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Visions of utopia and decay have always been
intimately connected. The image of a remade
world necessarily entails the ruination of the old,
but the very paradise that the utopian imagination
at the same time like a description of all the
conjures up is also by its nature fragile and
thwarted avant-gardes of the last century. In
destined to desuetude. You could even say that
a belated reworking of the writings of Charles
the project of utopia is an unconscious excuse for
Fourier, the commune’s denizens ‘live on a diet
the invention of new ruins: a love of destruction
of home-grown vegetables and radical theory’;
and decadence dressed up as optimistic renewal.
schooled on Wilhelm Reich, they listen to
As Alun Rowlands’s curious ‘documentary fiction’
Hendrix, Faust and the Velvet Underground, and
attests, utopian schemes conceal the seeds of
film themselves degenerating from unregulated
their own obliteration; but the ruins of the perfect
community to ordered bliss. Eventually they find
world to come also press on the mundane
themselves reduced to scheduling even their
present: the remnants of utopia exert a strange
supposedly spontaneous sexual encounters. ‘At
fascination. 3 Communiqués is a subtle and
every beginning’, writes Rowlands, ‘confidence
playful excursion among the archives of certain
in the benefits of the group seems to prevail.
vanished futures.
At the end we just stare, in melancholy, anger or
Rowlands’s first subject is one Stanley
indifference at its remainders.’
Green, who from 1968 till his death in 1993 was a
In the final section, Rowlands considers
familiar sight on London’s Oxford Street, selling
Sealand: the Second World War sea fort off the
his pamphlet ‘Eight Passion Proteins with Care’
coast of Suffolk, declared an independent nation
and wielding a sign that warned against the
(complete with citizenship and passports) in the
libidinal excess occasioned by eating meat, cheese
late 1960s: ‘our non-site forms a discursive and
and nuts. He railed also against too much sitting
ramshackle web of imagery, conjecture, analysis
down. For Rowlands, the peripatetic prophet of
and recollection, which like the platform’s
protein wisdom is a walking anachronism: a relic
occupation over thirty years itself, lacks either
of Victorian pamphleteering, for sure, but also
focus or direction’. It’s not only the reference to
a reminder of the extent to which all utopian
the ‘non-site’ that makes Rowlands sound like
visions seem obsessed by modifying the human
Robert Smithson here: the rusted hulk of the fort
body. Green was only unusual in his favouring
starts to seem a crystalline accretion of utopian
sexual continence over free love. His dietary
and decadent impulses, an ‘islet of resistance’
theories were otherwise oddly of a piece with the
that is also spinning into entropic ruin.
main current of radical communalism and even
In sum, 3 Communiqués is dense with
with Deleuzian notions of bodily becoming; as
connections between the histories of political
Rowlands puts it: ‘the body becomes all machine
idealism, aesthetic revolt and plain crankishness.
and architecture, skin becomes multi-dimensional,
The book itself embodies its infolding themes:
and the city is an organism’.
its design somewhat resembles that of Georges
The second narrative concerns the ruins
Bataille’s Documents (1929–30), and the three
of a 1960s countercultural commune, and reads
parts are concertinaed together so that the
whole looks as eccentric as its inspiring and
absurd subjects. Brian Dillon
3 CommuniquÉs
By Alun Rowlands
Book Works, £12 (gatefold)
Artreview 130
FEB_books_p1.indd.indd 130 7/1/08 13:19:20
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