BASIC BANALITIES
A brief History of the Situationist International
pre-situ roots
The Situationist International (SI) was founded in 1957 in the Italian village of Cosio d'Arroscia as the Avant-Garde group 'International Movement for an Imaginist Bahaus' (IMIB) merged with the Lettrist International (LI) and the London Psychogeographical Association. Its life spanned over 15 years and finally ended in 1972 in Paris. By then it had moved from the fields of radical art where it had started, to the broadest but not alien ones of revolutionary politics.
At the time of its foundation the SI had solid roots both in the literary and artistic avant-garde tradition stretching as far back as Dada and Surrealism ideologically. This tradition was brought into the group mainly through Asger Jorn and Constant. The two had already been leading member of The International of Experimental Artists, later known as COBRA, as well as members of the International Movement For an Imaginist Bahaus (IMIB), one of the founding groups of the Situationist International.


COBRA

COBRA, or better The International of Experimental Artist, was an avant-garde group of Belgians, Dutch and Danish painters, architects and writers. It was founded in 1949, when the leading members of the Revolutionary Surrealist Group, the Host group and Die Experimentele Groep in Holland met at a congress in Paris. Those groups had been formed soon after the Second World War had ended. They constituted some sort of re-birth for the avant-garde world, which was quite stagnant after the commercial success of Surrealism and had received its final blow by the War.
The Belgian Surrealist Group, led by Christian Dotremont, was a break-away faction of its French counterpart. The split occurred after 1945 when Andre Breton, the leader of the Surrealist Group, returned from the U.S. where he had taken refuge during the war years. His intention was to shift the focus of the group activities towards mysticism, away from political militancy. He broke with the Communist Party and expected everybody else to follow (The surrealist and the Communist Party always had very strong links).
Dotremont and other members who had spent the war years in Europe, taking part in anti-Nazi resistance responded by forming the Revolutionary Surrealist Group, based in Brussels.
The Host group formed in Copenhagen around the magazine Helhesten, published between 1941 and 1944. The magazine published a variety of material and the group brought together painters, writers and architects.
Similarly, in Amsterdam, Die Experimentele Groep in Holland was a group of painters, writers and architects. They published the magazine Reflex, dedicated to poetry and texts.
In 1948 delegates of these three groups met whilst participating to a conference in Paris at the International Centre For The Documentation Of Avant-Garde Art. All were disappointed with the level of the discussion there and issued a collective opposition statement:
"the only reason to maintain international activity is experimental and organic collaboration, which avoids sterile theory and dogmatism"

In this statement they had basically outlined what would constitute the platform for their collaboration. Part of this platform had already been defined in a 'Manifesto' which appeared in the first issue of Reflex:
"The dissolution of Western Classical culture is a phenomenon that can be understood only against the background of a social evolution which can end only in the total collapse of a principle of society thousands of years old and its replacement by a system whose laws are based on the immediate demands of human vitality. [...]"

The group published a magazine, a sort of forum where their practice and ideas could be debated. It was called COBRA (from the initials of the cities of COpenhagen, BRussel, Amsterdam). Exhibitions and events were planned and enacted. Dotremont, the Dutchman Constant and the Danish painter Asger Jorn were the key figures of the group around whom a number of painters, architects, writers, poets and theorists gravitated.
They refused both realism and abstract art and worked for a primitive and more direct form of expression, searching through constant experimentation. Politically, all the one who had not already done so, broke with the Communist Party over its support for social realism. They distanced themselves from Surrealism, criticising the focus it put on the unconscious and the psyche. In the same time they brought forward the idea of the creation of a new urban environment, a more 'irrational' one, in open contrast with LeCorbusier rationalism. Constant then developed and took this concept with him into the Situationist International, where it was expanded under the name of Unitary Urbanism.
They disbanded in 1951. The group was largely ignored by the art establishment. Seven years later, following the personal commercial success of some original members of COBRA (Jorn, Constant and Appel) it was all of a sudden be 'discovered' and 'launched' as a major avant-garde movement.
Jorn and Constant, by then members of the newly formed Situationist International wrote about the recuperation of COBRA:

In 1958 some sort of conspiracy tries to launch a 'new' avant-garde movement, which has the peculiarity of having terminated 7 years ago. [...] The groups of the COBRA movement agreed on the proclamation of an experimental research in culture. This positive intention though, was paralysed by an ideological confusion, kept alive by a strong neo-surrealist component. The only result that COBRA reached was the creation of a new painting style.


Lettrist Movement and Lettrist International (LI)

During the Second World War years, Isidore Isou, a young and beautiful Rumanian poet, had elaborated his very own theory on poetry. According to this, poetry, like any other art goes through two dialectic phases, one of expansion and one of chiseling. After the Dadaist 'destruction' of words, poetry was now at the end of a chiseling phase. Isou's role was to complete this phase by destroying the letters, and initiate a new expansion period.
It was time for him to move to Paris, the capital of culture, and announce to the world his great discovery. Very much to his disappointment though, nobody was even interested in listening to his 'great' discovery. Far from being put off by this initial set-back, the megalomaniac and egocentric Isou armed himself with two tools to make his voice heard: scandals and disciples.
The Lettriste Movement was thus born. Publicity through scandal was obtained by stunts such as the publication of a pamphlet called 'The Lettriste Dictatorship' (doesn't sound anything special now, but imagine the effect in Paris 1946, only one year after the German occupation), the abrupt interruption of dadaist Tristan Tzara poetry reading and of a mass in Notre Dame to read out a 'God is dead' pamphlet. (The disrupter, dressed out like a monk, never quite made it to the end of the text as the Swiss guards attempted to kill him).
A group of youths in their twenties gathered around Isou and the cafes of the Left Bank. Guy-Ernest Debord joined the group in 1950, following the Lettrists attempted disruption of the Cannes Film Festival. They produced Lettrist sound poetry, Lettrist paintings with letters as their subject, and lettrist films.
In 1951 Isou's film The Drivel and Eternity Treatise was awarded the Avant-Garde Award at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was supposed to signal the end of the chiseling phase in cinema, with the film being scratched, torn and in parts completely blank. Debord will take the same theme a bit further one year later with his mainly blank Howling in favor of the Sade.

With regards to the situationists later elaboration, an interesting point in Isou's theories was his analysis of the young people as a social class. He saw this class as exploited and underrepresented, but because it wasn't tied by such things as family and work the young people were situated outside the market and relatively free from the capitalist forces that controlled both the market and the people within it. Isou had the merit of being the first to see the revolutionary potential of this 'class'. The Fifties saw the first signs of anger coming from the youths, with such movements as 'the angry young men' in Britain and 'Les blouson noir' in France.

In 1952 Debord and few others broke-away from Isou's movement and founded the Lettriste International (LI). Divergence had emerged a while back. The occasion for the break-away had been the demonstration Debord and the others held against Charlie Chaplin's Parisian press conference, an action condemned by Isou.
During the 5 years of its existence the LI was a very small and relatively unknown group. Its magazine, 'Potlatch' was distributed freely. 50 copies were printed of the first issue, 500 of the last one.
They decided to dedicate themselves to the serious study of leisure, mainly through practical experimentation of course:

"the organisation of leisure - the organisation of the freedom of a multitude a little less driven to continuos work - is already a necessity for capitalist states just as it is for their Marxist successor. Everywhere one is limited by the degradation of stadiums of television programs. [...] we have sought to devote ourselves seriously only to leisure [...] The construction of situations will be the continuos realisation of a great game, a game the players have chosen to play"
The LI put into 'experimental practice' the architectural and behavioural theories already outlined by the Lettrist Movement. Those lead to the elaboration of the concept of Unitary Urbanism and its field-study, Psychogeography. Their starting point was the idea that architecture influences the life of the people who live in it in a much greater way than commonly thought. A critique of architecture thus becomes a way of criticising life as a whole.
In 1953, 19 year old Ivan Chtcheglov wrote an essay titled 'Formulary for a new urbanism' (first published only 5 years later in the 1st Issue of Internationale Situationiste) a sort of passionate 'call to arms' for a new concept of urbanism: SIRE I AM FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY. We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun, is the opening of the road of psychogeography. Chtcheglov cries for the modern cities without music and without geography, Our imaginations...have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines, The hacienda ,and the new city must be built. He carries on describing his vision, the result of the new architecture envisaged, one which will have learned by experimentation with pattern of behaviour, the designer equivalent of constructing situations. It will be a modifiable city, buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing desires, everyone will live in his own personal cathedral so to speak, The districts of this city could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feeling that one encounters by chance in everyday life
The LI took on board the formulations of Chtcheglov, especially the experimental drifting called Psychogeography. In 1955 Debord writes an essay titled 'Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography' which in some ways is an elaboration of Chtcheglov's

Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals
Psychogeographic maps expressing complete insubordination to habitual influences were invoked. The city and its influence on the mood of its inhabitants was to be explored through dérivé, or systematic strolling, and psychogeographical games such as wandering through a town while following the directions of a map of another town. This research would be finalised at the creation of a new ambient leading to a new, pleasurable way of living.
The other theory elaborated during those years was the theory of Detournement, first outlined in Debord and Gil J. Wolman's essay 'Methods of Deournment' . They start from the point that "in the civil war phase we are engaged in art and creation at large should serve solely partisan purposes and that it is necessary to finish with any notion of personal property in those areas. Detournement is the free appropriation and adaptation of other's creations. Detournement is the displacement of contexts.
"It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish preservation of "quotes""
In 1957 the LI will merge with the International Movement For An Imaginist Bahaus (IMIB) to form the Situationist International (SI).



The International Movement for an Imaginist Bahaus (IMIB)

After the dissolution of COBRA, Jorn continued his activity of 'experimental artist' and of frantic organiser and contact-maker. It's during this period that he met the painter Enrico Baj, founder of the Nuclear Art Movement. Very much like COBRA, nucleartist were opposed to concrete and abstract art and believed in experimentation as a way to bring forth a renewal in painting.
Jorn was also in touch with Max Bill, a Swiss architect working on the project of a New Bahaus. The two were exploring the ground for a possible collaboration but the spontaneous Jorn soon fell out with Bill's rationalism. He accused him of wanting to make an academy without painting, without research into the imagination, fantasy, signs, symbols. In a letter to Enrico Baj he announced his intention to create an International Movement For An Imaginist Bahaus (IMIB). Baj joined the newly formed group, and so did ex- COBRA artists such as Dotremont and Appel. Jorn moved to the Italian seaside town of Albisola.
During the 1954 local festival he met painter-politician Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio and philosophy student Piero Simondo. The two were very much interested in IMIB's intentions and ideas. A year later, Gallizio's studio in the wine hills town of Alba, became the IMIB Experimental Laboratory. Everybody worked and experimented side to side in the disciplines of painting, architecture and music. Meanwhile, Jorn kept active the contacts with other European avant-garde movements, among those, the French Lettrist International.
In September 1956 Jorn and Gallizio organized the "First World Congress of Liberated Artists". Gil J. Wolman represented the LI. Under its insistence Baj was excluded from the very first day.
The Congress concluded with a signed resolution declaring the "necessity of an integral construction of the environment by a unitary urbanism that must utilise all arts and modern techniques" and the "recognition of an essential interdependence between unitary urbanism and a future style of life".
An exhibition of the work produced by the IMIB Experimental Laboratory as well as one of "Futurist Ceramics 1925-33" were organized to run parallel with the Congress.
Constant stayed on in Alba after the Congress to carry on his studies on urbanism and space. He planned a mobile construction for some gypsies camped on Gallizio's land. Using movable dividing walls this was an experiment for a new model of town based on the principles of common property, mobility and the possibilities of continual modification of the living environment.
Gallizio was working on his 'Industrial Painting'. The name does not refer to the way those paintings were produced. They were hand-made and Gallizio experimented with a variety of materials: glue, paint, wax, alimentary assiline, sand, carbon, and so forth.

The term 'Industrial' referred more to the quantity of work produced. Gallizio, with the aid of his son, Jors Melanotte, 'painted' on rolls of canvas 70 to 90 meters long and sold them by the metre, using them to make clothes, drapings, partition for mobile architecture. The idea was to attack the dogma of the preciousness of painting by over-producing them.
Almost in the same time, a psycogeographical exhibition by Walter Korun and Guy Debord was organised in Brussels.
In May 1957 Debord wrote what will become a preparatory document for a conference two months later. The pamphlet called 'Rapport sur la construction des Situations et sur les conditions de organisation et action de la tendance Internationale Situationiste' starts off with First of all we think the world must be changed. It then carries out an analysis of the historical avant-garde, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, setting the background for the discussion in that tradition.

"The surrealist program, asserting the sovereignty of desire and surprise, proposing a new use of life, is much richer in constructive possibilities than is generally thought [...] but its error is [...] its belief that the unconscious was the finally discovered force of life [...]"
According to Debord, all the avant-gardes have been re-absorbed and have lost their potential as revolutionary forces. Debord envisages the creation of situations, described as the concrete construction of momentary ambients of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality". The situations are the opposite of the spectacle, the alienated form of life resulted from late capitalism. The notion of spectacle will be developed all through the SI period.
The Rapport... calls for collective action,

"we have to eliminate the sectarianism among us that opposes unity of action with possible allies for specific goals and prevents our infiltration of parallel organizations."
At the Conference Gallizio, Jorn, Olmo, Simondo and Verrone represented the IMIB, Debord and Bernstein the LI. The Englishman Ralph Rumney was present and was told he had to be a group in order to participate in the 'unification'. The non-existent London Psychogeographical Association was invented there and then, thus giving a bit more credit to the word International to the newly born Situationist International.



home | site design by Schonk! | ˝© 1998 - ...