Five Years: Draft
Code of Practice.
Part 4.
Field Recording.
.............................................................................................................................Open To Anyone.
Saturday-Sunday
23-24 September 2023
1-6pm.............................................................................................................................
Part 4, is continuation of a proposal for Five Years by Edward Dorrian.
An invitation for anyone, either within or outwith Five Years, to take part in an ongoing and open discussion, recorded for transcription, that drafts how Five Years attempts to, or could attempt to articulate collectively its ‘principles of organisational co-operation’ in terms of a working ‘code of practice’.
A conversation, staged in the physical gallery at Five Years as a‘shared resource’ operating ‘without individual directorship’. It is proposed as a process of ‘dialogue and the exchange of ideas’ between anyone interested in taking part, and questioning, an open-ended practice driven by an assumption of equality between anyone. Anyone?
A discursive practice then, that directly and closely makes something matter between equals speaking together?In practice, the raw material of this messy drawing up of a working code of practice, performed through the ‘simplest’ of actions –seeing, listening, speaking, reading– constitutes a mode of gathering, arranging, and editing as the gradual sketching out of a collective space by voices. As practice.
Transcriptions of recordings are anonymized.
Full participant ethical consent and copyright of own data material is maintained.
see Five Years: Draft Code of Practice. Parts 1-3
Edward Dorrian
21 September 2023.............................................................................................................................
Edward Dorrian is a part of Five Years (1998-present) and a PhD research student at Kingston University. Kingston School of Art, School of Arts/ School of Creative and Cultural Industries, Department of Critical and Historical Studies, Department of Fine Art/ Research groups: Contemporary Art Research Group (CARG), Visual and Material Culture Research Centre (VMCRC)]
Working out of a contested common ground: A politics of drawing as collectivity and organisation
https://www.kingston.ac.uk/research/research-degrees/research-degree-students/profile/edward-dorrian-136/
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5 November 2022:
I think for me it’s about understanding what the kind of arc, the overarching sort of trajectory of this is. Because it seems as though this is a generative process in that what happens is it’s exponentially growing, it’s a got a potential to keep growing. – Yes.– To create more words. Whereas the proposition of developing a code of conduct requires something succinct. –Yes.– So it feels to me that where at the outset of the project the premise was to develop codes of conduct, in fact, it has started to shift, it is about the conversation rather than specifically about the code of conduct, it’s about what conversation does in the environment and specifically within Five Years. But it doesn’t seem to me, to be taking those very pragmatic steps towards how we actually agree a code of conduct. –Yes.– So it feels as though the focus of the project is kind of, it’s developing its own trajectory, it’s developing its own kind of path. –Yes I think that’s right.– So I think it’s just trying to understand therefore, what is the goal for the project because in the first place we’re at a point where we’re expanding our membership. We need to all be invested in a conversation about: What does it mean to be a member? So where the beginning of this project included a limited number of voices, and those voices have remained, you know that particular conversation remains the sort of pillar of the raw material that is being worked with. How can other voices come into that particular document. To me this speaks about conversation. So in some ways the content is not what it’s about because the means by which it’s presented, and especially if there’s redacted text it’s not inviting, it’s not inviting people to actually read from start to finish to get a sense of: How can I contribute to this discussion? How can I understand this discussion to be able to contribute to it or add to it? So that’s where to me it feels like the focus has changed.
It’s about understanding. What’s the kind of arc, the overarching sort of trajectory of this? Because it seems as though this is a generative process, in that what happens is it’s exponentially growing. It’s a got a potential to keep growing. Yes? To create more words. Whereas, the proposition of developing a code of conduct requires something succinct? Yes? Consensus? An agreement in opinion, feeling, or purpose among a group of people, say like Five Years. Especially in the context of decision-making? The collective unanimous opinion of a number of people? It feels here, that where at the outset of the project the premise was to develop codes of conduct, in fact, it has started to shift. It’s about the conversation rather than specifically about agreeing the code of conduct? It’s about what conversation itself does in the environment and specifically within Five Years. But it doesn’t seem to be taking those very pragmatic steps towards how we actually agree a code of conduct. Yes? It feels as though the focus of the project is kind of, it’s developing its own trajectory, it’s developing its own kind of path. Yes? Is that right? It’s just trying to understand therefore… What is the goal for this project? Because in the first place Five Years is at a point where its expanding its membership. We need to all be invested in a conversation about: What does it mean to be a member? So whereas the beginning of this project included a limited number of voices… and those voices have remained… and that particular conversation remains the sort of pillar… the raw material that is being worked with… But… How can other voices come into that particular document? This particular document? Which seems to speak about conversation. So is it that in some ways the content is not what it’s about… but the means by which it’s presented… and especially if there’s redacted text… it’s not inviting. Is this inviting people to actually read from start to finish to get a sense of – How can I contribute to this discussion? How can I understand this discussion so that I may be able to contribute to it, or add to it? So that’s where it feels like the focus has changed.
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Five Years was founded as an organisation in 1998 and its activities were initially based at spaces in Underwood Street, Hoxton - a location that was also home to other artists’ projects including 30 Underwood Street Gallery and Bank. From the outset Five Years intention has been to maintain a long-term working context and physical environment guided by principals of organisational co-operation, while supporting the sometimes conflicting drives of creative autonomy, artistic collaboration, dialogue and the exchange of ideas. To an extent it has functioned as a sustained experiment in whether individual artistic agency and dissenting perspectives on cultural production can be supported in an open and non-competitive structure. Over the course of more than two decades it has presented more than 250 exhibitions and events at 3 primary venues and has involved 29 members, functioning without individual directorship or regular funding, operating in the zones of marginality and precarity. Its continued existence is as much about its ethics as its activities, which have a symbiotic relationship to one another.
Five Years defines itself as an artists’ organisation rather than an artist-run organisation: its purpose is to facilitate, support and make public its members’ projects and by extension the projects of those artists invited by its members to contribute to the programme - the physical gallery space is a shared resource, a tool rather than a gallery ‘run’ by the artist in the role of curator or director. Five Years intention is not to play a secondary or supportive role to the commercial or established institutional sectors, as a ‘springboard’ for so-called ‘emerging’ artists: it has endeavoured to create an environment where serious experimentation and artistic development can be sustained over long periods of time with relative autonomy.
http://www.fiveyears.org.uk/archive2/pages/255/1000Years/255.html
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Five Years: Draft Code of Practice. Parts 1-3
Part 1
25-26 September 2021.
An open invitation to anyone concerned (whether a member of Five Years or not) to contribute to a series of discussions, that were recorded in the space at Five Years 25-26 September 2021. Discussions that revolved around how Five Years could operate. A code of practice.
Part 2
9-10 April 2022
A fragmented and expanded open text. The subsequent recorded material/draft transcript exists now as an anonymized text, to be edited freely by those who shared in its making. And by anyone who wants to further concern themselves. In practice, this means developing a way, an open form, in which participants take part in production. That is, the subsequent transcription, editing and arrangement of the process of publishing the recorded material. Taking shared responsibility for drawing up of a prospective working code of practice for Five Years. As an artists’ organisation. As a self-constituted practice in free association. Where continuing opportunity to work out how ‘membership’ and ‘participation’ in Five Years can be openly addressed: ‘Its’ principals of organisational co-operation. As collaborators, co-creators, interlocutors. As artists. As equals.
Part 3
5 November 2022
A speculative and ongoing working document. Open to anyone. Participants have allowed their own parts in the conversation to be read. Begun to edit as seen fit. Further drafting is presented here at Five Years. The lengthy transcription of this open and public conversation, anonymized and repositioned operates as reading material for sharing in continued discussion. Discursive encounters and decision-making processes. Supporting the sometimes conflicting drives of creative autonomy, artistic collaboration, dialogue and the exchange of ideas. To an extent functioning as a sustained experiment in whether individual artistic agency and dissenting perspectives on cultural production can be supported in an open and non-competitive structure. As collaborative experimentation and radically open, speculative discourse. Possible further text. More sharing. Less. Stop. This is a proposed recorded discussion considering how open participation at Five Years might work out in practice.
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Post-
- The definition of conversation (that is, the most simple description of the most simple conversation) might be the following: when two people speak together, they speak not together, but each in turn: one says something, then stops, the other something else (or the same thing), then stops. The coherent discourse they carry on is composed of sequences that are interrupted when the conversation moves from partner to partner, even if adjustments are made so that they correspond to one another. The fact that speech needs to pass from one interlocutor to another in order to be confirmed, contradicted, or developed shows the necessity of interval. The power of speaking interrupts itself, and this interruption plays a role that appears to be minor—precisely the role of a subordinated alternation. This role, nonetheless, is so enigmatic that it can be interpreted as bearing the very enigma of language: pause between sentences, pause from one interlocutor to another, and pause of attention, the hearing that doubles the force of locution.
- The inter of a political interesse is that of an interruption or an interval. The political community is a community of interruptions, fractures, irregular and local, through which egalitarian logic comes and divides the police community from itself. It is a community of worlds in community that are intervals of subjectification: intervals constructed between identities, between spaces and places. Political being-together is a being-between: between identities, between worlds.
- The […]tension between being together and being apart is played out on two levels. The artistic ‘proposition’ conflates two regime of sense - a regime of conjunction and a regime of disjunction. The community built by that dissensus itself stands in a twofold relationship to another community, a community between human beings. This […] assemblage of data and the intertwining of contradictory relations are intended to produce a new sense of community. Mallarmé’s poetry aims to provide the democratic community with the ‘seal’ that cannot be supplied by the counting of votes. It’s very distance from social engagement is also a way of preserving, in the absence of the ‘crowd, its capacity for intervention in the ‘festival of the future’. The construction of the solitary place aims at creating new forms of socialization and a new awareness of the capacity of anyone and everyone. But collective discussion of its design already actualizes the form of community that is its goal. Deleuze and Guattari elaborate on that dual relationship. On the one hand, the ‘community of sense’ woven together by artistic practice is a new set of vibrations of the human community in the present; on the other hand, it is a monument that stands as a mediation or a substitute for a people to come. The paradoxical relationship between the ‘apart’ and the ‘together’ is also a paradoxical relationship between the present and the future. The artwork is the people to come and it is a monument to it expectation, a monument to it absence. The artistic ‘dissensual community’ has a dual body. It is a combination of means for producing an effect out of itself: creating a new community between human beings, a new political people. And it is the anticipated reality of that people. The tension between ‘being apart’ and ‘being together’ is bound up with another tension between two statuses of artistic practice: as a means for producing an effect and as the reality of that effect. To the extent that it is a dissensual community an aesthetic community is a community structured by disconnection.
1. Maurice Blanchot Interruption (as on a Riemann surface) The Infinite Conversation. p74
2. Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement, p137–38
3. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator: Aesthetic Community, Aesthetic Separation, p58-59;
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. by
Graham Burchel and Hugh Tomlinson London: Verso, 1994, p76
Draft Afterword
Dear _
All. My apologies for leaving this to the last moment. A field recording. Continuing a simple enough proposition. Our conversation being recorded. The word proposition in its widest sense: a proposition meaning a statement; it means a proposal or offer; and it also means an operation, artistic operation, that lends itself to some form of response or interaction. Calls for. Our conversation. Stuttering. Drifts. Up down across. Part 4. This part, proposes the presentation of the transcription. Of part 3. Anonymized. Text only. And. While we record. For something further. From what seems a generative process. It has a potential to keep growing. To create more, words. Raw. Material. To be discussed. But this text is difficult to read. No way obvious way in. A telephone book. In fragments. The Desert. In the middle. This is how it is. Meet and separate in the middle. Lurching from station to station. Perhaps. Drawing lines. Reading encounters between the simplest of acts. The simplest acts. Looking. Speaking. Listening. Reading. All talk that plays out. Attempts. To make a working out. Code of practice. Code of practice in inverted commas. A sort of collective space by voices. The gradual sketching out. At stake here. Uncertainty. Unruly. To account for the constitution of a web of discourses. Discourses that break. With. What. What was, is, at stake. Is in italics. The construction of a story. Book. The gradual sketching out of a sort of collective space by voices. Sounds staged. Like theatre? So, it’s a practice of interlocution? Recorded in the field. Calling. And somehow anyone can become a part? Whereas the beginning of this project included a limited number of voices, and those voices have remained, you know that particular conversation remains the sort of pillar of the raw material that is being worked with. How can other voices come into that particular document. What’s being left in the space to be looked at. Read. This speaks about conversation. Interrupting. A motley heap of sudden ideas. Five Years, Edward Dorrian, as a part of Five Years, invites you. An invitation for anyone, either within or outwith Five Years, to take part in an ongoing conversation staged in the gallery space at Five Years. The community group, and the artist, have within projects of this kind. What sort of importance is ascribed. Edward Dorrian. You should be ashamed. Of being. So unprofessional. Meaning. All things are open to some form of response. Interaction. By anyone. Terms and conditions. An open discussion, recorded for transcription, that attempts to articulate, in public, how Five Years collectively draws up its ‘principles of organisational co-operation’. in terms of a working ‘code of practice’.A proposal, in practice, of a ‘shared resource’ operating ‘without individual directorship’: A process of ‘dialogue and the exchange of ideas’ between anyone interested. You, me, us, we, them. etc. A discursive, and open-ended practice then, that directly and closely makes something matter between participants speaking together. And driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being. A practice or practices, where anyone may openly displace, transfigure what is being made. Collaboration and dialogue, freely played out as interruptive, fragmentary and fragmented open practice of a fragile collectivity. The raw material of this messy drawing out, a working out, of a pragmatic code of practice performed through the ‘simplest’ of actions. Simplest in inverted commas. Actions –seeing, listening, speaking, reading– constitutes, constituting, a mode of gathering, arranging, and editing as the gradual sketching out of a collective space by voices. Yes, yes I know. Look. How can I make something of this. We. How can we. Read this story. Listen. With its interlacing of the voices of a cast of characters. Can anyone. Question mark. Understand this discussion. Do you know what I mean. Part-take, refuse it. Double meaning of share, both community and separation, sharing and dividing. Again. The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma is calling. Sort of. Or method of equality. A method of equality means, regards, the practice. Does it? On collective, iterative processes that encouraged dialogue and result in the shared authorship of work. My words tend to indicate a movement out of a situation. How’s that working out? Well. Question mark. Posture. Between. Being together. Being a part.
Edward Dorrian
9-20 September 2023
