The final project for this quarter is a small, free-standing gallery space for the artist Tara Donovan. Among other stipulations, the brief establishes a formal matrix which requires two floors and a maximum footprint of 30’-0”x29’-6”. A simple program and a generic site suggest an architectural narrative, but deny the necessity for any rigorous consideration of program or site. These technicalities form the backdrop for the myriad theoretical and pedagogical concerns implicit in the title: Sensitive Primitives.

Rather than fail in an attempt to explain the full parameters of the title, I will briefly address the issues relevant to my thinking. The first issue, and perhaps the most obvious, is transformation in the Eisenmanian sense; the initial matrix serves as iteration one of an ensuing indexical process of transformation. For me, this process operates primarily as a form-finding method of elaboration by facilitating a circulation concept relating to certain experiential sensibilities regarding Donovan’s work. The subtext is a materialist agenda, encouraging an understanding and careful consideration of intensive and extensive forces. In my work this is a regulator of mass or poché, though my project is relatively primitive in this sense. Finally, there is a clear reference to the Deleuzean diagram in the requirement to analyze a specific work of Donovan. I believe the intent is to unlock the generative potential of accumulative processes (a callback to Analog Generative System) as embodied in analytical diagrams. Unfortunately, my deployment of this ideology only goes so far as to regulate the physical relationship between Donovan’s pieces in a phenomenological sense.

The analytical diagrams in this post articulate various aspects of Tara Donovan’s ‘Haze’ 2003. The conditions of material stratification and formal reading from different distances are of particular importance.