaces were retreating along with the activities
that we imagine, suppose or reminisce to happen. The research was designed to contribute to
Miriam Shores work on Edgelands to respond to particular sites with art activity, specifically
temporary art installation and performativity in order to offer a creative architecture that activated
such sites.
Thus Along horizontality began with the line of the horizon as the edge of a horizontal plane and
moved along to the feet of the subject that activates and produces the plane. Line to Line is the
space between and its production.
It explores in greater depth methods of horizontality for artistic responses to site production in our
Edgelands; I argue horizontality as a site specific approach for Edgelands. The integration of site and
activity rather than a ‘plop art’ piece as Lucy Lippard describes in …… is derived from being within
the site itself as a fluxus. This culminates in a study Along Horizontality where I attempt to utilise
the methods of Rosalind Kraus’s horizontality towards such activities and Ingold’s arguments on
‘form-giving’ as a movement that activates; that goes ‘Along’ between formless2(and ‘formC giving’
which could be understood in Ingold’s phrasing ‘textilic to the archetectonic’3. Ingold would describe
a woven approach to making which subscribes to the integrated approach of site and activity for
edgelands activity and certainly the textilic is apparent as a result of the research with the knowing
group.
To what activities do we turn for artistic and creative acts for edge spaces that we can we use
reminiscently, symbolically and productively to produce these sites on a greater level of agency in
order to recuperate or even garner this value associated with edgelands and how to establish these
sites of production as part of a valued architecture?
During 2013 C2014 I was invited to participate in the Knowing project. This consisted of two
separate visits culminating in presentations, workshops with a view for a final
workshop on Kites.
Initially we explored line and space. Several perceptive experiments involving sight, distance,
experience of space, measurements of space were explored. Additionally other members
contributed with Gicometti’s window. Paper diagrams, perceptions through feeling and touch
without sight were part of this research opening up that avenues of how perception is part of the
learning process of making and drawing line, placing line and perceiving units of measurement in
space. Progressionally we took this into drawing with line by using yarn to construct shapes, spaces
and examine how line can draw into space to create illusionistic expansions of planes, surfaces and
perceptions of space. We looked at Fred Sandback and his balls of acrylic. Strung up in interiors they
made line constructions which act as constellations of thought. John Rajchman writes on Fred
Sandback in his essay ‘Lines of thought’ that the delicate threads act as necessary nomadic activity
of thinking and working out that expresses idea as actuality.
‘There isn’t an idea which transcends the actuality of the pieces. The actuality is the idea’
Rajkman notes how in order to understanding the potency of this phrase the knot in the line should
be unravelled as it connects to other practices. He reflects that there is a peculiarity in the way of
thinking within an artist work, a strange ‘form of search and research’ which in its very action
prompts encounters with others.
This peculiar turn is perhaps the central point of the research within the Knowing project as it
interweaves the experiences and knowledge of others over takes that resonate with prized one of an
interdisciplinary nature. An act of using line, the task of drawing with line, drew upon certain
conditions of immediacy, task and exercise; but importantly connection with and disconnection that
appeared to travel down the line as a drop of water might idle down into the nebulus of the research
itself. Intersections of drawing, phenomenology of space and place, knowing and interaction with
line as material and agent, perception and optic surfaces and the process as the very work were
woven.
This role of process is understood as the process by which we learn and make indicating the arrival
of a form. However in Sandbacks work and perhaps in the activities of working with line Ingold refers
to Klee ‘form is the end, death’4
This meshed activity only distilled itself when sewing grids on water soluble fabrics months later
when considering notions of drawing with thread, tracing, drawing into space and how line became
object such as Gego’s5 work whereby the interconnectivity gives strength to the structure and
creates the spaces between that offer sets of visual planes and illusional surfaces. Much can be said
of the crystallizing or forming of thought through the process and interaction with tasks in solitude
or (in one’s own place) or in connection with others. It gives strength to the body of work, shape and
perhaps the cross section reveal the peculiarity of the work.
It appears inherent within this knowing group that the connection between practitioners and
practices, experiences and perception of line and space expanded this irregular grid. In fact Rajkman6
goes on to add Rosalind Kraus’s essay ‘The Expanded Field’7 as integral to intersections when
considering the interplay between space and time in relation to sculpture and art. By shifting from
traditional figure-ground perceptions, illusions, surfaces, planes and inter connectivity became not
only part of spatial practices but resembled the inter-dimension of art and philosophy including
notions of the nomadic and groundless work.
Grid: revealed several spaces within the research I was conducting as well as several holes. Firstly
the space revealed were between lines themselves. Moveable, wavering lines that were given
agency by the exercises and connection to a human being
Ingold removes the notion of something static or imposing such as the subject or object and arrives
ject or thing to illustrate how things are intertwined with several activities, actions causations going
on at once. In my research I choose to call this ‘going along’ rather than Ingold’s ‘going-on’8 as it
better integrates the ex-tension of a thing to embrace the motion of a thing and with a thing. In this
case the thing is a kite and its twine.
The agency of the kite focuses on two aspects the ‘interface of feeling with the body, it is a physical
active Line. The kite line could be described as active drawing, a line of agency, a productive line but
this needs examining furthering order to understand its lines and its relevance to Along
horizontality. The Lines of agency and flight are explored through Tim Ingold’s research on Lines
and Making and actually hark back to his initial paper on the Textility of Making in 2010 where he
asserts the process of flow and material rather than fixed forms imposed upon the visible. In other
words he draws attention to an inbalance between what is a final work or object and the making
knowing process that evolves to bring this work into being9
This becoming process appears to work very aptly alongside horizontality as it is not fixed upon the
form but in fact in becoming embraces the formless and the working along the ground as defined by
Kraus…..
Conclusion
Line and Agency thought the fluxus of the kite
The exCtension of line is textility
horizontal event is exCtension
this is going along – Along horizontality
Miriam Shore….
Rosalind Kraus and YveCAlain Bois, Formless:((A(Users(Guide ( 2007)
3 Tim Ingold, The(textility(of(making (Oxford University Press, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2010;34) pp
91 C 102
4 Tim Ingold ibid pp
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Tim Ingold ibid pp96
Tim Ingold, ibid