The work this proposes will come to be known as (not just) Manque Manque. The project is derived from an invitation from a group of artists to curate an exhibition and from my pre-existing interest in the idea of ‘the gap’. This project is in collaboration with Robert Dingle, but we are keen to maintain our individual and separated trajectory through it, therefore we shall not be working together to write these ‘mission statements’. It is also to be noted that due to space restrictions certain arguments have needed to be unavoidably condensed.
Manqué: Fr. having failed, missed, or fallen short, esp. because of circumstances or a defect of character; unsuccessful; unfulfilled or frustrated (usually used postpositively): a poet manqué who never produced a single book of verse.
[Origin: 1770–80; <>
Manqué Manqué is/not an exhibition.
Considered as the (not-quite) beginning or initiation of a continued series of work (projects, exhibitions, events, talks, presentations, performances, acts and conversations), Manqué Manqué will come to mark, not a teleologically defined, goal orientated, project, but a laboratory of sorts. The laboratory proposes an amorphous, changeable, unreliable, unresolved, imprecise, array of experiments in contemporary art practice.
The project will be informed by a parallel series of discussions and conversations led by those involved and supported by a selection of texts, resource material etc. We envisage accumulating an expanded group of interested parties around the ideas we are exploring, the output of which will be made available for everyone to access and add to, a forum providing a plurivocal discursive space. So far approximately ten artists are involved, but we are keen not to limit it to just artists, but to include people from many disciplines.
My interest in the idea of gapping, spacing, lack or failure, or synonyms thereof, can be worked through from a number of angles. Lacanian subjectivity (the split or castrated subject), Derridean différance, Deleuzian notions of the fold (specifically through a reading of Leibniz and Foucault), Žižek’s parallax gap, the fold in Mallarmé (an infinite abyss), Simon Critchley’s ‘clôtural reading’ (through his reading of Derrida and Levinas), Nancy’s being singular plural and his idea of an inoperative community, Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democracy that relies on antagonism and Ranciere’s ignorant school master that must constantly reinstate the gap in knowledge..
As I am working in collaboration with Robert Dingle it is also important to problematize that relationship. To engage in a rethinking of collaboration I am developing a concept of ‘minimal collaboration’, which is not to suggest that I minimally collaborate or that I collaborate minimally, but that I am interested in a collaboration that maintains difference, that does not result in Hegelianism, but maintains through a motion similar to Adorno’s negative dialectic, the tension between the collaborating parties. The gap that operates between collaborators must be constantly reinstated to allow for difference to operate as such, an eradication, or shortening of this gap can result in what Levinas calls an ethical violence. It is through a process of maintaining the gap, through embarking on what I would name an ‘interruptive curatorial practice’ (a practice that comes to perform the gap, comes to fragment temporally or physically the experience of viewing art), that I would be able to rethink the collaboration inherent in curation.
It is important that the processes by which we communicate and operate as a group work as a radical democracy, in Laclau and Mouffe’s terms, not by a process of consensus, which would follow a Hegelian model, but whereby antagonism is allowed to stand. Therefore, I am suggesting a radical re-think of the possibility of group identity thought through Deleuzian models of becoming, the rhizome and assemblages.
We have approached one gallery, the Wallis Gallery in Hackney Wick, for a space to work in. This site is particularly interesting as it is due for demolition in 2009 for the Olympic development. The project, then, comes to operate as a critique of the claims to success and achievement that the Olympics make.
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