Edward Dorrian and Amy Todman

Doing Fine... What Can I Do? (History) is our (Edward Dorrian and Amy Todman) attempt to address a number of the specific principles/ problems of engagement laid out in the Fragments project concept. Namely that the project asks us to…

  1. Position practices in fields ‘outside’ of each other (eg ‘work of Art’ and ‘History’)
  2. Place emphasis on one-to-one [private] dialogues between ‘practices’/ practitioners
  3. Produce from these one-to-one dialogues, results that will form some kind of exhibition/ event that will be open to the public (to engage with).
  4. Try to imagine what ‘Fragment’ might mean.

With these problems in mind, here is of our collaborative... project

 

Five Years: Fragments publication
Showroom Launch

 

Is Work and History really all about positioning? Or not at all? A one-to-one dialogue.

The transcription of a two hour conversation recorded in Amy’s research office in Glasgow University [college of arts postgraduate study space] on the 2nd of December 2012. Partly recorded in sound. Partly video recorded. An ad hoc discussion trying to work out what we might make a piece about in response to the problems set out above. The transcription attempts to retain the voice’s patterns (an authenticity?) It does not seek to tidy mistakes, naiveties, intimacies, errors or incoherences. Each voice in conversation is divided by turn into parts (fragments?) and catalogued (one of us is even, the other is odd). Systematically numbered 1-1207.

Separately, and after the event, we revisit the conversation. At a remove we set about adding to, but not subtracting from the (transcribed) text. We assign to each numbered part a further reflection. A footnoted commentary. Might these forms be seen as fragments?

Can the fragments be understood in their Romantic form as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy suggest? ‘A determinate and deliberate statement, assuming or transfiguring the accidental and involuntary aspects of fragmentation... aim[ing] at fragmentation for its own sake’?[1]

Would it ‘really not serve [us, to regard the concept of the fragment as something that] ‘merely emphasizes incompletion, residualness, detachment, or brokenness’?[2]

Or is there something else of the fragmentary that might be of service? ‘Since meaning is given by such a placing in common (the continuity of a series of always discontinuous and even divergent texts, of essentially different forms and ‘genres’), there are no reasons to differentiate between texts already published elsewhere and texts written for the publication. Often these already-published texts contain a latent possibility of citation, that is, they belong already to the fragmentary or, more simply, to fragments, sentences, paragraphs, which, when put into relation with others, can take on a new meaning or further our research. Abandon any preconceived idea of originality or the privilege of being previously unpublished’ [3]

Or should we just forgo the term and present an extensive series of footnotes that attempt to interrupt, clarify, explicate succinctly and rigorously index our original transcribed conversation/ text? See what happens?

Our work (fragmented text?) will operate as the object for further conversation (action?).
Principally: What is the place and function of this project as conceived and thus far executed? This is the question opened to the public. We propose to announce a series of events where part of our work (research?)will act as starting point for a conversation/ discussion in a free public space at a given time. Something akin to a reading group. Private and public. Closed study space. Studio. Public area. Open. Parrhesia and interior dialogue.

We may not necessarily both conduct the conversation, but its event will be declared (and recorded) and added to the research (work?)

1
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy
The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism.
2
Rodolphe Gasché
Ideality in Fragmentation (Foreword to Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophical Fragments)
3
Comité: The First Issue. Bulletin Published by the Student-Writer Action Committee in Service of the Movement (October 1968) Maurice Blanchot Political Writings, 1953-1993

Amy Todman
Amy Todman is an artist and researcher who completed her PhD in Art History at the University of Glasgow in 2013. Her academic interests address aspects of drawing in Britain over the early modern period with a particular focus on records of place. Complementary research interests explore approaches to drawing and fieldwork in contemporary artistic practice and include writing, film, performance and sculpture. See also http://amytodman.blogspot.co.uk/

Edward Dorrian
is an artist and member of Five Years. He has (co)organized at Five Years:
Five Years Publications: School Book Projects. (Im)Possible School Book: As Found. Tate Modern. Tanks Project (2012); This Is Not a School. (2011); So Much For Free School. Etc: A Draft Publication (2011); Lecture Hall. Free School. Bethnal Green Library, London (2010); Field Recordings( 2010); Interrupted Correspondence, James Taylor Gallery, London (2009); Yes. Yes. I Know. Free School. I Know. (with Ana Cavic, Renée O’Drobinak and Claire Nichols (2009); Free Show (2008); Peer Esteem (2008); Art For Everyone (2007)