3 Communiques

3 Communiqués is a documentary fiction charting a journey through the marginal histories of communalism, self-presentation and collective agency. The aim of the book is to renegotiate speculative propositions as tools for progressive thinking, through innovative writing (as art). Mapping three distinct histories, the book utilises three entropic and under-documented archives.

Working with privileged access to the Protein Man archive, Museum of London, the Friederichshof Film archive, Burgenland, Austria, and the Fourier Collection, Archives Nationales, Paris, the narratives reveal alternative scenarios for conjecture. This subjunctive approach (a ‘what if’ scenario) fosters a solvent flux between the created and the re-created, between history and fiction.

Shifting between social and political, contexts and intentions, the writing aligns marginal histories where desire coalesces as a governing principle and productive force. Manifest through the pamphleteering of Stanley Owen Green (Protein Man), the action-analysis commune of Friedrchshof; and Charles Fourier’s blueprints for the ‘phalansteries’ of ‘attractive labour’; all three paradigms share a consistency of praxis and a creative misreading of theory, before succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of the archive.

3 Communiqués, published by Bookworks London, September 2007 pp. 80, 230 x 165mm, full colour publication in 3 parts; designed by Simon Joesbury, Secondary Modern. Supported by Arts Council of Wales, Arts Humanities Research Council & University of Reading

ISBN 978 1 870699 91 4

3 Communiques Abridged

Reviews of 3 Communiques

'3 Communiqués is dense with connections between the histories of political idealism, aesthetic revolt and plain crankishness. The book itself embodies its infolding themes: its design somewhat resembles that of Georges Bataille's ‘Documents' (1929-30), and the parts are concertinaed together so that the whole looks as eccentric as its inspiring and absurd subjects.' Brian Dillon, Art Review

'So I examined first the pictures - strange mystifying documentary poseurs - then read the words, read them slowly because there was something about the size of each book and the size of the print which insisted on the sheer existence of atmosphere, which insisted in turn on something harder to discern. These were books listening to a mass audience but at a deeper level than the audience knew.' Karen Elliot, 3am Magazine

Some Reading

An Archival Impulse

Hal Foster’s essay originally published in October Magazine Fall 2004, No. 110, Pages 3-22, in which he identifies a desire to retrieve and materialise historical material, often in the production of new archives. These practices may follow the model of artist as curator, and play on the categorisation and knowledge sets, but they are not necessarily concerned with institutional or representational critique. Yet these private archives do question and pervert orders that aim to disturb the symbolic order at large. Foster argues that in making connections between things that cannot be connected, these archives tend to underscore the nature of all archival materials as found and constructed, factual and fictive. For Foster, there is within certain forms of archival artwork a redemptive aspect: within the suggestion of possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations is an inherent possibility of transforming the no-place of the archive into the no-place of utopia. Foster asks how useful are critical negotiations of archival forms as they intersect strata of social, institutional and psychic space? 

Seth Price's Dispersion is an eccentrically designed and illustrated treatise on media, distribution, and the future status of the work of art is both precise and open-ended. Taking up examples that range from Marcel Broodthaers and Dan Graham to Linux, Alexander Kluge, and the Daniel Pearl video, Price forges a complex and prophetic art history, even as he appropriates and recasts the traditional roles of writer and designer. "Suppose an artist were to release the work directly into a system that depends on reproduction and distribution for its sustenance, a model that encourages contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur? The art system usually corrals errant works, but how could it recoup thousands of freely circulating paperbacks?" (Kelly Walker Artforum April 2004)

Archive Fever

Derrida's seminal essay articulates the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes. It forges a blunt institutional critique of the archive as a place of origin and perpetuity; a place of stasis and order. The archive has potential for discovery of diverse and disparate meanings through power, politics and technology. First presented at a conference on memory in London on June 5, 1994, Derrida notes the archival impulse is riddled with contradictory purposes found in individual and collective minds, historically and fictionally. Indeed, history and fiction may blur in the haunted selves that suffer from "archive fever" (mal d'archive).

Some Browsing

Continuous Project

Continuous Project is an innovative art and publishing collective comprising Bettina Funcke, Wade Guyton, Joseph Logan and Seth Price. The group work with image, text and archival documents to mine the cyclical relationship between art and spectatorship. Their project of transporting historical material into the present via facsimile has recently taken on the dimension of performance in staged re-enactments of conversations and panel discussions between artists, critics and curators.

Society of Control

Stephan Dillemuth's website contains detailed information on his projects, essays, and collaborations, including a large photographic archive from his research into many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century living experiments, like Germany's Lebensreform movement, the long-lasting Oneida Community in the United States, and various iterations and histories of bohemia.

After 1968

Research project by Katja Diefenbach that explores the notion of the political in post-marxist theory.

International Communities

Lars Bang Larsson’s review of Vi International Communities curated by Charles Esche. What keeps a community together? What defines the subjectivity of a group? Contemporary communities, if they aren’t amorphous and mediated like Internet chat rooms, are located in an undefined social space, a realm in which everything flows - from desire, identities and money to politics and capital. The Swiss philosopher Hans Saner suggested that the concrete evidence of a sense of belonging or a real and qualitative ‘we’ is solidarity: where solidarity is taken as a matter of fact, the ‘I’ recognizes a ‘we’ as a higher good. In other words, we need to embrace dispersed subjectivity.

Militant Esthetix

Militant Esthetix is the website of Esther Leslie (lecturer in English at Birkbeck College) and Ben Watson (music critic and poet Out to Lunch). The site contains writing and artworks. The essays are divided into sections that focus on, for example, Frank Zappa (1940-1993), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), the Situationist International movement, and contemporary art writing. Militant Esthetix is motivated by a commitment to the marriage of aesthetics and radical politics, and so features polemical writing and art.

meeting at on Wednesday 16th April at 12.30

in the Knights Park Flexible Learning Centre for all students involved in the project. I'll be able to give you the books and headsets and we can run through any problems you've had accessing Second Life around the Uni or from home.
Alun is just about to post up some resources to this blog.
Look forward to seeing you then.

Welcome to the discussion everyone,

I hope you will all be able to pick up a copy of Alun's book from me or Andrea in the next few days and have a look at it. We'll be in touch very shortly with dates for the reading, seminar and other events. Alun will be sending through some more resources soon for you. I've also got some headsets waiting for you to try out the voice chat options. Be in touch soon! Lucy