Situationists

Situationists are members of the Situationist International (SI) (1957–1972), a European avant-garde art movement whose embrace of radical politics gave them a significant role in the student uprisings of the late 1960s. Initially, a breakaway group of the Lettrist International, the SI sought to create “situations,” moments of radical disruption in which the possibilities of a different society more attuned to “real” desires, might be envisaged or temporarily realised. Members of the group included Dutch architect Constant Nieuenhuys, a cofounder of the Amsterdam Provos and the painter Asger Jorn; Italian painter Pinot Gallizio; in the United Kingdom, Donald Nicholson-Smith, the poet Alexander Trocchi and art historian T. J. Clark; and in France, utopian architect Ivan Chtcheglov (Gilles Ivain), Michèle Bernstein, Raoul Vaneigem, and Guy Debord. Also associated with the movement (but after its official demise) were “punk” activists, including Sex Pistols manager Malcolm MacLaren, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, and graphic designer Jamie Reid.

Among techniques developed to explore the possibility of creating new situations were the theory of “unitary [Page 707]urbanism,” which sought to unearth complementary and transforming moments of city life, the dérive, a narrative walk or simultaneous walks through the urban environment (sometimes connected by walkie-talkie) designed to stimulate an awareness of the utopian potential available in the built environment, especially its more forgotten corners, and “psychogeography,” at once a practice, similar to the dérive, aimed at defining the emotional tenor of specific areas and an architectural intervention in urban development aimed at creating previously unheard of new environmental emotions. The ludic influence of Johan Huizinga's theories of play in Homo Ludens and the critical urban studies of Lewis Mumford is visible in many of these activities. In all of them, the contrast is drawn between the abstract space of representation, including sociological representation, and the gritty reality of city streets. Abstraction is seen as the intellectual equivalent of the homogenisation of space brought about by the ascent of the commodity to the status of spectacle, pure sign. Similarly, the situationists were concerned to distinguish their dérive from the random wanderings of the surrealists, criticising both the classspecific aristocracy of an irresponsible enjoyment and the surrealist concept of chance as a last bastion of freedom. Rather, they recognised the role of planning in urban geography and sought tactics for changing the ways in which the planned and administered environment might be inhabited.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the group's interest in practical experiment gave way to a more theoretical and intensely negative assessment of consumer capitalism, a theme captured in the phrase “the colonisation of everyday life” borrowed from Henri Lefebvre, for a time an associate of the SI. The last remaining element of the art practice was détournement, the practice of reorienting advertisements, political slogans, and media catchphrases for revolutionary or simply ironic purposes. Much of their art in this period is therefore also sociologically critical of the circumstances of both the art and the society in which they found themsleves. Such was Gallizio's semiautomated industrial painting, sold by the metre, as ironic comment on the commodification of painting and of the self-expression that it was understood to communicate. In a related gesture, Debord's film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howlings in Favor of de Sade, 1952) contains a 24-minute passage of darkness and silence intended to destroy the possibility not only of vision but of the spectacularisation of the self, otherwise unavoidable in the society of the spectacle. This sequence might also be taken to illustrate the situationist thesis that the spectacle makes visible the simultaneous presence and absence of the world that is typical of the world of the commodity in general and of the spectacle of the commodity in consumerism in particular. In this way, Debord's film is a détournement of the cinema apparatus. In a postsituationist example, Debord photographed reporters following him after he was implicated in a society murder, thus denying journalism its claim to truth through anonymity.

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