The Situationist International

Our ideas are in everybody's heads and one day they will come out.

The Situationist International was an artistic and political movement active in France from 1957 through 1972. The Situationists were those post-war bohemians we imagine living in Continental cafes who, like the Surrealists before them and Baudelaire's Flaneur, wandered through the Parisian streets and stumbled upon spontaneous, continuous, ever changing experiences. Concerned with the increasing commercialisation of the art world, the commodification of goods and the apathy of modern urban life, the Situationists placed their faith in youthful revolt and agitation.

We will not lead we will only detonate.

Formed in 1957 in a small town in Northern Italy, the Situationists combined the remaining members of avant-garde groups. The principal members were artists and writers; the french theorist and film maker Guy Debord who had lead the Lettrist International, the former COBRA artists Asger Jorn (Denmark), Constant Nieuwenhuys (Holland) and the Italian Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio had been part of the movement for an imaginist Bauhaus.

Perceiving that alienation in society was a result of the domination of the individual by the mass media and consumerism, the Situationist International did not proclaim itself as a political movement but was interested in the construction of moments in life and in replacing passivity and doubt with playful affirmation. The name Situationist denoted activity that aimed at making situations. What could be transformed into a situation? It could be an epic or a moment in an individual's life. From 1957 through 1972 they published journals and books, held exhibitions, made films, sprawled grafity on city walls, subverted and created comics and helped detonate the student revolts of May 1968 in Paris. The members of the Situationists were aesthetic in political renegades who wanted nothing less than to change the world.

If we do not want to participate in the spectacle of the end of the world we will have to work towards the end of the world of spectacle.

The Situationists had two techniques that they believed were keys to changing the world.

1. 
   
   Dérive - the drift.
   
   
   The people wandering through cities being simply pulled by the attractions that you could find in the city and are repulsed by things that are ugly and hateful. Simply letting the city itself, its streets, its buildings, its ambience, its mini-climates, guide you, draw you down, making you see the city that you live in in an utterly new way. This was a way of discovering Utopia, of discovering what you hated and what you loved.
2. Detournement - the cut-up, collaged, juxtapositioned and refusal of original creation. It was the belief that everything that needed to be said was already there waiting to be picked up. It only had to be put together in new ways to let the people see the world in new ways.

In 1957 Asger Jorn and Guy Debord collaborated on a collage book called Memoirs, which brought together the two techniques of dérive and detournement. The book is made of fragments teken from books, newspapers, magazines, photographs, adverts, cartoons, comics and more. Sine the Situationists were heirs of the Lettrist their mood is encapsulated within the book. It is a remarkably powerful book as you can feel people drifting through their city, you can feel them seeing the city in a new way.

The Situationists developed other concepts of which the most significant were Unitary Urbanism (that is integrated city creation of an interest in games played on urban sites) and Psychogeography (play is free and creative activity). Believing the political had become lost in the repetitive gestures of every day that lived experience had been transformed into spectacle, desire and consumption, the Situationists constructed situations in order to actively recapture and transform everyday life. Through art making and thorizing they aimed at the subversion of what Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle. In this book Debord described how capitalist societies complemented the increasing freagmentation of everyday life, including labour, with a nightmarishly false unity of the spectacle passively consumed by the alienated workers. Debord has said that "the spectacle is capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image" and that in societies where modern conditions of production prevail all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacle.

Initially the Situationists focussed on art making. In 1959 three artists held major exhibitions of their work, including Asger Jorn whose modifications or altered paintings were shown in Paris. These were second hand or kitsch paintings by unknown artists, which were then painted over by Jorn as a way of calling the activity of painting into question and the fulfillment of the self as expressed in painting. In an essay entitled Detourned Painting he wrote

Be modern. Collectors, museums - if you have old paintings do not despair. Retain your memories but detourn them so that they correspond with you era. Why reject the old if one can modernise it with a few strokes of the brush? This casts a bit of temporality on your old culture. Be upto date and distinguish at the same time. Painting is over. You might as well finish it off. Detourn. Long live painting!

(Image: COBRA Modification 1949 (with Constant, Appel, and Corneille, based on Richard Mortensen)

Whereas Jorn's response to the commodification of art resulted in modifications, Pinot-Gallizio's response was to create work that could be sold only by the metre. His industrial paintings, rolls of canvas upto 145 metres in length produced mainly by hand, could be draped along the walls of a gallery or stored in rolls. Theoretically these industrial paintings could engulf entire cities (thought they were subversive to the gallery system).

In the same year Constant exhibited a number of his utopian models. Inspired by unitary urbanism, in whish the city is seen as a point of departure for new activities such as free play, these models were a plan for a new way of life in the automated world. Constant's work attempted to make connections between a creative urban lifestyle and the environment. Virtually all of his art making activities were models for thought and recreation of the future.

1962 - the second phase of the Situationists with a shift towards film making, books and journal writing. The journals composed of articles that were often written collectively and anonymously, it was a critique on capitalist culture and urban life, enlivened with images inherited from the mass media. Guy Debord directed six films from 1957 to 1978. These films were mostly unknown to the public and have rarely been seen outside France. Debord's films comprise of mainly audio citations primarily of phrases taken from a variety of sources - everything from Marx, Nietzsche, Heigel to commercials, law codes, newspaper articles etc. Combined with images that are also citations from films, newspapers, books and the history of cinema. (Debord's films were strikingly like that of Jean-Luc Goddard, which suggests Goddard learnt a lot of what is in his l'oeuvre from the Situationist, although I find no evidence that this has ever been admitted by the french director.)

The late 60s were politically unsociably volatile times in Europe and the United States. Dissatisfaction with the Vietnam war, societal values and political structures were building, particularly in the universities. May 1968 was kicked off by demonstrations, protests, denunciations of outrages behaviour at the campus of the University of Paris at Nanterre. The people who kicked this off named themselves Les Enragés who were followers of the Situationist International. They were trying to put the Situationist's critique, which excited them, into practice and people began, as the Situationists had fantasized and called for for years, to stand up and talk. They occupied their factories, schools, theatres, offices and began to talk in groups. It was a month of noise. The slogans that covered Paris, that spread across France and over the next twenty years have spread all across the world, were mostly Situationist slogans either copied out of their tracts or put up by them themselves.

Humanity won't be happy till the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist.

Boredom is counterrevolutionary.

We don't want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.

Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as 'progressives.'

Under the paving stones, the beach.

I love you!!! Oh, say it with paving stones!!!

Be cruel.

Be realistic, demand the impossible.

Stalinists, your children are among us!

Abolish class society.

Down with the spectacle-commodity society.

End of the university.

Abolish alienation.

No matter how long some of their essays, no matter how serious their tracts were, they always believed that good critique was being able to boil down to a single slogan, to a single new caption, a new single speech balloon stuck on an old comic strip that ought to be comprehensible immediately to anyone. This isn't to suggest that the Situationist International were who started May 1968 or that they governed it but had there never been a Situationist International there never would have been a May 1968. However, splits followed and in 1972 the Situationist International was dissolved. 1968 was a bitter victory for the Situationists.

When it became time in the mid 1970s to change pop music, when pop fans were bored to death with the deadness of poplife, Situationist notions of change, of outrage, of excess were part of what drove them to try and create groups such as The Sex Pistols. One of the central images of Anarchy in the UK, the Sex Pistols first record, is the idea of all of the UK as a single ugly, lifeless, empty block of public housing.

Right! now

ha ha ha ha ha...

I am an antichrist

I am an anarchist

Don't know what I want

But I know how to get it

I wanna destroy passerby

'Cause I wanna be Anarchy

No dogsbody

Anarchy for the UK

It's coming sometime and maybe

I give a wrong time stop at traffic line

Your future dream is a sharpie's scheme

'Cause I wanna be Anarchy

In the city

How many ways to get what you want

I use the best

I use the rest

I use the N.M.E

I use Anarchy

'Cause I wanna be Anarchy

It's the only way to be

Is this the M.P.L.A or

Is this the U.D.A or

Is this the I.R.A

I thought it was the UK

Or just another country

Another council tenancy

I wanna be Anarchy

And I wanna be Anarchy

(Oh what a name)

And I wanna be anarchist

I get pissed, destroy!

'Anarchy in the UK' by The Sex Pistols

('Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols' album, 1977)

This is the Situationists critique of architecture as the critique of society boiled down to a couple of lines in a song. British artist Jamie Reid, who created many designs for the Sex Pistols, has created a large collage that he constantly alters depending on the history of the band. This collage vividly incorporates the Situationist's theory of detournement.

(Image: God Save the Queen, Jamie Reid, 1977 - cover to The Sex Pistols song of the same name)

In the past three decadesthere has been widespread diffusion of the Situationist's ideas about society, art and the relation between the two. The link between the social and political was one that is considered contraversial but is now increasingly accepted. Contemporary art directed towards social, cultural and political change can be seen in active collaborative groups such as Group Material who detourn works of art, found objects and everyday advertising to create exhibitions, which address relevant themes such as democracy, education and cultural representation. American artists such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger deal with issues related to the spectacle - the media, social myths, cultural stereotypes and strategies of appropriation, though many artists have absorbed Situationist ideas into their art practices without being aware of Situationist texts and artworks. The Situationist International's project was always a project of communication, an attempt of trying to find forms of free speech and then to use them.