situationist art and the letterist movement

1. • The Letterist International (LI) 1952-1957
• The Situationist International (SI, 1957–72),
• Fluxus 1960s-1970s

2. • The Letterist International (LI) was a Paris-based collective of radical artists
and theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord as a schism
from Isidore Isou's Letterist group. Letterist International had almost no ideas in
common with Isou's Lettrism, of which used the name only ironically;[citation
needed] instead, it was more a draft version of the Situationist
International,[citation needed] many of the core ideas of which it anticipated.
• The group was a motley assortment of novelists, sound poets, painters, film-
makers, revolutionaries, bohemians, alcoholics, petty criminals, lunatics, under-
age girls and self-proclaimed failures. In the Summer of 1953, their average age
was a mere twenty years old, rising to twenty nine and a half in 1957. In their
blend of intellectualism, protest and hedonism—though differing in other ways,
for instance in their total rejection of spirituality—they might be viewed as French
counterparts of the American Beat Generation, particularly in the form it took
during exactly the same period, i.e. before anyone from either group achieved any
real fame, and were still having the adventures that would inform their later works
and ideas.

3. • the Letterist group
disrupted a Charlie Chaplin
press conference for
Limelight at the Hôtel Ritz
Paris in October 1952.
They distributed a polemic
entitled "No More Flat
Feet", which concluded:
"The footlights have
melted the make-up of the
supposedly brilliant mime.
All we can see now is a
lugubrious and mercenary
old man. Go home Mister
Chaplin."

4. Gil J Wolman, Untitled, Ca.
1966
Collage on canvas, 24 x 41
cm

5. • There was a serious purpose behind their ambulation. They developed the
dérive, or drift, where they would wander like clouds through the urban
environment for hours or sometimes even days on end. During their
wanderings in the Summer of 1953, an "illiterate Kabyle" suggested to
them the term Psychogeography", to designate what they saw as a pattern
of emotive force-fields that would permeate a city. The dérive would
enable them to map out these forces, and these results could then be
used as a basis upon which to build a system of unitary urbanism.
• Another important notion developed by the LI, was that of détournement,
a technique of reutilising plagiarised material (literary, artistic, cinematic,
etc.) for a new and usually radical purpose. The defining LI text here was
"A User's Guide To Détournement", by Debord and Wolman (Les Lèvres
Nues, no. 8, May 1956). They argued: "In truth, it is necessary to do away
with the whole notion of personal property in this area. The emergence of
new demands renders earlier 'great works' obsolete. They become
obstacles, bad habits. It is not a question of whether we like them or not.
We must pass them by."

6. COBRA (or CoBrA) was a European avant-garde movement active
from 1948 to 1951.
Their working method was based on spontaneity
and experiment, and they drew their inspiration
in particular from children’s drawings, from
primitive art forms and from the work of Paul
Klee and Joan Miró

7. COBRA was formed by Karel Appel, Constant, Corneille,
Christian Dotremont, Asger Jorn, and Joseph Noiret on 8
November 1948 in the Café Notre-Dame, Paris, with the
signing of a manifesto, "La Cause Était Entendue" ("The Case
Was Settled"), drawn up by Dotremont. Formed with a
unifying doctrine of complete freedom of colour and form, as
well as antipathy towards Surrealism, the artists also shared
an interest in Marxism as well as modernism.

8. Situationism.
A meaningless term, according to the
Situationist International (SI, 1957–72),
which contended in the first issue of its
journal Internationale situationniste that
“there is no such thing as situationism,
which would mean a doctrine for
interpreting existing conditions.” The
Situationist International, founded in
1957 by Michèle Bernstein, Constant,
Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, among
others, was a European avant-garde
collective.

9. The Situationist International (SI) was influenced by, and formed in reaction to, avant-garde movements,
predominantly the Letterists, Surrealists and Cobra. Its theories married existentialist activism, psychoanalysis,
the Marxist approach to commodity culture and the Frankfurt School philosophy with anarchistic aesthetic
beliefs.
The protagonists, including Debord, utopian architect Constant Nieuwenhuys, painter Asger Jorn and
philosopher Raoul Vaneigem, were primarily concerned with critiquing modern life. Employing theory as the
principal means of inciting action, the group published an eponymously titled journal of essays between 1958
and 1969. The work incorporated raised questions about the idea behind an aesthetics of the everyday and the
creation of revolutionary ’situations’. Later termed as dérive, this offered a way of creating completely new,
unpredictable itineraries, dependent on chance and the spontaneous subjective impulses of the wanderer.
It critiqued mainstream art institutions for their tendency to “recuperate” oppositional practices by
domesticating them as art movements separated from direct involvement in everyday life. Situationists
rejected copyright, published anonymously in their influential eponymous journal and coordinated actions
critical of the art world and the socio-economic power structure of Europe as it underwent postwar
reconstruction and the dramatic expansion of mass media culture. Debord would later publish the Situationist
critique of the social power disseminated by the mass media in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle,
which he made into a film in 1973.

10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C
V6k_SKkHKQ
• The Society
of the
Spectacle,
which he
made into a
film in 1973.
SI member and utopian architect Constant’s
model of Yellow Sector, from Internationale
Situationniste no.4, June 1960, shows the
hanging Situationist city where play and
residence are united

11. Constant
Nieuwenhuys
In 1956, the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys started working on a visionary architectural proposal for a future society;
he didn't stop for almost twenty years. Having been a co-founder of the Cobra group of artists in the late forties, he
abandoned painting in 1953 to concentrate on the question of "construction". He became a founding member of the
Situationist International in 1957 and played a central role in their experiments until his resignation in 1960. New Babylon,
as his project would eventually be called, is a situationist city intended as a polemical provocation.
New Babylon was elaborated in an endless series of models, sketches, etchings, lithographs, collages, architectural
drawings, and photocollages, as well as in manifestos, essays, lectures, and films. New Babylon is a form of propaganda that
critiques conventional social structures. New Babylon envisages a society of total automation in which the need to work is
replaced with a nomadic life of creative play, in which traditional architecture has disintegrated along with the social
institutions that it propped up. A vast network of enormous multilevel interior spaces propagates to eventually cover the
planet. These interconnected "sectors" float above the ground on tall columns. While vehicular traffic rushes underneath
and air traffic lands on the roof, the inhabitants drift by foot through the huge labyrinthine interiors, endlessly
reconstructing the atmospheres of the spaces. Every aspect of the environment can be be controlled and reconfigured
spontaneously. Social life becomes architectural play. Architecture becomes a flickering display of interacting desires.
Constant always saw New Babylon as a realizable project, which provoked intense debates at schools of architecture and
fine arts about the future role of the architect. Constant insisted that the traditional arts would be displaced by a collective
form of creativity. He positioned his project at the threshold of the end of art and architecture. Yet it had a major influence
on the work of subsequent generations of architects. It was published widely in the international press in the 1960s and
Constant quickly attained a prominent position in the world of experimental architecture. But this influence would
eventually be forgotten; the project has not been displayed since Constant stopped working on it in 1974.

12. • Situationists developed key activist concepts including:
the dérive (“drift”), a way of moving collectively
through unfamiliar urban pathways that cut across the
political demarcations of space; “unitary urbanism”
and “psychogeography,” which described the
psychological investment in urban space; and
détournement (“subversion”), the creation of works
using preexisting materials in order to subvert their
ideological function. Examples of Situationist
détournement include Debord and Jorn’s artist’s books
Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires.

13. The book is a work of psychogeography, detailing a period in Debord's life when he was in the process of leaving the
Lettrists, setting up Lettrism International, and showing his 'first masterpiece',[1] Hurlements en Faveur de Sade (Howling
In Favour Of Sade), a film devoid of imagery that played white when people were talking on the soundtrack and black
during the lengthy silences between.
Credited to Guy-Ernest Debord, with structures portantes ('load-bearing structures') by Asger Jorn, the book contains 64
pages divided into three sections. The first section is called 'June 1952', and starts with a quote from Marx:
Let the dead bury the dead, and mourn them.... our fate will be to become the first living people to enter the new life
Mémoires (Memories) is an
artist's book made by the Danish
artist Asger Jorn in collaboration
with the French artist and
theorist Guy Debord. Printed in
1959, it is the second of two
collaborative books by the two
men whilst they were both
members of the Situationist
International.
The book is most famous for its cover, a dust jacket made of heavy-grade
sandpaper. Usually credited to Debord, the sleeve was actually conceived in a
conversation between Jorn and the printer, V.O. Permild:[Permild:] Long had
[Jorn] asked me, if I couldn’t find an unconventional material for the book
cover. Preferably some sticky asphalt or perhaps glass wool. Kiddingly, he
wanted, that by looking at people, you should be able to tell whether or not
they had had the book in their hands. He acquiesced by my final suggestion:
sandpaper (flint) nr. 2: ‘Fine. Can you imagine the result when the book lies on a
blank polished mahogany table, or when it's inserted or taken out of the
bookshelf. It planes shavings off the neighbour's desert goat.[4]

14. • Other examples are Debord’s film On the Passage of a Few
People Through a Brief Moment in Time, a pseudo-
documentary of the SI consisting of appropriated elements,
Jorn’s “Modifications,” graffiti-like additions to found kitsch
paintings (e.g., Le canard inquiétant, 1959; Silkeborg,
Kstmus.) and Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio’s “Industrial
Paintings,” produced by splashing paint and other materials
in an assembly-line process on industrial bolts of cloth.
Constant’s Situationist New Bablyon project (1957–74)
involved hundreds of collages and models of spatial
ambiances designed to shift according to the user’s
psychological state, as an intervention into postwar
urbanism (e.g. Grote gele sector, 1967; The Hague,
Gemeentemus).

15. On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Moment In Time
(english subtitles)
Guy Debord, 1959.
http://vimeo.com/58909937
On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Moment In Time (english subtitles)
Guy Debord, 1959.
The spoken commentary includes a large portion of detourned phrases, drawn indiscriminately from classic thinkers, a
science-fiction novel, and the worst pop sociologists. In order to go against the usual documentary practice regarding
spectacular scenery, each time that the camera is on the verge of coming upon a monument this has been avoided by
shooting in the opposite direction, from the viewpoint of the monument (just as the young Abel Gance shot a passage
from the viewpoint of a snowball). The initial plan for this documentary envisaged more détournements from other
films, particularly recent ones (for example, during the passage on the failure of revolutionary efforts of the 1950s, this
sequence of two different scenes: a worried young woman, in the luxurious decor of a detective film, telephones
someone to urge him to wait; the Russian general in For Whom the Bell Tolls, seeing planes pass overhead, replies to a
telephone that it is unfortunately too late, that the offensive is already launched and that it will fail like so many
others). These extensive film-quotations were ultimately prevented because several distributors refused to sell
reproduction rights for at least half of the scenes selected, which refusal destroyed the montage envisaged. Instead,
more extensive use was made of the Monsavon soap ad, whose star was to have a brighter future.
André Mrugalski is responsible for the sequence of detail photos detourning the style of “art documentaries.”
This short film can be considered as notes on the origins of the situationist movement; notes which thus naturally
include a reflection on their own language.
Technical Notes on "The Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time," Guy Debord

16. • In 1961, the group expelled all artists and turned its
focus entirely to political critique. Debord, Bernstein
and Raoul Vaneigem were involved in the student
uprisings in Paris in May, 1968. Situationist theory
influenced contemporary architecture, urbanism and
industrial design, from the utopian projects of the
1960s to the contemporary work of Rem Koolhaas and
Bernard Tschumi. In critical theory, it shaped the
thinking of Jean Baudrillard, T. J. Clark (himself a
former Situationist), Jonathan Crary and MacKenzie
Wark. Its artistic descendants include punk and
Appropriation art, artistic activism, interventionist art,
and tactical media.

17. • "Sous les pavés, la plage"
• Influenced by the Situationist International, this is a slogan from the 1968
protests in France. It basically means, 'underneath the pavement, is the
beach'. You never know what you might discover about the city unless you
look deeper.

18. Many of the most famous slogans which were scribbled on the walls of Paris were
taken from their theses, such as FREE THE PASSIONS, NEVER WORK, LIVE
WITHOUT DEAD TIME. Members of the Situationist International (SI) co-operated
with the _enrages_ from Nanterre University in the Occupations COmmittee of the
Sorbonne, an assembly held in permanent session. On 17 May, the Committee sent
the following telegram to the Communist Party of the USSR:
SHAKE IN YOUR SHOES BUREAUCRATS STOP THE INTERNATIONAL POWER
OF THE WORKERS' COUNCILS WILL SOON WIPE YOU OUT STOP
HUMANITY WILL NOT BE HAPPY UNTIL THE LAST BUREAU- CRAT IS HUNG
WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST STOP LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE
OF THE KRONSTADT SAILORS AND OF THE MAKHNOVSCHINA AGAINST
TROTSKY AND LENIN STOP LONG LIVE THE 1956 COUNCILIST
INSURRECTION OF BUDAPEST STOP DOWN WITH THE STATE STOP

19. Rem Koolhaas who is a Dutch architect, a
former journalist and also a genius who
dared to reverse the methodologies of
Modern Architects by producing works
that challenge them. For example, in one
of his house Villa Dall’ava he puts a
swimming pool on the rooftop just to
prove that he can.

20. Despite the acuteness of their critique of modern capitalism, the
Situationists mistakenly took a temporary economic boom in post-war
France for a permanent trend in capitalist societies. Their belief in
economic abundance now seems wildly optimistic; not only
underproduction but also underconsumption continue in advanced
industrial societies. In many parts of the globe, especially in the
southern hemisphere, so-called "natural alienation", let alone social
alienation, has yet to be overcome. Nevertheless, for all their
weaknesses, the Situationists have undoubtedly enriched anarchist
theory by their critique of modern culture, their celebration of
creativity, and their stress on the immediate transformation of
everyday life. Although the SI group disbanded in 1972 after bitter
wrangling over tactics, their ideas have continued to have widespread
influence in anarchist and feminist circles and inspired, at times almost
subconsciously it seemed, much of the style and content of punk rock.

21. Street poster favoring the May 1968 uprisings
in France. It depicts a woman protestor
throwing a paving stone. The text reads:
"beauty is in the streets."

22. Two Cowboys, punk
T-shirt by Malcolm
McLaren and
Vivienne Westwood.