Five Years

How do we, participants in Five Years, define ourselves in relation to the space and project? How do we identify ourselves to be seen in relation to the expert discourse of the market? The project must display within its protocol,to being named and identified in this process, to submit (even if marginally) to its form of management.

2)To digress. A term used repeatedly in our conversations is that of the Romantic movement. A movement identified from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. A proposition emerged: Five Years is conceived as a Romantic project. A consequence of this was the putting into play of another term: the fragment. The mode of participation has been explicitly that of the fragment, or of the fragmentary. To identify Five Years has been to identify a string of fragments arranged around an empty centre not a coherent synthesis bound by a proper name. In a more general way, as a collective body, Five Years, we might say, is a collection of fragments. A body of practices that sometimes converge, at other times, do not. To make an analogy, one might draw upon readings of the discourse of Romanticism. Such a discourse is littered with fragments, from incomplete projects, to ruins, to definitions.

3) Listen to one Romantic, Frederich Schlegel:
“A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine.”
Listen to Schlegel again: “a dialogue is a chain of fragments.”
Listen to another Romantic, Novalis: the literary seed of the fragment is that which might lead to a plural writing, a writing done in common: “The art of writing jointly is a curious symptom that makes us sense a great progress in literature. One day, perhaps, we will write, think and act collectively.” (His example?, the newspaper as a piece of collective writing; “Newspapers are already books made in common”). Or lets turn our ears towards Maurice Blanchot who has gathered together these quotations on the fragment by Schlegel and Novalis. He remarks – this time thinking on the aphoristic mode of René Char - that with the the arrangement of a fragmentary speech we encounter a “new kind of arrangement not entailing harmony, concordance or reconciliation, but that accepts disjunction or divergence as the infinite center from out of which, through speech, relation is to be created: an arrangement that does not compose but juxtaposes, that is to say leaves each of the terms that come into relation outside one another, respecting and preserving this exteriority and this distance as the principle... Juxtaposition and interruption here assume an extraordinary form of justice.”

4) As a collection of fragments, then, Five Years approaches its own arrangement as a collection that foregrounds the justice of exteriority, a refusal of synthesis through selection, a justice of “arrangement at the level of disarray.”
A gallery in pieces (a collection of pieces, a collective based on the fragment), the inclusion in the space shows not one distilled collective concern, but a concern for collective equivocity. Such a term does not call towards ambivalence or ambiguity. Instead it points towards equal voices, towards the struggle that equality demands. To place voices in equal is to experience not harmonic synthesis (achieved through the sublime violence of sublation) but the constancy of struggle, of the discordance of discourse among equals.

5)The collective whole or work of Five Years, then, is the work of the empty place around which a garland of fragments operate. As fragments (each practice a fragment) each practice is that of the ‘complete’ individual – the hedgehog or porcupine principle whereby the fragment individuates completely – but these complete parts converge as on a garland. The string upon which these fragments are strung, Five Years, encircles an ‘empty place’ as the site of incompletion, of the refusal of completion through synthesis. Here the possible activity of dissensus rather than consensus can take place, if one is brave enough. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, in their analysis of the Romantic fragment, point to this – their understanding of the fragment is that it points to both completion and incompletion, undermining both paradigms, pointing towards a notion of the dialectical as “it covers the thinking of identity through the mediation of non-identity”. As both part and whole, as thoroughly complete (as a hedgehog) and incomplete the fragment and the empty space it provokes troubles a logic of identity, that logic which in part underwrites a gallery, principally a named participation in an Art Fair.

6) In a move of covering identity with non-identity, one might say that the refusal of identity that is Five Years points towards the status of antagonism defining the social field, a site where the struggle for identity is never assured. Such a notion is undoubtably Romantic if one was to return to proper names. If one were to return to Frederich Schlegel’s notions of the fragment, one could look at his Critical Fragment no.103 to find a parallel, and find an analogy for the working principle of Five Years. Refusing the work of harmony – those “works of beautiful coherence” - Schlegel sings the praises of the piece in pieces: the “motley heap of sudden ideas” from which some kind of unity emanates, not from any synthetic principle, but from the “free and equal fellowship” that corresponds to its particular form of disarray. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy point to the inherent ideal and organic politics that resides in this heap of fragments. Without unity but united by a politics of freedom and equality, one might make a correspondence with the ‘motley heap of sudden ideas’ that is, for better or worse, the organisational principle named Five Years. We are talking about a shared idea of how a romantic fragmentary project might be thought of. We are talking about what Five Years might be. We are talking about a notion of bureaucracy – of how a Romantic project finds itself organised. We are talking about recent returns to notions of the Terror, of how the actions of Robespierre and Saint-Just might be seen as a form of instrumentalised Romanticism: fragmentation literally put into action, romanticism and order being put into a bureaucratic formalisation. What might a Romantic Party of the Fragment look like? How might it identify itself? (One might look here to Surrealist history, of the shared terms, manifest formation, violent expulsions and virulent retorts that occur in the artistic collective that so fore-grounded the art of fragmentation). What kind of Part might there be to come?

7) Perhaps a haunting notion of the Ideal, of idealism, of the troublesome nature of putting the Idea into Action. To have fidelity to such a notion, to an equality-event of the fragment, is perhaps what is happening right now. To have done with instrumentalisation then. A fleeting proposition from us: Romantic Bureaucracy is put forward, is put on hold. (To think a bureaucracy in terms of Romanticism put forward by Blanchot would be to think about an instrumentalisation of a movement that necessarily composes and decomposes, that comes together to fall apart. Not Romantic Bureaucracy, then. That is happening already as an artist run space- exhibition-event form, that persistently un-works itself, refuses coherence. To borrow again from Blanchot, we perhaps have here the work of un-working. To end for now with a question: we might ask, paradoxically, what is lacking in the fragment? Both nothing and everything – it is both irresolutely complete and incomplete. Instead we might ask how one moves from the open field of the social to the abrupt violent gesture that fragments, that causes the fracture of the fragment.