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Dialogues@RU is published annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume One
Spring 2002
To
Live Without Dead Time: An Inquiry into
Political Art and the Art of Political Struggle -
Page 3
Elliot Aronow
Drawing from the avant-garde's tradition of revolutionizing daily life and creating autonomous art, radical thinker, artist and writer Guy Debord asserted: "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it. Staying close to an author's phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ones" (Debord 145). While this statement may be construed as a simple call for artistic theft without any rhyme or reason, implicit within it is the idea that art and politics are intrinsically linked to one another. To create art under traditional modes of production is to further propagate the hegemony of the status quo, thus one must refuse taking part in the "economy" of art and steal artistic artifacts from the past and make old images undertake new meanings. Echoing Burger's claim that avant-garde art posits intention over product, Debord and the Situationists looked to imbue old products (symbols of the repressive world of industrial capitalism) with new intentions (Marcus 168). Rather than creating new works of consumable art that could be sold, purchased and critiqued in the form of a commodity, the Situationists sought to replace the "false ideas" of capitalism with "correct" ones which posited personal autonomy and creative control over profit making and the demands of the market.
The most general and accessible definition of the Situationist International can be found in Greil Marcus' 1989 book, Lipstick Traces. In the introductory portion of his text, Marcus states that the Situationist International, (or SI), first organized in 1952 as the Lettrist International, and refounded in 1957 at a conference of European avant-garde artists as the Situationist International (Marcus 18). In sharp reaction to Orthodox Marxists and the crimes committed in the name of Communism by Stalin and his ilk, the Situationists sought to offer a critique not only of leftist politics, but of art, leisure and conditions which constitute everyday material life. In his work, the Society of the Spectacle, author Guy Debord, a key figure in the SI, argues that capitalist society has served to create new relations between individuals (Debord 2). Furthermore, it is these new relations that have come to define not only the economic sphere, but daily life itself. Marcus adds that to the Situationists, "life is no longer lived, but experienced through a system of images and relations placed on the individual by the advanced capitalist state" (Marcus 299). Debord refers to this system of relations as "the spectacle." He continues: "the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images" (Debord 12). Using this working definition of the spectacle (that of a relation that is governed by images), one can see how the SI's radical approach to politics crossed over into their theories on art and reclaiming daily life from the spectacle.
A chief tenet of Situationist thought is the notion of "detournement." Marcus, in his exposition of situationist tactics, argues that detournement is "the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts and their diversion into contexts of one's own device" (Marcus 168). Debord adds that detournement is way by which to undermine the authority that an image initially held, through a removal of "a fragment or quotation from its context" (Debord 146). A prime example of detournement which was carried out by the SI during the late nineteen sixties was the marking up of public spaces with various pieces of graffiti. Included in the SI program of detouring was a critique of modern capitalist society, ranging from a parody of boredom offered by the spectacle ("Boredom is always counter-revolutionary") to a critique of the farcical notions of vacation and leisure ("Club Med- A Cheap Holiday in Other People's Misery") (Marcus 31). While an advert for a vacation spot (depicting a safe haven removed from the grind of selling one's labor day in and day out) could provide the illusion of financial security, happiness and personal fulfillment, it could also portray the realities of misery, poverty and boredom after it had been painted over with various incendiary words and slogans that were intended to alarm the public. This tactic of adding new (previously hidden) meanings to objects and public spaces with the intention of spreading radical political ideas can be found in Situationist graffiti, which served to baffle police and university students alike throughout the SI's existence.
Unlike convention art, which specifies an individual artist or group of artists as the producers of a specific piece, Situationist artwork remained intentionally anonymous in the public sphere. Situationist art rejects the idea of the artist as a hierarchically stratified mouthpiece for an official movement or party. Within Situationist theory is the idea that there is no authentic voice, no one figure who can be singled out and brought under control by the normative culture. Thus, each artist could maintain what Burger calls their "autonomy," due to the fact that since no one author claimed responsibility of a detourned piece, the flow of ideas ran from the artist directly to the public, without any mediation or criticism from the spectacle (Burger 186). To the SI, art was to be removed from the gaze of bourgeois gallery patrons and brought to the street, where those who can derive new meanings and interpretations from its puns and slogans could view it. This method of disseminating radical political thought directly to the public is best exemplified in the SI's street campaigns, which included graffiti and the wheat pasting of detourned images (Marcus 170). One piece that stands out in particular is the phrase " NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS" (Never Work) that had adorned the walls of the rue de Seine for months on end in the early fifties to late sixties. By vandalizing the symbols of the spectacle, such as university buildings and advertisements, the SI allowed for their radical politics to be joined to the artistic practices.