"Arts, Faculty of"@en . "Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "Scott, Victoria Holly Francis"@en . "2009-07-20T17:58:09Z"@en . "2000"@en . "Master of Arts - MA"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "Removed from its artistic origins in the French avant-garde during the interwar\r\nperiod, the European based group known as the situationist international is often\r\nrepresented as being solely occupied with politics to the exclusion of all else, particularly\r\nart and aesthetics. In what follows I argue that throughout the sixties the anti-aesthetic\r\nposition was actually the governing model in France obliging the avant-garde to adjust\r\ntheir strategies accordingly. Artists and artists' collectives that placed politics before\r\naesthetics were the norm, enjoying widespread popularity and recognition from both the\r\npublic and the French State. These overtly partisan groups and individuals sapped art of\r\nthe power it had enjoyed in the fifties as a venue removed, or at least distanced from,\r\nformal politics. In response, the situationists officially rejected the art world, turning to\r\nthe popular and vernacular culture of the streets in an attempt to get beyond both\r\nclassical aesthetic principals and the overt propagandistic objectives of groups such as le\r\nSalon de la jeunePeinture. Turning to the climactic moment of 1968 I track the ways in\r\nwhich these debates informed the posters and graffiti which marked the unfinished\r\nrevolution, sorting out the various aesthetic positions and political persuasions that\r\ndominated the events. My thesis contends that the situationists were not anti-aesthetic,\r\nthat they simply advocated a different kind of aesthetics: one that rejected traditional\r\nnotions of beauty for the more active and open concept of poiesis or poetry. Beyond\r\nwords on a page, this notion implied art as a way of life, emphasizing production,\r\ncreation, formation and action and can be traced back to the groups prewar origins in the\r\nDada and surrealist movements. Moreover, this concept of poetry was not adverse to\r\nissues of form being highly dependent on the materiality and physicality of the urban\r\ncentre, specifically the streets. Finally my conclusion expands upon the similarities\r\nbetween this notion of poetry and the 17th century understanding of beauty, the latter\r\nconcept being associated with a subtle criticality and strategic wit. It was this\r\ninterpretation of beauty that defined and produced the art of 1968."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/10958?expand=metadata"@en . "12427156 bytes"@en . "application/pdf"@en . "LA BEAUTE EST DANS LA RUE: ART & VISUAL CULTURE IN PARIS, 1968 by Victoria Holly Francis Scott B.A. University of British Columbia, 1996 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of Fine Arts) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA JUNE 2000 \u00C2\u00A9 Victoria Holly Francis Scot^ 2000 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada \ DE-6 (2/88) Abstract Removed from its artistic origins in the French avant-garde during the interwar period, the European based group known as the situationist international is often represented as being solely occupied with politics to the exclusion of all else, particularly art and aesthetics. In what follows I argue that throughout the sixties the anti-aesthetic position was actually the governing model in France obliging the avant-garde to adjust their strategies accordingly. Artists and artists' collectives that placed politics before aesthetics were the norm, enjoying widespread popularity and recognition from both the public and the French State. These overtly partisan groups and individuals sapped art of the power it had enjoyed in the fifties as a venue removed, or at least distanced from, formal politics. In response, the situationists officially rejected the art world, turning to the popular and vernacular culture of the streets in an attempt to get beyond both classical aesthetic principals and the overt propagandistic objectives of groups such as le Salon de la jeunePeinture. Turning to the climactic moment of 1968 I track the ways in which these debates informed the posters and graffiti which marked the unfinished revolution, sorting out the various aesthetic positions and political persuasions that dominated the events. My thesis contends that the situationists were not anti-aesthetic, that they simply advocated a different kind of aesthetics: one that rejected traditional notions of beauty for the more active and open concept of poiesis or poetry. Beyond words on a page, this notion implied art as a way of life, emphasizing production, creation, formation and action and can be traced back to the groups prewar origins in the Dada and surrealist movements. Moreover, this concept of poetry was not adverse to issues of form being highly dependent on the materiality and physicality of the urban centre, specifically the streets. Finally my conclusion expands upon the similarities between this notion of poetry and the 17th century understanding of beauty, the latter concept being associated with a subtle criticality and strategic wit. It was this interpretation of beauty that defined and produced the art of 1968. ii Table of Contents Abstract ii Table of Contents iii List of Illustrations v Acknowledgments vii Dedication viii Introduction Parfum de Greve Generate 1 Illustration 6 Chapter I Revolution in the Service of Poetry: Situationist Aesthetics Reconsidered I Beauty as a sum of Possibilities 7 II Beauty as Poetry 12 III Le Pourissement Consommable, 20 Le Pourissement du Consommable: Different Package Same Shit Illustrations 28 Chapter II High Jinks: Modernism at Midnight I Les Identites Scandaleuses: 32 The Art of Cultural Subterfuge II De Ces Fous on s'en Fiche, 34 Des Affiches on s'en Fout: The Art of Posters III Mots Sans Culottes: The Art of Graffiti 42 IV The Restraints Imposed on 48 Posters Excite the Pleasures of Graffiti without Restraint Illustrations 54 iii Chapter III Of the Streets: The City as Oeuvre I La Langue du Mur: 77 The Public Matter of Private Interests II Slight of Hand: 81 Posters & Graffiti in the Streets III Noir: The Silent Partner 86 IVDroledeJeu: 90 The Problem of Democratic Propaganda Illustrations 94 Conclusion Out of the Past 99 Timeline 104 Bibliography 105 iv List of Illustrations Introduction 1. La beaute est dans la rue, Montpellier : 6 Chapter One 1. Claude Lorrain, Seaport with Ulysses Returning to Chryseis to Her Father, 1644 28 2. Paris Metro Map, 1967 29 3. Asger Jom, Paris by Night, 1959 30 4. Back page of the Belgian journal Les Levres Nues (January 1955) 31 Chapter Two 1. Atelier des Beaux Arts, 1968 54 2. La Chienlit c 'est lui! (He's Chaos!), Atelier des Beaux Arts, 1968 55 3. Une Jeunesse que I 'avenir inquiete trop souvent (Youth too often worried by the future), 1968 56 4. Nous Sommes le Pouvoir, Antonio Berni's workshop 57 5. De Gaulle, Atelier des Beaux Arts, 1968 5 8 6. Police, Atelier des Arts Decoratifs, 1968 59 7. Nous sommes tous des indesirables (We are all undesirables), Atelier des Beaux Arts, 1968 60 8. Serie Noire, 1994 61 9. A Bas les cadences (Put an end to endless routine) Atelier des Beaux Arts, 1968 62 10. Fin a la societe de classe (Down with Class Society), CMDO June, 1968 63 11. Nous voulons une universite populaire (we want a popular university), Atelier des Beaux Arts, 1968 64 12. Universite Populaire Oui (Yes to a Popular University), Atelier des Beaux Arts, 1968 65 13. Fin del'universite (End of the university), CMDO June, 1968 66 14. Le pouvoir aux conseils de travailleurs (All power to the workers councils), CMDO June, 1968 67 15. Pouvoir Populaire, Atelier des Beaux Arts, 1968 68 16. Que peut le movement revolutionnaire maintenant? (What can the revolutionary movement do now?), CMDO June, 1968 69 17. Ne Travaillez jamais (Never Work), Guy Debord, 1953 _70 18. Rita Hayworth in Gilda 71 19. Qui Cree? Pour Qui? (Who creates? For Whom?), Atelier des Beaux _Arts, 1968 ; 72 20. Les Beaux Arts sontfermes (The Art School is closed), Atelier des Beaux Arts, 1968 : 73 v 21. La police s 'affiche aux Beaux Arts (The police parade in the art school), Atelier des Beaux Arts, 1968 . 74 22. L 'Art au service du peuple (Art in the service of the people), 1968 75 23. A suivre (to be continued...), CMDO June, 1968 76 Chapter Three 1. Jo Schnapp, photograph of anonymous Paris graffiti, 1968 94 2. Tracts falling from the sky, the Sorbonne, May 1968 95 3. Jo Schnapp, photograph of graffiti inside the Sorbonne, 1968 96 4. Jo Schnapp, photograph of Never Work graffiti, 1968 97 5. Jo Schnapp, photograph of graffiti on stairway in the Sorbonne, 1968 98 vi Acknowledgments It is said that you are only as good as the people around you so I can only hope that the students, staff and faculty take full credit for any good ideas in this thesis which are, in my opinion, entirely attributable to the intellectual environment they have created at UBC. I am very fortunate to have had such awesome teachers and colleagues. Serge Guilbaut's ideas anchored this project and his contributions have been a endless source of joy and frustration. I will never forgive him nor will I ever know how to properly thank him for everything he has taught me. Special thanks also go to John O'Brian and Rose Marie San Juan for their comments and criticisms. Maureen Ryan, Carol Knicely, Steve Harris and Joseph Monteyne have consistently provided me with encouragement during my time here, along with Jennifer Cullen, Jill Carrick, Ruth E. Iskin, Trish Kelly, Alexa Fairchild, Maggie Milne and Brent Epp. Joan Handwerg, Shep Steiner and Kevin Chong also deserve mention because they were into beauty before anybody. And, in order of appearance, Scott Watson rocks. Abroad thanks are due to Laurent Gervereau and the staff at that Museum of Contemporary History in Paris who set me up with my first interviews and let me roam freely in their archives. Thanks also to Jeanne Lambert, at the Mediateque at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts who was equally generous with her time, knowledge and contacts, and to Anne-Marie Garcia who helped me access their poster collection. Jeanne Sauvage at the Department of Prints at the Biblioteque Nationale was also very helpful in this respect, accompanying me into the very bowels of Richelieu. Carolyn Johnston gave me the low down on the French Library system and insisted I visit the International Institute for Social History in Holland. I am very grateful for her sound advice. Thanks to Mieke Izjermans who made my research and stay in Amsterdam such a pleasant experience, Steef Davidson for welcoming me into his home (and poster collection!) and Pram Pramudji for guiding me through the archives at the Stedelijk Museum. For granting me interviews and corresponding with me I would like to thank Jacqueline B. de Jong, Bernard Rancillac, Henri Cueco, Francois Miehe, Francois Le Tailleur, Gerard Fromager, Roberto Ohrt, Philippe Vernes, Michele Katz, Jean-Louis Violeau, Alice Debord, and Merri Jolivet. Guilbaut was right when he said I would learn the most from talking to people. Pierre Scies, Kader el Janabi, Marie-Therese Huerta, & the staff at the Musee dTgor Balut also made my time in Paris unforgettable. Here at home the extra-curricular activities organized by members of Espontaneos/as (Anthony Kinik & Mari Dumett respectively), APEC-Alert, Vanarchy, and the East-side Revolutionary People's Front, have been a constant and annoying distraction but ultimately they helped me understand the practicalities of the material at hand: props to Santu, Bantu, Beanie, Link, Eddie & Biff. Finally I would like to thank my family. The Bowden Street people, Mr.s Ting, Dan, Joan, Susan, Elliot, Kris, Red Sonja, Craig and Kay have all supported me in one way or another over the years but special recognition goes to the man who first introduced me to Gilda and largely bankrolled this adventure, my father, John Scott, and also to my favorite sister and biggest inspiration, the very beautiful Kitty Scott. vii For my favorite brother Introduction Parfum de Greve Generate To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it -Barthes, Mythologies The poster La beaute est dans la rue (Beauty is in the Streets) from which I drew the title of my thesis succinctly sums up the main issue at hand. That is, the unification of high and low: the coming together of the indiscriminate and open character of the street with the usually removed and discriminating notion of beauty (fig. 1). In this poster produced in 1968 at a workshop outside of Paris in Montpellier, the viewer is presented with an image that is neither beautiful nor ugly. Here the concept of classical beauty is reinvented with the power of action and movement across time and space.. This beauty is no frozen caryatid holding up some Greek temple high on a mountain top, she is a threat from below, from the streets. In imitation of Delacroix's, \"Liberty Leading the People,\" the swift protagonist, clad from head to toe in anarchist black, is jumping off the gratings that were used as barricades in 1968. There are no flags or guns in this picture, instead she is applying what the European based group know as the situationists called the \"irrefutable critique of the brick.\" In 1968 the entire postwar order was challenged by a wave of insurrections from America and western Europe to Czechoslovakia and Japan. These movements were not completely successful but they did set an unrivaled precedent, fomenting the beginnings of revolution out of sheer imagination. What made these uprisings extraordinary was that they occurred during a period of prosperity, contradicting Marxist assertions about the prerequisite of insufficient material conditions for instigating crisis. The social upheaval of 1968 was not caused by poverty, it was rooted in the moral outrage provoked by the war in Vietnam and surprisingly, boredom. Moreover it was for the most part, white middle-class kids from privileged sectors of society who instigated the 'events,' as they have 1 come to be known. Taking their cue from revolutionaries in Cuba, China, parts of Africa, and the ghettos of black America, they created their own opportunities. After the second world war, a revolution in a first world country had been unthinkable. \"Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible!\" was an important slogan that year. Keith Reader encapsulates what happened in France in one sentence: \"In May 1968, a student protest over restricted visiting rights in university hostels sparked off a movement which brought virtually the whole of France to a halt, yet culminated anti-climactically in an increased Gaullist majority in the July general election.\" Over ten million people went on strike, shut down Paris for almost two months, and nobody got killed.1 Social historians argue, and popular opinion dictates that the 'almost revolution,' the general strike, is the most important feature of 1968, but May is also remembered for the cultural explosion that accompanied the action in the streets. In many ways the two are inseparable. The widespread emergence of a new type of poster and a new type of graffiti established 1968 as a watermark, for both politics and art. From the beginning of May right through to July, over 600 000 posters were produced with over 500 different silk-screen designs, along side numerous examples of funny, philosophical, and down right sophisticated graffiti.2 One of the leading forces in the events, both political and artistic, was a small group known as the situationist international. Originally composed of a diverse crew of sculptors, painters, inventors, writers, quasi-scientists, philosophers and film makers the situationists had been preparing for May, literally, for over ten years. Established in Italy in 1957, they enjoyed a small but loyal following, sustained by their eponymously entitled journal which was published yearly until the group disbanded in 1972. Over that period close to eighty different individuals have been linked to the situationists, but its 1 Several people were killed during May however their deaths are widely believed to be accidental. 2Today the postera remain the favored emblem of France's most recent revolution, selling for over $1000.00 (American) at auction. 2 membership was constantly in flux due to the hard-line nature of their organisation.3 The singular task they set themselves was nothing less than the realization of art, to inject everyday life with the passion and attention normally reserved for painting and sculpture. Not inclined to half measures they were willing to dismantle the entire structure of society to achieve their ends. Although they claimed to have sections throughout the western world, they were largely based in Europe, specifically Paris, and so it is no surprise that was where their ideas had the most resonance, culminating in what some consider to be their ultimate piece de resistance, the events of Paris 1968. Their theory which they were constantly reworking via their journal and certain concrete exercises, was eventually laid out in two key volumes: Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life, published in 1967 (considered to be the inspiration for much of the graffiti in 1968), and Guy Debord's Society ofthe Spectacle. Together they devised a revolutionary theory, based around the notion of the spectacle, which they described accordingly: \"The Spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation, among people, mediated by images.\"4 This overriding concern with the culpability of the image in situationist texts has been billed in North America as evidence of this groups profoundly anti-art and anti-aesthetic bias. Building on the work of scholars such as T.J. Clark and Thomas Crow in this thesis I argue that this is a misinterpretation stemming from an unfamiliarity with the terrain of postwar art in France. Nevertheless this is not a history of the situationists, rather it is an attempt to track the various aesthetic arguments that informed and produced 1968. Situationist theory developed as a result of, and in reaction to, a strong history of politicized art and debate on the left in 20th century France, and in the poetic tradition of the avant-garde going back to the prewar period they took the contest to a new level, raising the stakes politically, intellectually, and visually. 3For a list of these individuals see Jean-Jacques Raspaud and Jean-Pierre Voyer, L'Internationale Sitaationniste: Chronologie, bibliographic protagonistes (avec un index des noms insultes). Paris: Champs Libre, 1972. 4Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 12. 3 While art historians may secretly believe in beauty they dare not say it out loud. (Especially now when the field known as visual culture has gained so much academic ground.) Any public discussion of beauty is immediately belittled as the term is associated with art history's so-called sordid past of connoisseurship and shameless elitism. Since the late seventies in fact, paralleling the rise of cultural studies, beauty, or rather, the preferred more clinical term, aesthetics, has been labeled as a reactionary notion, aligned with market forces, the canon, and the structures of domination that go with them. In a battle that pits art-for-art's sake, against art as cultural critique, the realm of aesthetics is portrayed as hostile to the vernacular, which is acclaimed as 'the' site of resistance. In the book Anti-Aesthetic (1983) Hal Foster goes so far as to say that the critical capacities of aesthetics are illusory if they ever existed at all.5 This issue is now an implicit component of the rumpus between art history and visual culture where art history is criticized for being exclusive and visual culture is celebrated for being open and progressive. Recently Thomas Crow has gained notoriety for coming to art history's defense. He argues that art history is by its very nature inclusive, and suggests that its proper subject is, indeed has always been, the examination of the give and take between the two categories of high and low. Unfortunately however, in a rare capitulation to the visual culture camp, he stops just short of explicitly defending aesthetics, let alone mention the now taboo subject of beauty. In this essay I will bring Crow's argument to a head. Using May 1968 as a case study and building on Crow's thesis, my argument will demonstrate that the vernacular and high art are not mutually exclusive categories and will suggest, moreover, that the notion of beauty, or in this case, poetry (in the Greek sense of the word denoting an emphasis on process), is not simply an anachronistic paradigm inextricable from conservative politics, but that it is rather, a cultural strategy like any other, specific to a The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, intro. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press 1983), p. xv. 4 certain time and place, independent of, but not necessarily antagonistic to, political allegiances of any type. There are three sections to this thesis. My first chapter explores the situationist theories about art and reasserts the importance of French art history to the situationist proposition of \"World-wide proletarian revolution with unlicensed pleasure as its only goal.\" Poetry replaced the notion of beauty in situationist writings. Tracing out the history of this notion within French avant-garde circles I delineate the ways this approach differed from mainstream French art of the period, which was solely concerned with its effectiveness as propaganda. Chapter two takes up the posters and graffiti of 1968, comparing and contrasting several examples in an effort to put their various aesthetic and political positions into relief. Again the subject of propaganda features prominently as each form displayed varying degrees of resistance to and comprehension of the artistic and philosophical problems that plague this method. Finally, the last chapter provides an examination of the position of public space in this equation. Explaining the historical significance of the noir aesthetic to the French avant-garde in the 20th century, I execute a formal analysis of a photograph of a Parisian street corner covered in posters and graffiti and emphasize the importance of the materiality of the streets to the situationist project. In the conclusion the notion of poetry is aligned with the 17th century notion of strategic beauty which, contrary to contemporary understanding of the term, implied intellectual wit and criticality. 5 ifi Mauri EST DANS LARUE FigTl 6 Chapter I Beauty as a Sum of Possibilities Today, every phenomenon of culture, even if a model of integrity, is liable to be suffocated in the cultivation of Kitsch. Yet paradoxically in the same epoch it is to works of art that has fallen the burden of wordlessly asserting what is barred to politics...This is not a time for political art, but politics has migrated into autonomous art, and nowhere more so then where it seems politically dead. -T.W. Adorno, On Commitment Claude Lorraine's Seaport with Ulysses Returning Chryseis to her Father, painted in 1644, depicts a bustling port scene illustrating a story from Homer's Iliad (fig. 1). Originally a pastry cook, Lorraine moved to Rome in his teens where he trained as a decorative painter and later helped to establish the genre known as classical landscape. Initially he painted the countryside around the city but as his audience became more sophisticated he met their demands with mythological panoramas evoking the pastoral worlds of the classical age. Chryseis can be seen arriving on the steps of the palace on the left, but it is so far in the distance it can not be considered the main subject of this painting. The great ship upon which she made her journey is much more compelling and immediately calls to mind the line: \"...for the present let us launch a black ship into the bright sea.\"6 The beckoning horizon combined with the minutia of everyday port life give this painting an expansive breadth. Warmed by the late evening sun, which casts long shadows along the edge of the water, this painting dramatically captures the infinite number of possibilities contained in a single moment. In 1958 Guy Debord, one of the principal intellectuals associated with the situationists, compared this image to the map of the Paris Metro (fig. 2). He had this to say about pleasant seaside vistas: I scarcely know of anything but those two harbours at dusk painted by Claude Lorrain - which are at the Louvre and which juxtapose two extremely dissimilar urban ambiances - that can rival in beauty the Paris Metro maps. It will be understood in speaking here of beauty I don't have in mind plastic beauty - the \"(141-143; said by Agamemnon to Achilles) Iliad, Book I. quoted in: H. Diane Russel. Claude Lorraine 1600 - 1682, (National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1982), p. 148. 7 new beauty can only be a beauty of situation - but simply the particularly moving presentation, in both cases, of a sum of possibilities.1 The equation of the Paris metro map with beauty would certainly appear specious to some but Debord saw these juxtapositions; the busy port opening to the beckoning horizon, and the potential for inter-neighborhood adventure offered up by the subway map as a stimulus to the urban imagination. And while he dismisses plastic beauty here, it is unclear whether he is completely rejecting formal or pictorial beauty. The crucial part of this assertion is, after all, the idea of beauty as a sum of possibilities and is related to the anarchist celebration of chaos: an idea perfectly embodied in the random circuit articulated by the Parisian subway map.8 It could be argued that attempting to place the situationists, a group clearly against both art and capital P politics, into the web of art history, is like trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. Committed to bridging the gap between art and life in the postwar period, the situationists rejected art to launch a movement of unprecedented cultural militancy. They described their position accordingly: \"We are artists in so far as we are no longer artists: We come to realize art.\"9 North American scholarship repeatedly asserts that the situationists contribution to the twentieth century was their redefinition of politics; their dismissal of party loyalty and their full on recognition of the cultural potential presented by situations in everyday life. In their prolific writings they rarely address the subject of art and when they do it is only to vent their unbridled wrath. 7Guy Debord, \"Introduction to a critique of Urban Geography\" (originally written in June of 1958) in Ken Knabb, Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981). p. 7. Thanks to Anthony Kinik for drawing my attention to this important quotation. 8In his book Situationist City Simon Sadler argues that Debord was referring explicitly to the \"beautiful\" content of the map in question, completely negating the obvious formal aspects of the comparison. However he goes on to assert that: \"...their appearance reminded the viewer of the new trends in art informel and abstract expressionism like Jackson Pollock's seminal Autumn Rythm (1950), which were trying to break away from modernisms hard edge geometry; and, in turn, they evoked the labyrinthine plans for cluster cities drawn by Smithson's and Constant.\" While I am unfamiliar with the representational history of both of these maps, on a recent trip to Paris and London I noted with amusement the-oniform grid like representation of the London subway, compared to the higglety-pigglety Paris map which seems completely unencumbered by any sort of fixed pattern. 9 \"Questionnaire,\" Internationale situationniste 9 (aout 1964), p. 25. 8 As early as 1956 Guy Debord and Gil J Wolman wrote that: \"The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propagandistic purposes,\" suggesting that art's function was, or should be, solely political.10 I myself have stated elsewhere that the situationists wanted nothing else than the death of art, to take it out of the galleries and museums and unceremoniously drown it in the gutter.11 Raoul Vaneigem, the situationists' second in command, wrote that: \"Only an art armed against itself, against its own weakest side - against its most aesthetic side - has any hope of evading co-optation.\"12 An attempt to contextualize the situationists within art history then, to discuss this apparently anti-aesthetic group in terms of aesthetics when they were so obviously concerned with politics to the exclusion of all else, would not only appear to be intellectually fraudulent, but also mischievous, dangerous, high treason: a radical depoliticization of a political project that was originally, authentically radical. Despite the fireworks, it could just as easily be argued that it was not politics that the situationists redefined, but art. As the sole heirs of the Dadaist, Surrealist, and Lettrist movements, the situationists were actually the most recent embodiment of a long line of radical political dissenters firmly grounded in art. Politics proper was actually a secondary, even negligible concern: a necessary if somewhat embarrassing and tedious chore. In 1958 Guy Debord wrote that victory would go to those who knew how to make disorder without liking it. 1 3 Art, the realization of art, was the situationists first passion, politics, the dirty dishes in the kitchen of an authentic life. The phrase \"We are politicians in so far as we are no longer politicians: we come to realize politics,\" never appeared in any situationist text. 1 0Guy Debord & Gil Wolman, \"Mode d'Emploi du detournement, \" Les Levres Nues 8 (Brussels, 1956). I will address this point further in chapter three. 1 Victoria Scott, \"In Deference to the Word, In defiance of the Wall: The posters and Graffiti of May, 1968,\" exhibition catalogue Up Against the Wall MotherPoster! Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, December 1999. p. 22. 1 ^Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Rebel Press/Left Bank Books, 1994), p. 201. 1 3Guy Debord, \"These sur la revolution culturelle\" Internationale situationniste 1 (juin 1958), p. 21. 9 Either way, art, life and politics become inextricably intertwined in the theory of the situationists, which is ultimately the point. This essay does not set out to prove that the situationists were hard-core aesthetes (as has been argued elsewhere), the objective is to focus on a very small but crucial component of their writings, specifically their aesthetic ideas, in order to bring out the nuanced artistic debates occurring at this revolutionary moment, tracking the way they shifted and changed with and against the times.14 Surviving numerous translations and interpretations, situationist texts continue to generate heat, even as they exist today, removed from the particular historic and cultural circumstances which gave the ideas their original relevance. As stated above, the paradoxes involved in situating this group within art history are considerable, but it remains an important exercise. Not only because it was the artistic component that made their politics so effective, as has been suggested elsewhere,15 but also because to unlock the much vaunted universal significance of situationist theory the contexts from which it originated must be duly accounted for. Since its inception, the position of the situationists has been represented, on this side of the pond, as a direct challenge to notions associated with western art such as quality, formalism, and beauty. Martin Jay, for example, has written that the situationists were not just suspicious of the image, but actively hostile towards visual pleasure.16 Lately however, this interpretation has undergone close scrutiny by the likes of T.J. Clark and Anselm Jappe.17 They argue instead that the situationists were not so much appalled by the image writ large than dissatisfied with the level of interpretation and production of 1 4Lucy Forsyth \"The Supression of Art,\" unpublished paper delivered at the Manchester University Conference \"The Hacienda must be Built: On the Legacy of the situationist revolt,\" Manchester, January 1996; quoted in Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998), p. 44. 1 5 T . J . Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith, \"Why Art Can't kill the Situationist International,\" in October 79, p. 29. 1 6 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in twentieth century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 429-430. 1 7See Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, with a foreword by T.J. Clark and a New Afterward by the author (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith were both part of the English section of the situationists. 10 images. Clark writes: \"...supposing we take Debord's writing as directed not to anathematizing representation in general (as everyone has it) but to proposing certain tests for truth and falsity in representation and, above all, for truth and falsity in representational regimes.'\" Anselm Jappe later reiterates this point directing our attention to the foreword of the second volume of Debord's autobiography Panegyrique, where Debord writes: \"The reigning deceptions of our times are on the point of causing us to forget that truth may also be displayed by means of images. An image that has not been deliberately separated from its meaning can add great precision and certainty to knowledge. Nobody had ever cast doubt on this until these last few years.\"18 These writings suggest that Debord believed (much like many art historians) that images, when placed in their full and proper contexts, can be used as reliable indicators of truth. More importantly however, the last sentence alludes to a recent misinterpretation of situationist ideas about images. Treading with due caution, Clark and Jappe seem to be attempting to correct the postmodern interpretation of situationism. Chipping away at contemporary scholarship which presents the situationists as being defined by a certain asceticism and minimalism, inclined and concerned with writing and the conceptual rather than the visual, this intervention finely tunes the notion of the image in situationist writings, enhancing our understanding of Debord's position.19 Pushing ahead with this new reading, this essay places the visual front and center in an effort to explore the historical development of situationist aesthetic theory, recontextualizing these idea in their origins in the prewar era, up until their realization in the events of 1968. Building on the argument presented by Clark and Jappe I will argue that the situationists' ideas regarding aesthetics were based upon the theoretical advancements ^Panegyrique, vol 2. (Paris: Artheme Fayard, 1997), \"Avis\"; quoted in Jappe, p. 134 - 135. Jappe also suggests a re-evaluation of Debord's films here and continues, providing an extended elaboration on his reading of Debord's position on the question of the image. 1 9 This description is taken almost verbatim from Simon Sadler's book The Situationist City, on p. 4. As Anselm Jappe reminds us Debord's films do much to disprove this argument displaying a virtual glut of highly charged images. Minimal is simply not an appropriate term to describe the situationist output. 11 achieved by groups such as the Dadaists and the surrealists, and were further developed in the postwar period, with the help of the Lettrists and the Lettrist International, not only as a challenge to classical notions of beauty and form, but also later, as a reaction against the prevailing tenor of mainstream artists working in that period. Several movements which enjoyed success in the sixties were explicitly anti-aesthetic. Celebrated by the French state and showcased at such prestigious events as the Paris Biennial, these artists and collectives actually represented the dominant stylistic discourse. Opposed to the objectives and politics of both camps: the retrograde notions of classical beauty, on the one hand, and shallow politics of the collectives on the other, the situationists cut loose from their progenitors and laid out a body of theory which challenged both aesthetic paradigms, while vigilantly cultivating their own definition of what they considered to be authentic art. Beauty as Poetry Social realism has been one of the most enduring and widely practiced artistic approaches of the twentieth century. Simultaneously it has provoked the most important and crucial aesthetic debates of the period. This aesthetic paradigm consists of the application of late 19th century realist techniques to render socially concerned yet objective works of art or literature. The so-called objectivity of this style has proved to be the perpetual sticking point. In the sixties this debate would resurface via disputes about ideology and propaganda, helping to crystallize the differences between mainstream artists such as the Salon de la jeune peinture and the avant-garde situationists. To understand what was at stake it is important to locate the roots of this controversy which can be traced back to the interwar era. Formally introduced as the official aesthetic of the Soviet Union in 1934, social realism was later imposed by communist states throughout the world and continues to thrive today in contemporary art in a variety of different guises. Debates about the social value and meaning of this program began decades earlier, following the first World War in 12 Germany. There social realism was challenged by artists associated with the Dadaist movement, who criticized it for enforcing the functional bias of society. According to the Dadaists, social realism's subscription to linear perspective fostered a rationalist system which was bound to the logical and utilitarian outlook of western capitalism, an outlook that had, in their view, produced a deadly war machine while reducing the working classes to industrial wage slaves.20 In response they formulated an anti-bourgeois and anti-social realist art form that promoted open experimentation. For the Dadaists, adherence to social realism meant passively accepting the world as it was instead of actively changing it.2 1 The surrealists followed in their predecessors' footsteps and continued to criticize both the visual and political status quo represented by social realism, despite the objections of the French Communists. In total opposition to the party faithful, who exclusively supported art committed to clear working class themes, the surrealists called for an art which addressed concerns beyond material well-being, and were, as a result, repeatedly snubbed by the party for their efforts. Again, taking their aesthetic cue from the performance oriented Dadaists the surrealists formulated an art that encompassed literature, film, and public scandal which strove to surpass the meaningless repetition of happy workers in paintings or posters, producing a movement committed to the revival of the imagination and the exploitation of the possibilities presented by everyday life. Dada and surrealism emphasized the notions of spontaneity and moral commitment. Both movements subscribed to the idea that in order to change reality society must first radicalize its limited vision and predictable verbal formulas 2 2 The extent to which the world could be changed depended entirely on the capacity of the public's imagination and concurrently that public's ability to express a strong poetic vision. When the surrealists 2 0 Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: The Political Image in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Abrams, 1997), p. 32. 2 1Hrid. 2 2Mary Ann Caws, The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism: Aragon, Breton, Tzara, Elouard & Desnos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 6. 13 used the word poetic they had more in mind than simply words on a page, poetry implied a way of life, not simply a manner of expression.23 Surrealist poetry was not art in the traditional sense, it was the freeing up of relationships between seemingly opposed objects and ideas.24 Andre Breton acknowledged its relation to romanticism on this account, particularly in regard to the ideas of analogy and correspondence. For him, and all the surrealists, the sublime, the point \"where the yes and no meet\" declares itself only to those in a constant state of anticipation. Poetry is both the open landscape where the sublime is located and the quality which best describes the surrealists uncompromising attitude, \"le comportment lyrique.\"25 Surrealist theories and experiments were all directed towards this material and spiritual liberation which was designed to make them completely open to what they referred to as the marvelous.26 The merveilleux was the exact embodiment of human freedom: \"The relationship which is produced from the negation of the real by the marvelous is essentially ethical, and the marvelous is always the materialization of a moral symbol in violent opposition with the morality of the world in whose center it appears.\"27 Beauty was not far behind. One of the defining characteristics of the surrealists was their occupation with the potential of the subconscious indicated by their fondness for automatic writing for instance. Beauty was the switch which could provide access to the subconscious. In opposition to classical conceptions of the term, Breton defined it as an intensely unsettling experience: \"Convulsive beauty will embody veiled eroticism, fixed explosions, and circumstantial magic, or it will be nothing.\"28 This belief would later find favour with Debord who associated beauty with lived experience; 2 3Caws, p. 9. 2 4Caws, p. 30. 2 5Caws, p. 18. 2 6Caws, p. 17. 2 7Qaoted by Patrick Waldberg in Le Surrealisme: sources, histoire, qffinites, a catalogue published by the Galerie Charpentier, 1964. Caws, p. 20. 2 8 Andre Breton, \"La beaute sera convulsive,\" in Minotaure 5, (1934), p. 16. 14 experience that could satiate an imagination marked by a peculiar combination of indifferent wonder and ruthless skepticism. The debate about social realism carried over into the postwar period in France but with slightly different players. Reactivated after the annees noires of the Occupation by the inflammatory politics of the Cold War the conflict was social realism against abstraction.29 Concerned about retaining its title as the World Champion of Art and highly agitated by the debate between realism and the perceived threat of American Imperialist abstraction, France found itself at a loss both spiritually and materially.30 The barrage of propaganda the French had experienced during the war had made the public highly suspicious of representations of any kind (be it a political poster or a work of art) to the point where expression itself was considered a dangerous proposition.31 In response, painters like Bram Van Velde, Antoni Tapies, Jean Dubuffet, and others pursued a tempered detachment. Looking for a way to sidestep the pitfalls of the traditional authoritarian ideological battles they produced an art that put the dominant aesthetic codes into question, creating a small but significant breathing space outside the grand utopic designs of the fascists, capitalists, and communists.32 These artists were not alone in their endeavors to outmaneuver the dominant ideologies. Activity against the polarization of the intellectual, artistic, and political landscapes made the postwar period in France, and Europe for that matter, an extremely vital decade on many fronts. Taking up where Dada and the surrealists left off, this period produced several important precursors to the situationists, movements such as Lettrism, the Lettrist International, Cobra, Imaginist Bauhaus, and journals such as the Belgian Les Levres Nues, Reflex from Holland, and Ion andPotlotch from Paris, all of which combined 2 9 B y associating American abstraction with American imperialism the communists put an end to any discussion of its varieties, objectives and meanings; lyrical abstraction, geometric abstraction etc. In its place the communists continued to advance an apparently more accessible painting which was concerned with the message, rather than the quality of the work itself. 3 0Serge Guilbaut, \"Matieres a reflections, les murs d'Antoni Tapies (1955 - I960),\" in Voir, Ne Pas Voir, Fatrt Voir, ( Nimes. Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 1993), p. 170. 3 1Ibid,, p. 73. 3 2Ibid., p. 86. 15 the artistic ambition of the avant-garde with an intellectual commitment and engagement outside the aegis of traditional party politics. Postwar France saw the rise of state led modernization brought on by the Cold War, and the reallocation and reorganization of public space around the exigencies of the automobile. New technological innovations, new appliances, and the proliferation of new forms of advertising through television and glossy magazines attempted to give Paris a total make over, supplying it with a shiny new wrinkle-free face. Resisting this phenomenon, what Henri Lefebvre referred to as the colonization of the everyday life, avant-garde artists called for the end of painting and a return to the back-alleys of the city spaces which had provided them with so much inspiration in the prewar period. Turning to the material and matter of street culture, these movements took up newspapers, posters, signs, words, headlines, the very streets themselves, and even entire neighborhoods as the shared ground for their endless adventures. Confusion between text and deed is characteristic of this era. It is hard to tell where words end and actions begin. With the rise of groups like the Lettrists and movements such as Concrete Poetry, both which privileged the word over the figure, images and/or \"visual texts\" were no longer presented as finite descriptors, but rather as open models, or ongoing experiments, designed, in the case of Lettrism for example, to belie the so-called transparency of the word. Altogether what can be observed in the art of this period is a tendency towards words and action, and a withdrawal from the auspices of traditional art, such as figurative painting and sculpture. A concern with print, text, and words characterized these movements which took up the conventions of popular culture such as comics, graffiti and street posters as a way to mark themselves out as distinct from mainstream artists such as Andre Fougeron who continued to make paintings in a social realist vein. Foreshadowing the situationists predilection for words, the Lettrists rejected realist figuration and focused on letters and signs, what they called hypergraphy. 16 Lettrism was founded in Paris in 1945 by Isidore Isou, a Rumanian communist. Important members included Maurice Lemaitre, Roland Sabatier, and Gabriel Pommerand.33 Like Dada and surrealism before it, the movement aspired to engage all fields of culture, from painting and poetry to economics and philosophy. Lettrism was based on a poetic and pictorial concern with sound, letters, and signs. Debord, who was not impressed with the Freudian bent of the remaining surrealists, took up with the Lettrists but almost immediately broke it off over a scandal involving Charlie Chaplin (he preferred the Marx Brothers).34 In 1952 Debord went on to found the Lettrist International with Jean Louis Brau, Serge Berna and Gil. J. Wolman. Five years later, in 1957, this group would join up with Asger Jorn and Michele Bernstein and found the situationist international in Turin Italy. Concrete Poetry, another movement manifesting similar concerns as those of the Lettrist and the Lettrist International, was formulated by Max Bill and Eugen Gomringer. Launched in 1956 in Sao Paulo as part of an exhibition of Concrete Art, by a group of Brazilian poets and designers, they also conceived of the poem as an object in and of itself, and consciously used graphic space to buttress its structure, along lines first set out by Stephane Mallarme and Guillaume Appollinare. But their concerns extended beyond words on a page, like the preceding movements in Europe, they were also interested in the verbal and vocal nature of words, the materiality of noise. The withdrawal from painting proper can also be observed in the work of the Danish artist Asger Jorn. Recently this artist has begun to receive attention from established North American art historians. His painting Paris by Night (fig,. 3) opened up 3 3 The Lettrist continue to enjoy a wide following and are still publishing books and participating in exhibitions in Paris and abroad. 3 4In Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces he tells the story of how Charlie Chaplin came to Paris to promote his new film Limelight. Recently barred from the US, and fresh from England where he had been received by Queen Elizabeth II, performing the requisite bow, \"Chariot\" was warmly welcomed by everyone. Certain members of the Lettrists however, Serge Berna, Jean-Louis Brau, Guy Earnest Debord, and Gil. J Wolman made a big stink at his press conference disseminating a leaflet entitled \"No More Flat Feet\" denouncing Chaplin as a fascist among many other expletives. Isidore Isou was not impressed and subsequently the group split and Lettrist International was born. p. 340 - 341. 17 Thomas Crow's survey text Rise of the Sixties, while T.J. Clark's latest book, Farewell to an Idea, praises him as nothing less than\"...the greatest painter of the 1950s.\"35 Jorn was a founding member of the situationists and the only artist associated with the group to make a significant name for himself outside of his situationist activities.36 Guy Atkins, has described him as a catalyst and team leader: a warm blooded situationist who patched up the animosity caused by Debord's lack of diplomacy.37 Jorn based a large part of his work on ready made paintings he acquired at flea markets, reworking them in a critical and playful manner to unravel and uncover hidden meaning and latent jokes. While he is perhaps best known for these altered images, Jorn was also a prolific writer who produced volumes of musings on subjects ranging from political economics to Norse graffiti.38 Of concern here, however, are his writings on what he termed, artistic problems. These would later form the back bones of many of the situationist ideas regarding aesthetics. Jorn summed up his position on aesthetics in a series of texts first printed between 1954 and 1957 in his book entitled, Pour la forme?9 Disputing the widely held view born of art academies, that works of art should be judged solely by formal criteria distinct from their moral, political, or religious utility, Jorn argued for a new system of aesthetics that would surpass classical notions of harmony and beauty without sacrificing the joy and pleasure traditionally associated with these categories. In opposition to general assumptions which proposed that artistic value was somehow inherent in the object itself, Jorn stated that notions of timelessness and quality were applied categories, 3 5 T . J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, (London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 389. 3 6 Jorn was also a member of Cobra, a group of painters (mostly) which took its name from the home cities of its participants: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam respectively. 3 7 Guy Atkins, AsgerJorn, The Crucial Years: 1954 - 1964 (1977) quoted in Knabb, p. 391. 3 8 For more on Jorn's writings see, A Bibliography of Asger Jorn's Writings, Silkeborg Museum, 1988. 3 9 Asger Jorn, Pour La forme: Ebauche d'une methodologie des arts, (Paris: Internationale Situationiste, 1958). 18 and that the true objective of a work of art was to affirm human beings as the essential source of value.40 Jorn suggested that beauty was a concept worth salvaging, but only if it could be disassociated from its historic allies. \"We must prepare ourselves for a new goddess born of reason, distinct from miracles and mystery, and far away above all, from the formulas of philosophers and aestheticians who have been ardently accumulating their petty theories since antiquity.\"41 Calling for a deregulation of aesthetics he argued for the reinstatement of ugliness as the essential component of this paradigm. It was ugliness, not beauty, he wrote, which was the true barometer of aesthetics. Beauty did not even exist, according to his analysis, except as a function of ugliness. The domain of aesthetics proper, he proposed, should not be concerned with the overriding concept of beauty, but rather, the tension between the two categories. Beauty itself could not be dismissed completely, however, because ugliness would have to be abandoned also. Jorn maintained that boredom was the opposite of aesthetics. A rejection of aesthetics necessarily endorsed apathy. Consequently, an era without ugliness was also an era without progress. Jorn also held similar ideas about morality. Good was nothing without evil, and vice-a-versa. Morality was about the interplay between the two states without which there would only be neutrality 4 2 Although he makes no formal suggestions about what exactly would replace classical aesthetics, he does briefly allude to poetry. I should point out here that like the surrealists, Jorn is using this term in the Greek sense of the word. In Jorn's text, poetry does not simply denote verse as opposed to prose, but rather the art of composition: an emphasis on creation, production, and formation. Instead of being exclusively concerned 4 0Asger Jorn, in \"Critique de la politique economique.\" in Internationale situationniste 4 (juin I960), p. 20. 4 1 Jorn, Pour la forme, in Documents relatifs a la fondation de I'internationale situationnistes 1948 -1957, (Paris: Editions Allia, 1985), p. 443. 4 2Ibid., p. 447-448. 19 with words on a page, the latter definition implies action taking place across time and space.43 Le Pourissement Consommable, Le Pourissement du Consommable: Different Package Same Shit By the sixties modern consumer culture had completely insinuated itself into French life and the differences between state capitalism and state communism were becoming less and less tangible. As the critique of high art which had been developed in the previous decade gained ground, some groups chose to reject art completely while others persevered, producing a diverse array of paintings, happenings, and sculptures. Largely uninterested in the possibilities of the street and the problems regarding expression itself that had engrossed the avant-garde in the fifties, the mainstream painters of the sixties continued to struggle with the aesthetic debates of the past and tried to invent a new visual code distinct from both social realism and abstraction. Heavily influenced by American Pop, which was ubiquitous in France at this time, they turned their eyes upwards, replicating the smooth surfaces, clean lines and bright colors of the \"ready-made\" images and objects of the new visual order.44 While the artists associated with Nouveau Realisme such as Arman and Martial Raysse, fastened together consumer objects in sealed constellations that hovered between shop displays, neon signs, oddball collections, and plain refuse, other artists, such as those connected to the Salon de la jeune peinture, many of whom were also involved with La Figuration Narrative, and La Nouvelle Figuration, participated in politically committed collectives which discussed current events, as well as issues pertaining to art and culture. Loathe to leave France's legacy of high art behind, these latter movements took their politics and their painting very seriously, in that order. In the name of so-called transparency and accessibility these artists renounced any pretensions to aesthetics and 4 3Ibid., p. 447. 44Catherine Millet, L 'Art Contemporain en France, (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), p. 83. 20 embraced what they saw as the effectiveness of the commercial poster or political banner, shamelessly producing what amounted to artful, if somewhat incoherent, propaganda For the artists associated with the Salon de la jeune peinture, the sole function of art was to shape public opinion. Established in 1950, the Salon desjeunespeintres (which subsequently became the Salon de lajeune peinture in 1954), took pride in their complete negation of aesthetics. At no time did they judge their work according to skill or plastic qualities, as a result all formal concerns were sacrificed to political exigencies.45 Key issues for the members of the Salon de la jeune peinture, were whether or not the ideas they were trying to communicate were politically correct, and if so, whether or not their painting conveyed these messages accurately. This retreat from high art and the accompanying foray into politics and mass or popular culture was taken to more extreme lengths by the situationists 4 6 In 1962 the situationists eliminated all the official artists from their group, most notably Asger Jorn, and turned their attentions towards other projects.47 Throughout the sixties they focused their energy on developing their theory, publishing their ideas in their journal and experimenting with different forms of public intervention maintaining that historical and political circumstances had reached a point where traditional aesthetics, whether they be classical or modern, no longer had the power to effect profound social transformation. According to the situationists, for three centuries, efforts to produce a normative classicism, or neoclassicism had resulted in a series of successive failures 4 8 Any modest victories had been quickly assimilated by the official discourse whether it be the monarchy, the revolutionary bourgeois, or the state.49 Despite their antipathy towards 45Bernard Rancillac, one of the more well known members of the collective, actually went so far as to produce some paintings that were only words: Long Live the Populist Communist Republic of China, and Make Revolution, Promote Production!, Millet, p. 93. 46I will return to the debate about what actually constitutes popular and/or mass culture in Chapter two. 47Painting, collage, film-making and other traditional forms of art continued to be practiced by members within the group but in a much more limited, unofficial capacity. 4 8Guy Debord, Society of Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, (New York: Zone books, 1995), p. 134. 4 9Ibid. 21 classical and modern aesthetics, the situationists did not however, deny the existance of the category of aesthetics, or the fact that they themselves subscribed to their own particular version. When asked by the Center of Socio-Experimental Art about their opinion on this matter the situationists responded that, they were not only attempting to get beyond aesthetics, they were also trying to overcome the negation of aesthetics itself.50 In an article entitled: \"All the King's Men,\" published in 1963 a detailed account of the meaning the situationists ascribe to the word poetry is provided. Taking their inspiration from Jorn and writers associated with Les Lewes Nues such as Paul Nouge, the situationists explained the importance of this idea to their overall theory.51 According to its anonymous author, poetry holds the entire world in its gaze. It \"...invariably wants to reorient the world and its whole future to its own ends. As long as it lasts, it allows no compromises. It brings back into play all the unsettled debts of history.\"52 The situationists considered poetry to be the anti-matter of consumer society, that unlike beauty, which presents itself solely for consumption, poetry defies all co-optation. The author continues: \"Poetry must be understood as an immediate communication with reality and as a real alteration of reality. It is nothing other than liberated language, language recovering its richness, language which breaks its rigid signification and simultaneously embraces words, music, cries, gestures, painting, mathematics, facts, acts.\"53 In his book The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem asserted that poetry is the act which brings new realities into being; a gesture which reverses perspective. \"The materia prima is within everyone's reach. Poets are those who know how to use it to 5 0 Q : Do you think your aesthetics would be different if you lived in a socially, politically and economically different society? A: Certainly. When our perspectives are realized, aesthetics (as well as its negation) will be superseded. \"Response to a questionnaire from the center for Socio-Experimental Art,\" in Internationale situationniste 9 (aout 1964), p. 42. 5 lEaul Nouge, \"Notes sur la poesie,\" in Les Levres Nues 3, (octobre 1954), p. 8 - 13. 52Anonymous, \"All the Kings Men,\" in Internationale situationniste 8, (Janvier 1963), p. 32. 53Ibid., p. 30. 22 best effect.\"54 At the same time, the poetic experience was not without risk or danger. The poet puts herself at risk to incite other people into action.55 Vaneigem continues: \"Poetry is the organisation of creative spontaneity the exploitation of the qualitative in accordance with its internal laws of coherence. Poetry is what the Greeks call poiesis, 'making,' but 'making' restored to the purity of its moment of genesis - seen in other words, from the point of view of totality.\"56 Totality was an important concept for the situationists and warrants explanation. Lucian Goldmann defined the term with the following words: Totality is the idea that a phenomenon can be comprehended only by first inserting it in the broader structure of which it is part and in which it has a function, the latter being its objective meaning independently of whether or not the men acting and creating it are conscious of it. It is the category of meaningful structure, which can be comprehended only by inserting it in a meaningful structure and the whole of history.57 T.J. Clark has recently described totality as inhabiting the very bones of painting.58 While another eminent art historian, Arnold Hauser, believed that art was seized by nothing less than a mania for totality: that through art it seemed possible to bring everything into relationship with everything else, that everything seems to include within itself the law of the whole.59 Totality was also associated by the situationists with ideas about quality. In their writings they maintained that the industrial revolution had destroyed individuality and artisanal production, knelling the death toll for human mastery, or skill. 6 0 Industrialization, which emphasized quantity over quality, 54Vaneigem, p. 200. 5 5This is why the poetic problem is inseparable from questions regarding morality. 56Ibid., p. 199. 57Goldmann, \"The dialectic of Today\" in Cultural Creation in Modern Society, p. 112. quoted in Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukdcs to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 325. 5 8Clark, p. 270. 5 9Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Vol, 4. trans. Stanley Goodman (New York, 1958), p. 237. quoted in Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 289. 6 0Jorn, \"La fin de l'economie et la realisation de Tart,\" in Internationale situationniste 4 (juin 1960), p. 20. 23 extinguished any pretensions manufacturing may have had for formal issues.61 In their statements about the dubious satisfaction obtained from consumption, they suggested that the active consumer was cursed from the outset because the so-called freedom to choose was really only the freedom to settle or compromise.62 Again, in the vein of surrealist principals, poetry provided a glimpse of the possibilities of the immanent future of global reversal. Quality was the secret password to this reordered universe: \"The qualitative encapsulates and crystallizes these possibilities; it is a direct communication of the essential. Only the qualitative permits a higher stage to be reached in one bound.\"63 The tool which the situationists used to facilitate this conceptual leap was detournement. Detournement consisted of taking an existing art form and inverting the social significance of the medium by rearranging its elements to change the over all meaning. Asger Jorn's re-configured flea market paintings, or the commercial gags that decorated copies of Les Levres Nues (fig. 4), which made use of readily available second rate bourgeois images and then added to them to reorient their purpose, are some early examples. Debord described detournement as a technique which restored subversive qualities and critical judgments to ideas that had deteriorated into respectable and hardened truths.64 He continued emphasizing that detournement was the antithesis of quotation; that it was a reinsertion of the object into its proper context, into the overall frame of reference of its period, and a rectification of the precise signification that it constituted within that framework. More than that it was the fluid language of anti-ideology. The situationists defined ideology as a false consciousness of reality which produced real and distorting effects. The spectacle was the materialization of ideology, 6 ^he situationists are using formalism here in the general sense of the word, denoting attention to form, rather than form for form's sake. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 26. 62Ib1d., p. 43. 6 3Vaneigem, p. 127. 64Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 146. 24 the triumph of the fragment. Total ideology was the despotism of the fragment imposing itself as the whole truth. \"The spectacle is the acme of ideology, for in its full flower it exposes and manifests the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life.\"65 The situationists did not necessarily believe that they could escape ideology, but they did believe that its mechanisms, the way it functioned, could be exposed. Whether or not an art form can totally transgress ideology, the situationists believed it could be anti-ideological. This is what the situationists meant when they described detournement as a \"...communication containing its own critique.\"66 Detournement is an effort to betray the lie of the fragment with the truth of the totality. When the fragment presents itself as the totality it dismisses the importance of the act of interpretation. It alleges that interpretation is redundant and claims complete innocence. It declares, most insidiously, that there is no need for interpretation because its aims and objectives are obvious to everyone. The only thing that was completely resistant to the reign of the fragment was poetry: \"No poetic sign is ever completely turned by ideology.\"67 The situationists criticized general art practice in the sixties for not living up to its potential. Believing it to be phony and contrived they summarized it as formal repetitions attractively packaged and publicized, completely divorced from the original combativeness of their models. Much of what was being produced during this time, according to the situationists, was a disingenuous continuation of modern art, and could be diagnosed as a symptom of the indiscriminate consumption of cultural leftovers. This resulted in the proliferation of artistic movements that were completely indistinguishable from one another. The situationists described this as the realization of modern marketing strategies in the art world where one brand is sold as many different products under rival 65Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 151. 66\"R\"eponse a une enquete du centre d'art sodo-experimental\" Internationale situationniste 9 (aout 1964), p. 41. 67Vaneigem, p. 102. 25 trademarks.68 They reserved a special venom for American brands: \"...pop art, a form of consumable putrefaction, is also an expression of the putrefaction of consumption.\"69 The vogue for so-called \"collective projects,\" showcased at prestigious events like the Paris Biennial, was also severely criticized by the situationists for encouraging the most backward tendencies of communism.70 While they believed in artists coming together to realize a common goal they contended that a certain level of rigor, discipline, and individualism was essential for success.71 Motley collections of indifferent and politically unfocused artists were preventing the elimination of the real problem, the barrier between art and life. Finally however, the spiritual and material exhaustion of western art, its irrelevancy, had made it, at best, a secondary concern anyway.72 The predominance of advertising through posters, radio, magazines, and now television, was ultimately much more interesting to the situationists. While both modern art and advertising were considered to be equally vacuous, advertising, at least, was judged to have greater public relevance. As an unadulterated form of propaganda, unencumbered by any artistic concerns, it was entirely more adept at manipulation, making it a much more compelling social force. Guy Debord and the situationists were not against images or even visual pleasure, they were against ideology. It is misleading to say that the situationists were against painting. They were however, unquestionably critical of what art and painting in France had become. Indeed, in that highly charged moment of the late sixties all images were susceptible to manipulation; nothing could remain innocent. Consequently, the situationists denounced images, not because they didn't believe in aesthetics or were against form, or beauty, but because they believed that freedom, what the surrealists defined as the marvelous, could not be contained by images alone. 68Ibid., p. 44. 69Vaneigem, p. 123. 70\"Reponse a une enquete du centre d'art socio-experimental\" p. 40 - 44. 71Thanks to Serge Guilbaut for pointing out the issue of individualism. 7 2Ibid. 26 I have illustrated that while the situationists did not subscribe to classical notions of beauty, they did develop an aesthetic system, drawn from the Dadaists, surrealists, and later the Lettrists and Lettrist International which was constructed around the concept of poetry. This notion was realized in the situationist theory of the derive. Derive meant to roam or drift in the city without any kind of pre-ordained objective. It was the actualization of detournement across space and time and was concerned with taking advantage of chance, particularly the random juxtapositions opened up by the urban landscape. Cutting loose from the boundaries of physical space, the derive also implied the ability to travel over psychological distances.73 Thus whereas surrealism in the heyday of its assault against the oppressive order of culture and daily life could define its arsenal as \"poetry without poems if necessary,\" it is now a matter for the SI of poetry necessarily without poems. What we say about poetry has nothing to do with the retarded reactionaries of some neoversification, even one based on the least ancient of formal modernisms. Realizing poetry means nothing less than simultaneously and inseparably creating events and their language.74 In order to ensure that the revolution did not betray its own project the situationists broke away from their predecessors, the surrealists, who put poetry at the service of revolution, and instead, put revolution at the service of poetry.75 This meant that art was no longer bound to serve politics, now it was politics that was to be the servant of art. 73~Michel de Certeau, \"For A New Culture Quarts, September 9, 1968)\" in The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997) p. 41 - 42. 1 3 7Serge Guilbaut, \"Get A(n) (everyday) Life!\" in Up Against the Wall Motherposter! Exhibition Catalogue, Belkin Gallery, December 1999.p. 3. 1 3 8Laurent Gervereau, \"L'Art au Service du Mouvement,\" in Mai 68: les mouvements etudiants en France et dans le Monde (Paris: Collections des publications de BDIC, 1988), p. 164. 1 3 9Oneofthe more notable aspects of 68 was the fact that it was the first time overturned cars were used as barricades. 80 way screen of mass media.140 Graffiti was the sine qua non of communication at this time exactly because it was xm-mediated.141 Although in recent years Roger Chartier and W.J.T. Mitchell have written about the tension between words and images, speech and words are not intuitively associated with visuality. This idea is, of course, central to an examination of graffiti. Speech is important, because while it is generally conceived as occupying a position clearly outside the domain of the image, the instantaneousness of speech, its ephemerality, suggested by the word bubbles or clouds that appear comic books, is essential to this form. In addition, the presence and freshness of oral debate is often represented in graffiti, as public space is held hostage to these mute gestures, and we, as an audience, are forced to confront them, and they each other. Slight of Hand: Posters & Graffiti in the Streets Graffiti oscillates between representations, it is both figural and textual.142 It can be defined as verbal images that are addressed freely to a certain audience, written on a ground that was not meant for that purpose, using what is at hand, in the immediate time available.143 Readability is sometimes cited as the only criteria for graffiti, but unreadability, not to mention the choice of location, and juxtaposition with other signs; posters, graffiti or other cultural signifiers, i.e. movies and political events, have always been important elements. Graffiti declares that the normal conduits of information, the 'official texts' have proved inadequate, that they are denying the reality of at least one segment of the population.144 They are almost always an attack: even the chaotic aesthetics of a well used wall is an attack on the accepted aesthetics of the status quo: \"... frequently phrased in esoteric and coded forms, it is often difficult for the casual observer to distinguish 1 4 0Jean Baudrillard, Pour une critique de I'economiepolitique du signe (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 218. 1 4 1 Again, thanks to Maggie Milne for this discerning remark. 142JDenys Riout, Le Livre du Graffiti, p. 37-38. 1 4 3Ibid., p. 39. 1 4 4Ibid., p. 4. 81 between what is merely incoherent and what has been written in a magical code reserved for initiates.\"145 In both their approach to public space, and rough spontaneous visual style, the posters owe much to graffiti and should be seen as an extension of this tradition, with some important qualifications. Like graffiti, the posters served as a communication network, publicizing events and providing valuable information the press was omitting or ignoring. Produced on the fly, they were used to respond to events immediately, and their presence throughout the Latin Quarter was testimony to the magnitude of the movement. However, the production of posters in 68 was a group effort, and, consequently, it was bound by certain limitations. First of all, to make copious amounts of posters you need adequate materials, sufficient space and the appropriate equipment. Also, because of the number of people participating, production was time consuming. Formulated by members of collectives, who often discussed all the pertinent issues concerned, including social and philosophical questions, via their continuous general assemblies, the poster often had to work its way through several layers of unofficial censorship, before it reached the public. This sometimes had the effect of slowing up the dialogue that was beginning to take shape between the mainstream press and the students, but it also severely frustrated the radical ideas that were struggling to gain an audience. Graffiti managed to avoid these snares. Unlike the slow process of the posters, the graffiti writers avoided the problem of consensus. Often executed in secret and in defiance of local law and/or even one's supposed political comrades, this largely individual act, suffered editors only after it had been received by the public. Relatively uncensored, the integrity of the ideas remained intact. In many ways graffiti was a more direct and original form of expression, and most importantly, it was fast. 1 * 5 A n exception to this is Brazil, where they actually celebrate \"National Graffiti Day.\" Ibid. Howard J. Pearlstein, \"Handwriting on the Wall,\" in Aesthetics of Graffiti San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 1978 (no page numbers). 82 Cities are like books. Major cities swarm with multiple texts: street names, people, societies, banners, journals, tracts, menus, prices, etc.1 4 6 Posters and graffiti occupy a category which stands somewhere between speech acts and monuments.147 Together in 68 they enabled the Latin Quarter to brake free of its official script, politicizing public space by laying out the issues before the eyes of their readers, bringing the importance of contrast and comparison, in terms of both politics and aesthetics, into the foreground. While stores and street signs linked the buildings and spaces of the Latin Quarter together, and the Sorbonne marked out its territory through its monumental architecture and stately vistas, the posters and graffiti subverted these connections, treating the streets, back alleys, facades and monuments as an open screen for the projection of manifestos, gimmicks and acts of sabotage.148 Challenging the conformity of the traditional commercial and political signage, these illegal interventions broke down the impersonal authority of public space by suggesting referential relationships betwixt and between what had previously been considered to be wholly unrelated urban texts.149 Collectively, the graffiti and posters gauged the debate and drew lots for their audiences. Shamelessly competing with each other, the regular French commercial and political posters, and the oversized American style posters, they covered the spaces closest to eye level, their words alternately expanding or contracting, even winding around architectural components, according to their whims and/or objectives: \"I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires,\" for example, which was written near the Rococo stairway of the Sorbonne amphitheater (fig. 3). 1 4 6 i e Livre du Graffiti, texte de Denys Riout, Photographies de Dominique Gurdjian, Jean-Pierre Leroux and Denys Riout, (Paris: Editions Alternatives, 1990), p. 4. 1 4 7 David M. Henkin applies these ideas specifically to nineteenth century New York, but I think they provide a useful way to discuss Paris in 68. City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Colombia University Press, 1998), p. 71. 1 4 8Henkin, p. 15. 1 4 9Henkin, p. 18 & 71. 83 As they accumulated their original messages were continually being reformulated. To some extent this undermined their effectiveness as walls of mixed messages covered one another like scales, canceling each other out, or simply blurring altogether into one long incomprehensible passage.150 In the public domain, however, these elements were radically severed from their author's control.151 On one hand walls of endless directives risked being ignored by their intended audiences but they could also be continually rearranged to create humourous and subversive j uxtapositions.152 The photograph of the Parisian sidewalk scene discussed earlier provides us with a demonstration of how this played out on the ground level (fig. 1). On the left wall a poster displaying a ribbed goblet filled with beer labeled Vega is decorated with smiling words that read: \"The blond from the North\" Below the word \"Logos,\" appear on a film poster, and below that an advertisement with bold black lettering announces a show entitled, \"The Funny Game.\" To the left is a poster publicizing midnight film screenings of The House of the Devil, Monsters from Space, and Nosferatu. On the other side of \"The Funny Game,\" squeezed in above a flyer for a burlesque ballet entitled \"Death\" is an election poster for smiling politician with the unfortunate last name of Low. Dominating the wall on the right side of the gate is an advertisement for a Hollywood film executed in the same style as the CMDO posters, with bold oversized white letters on a black background. The Outlaw, directed by the American Industrialist Howard Hughes, was made in 1941. Sometimes referred to as the most infamous western of all time, as its so-called racy contents had it banned from public theaters until 1946, it starred Thomas Mitchell, Jack Bueter, and Jane Russell in a down to earth take on the legendary life of Billy the Kid. Above the title is a quote from the French film critic Andre Bazin: \"They slept with the same woman, but they loved the same horse.\" \u00E2\u0080\u00A2ISOfcid. 1 5 ^ i d . 1 5 2Henkin, p. 18. 84 Below is another advertisement for late night cinema. Under the heading \"Erotically yours...,\" this time dashed out in sloppy white paint, they advertise a showing of Un Chien andalou (1926). This was the first film made by the surrealist Spanish director Luis Bunuel, which he co-wrote with Salvador Dali . 1 5 3 Below, a young woman lies prostrate, her hair spilling over her unsmiling face which stares out at us vacantly. Like an over easy Olympia, she too is punctuated with a black cat who has conformably settled on her ass. Most commonly associated here in North America, with Halloween, among anarchists, black cats are code for anarchism itself. Below it, in casual lettering it warns: \"An Affair of the Heart restricted for those under eighteen.\" Again the lowest register is inhabited by politicians: Mr. Low and, unbelievably, Mr. Straightlaced. Finally, on the doors, in defiance of municipal law which has been physically and permanently posted in the space itself, lest anyone forget, via those two miniature metal signs, is the graffiti dramatizing \"...the clash between a barely conspicuous and patently ineffective public authority, and a commercial culture intent on leaving no vertical space unmarked.\"154 The posters themselves are laid out in such a way as to create a subversive stream of dialogue. Cleverly unfurling the politics of city space via a barrage of juxtapositions and jokes. The prominent poster for The Outlaw refers to the illegal act of graffiti itself, and its absent author who has already made his successful getaway. Women, crime, sex and pleasure are given high priority in this \"funny game\" of the apparently accidental collage, where even the beer is a blond Formal politics and politicians, the men who make the laws, are relegated to their natural resting place at the bottom of the register, refiguring public space and inverting social hierarchies where politicians normally float to the top. Finally, in the last ironic twist, the small metal \"defense d'affichex\" signs on the doors are actually directed at the walls covered in posters. Hence, the words written on the door are J^Bufiuel later parted company with Dali when he supported Franco. 1 5 4Henkin, p. 70. 85 not unlawful but in fact legal, testifying yet again to the superiority of graffiti over the posters. 1 5 5 The same hand writing graces a wall in another photograph (fig. 4). This time it reads \"Never Work.\" In the background, perhaps in an abandoned alleyway another wall has been tiled with black posters, again replicating the style of the CMDO. Large white text reads, over and over again: \"Savage Credo.\" Suggesting that \"Never Work\" is the savage motto of the socially and politically dispossessed. Inside the Sorbonne the outlaw strikes again along a set of stairs which guides students on a daily basis through their academic schedules. \"Hide yourself object!\" warns one, while another directs the reader to \"Put your head down and graze!\" or in an alternate translation, implying oral sex \"Shut up and eat!\" The writing pulls the viewers eyes to the floor, mimicking the motions of a cow, or in the latter case, an obedient lover (fig. 5).156 Here the students are eloquently being criticized for their passivity and herd mentality, and even perhaps their tired sexual habits. This graffiti makes the invisible politics of the space visible; not only does it articulate that hazy moment between classes when students let the nameless crowds pull them to their preordained destination but it also refers to the highly charged public morality regarding sexual relations among young people at this time. Noir: The Silent Partner In North America the word noir is usually associated with Hollywood movies, particularly those made in the forties. In France however, the meaning of the term noir has a distinctly political flavour, and is often used in a broader fashion to denote a particular aesthetic, or sensibility. Previous chapters alluded to noir as an important influence on the CMDO posters, specifically in their imitation of the graphic design of Serie Noire crime novels, and also the graffito, \"I love Gilda,\" which referenced the film noir of the same 1 5 5Thanks again to Serge Guilbaut for recognizing this little mockery of state control of public space. 15^~Here at UBC, behind Serge Guilbaut's back, his students often refer to him as 'Coach' or simply: 'The Master.' Again I have him to thank for this last interpretation of \"Baisse-toi et broute!\" which I would have completely missed if he had not so generously pointed it out to me. 86 name. In fact the term noir had been in use in France since the thirties, and was a crucial element of surrealism, and later Existentialism. Both movements were very influential on the situationists, who were also greatly attracted to the noir mystique. To understand the importance of this concept to 68, and to the situationists themselves, it is essential to have a grasp of this notion's history, and its relation to French film, and pulp fiction. According to film historian Charles O'Brien the origins of the word noir go back to the years before the war. At that time the word noir often had derisive connotations and was frequently used by the right wing French press in their attacks on the \"immorality and scandal\" of left wing culture.157 Soon after it was embraced by several writers who used it to describe a series of dark prewar melodramas set in the criminal underworld such as Pipe le Moko (1936), Hotel du Nord (1938), and Le jour se leve (1939).158 Later, in the forties, when many of the same themes were taken up and explored by American directors (many of whom were European emigres - particularly Germans), the term was re-invoked by French critics who could immediately relate to the moral ambiguity, and the honourable criminals of their own golden age of cinema.159 The compromised and conflicted nature of film noir, and noir protagonists however, was in no way exclusive to film. Pulp fiction, particularly American pulp fiction novels, with their portrayal of sympathetic outlaws also embodied the noir sensibility. Throughout the war American crime novels enjoyed unprecedented popularity in Europe.160 George Orwell has put it down to the sheer boredom of being bombed: the \"...millions to whom the world of gangsters and the prize ring is more \"real,\" more 1 5 7Charles O'Brien, \"Film Noir in France: Before the Liberation,\" Iris 21 (spring 1996): 7-20. Of course the term noir has an even older history: it describes the roman noir, or gothic novel, and in French Literary criticism it suggests the decadent of late romanticism, quoted in James Naremore, More than Noir: Film Noir in its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) p. 15. f^ysjaremore, p 15 15^Naremore, p. 20. 160rt...but it seems to have enjoyed its greatest popularity in 1940 during the battle of Britain and the Blitz.\" George Orwell, \"No Raffles and Miss Blandish,\" in The Collected Essays of George Orwell (London: Seeker, 1961) p. 255. 87 \"tough,\" than such things as war, revolutions, earthquakes famines, and pestilence.\"161 James Naremore has suggested that it was because they depicted a violent and corrupt world where ambiguous personal action was the only redemptive gesture possible.162 In fact the alienation and nihilism which defined the American crime novel in this period was probably strangely comforting to the soldiers fighting in the muddy trenches of World War II. 1 6 3 All the same, whoever was reading those novels was not reading them in French, as translations of American crime novels were not widely available in France until after the war. The American crime novel was actually introduced in France by the Serie Noire collection, discussed earlier. Established in 1945 by the surrealist Marcel Duhamel this series endeavored to: \"...choose manuscripts which were the most authentic and to propose novels that were living documents, true to life witnesses of the era.\"164 The problem with which he was immediately confronted with, was that of translation. Instead of hiring academics and specialists his solution was to employ journalists whose bread and butter was the everyday language of the streets. These were a new type of translators because they thought and wrote in the vernacular. This new style of French language imitated the terse dialogue of the American novels and established a unique tone that became inextricably associated with these novels and the noir sensibility as a whole.165 1 6 1Ibid., p. 256. ^Naremore, p. 24. 1 6 3 Tony Hilfer, The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1990), p. xiii. 164\"...Marcel Duhamel drew enough resources from his rather fanciful (but highly stylish) participation in the hotel industry (he was a manager of a hotel owned by one of his uncles), to shelter there permanently his friends Jacques Prevert and Yves Tanguy, who at that time excelled only in the art of living and of enlivening everything with their witticisms. Benjamin Peret stayed there also for a long time. Absolute non-conformity and total irreverance were the fashion, the best of moods reigned. It was a time for pleasure and nothing else. Nearly each evening found us gathered together around a table where the Chateau Yquem designed to blend it's sweet presence with those of many other and much more tonic brands.\" Andre Breton quoted in The Autobiography of Surrealism Ed. Marcel Jean (New York: Viking Press, 1980), p. T23r 1 6 5 The translators were Jacques-Laurent Bost, Boris Vian, Robert Scipion, the son of Gromaire, Jacques Legris and Henri Robillot. Pierre Giraud and Pierre Ditalia, L 'Argot de la Serie Noire, p. 9. 88 In the Serie Noire novels, the seamy reality of the American underworld of the late thirties and forties was revealed. Written in coded patois these books spoke to the wet grime of the gutter, the violence of the street, and also to sex, issues which were all pivotal to the adventure of 68. 1 6 6 Perhaps it is not so strange then that, these stories, which enjoyed such widespread popularity among the general public, also found favour among members of the situationists, many pro-situationist groups, and other types of anarchists active at the time. 1 6 7 Noir became a code, covertly indicating political allegiances: not just to anarchism (which is traditionally indicated by the colour black), or leftist principles in general, but to a nuanced aesthetic, examples of which, were inextricably bound to an authentically popular culture and a recognition of the art of the vernacular.168 In Panorama du fdm noir americain (1955), Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton define noir as method of psychological disruption whereby the spectator is disoriented by inverting common conventions. Noir reverses normality creating a tension that results from the upheaval of order and the \"...disappearance of psychological bearings or guideposts.\"169 Losing your orientation, on a grand scale, both psychologically and physically was what the situationists wished for everyone involved 166Despite its complete absense form the posters, and rare appearance in the graffiti, as I stated in my introduction many people trace the disturbances of 68 back to the problem of repressed, frustrated and/or overly controlled sexuality. Specifically this can be concretely observed via the occupation of dorms in Nanterre, which were organized to protest curfews and the gender exclusivity of student dorms. 167 The quotation, \"Besides, you anarchists are poor operators. Whenever you try your hand at it you bungle or get caught.\" from Jack London's tale about the philosophical contradictions involved in being an assassin for anarchists, The Assassination Bureau Ltd is cited at the beginning of the collection concerning the relations between the situationists and the Federation des Anarchistes: La F.A. et les situationnistes ou memoire pour discussion dans les families apres boire (editeur responsable Guy Bodson {Guy Debord?}, 1969?). 168 Whereas American intellectuals, acclaimed movies as the great twentieth century art form in the sixties in France film clubs and journals had existed since the thirties. French intellectual circles had always recognized the importance of film and, because of this history, had developed a strong school of criticism, which differentiated between authentically popular, i.e. grass roots film, and so-called popular American movies. Naremore, p. 13. Incidentally, this also relates back to the Maoism question because it was American intellectuals, such as Susan Sontag and others associated with the Partisan Review, which then confused the terms popular and mass culture in the sixties - calling American movies produced for mass consumption, \"popular\" movies. While she may not have been Maoist herself, the position she took up was typical of Maoists at that time. 1 6 9Quoted in Naremore, p. 21. 89 in 68. Not only did the noir sensibility allude to the criminal adventures waiting in the street, it also suggested the untapped possibilities of the public imagination. Drole de Jeu: The Problem of Propaganda Spontaneity was highly valued in May and June 1968. It continues to be considered one of its defining characteristics. No longer did revolution have to be a predictable Marxist co-efficient born of a conscious proletariat down on its luck. The almost revolution was proof. Profound destabilization was, apparently, authentically unpredictable, dependent on nothing more than the coupling of everyday boredom with nighttime sexual frustration.170 Alienation was not inevitable. The ubiquitous graffiti of the period echoed this conviction as it ironically commanded its audience to break the ice and: \"Be Spontaneous!\" Sifting though the remnants of 68, it becomes clear the keen irony of that phrase is perhaps more important than its eager sentiment. Combined with the extraordinary cultural explosion that accompanied the two month long general strike, the irony evident in many of the slogans, graffitos and posters produced during this period invoke the problem of democratic propaganda. That is, the problem of how to create propaganda that does not manipulate and thereby degrade its audience: how to capture the imagination without destroying it, or how to spontaneously upset the apple cart instead of paradoxically dictating its operation. Writing in 1962, French intellectual Jacques Ellul defined propaganda as a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization.171 He voiced deep concerns about this issue: \"...propaganda is undoubtedly the most formidable power, acting in only one direction (toward the destruction of truth and freedom), no matter what 1 7 %ee footnote 2, on page 88. * 7 1 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes trans, by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York: Vintage books, 1973, 1965), p. 61. 90 the good intentions or the good will may be of those who manipulate it.\"1 7 2 To defend oneself against this tyranny Ellul obliged the public to become informed about propaganda's limits and capabilities, and, in turn, to put it to use in a conscientious manner, because, while propaganda's reductive tendencies were considered anti-democratic, democratic society could not function without it. 1 7 3 As I stated in my first chapter, in 1956 the situationists believed that: \"The literary and artistic heritage of the world should be used for partisan propaganda purposes.\"174 But by 1963 they had changed their position: \"It is the merit of Jacques Ellul, in his book Propaganda, which describes the unity of the various forms of conditioning, to have shown that this advertising-propaganda is not merely an unhealthy excrescence that could be prohibited, but it is, at the same time a remedy in a generally sick society, a remedy that makes the sickness tolerable while aggravating it. People are a great extent accomplices of propaganda, of the reigning spectacle, because they can not reject it without contesting the society as a whole.\"175 The objectives of the situationists were very much concerned with the installation of not just radical democracy but direct democracy, this is an idea rooted in anarchism and is entirely inimical to propaganda.176 In fact, at the time, anarchists involved in the 1 7 2 Ellul , p. 257. 1 7 3Ibid. Reassessing Ellul's work, it is interesting to note, that while his analysis of propaganda set the scholarly standard of the times, he neglected a subject particularly pertinent to his thesis: the image. While the book historicizes and describes the way propaganda functioned throughout World War II, and the post-war era, it completely overlooks the significance of visual culture. It is not outrageous to suggest that this component of propaganda, could have provided a compelling subject. The analysis of images is, none-the-less, largely absent from most intellectual endeavors undertaken during this period. From the late fifties, and beyond, heavy hitters like Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes were all working on semiotics [Foucault was writing about art, but his discussion takes as its central concern the question of the gaze. See Martin Jay, \"From the Empire of the Gaze to the Society of the Spectacle: Foucault and Debord,\" Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in twentieth-century French Thought (Berkeley: The University of California Press , 1993), p. 383]. Ellul does address this subject in an extended footnote (pages 163 to 164), however the subject remains peripheral to his overall thesis. He did of course address this later in his book The Humiliation of the Word, 1981. . 1 7 4 G u y Debord & Gil J. Wolman, \"Mode d'emploi du detournement,\" in Les Levres Nues 8 (Brussels, 1956). 175\"Domination de la nature, ideologies et classes,\" in Internationale situationniste 8 (Janvier 1963), p. 7. 1 7 6Direct democracy describes an social organisation whereby there is no representation. Everyone represents herself or himself without mediation of any kind. This is different than radical democracy which still functions on the model of representational government. 91 French Federation des Anarchistes were actually debating whether or not anarchist propaganda existed.177 The situationists understood this but they also were aware that: \"Propaganda is the modem instrument by which...intelligent men can fight for productive ends and help bring order out of chaos.\"178 Ellul also wrote that the best propagandists did not believe the propaganda they disseminated: like the situationists, the efforts of great propagandists were, in no way interested in promoting the \"truth,\" their sole objective was to effect change. The situationists' approach contained within it the critique of ideology which distinguished them from the French anarchists. According to the situationists, the anarchists had turned Marx into a religious figure, and Marxism into a stagnant dogma. The situationists believed that if anything was to be retrieved from Marxism it would have to be up-dated and re-evaluated: Marxism's revolutionary credibility had to be gauged in correspondence to its contemporary relevance, to everyone - not just western Marxists and/or intellectuals. Historically western Marxists have been content to point out that the defiance of the status quo can be expressed only in terms not easily absorbed and neutralized by current popular discourse.179 Many intellectuals believed that popularization of Marxist ideas risked the dilution, if not the perversion of their meaning, not to mention the possibility of pre-mature co-optation.180 The situationists played both sides of this argument. On the one hand they refused to dilute the potency of their critique but they delivered it in forms relevant to mass and popular culture. Whether it was intentional or not their campaign worked on two levels: both official and unofficial. While the CMDO 1 7 7 L a / a et les situationistes ou memoire pour discussion dans les families apres boire (Paris: Guy Bodson, 1969), p. 4. 1 ^Edward Bemays quoted in Ellul, 119. 1 7 9Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukdcs to Habermas, (Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 1984), p. 11 - 12. 1 8 0 lb id. 92 posters, presented the position of the more orthodox strains of Situationism, the gTaffiti displayed an attitude typical of their more playful libertarian elements. The urban critique afforded by graffiti, dependent as it was on the material characteristics and physicality of space in the inner city, was in complete agreement with the situationist tactic referred to as la derive, the urban equivalent of detournement, alluded to in previous chapters. It was about turning the city inside out, changing the modern city-scape into a liberated zone in which authentic life would bring down the fiction of the city skyl ine. 1 8 1 If the derive was a form of intelligence \"immersed in practice,\" combining \"flair, sagacity, foresight, intellectual flexibility, deception, vigilant resourcefulness, vigilant watchfulness, a sense for opportunities, diverse sorts of cleverness, and a great deal of acquired experience,\" 1 8 2 situationist graffiti was its embodiment. At a time when total expression in the sphere of 'high art' had become impossible, the poetic and polemical qualities of graffiti in 68 made total critique a reality. ^Ijay, Downcast Eyes, p. 425. 182-^ a r c ei Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les Ruses de I'intelligence. La Metis des Grecs (Paris: Flammarion, 1974); quoted in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p 81. 93 Fig. 1 94 Fig. 2 95 Fig. 3 96 97 Fig. 5 98 Conclusion Out of the Past The value of an old work of art should be assessed on the basis on the amount of radical theory that can be drawn from it, on the basis of the nucleus of creative spontaneity which the new creators will be able to release from it, for the purposes of - and by means of, an unprecedented kind of poetry. -Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life Modernism is traditionally understood to have a strong formal constituent and has historically been defined as the defense of aesthetics against social, political, historical and intellectual forces. Crow challenges this idea, replacing it with the notion that modernism is about formal schisms between popular and high culture which ideally stimulate critical consciousness.183 While Crow implies the importance of aesthetics in this equation, he never explicitly articulates this idea. These two definitions, however, the pitch for aesthetics on one hand and the import of critical consciousness for creating change on the other, are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are inextricably intertwined as the situationists' poetic realization of art in the streets of Paris 1968 demonstrates. The writings of the situationists are largely read as a universal theory, that is to say a theory applicable to the entire perimeters of the expanding western world. Indeed since 1968, many of the tactics laid out by the situationists have been skillfully implemented by a diverse array of artists and activists both in France and abroad. However, to really get to the heart of this 'universal' theory, it is important to get a fix on the very particular circumstances that brought this movement about. North American scholars often imply that the situationists rejected art on the basis of its association with the bourgeoisie. Certainly the situationists had no mercy for bourgeois values, but at the same time, neither were they interested in promoting some anachronistic naive conception of the happy worker, as promoted by communist social realism or variations thereof. This complex position was realized in their aesthetic program which was developed both 1 8 3Thomas Crow, \"Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,\" in Modern Art in the Common Cultures (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 29. 99 with and against the grain of the artistic and intellectual debates that took place in France in the postwar period. The situationists were, in fact attentive to issues of form but it was a project completely removed from the artistic ideals of both the traditional left and right, and fundamentally concerned with authentic popular culture. Artists associated with the Salon de la jeunepeinture flattened painting out to the lowest common denominator. Believing that their images were transparent and universally intelligible, they denied the fact that form is always ideological, that images are inseparable from the contexts and time periods from which they originate. Inspired by publicity posters, they clung to the idea that their adherence to a commercial format testified to their defiance of bourgeois representational codes and that their paintings were more open and readable to a non-cultivated audience.184 When criticized for sticking to what amounted to a rehashed notion of social realism, they responded by asserting that their works, however figurative, were consistently critical, unlike social realist images where the sun never seemed to set.185 However it wasn't the question of content that made these paintings suspect, it was the philosophical principals that informed the works that opened them up to this valid criticism. These mainstream painters turned away from aesthetics because they saw it as a tool for ideological mystification. They chose the format of the banner or the placard with a view to making their paintings more democratic. The situationists believed that these so-called 'open' images were equally perplexing, and that they too masked a hidden agenda. The situationist critique of the spectacle was indeed that every image concealed its own 184Catherine Millet, L'Art contemporain en France (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), p. 22. 1 8 5 B y the mid-sixties the group was split down the middle with Gilles Aillaud, Edouardo Arroyo and Henri Cueco beginning to assert their communist and then Maoist tendencies, while Bernard Rancilliac and Herve Telemaque, though still highly political by North American standards, began a retreat, favoring the less radical images associated with American pop such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.This resulted in their eventual expulsion from the group. Millet, p. 68. The battle between the two factions was summed up in the slogan \"Aillaud and Arroyo versus Rancillac and Telemaque!\" Interview. Bernard Rancillac, June 22, 1999. At this time Rancillac also related to me that he considered Warhol to be as important as Picasso. On page 71 Millet goes so far as to link Rancillac and Telemaque up with Cobra, suggesting that their roots were closer to the paneuropean avant-garde group. While Rancillac and Telemaque were certainly different than the SJP I don't think they resembled Cobra in any way whatso-ever. 100 program. The genius of detournement was that it unveiled the specific idiosyncrasies that made different images function in different ways, turning them into vehicles for their own ideological denouement. By 68 the majority of artists in France were working under the assumption that art was only useful in so far as it could shape public opinion. This meant that the people who were traditionally entrusted with resisting the limits of ideology were now guarding its parameters. The highly developed political and artistic spectrums on the left in France allowed for an incredibly diverse production, however, at the same time, between local allegiances to the French Communist Party, romantic attachments to the cultural revolution in China, not to mention some coy experimentation with anarchism (Jean-Jacques Lebel comes immediately to mind here), the results were often confused and consistently compromised. Many groups took their painting very seriously but as they tried to escape both social realism and abstraction, they ended up lost in an airy hinterland somewhere near popular culture, but not that far off from mass culture, of both the capitalist and communist varieties. In reaction to this complete capitulation to capital P politics, the situationists chose to reject what art had become, and turn instead to the realm of everyday small p politics, utilizing forms of popular culture in a bid to open up new audiences and avenues of resistance. George Orwell believed that all art was propaganda, but that not all propaganda was art. This pat quip assumes art is always tied to a political function with a fixed objective within predictable perimeters. Art is anti-ideological, its only function is to deny functionality: to retain its innocence in the face of political coercion from any and all directions. Art is inimical to propaganda which is ideological by definition despite presenting itself as utterly sincere. The situationists were not opposed to art and culture in themselves, but only to their usurpation by those who wished to use them merely as instruments of manipulation and power. They were, in fact, not the enemies of art but the greatest defenders of its integrity. 101 Whether or not the mainstream artists in France during the sixties were consciously subscribing to the formal tenets of social realism they continued to buttress the underlying philosophy that things were the same in reality as in appearance. A hand written note which hung in the Atelier des Beaux Arts, read: \"Sincerity is more important than technique.\"186 The truth is never plain nor images ever sincere. To try and make them fit into these constraints is to neutralize the idiosyncrasies of imagery, of representational regimes of any type. The fact that images can never be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be making an outrageous, improbable and controversial proposition is the dangerous fun of the game at hand.1 8 7 Beauty, the marvelous, that convulsive poetic moment described by the surrealists which I alluded to in my first chapter is, I would argue, the same experience described by Thomas Crow which he refers to as the point of critical consciousness: a situation where differences are heightened, laying open new possibilities for change.188 Mario Perniola has elaborated on this idea contrasting classical notions of beauty with an idea culled from the Baroque period, a concept he refers to as strategic beauty or wit. Modern aesthetics associates beauty with roundness, smoothness, softness, sweetness, simplicity, contemplation and calm. Strategic beauty however is: \"...sharp, piercing, pungent, pointed, like iron that one uses for cutting or running something through, like a needle, a spear, it is the Latin acumen, and the French pointed*9 Using the work of thinkers such as Gracian Baltasar he elaborates on the 17th century definition of beauty which was associated with a subtle, critical, pleasing and probing, intellectual wit. He continues, suggesting that this understanding of beauty is the condition for survival in a world in 186Laurent Gervereau, \"La serigraphie a l'Ecole des Beaux Arts\" in Mai 68: Les Mouvements etudiants en France etdansle monde (Collection des Publications de BDIC, 1988), p. 186 . 1 8 7Hickey, Dave. The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993), p. 17. 18*Ibid., p. 12. 1 8 9 Mario Perniola, Enigmas: The Egyptian moment in society and Art, trans. Christopher Woodall (London: Verso, 1995), p. 113. 102 which things are not taken for what they are, but for what they appear to be. 1 9 0 Iris Murdoch wrote that beauty prepares us for justice, and medieval philosophers believed that beauty is a call. 1 9 1 More recently Elaine Scarry has asserted that: \"...there is no way to be in a high state of alert towards injustice without simultaneously demanding of oneself precisely the level of perpetual acuity that will forever be opening one to the arrival of beautiful sights and sounds.\"192 Visual culture and high art flag values that cause great anxiety on either side of the line that divides them. The values that each are said to represent, however, have never been finite. Historically the distinctions between the two have been consistently shadowy. High art and popular culture, or mass culture (depending on your political position), have always exchanged content and form to lesser or greater degrees with varying results. What does not change is the existence of beauty. As I have stated repeatedly throughout this thesis I am not referring to the classical conception of beauty which conforms to standardized norms or transcendental ideals, the notion of beauty I have developed here opposes boredom not ugliness. It is synonymous with political struggle against coercion of all types and confirms human beings as the ultimate source of value in our everyday lives. 190Perniola, p. 114. 1 9 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 78 & 109. 1 9 2Ibid., p. 60. 103 Timeline May - June 1968 May 6 First graffiti appears. May 10 First major street fight referred to as \"The Night of the Barricades.\" May 13 One million march in the streets. May 14 Sorbonne occupied. May 15 First posters are produced in the Atelier des Beaux Arts. May 17 The CMDO is established* May 20 Twenty million march in the streets. May 22 Student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit prevented from re-entering France after a lecture tour abroad. May 24 Widespread rioting occurs in protest. The stock exchange is set on fire. May 27 The Grenelle agreement is signed by unions and management in an attempt to get people back to work. May 29 The Atelier des Arts Decoratifs starts producing posters. May 30 De Gaulle calls an election and the CMDO move into the basement of the Atelier des arts Decoratifs. June 5 France's biggest union, the CGT** demands absentee workers return to factories. June 15 The CMDO dissolves. June 17 The Sorbonne is reclaimed by the police. June 18 Last workers return to factories. June 27 Atelier des Beaux Arts is shut down by police. June 30 De Gaulle wins election. * The CMDO stands for le Conseil pour le Maintien des Occupations (The Committee for the Maintenance of Occupations). * * CGT stands for Congres Generate de Travail (The General Congress of Workers). 104 Selected Bibliography A. 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"Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use."@en . "Graduate"@en . "La beaute\u00CC\u0081 est dans la rue : art & visual culture in Paris, 1968"@en . "Text"@en . "http://hdl.handle.net/2429/10958"@en .