alun rowlands, 3 communiques
Sometimes I put off doing a thing, and then the thing sits there silently chastising me, and then I actually get around to doing the thing, and it is a pleasant surprise – not as bad as expected, even an enjoyable thing.
I bought this book over two years ago at the Victoria & Albert Museum – it was one of a selection of unusual books on sale in connection with the Blood on Paper exhibition. Since then it has taken up long-term residence in my books to be read pile, gradually growing in reputation as a ‘difficult’ book that would need to wait until I had some spare brain space.
It was bought as much as an object as for reading – three pamphlets bound into one volume which fold out from one another, produced as a limited edition by Book Works.
As part of a new year’s resolution to read all of the books I already have before buying more, I settled down to tackle this one:
Stanley Green, ‘The ‘Protein Man’ is embroiled in an argument. He trawls the city streets campaigning for the suppression of desire through diet. His self-published pamphlet, ‘Eight Passion Proteins with Care’ outline the connections between nutrition, sedentary life and human sexuality. A second constellation recounts the history of a non-conformist group founded on action-analysis and bohemian schedules. Elsewhere, socialist-utopian Charles Fourier forms the basis of a discussion about the occupation of Sealand, His passional series and visionary designs of the Phalanx rouse the search for an islet of resistance.
3 Communiqués is a documentary fiction charting a journey through the marginal histories of communalism, self-presentation and collective agency. It forges a subjunctive archaeology that renegotiates utopian propositions as a way of both making art and as a tool for progressive thinking.
From the description, you can see how I might have got the idea this was going to be heavy-going. Actually, it was more accessible than that. The three tales each explored in documentary style a life spent committed to an ideal, each explored through the fragmentary records of that life – two boxes of records, a collection of films and a series of interviews. It was nicely done, leaving me with the uneasy feeling that I was getting a glimpse rather than the whole story, a partial perspective…or as the cover says “succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of archives”.*
*As an apostate archivist I have to disagree with that, it isn’t the archives that are unreliable, but the people who create and interpret them…
