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3/4/2007

The Situationist International

Tinguely Museum, Basel

Group show

Curated by: Heinz Stahlhut

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni ("We roam in circles through the night and are consumed by fire.")

The Museum Tinguely will be showing an extensive exhibition developed in cooperation with the Centraal Museum Utrecht on one of the least known yet most influential (anti)art movements of the post war era: the Situationist International (SI).

In 1950, a group of young incensed rebels, later to be known as the Situationists who triggered off the student revolts of 1968, gathered in the Parisian bar "Chez Moineau”. Whereas the Existentialists held court on the terrace of the "Deux Magots” and danced in Jazz clubs, the Situationists fought their battles during drinking bouts and in street actions, with attempts to destroy artworks and the Eiffel Tower, with anti-films and graffiti against the Society of the Spectacle.

The Museum Tinguely presents the most extensive exhibition hitherto on the Situationist International that was founded on July 28, 1957. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its foundation, 400 exhibits will illustrate this last important avant-garde movement that counted 72 artists among its members, with sections in Germany, Holland, America, North Africa and elsewhere, rescuing it from oblivion.

The exhibition reveals that the Situationists were not only the precursors of Fluxus, Arte povera and Punk, but that they also created their own aesthetics through their architectonic utopias, their comic strip collages, their political flyers and actions in May ’68 – although their actual aim was the "overcoming of art”.

The Situationists did not wish to create works of art but rather new situations, to provoke confusion within society and turn cities into "psycho-geographical hubs". Their greatest work of art, seen under this angle, was the uprising in Paris in May ’68. Following the failure of the 1968 revolts, the movement was dissolved in 1972 and was forgotten by public awareness. Yet, its philosophy became a political reality in Switzerland, in 1968 and again during the youth disturbances in 1980, and is the inspiration behind present-day opponents of globalisation in their battle against the "Society of the Spectacle”.

The last of the international avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, which was centred in Paris, existed from 1957 to 1972 with a total of seventy-two European, American, and North African members at various times. The guiding figure of the SI was Guy-Ernest Debord (1931–94), the exhibition is organized around his biography.

The SI's revolutionary program included the elimination of all forms of representation: the undermining of all authority, the destruction of all symbols of power, the elimination of art (even that of the Classical avant-garde) and all other forms of cultural spectacle, the regaining of the reality of life that had been expropriated by a society of consumption and commodities—in short, the struggle against late capitalist dispossession.

The rejection of the conventional intellectual discourse, its political radicalness, and also, quite simply, its limited number of members have contributed to the relative obscurity of Guy Debord and the SI outside France. As a consequence, the historical significance of the SI, which operated at the points of intersection between art and politics, is difficult to comprehend even today.

At the same time—not least as a result of the strong influence the SI's radical critique of society had on the student revolts—Situationist ideas were widely disseminated and left traces internationally in art, politics, architecture, and pop culture that can be followed right up to the present. Their methods can be found in Fluxus, punk, performance, and in the actions of the opponents of globalism in the twenty-first century.

The exhibition is structured chronologically and is divided into eight sections that illuminate the development of the predecessors and forerunners of the SI, such as the Lettrists and CoBrA through the intense collaboration of theorists and artists in the 1960s to the student unrest of 1968, which was powerfully influenced by the SI. Finally, it follows the traces of individual "members” after they were expelled by Debord. All the sections are bracketed by Debord's later film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni of 1978, in which he looks back, in idealizing retrospective, on the great days of the SI.

The Negative
The direct precursors of the SI were Lettrism and the Lettrist International (LI). The protagonists of this truly underground movement developed beyond the usual institutions and lifestyles into a subculture that was unconditionally dedicated to social protest. Various spectacular actions and publications testify to the irreconcilable negativism that stopped at nothing, not even self-destruction. Every form of personal pact with the existing order was despised. Neither the production of art nor work was supposed to corrupt the negativist rebellion.

The Lettrists presumed that the destruction of poetry, hacking it down to the "letter,” would make it possible to liberate language. The prescription of the liberated new creation out of destroyed reduction was subsequently applied to all of the arts and every social theme. The entire past was to be dissolved and brought to a new act of creation. The exhibition will show works and documents that illustrate the rigorously asocial existence of the protagonists and their equally rigorous work in the media of language and film.

CoBrA
The other group that preceded the SI also turned against avant-garde positions that had become academic, such as Surrealism and abstraction. The name of the group formed in November 1948 by Christian Dotremont of Belgium, Constant Nieuwenhuys of the Netherlands, and Asger Jorn of Denmark was derived programmatically from the initials of the three cities from which the artists and writers came: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, and at the same time evoked the dangerous reptile that was supposed to seize French dominance and nomenclature in art in its stranglehold. With reference to popular art and Art Brut, the members of CoBrA sought to liberate art from its elite reservation and make it a product for all: "Art exists in every act of happy people. Art is joie de vivre; it is the automatic reflex of our attitude toward life.” Defined by this ambition, Christian Dotremont, Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky, Constant, and Corneille created their narrative, often abstrusely fissured paintings. Until the group was dissolved in 1952, all of its members worked tirelessly to re-infuse magic into everyday life.

Lettrist International
The declared goal of the secret faction within the Lettrist movement that was founded by Guy Debord and Gil Wolman in 1952—the immediate precursor to the SI—was to channel the anarchic, chaotic actions of the individualist Lettrists and lend them political significance. The group, which saw itself as an alternative to bureaucratic socialism, refused any completed works or labour altogether; it proclaimed a terrorist concept of freedom and denounced all morality. Analogously, Debord pushed the Lettrist decomposition to its aesthetic absolute in the medium of film by countering the "spectacle” of modern society with a provocative monotony. The outraged reactions of the viewers, who were thrown back on themselves and the possibility of becoming active themselves, provided the real soundtrack of Debord's films.

Situationist International
All of these sources fed into the founding of the Situationist International in 1957, at an international meeting of the proponents of various neo-avant-garde movements. It united groups from different countries, all of which were interested in changing the social reality by means of aesthetic concepts and a corresponding practice. In addition to representatives of the LI, there were members of CoBrA and Italy's "Mouvement international pour un Bauhaus imaginiste”. It was primarily Debord and Jorn who were behind this merger of various avant-garde revolutionaries.

One integral component of their theoretical work was presenting elements of social criticism and subversive theory with both radical, revolutionary seriousness and covert wit and self-mockery, which transgressed every normative boundary of established political discourse and profoundly confused the establishment. The deliberate violation of all the rules of the game valid in the business of cultural until that time soon acquired a character of political subversion and fundamentally influenced events in Strasbourg in 1966 and the revolts of 1968.

The Spectacle
In its critique, the SI under Debord worked from the concept of the "spectacle” and no longer criticized primarily the alienating effect of work but rather the colonization of free time and the totalitarian mediatising of life. Consequently, it promoted the idea of eliminating art as such in order to guide it to "free life.” The SI saw art as part of the "spectacle” that degraded human beings into passive consumers, thus merely demonstrating to them the happiness and adventure of life, and thereby abandoning them to the boredom of everyday life. The subsequent elimination of art they called for meant primarily the elimination of every form of representation. Only thus could the promise of happiness inherent in art be realized in everyday life. The revolutionary potential of the forms for coming to terms with reality that the avant-garde had developed since the First World War would finally be liberated.

Overcoming Art
The program of the Situationist International thus advocated the use of artistic means not to produce art or as a criticism of politics but rather to produce reality. That could not be achieved by an art that had long since become part of the consumer society. Its potential for negation had to be directed at itself, and art had to be eliminated along with everything else that made up the "society of the spectacle.”

A richly illustrated catalogue in a German and English edition will be published by JRP Ringier Kunstverlag AG to accompany the exhibition, with contributions by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Axel Heil, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jacqueline de Jong, Michael Lentz, François Letaillieur, Annja Müller, Selima Niggl, Peter Sloterdijk, Juri Steiner, Mark Wigley, Nina Zimmer, Stefan Zweifel, and others.

Image: HP Zimmer, Ohne Titel, 1960. Indian ink and pencil / paper : 29.5 x 42 cm. Kunsthalle in Emden – Donation Otto van de Loo © 2007 Pro Litteris, 8033 Zürich. Photo: Kunsthalle in Emden

Press contact: Laurentia Leon Tel. + 41 (0) 61 6874608 Fax + 41 (0) 61 6819321

Museum Tinguel
Paul Sacher-Anlage 1 - Basel
Tuesday to Sunday: 11am - 7pm. Closed Monday
Adults: CHF 10 Students, trainees, seniors: CHF 7 Free under 16.

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