• The Letterist International (LI) 1952-1957

• The Situationist International (SI, 1957–72),

• Fluxus 1960s-1970s

• The Letterist International (LI) was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord as a schism from Isidore Isou's Letterist group. Letterist International had almost no ideas in common with Isou's Lettrism, of which used the name only ironically;[citation needed] instead, it was more a draft version of the SituationistInternational,[citation needed] many of the core ideas of which it anticipated.

• The group was a motley assortment of novelists, sound poets, painters, film-makers, revolutionaries, bohemians, alcoholics, petty criminals, lunatics, under-age girls and self-proclaimed failures. In the Summer of 1953, their average age was a mere twenty years old, rising to twenty nine and a half in 1957. In their blend of intellectualism, protest and hedonism—though differing in other ways, for instance in their total rejection of spirituality—they might be viewed as French counterparts of the American Beat Generation, particularly in the form it took during exactly the same period, i.e. before anyone from either group achieved any real fame, and were still having the adventures that would inform their later works and ideas.

• the Letterist group disrupted a Charlie Chaplin press conference for Limelight at the Hôtel Ritz Paris in October 1952. They distributed a polemic entitled "No More Flat Feet", which concluded: "The footlights have melted the make-up of the supposedly brilliant mime. All we can see now is a lugubrious and mercenary old man. Go home Mister Chaplin."

Gil J Wolman, Untitled, Ca. 1966Collage on canvas, 24 x 41 cm

• There was a serious purpose behind their ambulation. They developed the dérive, or drift, where they would wander like clouds through the urban environment for hours or sometimes even days on end. During their wanderings in the Summer of 1953, an "illiterate Kabyle" suggested to them the term Psychogeography", to designate what they saw as a pattern of emotive force-fields that would permeate a city. The dérive would enable them to map out these forces, and these results could then be used as a basis upon which to build a system of unitary urbanism.

• Another important notion developed by the LI, was that of détournement, a technique of reutilising plagiarised material (literary, artistic, cinematic, etc.) for a new and usually radical purpose. The defining LI text here was "A User's Guide To Détournement", by Debord and Wolman (Les LèvresNues, no. 8, May 1956). They argued: "In truth, it is necessary to do away with the whole notion of personal property in this area. The emergence of new demands renders earlier 'great works' obsolete. They become obstacles, bad habits. It is not a question of whether we like them or not. We must pass them by."

COBRA (or CoBrA) was a European avant-garde movement active

from 1948 to 1951.

Their working method was based on spontaneity and experiment, and they drew their inspiration in particular from children’s drawings, from primitive art forms and from the work of Paul Klee and Joan Miró

COBRA was formed by Karel Appel, Constant, Corneille, Christian Dotremont, Asger Jorn, and Joseph Noiret on 8 November 1948 in the Café Notre-Dame, Paris, with the signing of a manifesto, "La Cause Était Entendue" ("The Case Was Settled"), drawn up by Dotremont. Formed with a unifying doctrine of complete freedom of colour and form, as well as antipathy towards Surrealism, the artists also shared an interest in Marxism as well as modernism.

Situationism.A meaningless term, according to the Situationist International (SI, 1957–72), which contended in the first issue of its journal Internationale situationniste that “there is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine for interpreting existing conditions.” The Situationist International, founded in 1957 by Michèle Bernstein, Constant, Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, among others, was a European avant-garde collective.

The Situationist International (SI) was influenced by, and formed in reaction to, avant-garde movements, predominantly the Letterists, Surrealists and Cobra. Its theories married existentialist activism, psychoanalysis, the Marxist approach to commodity culture and the Frankfurt School philosophy with anarchistic aesthetic beliefs.

The protagonists, including Debord, utopian architect Constant Nieuwenhuys, painter Asger Jorn and philosopher Raoul Vaneigem, were primarily concerned with critiquing modern life. Employing theory as the principal means of inciting action, the group published an eponymously titled journal of essays between 1958 and 1969. The work incorporated raised questions about the idea behind an aesthetics of the everyday and the creation of revolutionary ’situations’. Later termed as dérive, this offered a way of creating completely new, unpredictable itineraries, dependent on chance and the spontaneous subjective impulses of the wanderer.

It critiqued mainstream art institutions for their tendency to “recuperate” oppositional practices by domesticating them as art movements separated from direct involvement in everyday life. Situationistsrejected copyright, published anonymously in their influential eponymous journal and coordinated actions critical of the art world and the socio-economic power structure of Europe as it underwent postwarreconstruction and the dramatic expansion of mass media culture. Debord would later publish the Situationistcritique of the social power disseminated by the mass media in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, which he made into a film in 1973.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV6k_SKkHKQ

• The Society of the Spectacle, which he made into a film in 1973.

SI member and utopian architect Constant’s model of Yellow Sector, from InternationaleSituationniste no.4, June 1960, shows the hanging Situationist city where play and residence are united

Constant Nieuwenhuys

In 1956, the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys started working on a visionary architectural proposal for a future society;he didn't stop for almost twenty years. Having been a co-founder of the Cobra group of artists in the late forties, heabandoned painting in 1953 to concentrate on the question of "construction". He became a founding member of theSituationist International in 1957 and played a central role in their experiments until his resignation in 1960. New Babylon,as his project would eventually be called, is a situationist city intended as a polemical provocation.

New Babylon was elaborated in an endless series of models, sketches, etchings, lithographs, collages, architecturaldrawings, and photocollages, as well as in manifestos, essays, lectures, and films. New Babylon is a form of propaganda thatcritiques conventional social structures. New Babylon envisages a society of total automation in which the need to work isreplaced with a nomadic life of creative play, in which traditional architecture has disintegrated along with the socialinstitutions that it propped up. A vast network of enormous multilevel interior spaces propagates to eventually cover theplanet. These interconnected "sectors" float above the ground on tall columns. While vehicular traffic rushes underneathand air traffic lands on the roof, the inhabitants drift by foot through the huge labyrinthine interiors, endlesslyreconstructing the atmospheres of the spaces. Every aspect of the environment can be be controlled and reconfiguredspontaneously. Social life becomes architectural play. Architecture becomes a flickering display of interacting desires.

Constant always saw New Babylon as a realizable project, which provoked intense debates at schools of architecture andfine arts about the future role of the architect. Constant insisted that the traditional arts would be displaced by a collectiveform of creativity. He positioned his project at the threshold of the end of art and architecture. Yet it had a major influenceon the work of subsequent generations of architects. It was published widely in the international press in the 1960s andConstant quickly attained a prominent position in the world of experimental architecture. But this influence wouldeventually be forgotten; the project has not been displayed since Constant stopped working on it in 1974.

• Situationists developed key activist concepts including: the dérive (“drift”), a way of moving collectively through unfamiliar urban pathways that cut across the political demarcations of space; “unitary urbanism” and “psychogeography,” which described the psychological investment in urban space; and détournement (“subversion”), the creation of works using preexisting materials in order to subvert their ideological function. Examples of Situationistdétournement include Debord and Jorn’s artist’s books Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires.

The book is a work of psychogeography, detailing a period in Debord's life when he was in the process of leaving the Lettrists, setting up Lettrism International, and showing his 'first masterpiece',[1] Hurlements en Faveur de Sade (Howling In Favour Of Sade), a film devoid of imagery that played white when people were talking on the soundtrack and black during the lengthy silences between.Credited to Guy-Ernest Debord, with structures portantes ('load-bearing structures') by Asger Jorn, the book contains 64

pages divided into three sections. The first section is called 'June 1952', and starts with a quote from Marx:Let the dead bury the dead, and mourn them.... our fate will be to become the first living people to enter the new life

Mémoires (Memories) is an artist's book made by the Danish artist Asger Jorn in collaboration with the French artist and theorist Guy Debord. Printed in 1959, it is the second of two collaborative books by the two men whilst they were both members of the SituationistInternational.

The book is most famous for its cover, a dust jacket made of heavy-grade sandpaper. Usually credited to Debord, the sleeve was actually conceived in a conversation between Jorn and the printer, V.O. Permild:[Permild:] Long had [Jorn] asked me, if I couldn’t find an unconventional material for the book cover. Preferably some sticky asphalt or perhaps glass wool. Kiddingly, he wanted, that by looking at people, you should be able to tell whether or not they had had the book in their hands. He acquiesced by my final suggestion: sandpaper (flint) nr. 2: ‘Fine. Can you imagine the result when the book lies on a blank polished mahogany table, or when it's inserted or taken out of the bookshelf. It planes shavings off the neighbour's desert goat.[4]

• Other examples are Debord’s film On the Passage of a Few People Through a Brief Moment in Time, a pseudo-documentary of the SI consisting of appropriated elements, Jorn’s “Modifications,” graffiti-like additions to found kitsch paintings (e.g., Le canard inquiétant, 1959; Silkeborg, Kstmus.) and Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio’s “Industrial Paintings,” produced by splashing paint and other materials in an assembly-line process on industrial bolts of cloth. Constant’s Situationist New Bablyon project (1957–74) involved hundreds of collages and models of spatial ambiances designed to shift according to the user’s psychological state, as an intervention into postwarurbanism (e.g. Grote gele sector, 1967; The Hague, Gemeentemus).

On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Moment In Time (english subtitles)Guy Debord, 1959.

http://vimeo.com/58909937

On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Moment In Time (english subtitles)Guy Debord, 1959.

The spoken commentary includes a large portion of detourned phrases, drawn indiscriminately from classic thinkers, a science-fiction novel, and the worst pop sociologists. In order to go against the usual documentary practice regarding spectacular scenery, each time that the camera is on the verge of coming upon a monument this has been avoided by shooting in the opposite direction, from the viewpoint of the monument (just as the young Abel Gance shot a passage from the viewpoint of a snowball). The initial plan for this documentary envisaged more détournements from other films, particularly recent ones (for example, during the passage on the failure of revolutionary efforts of the 1950s, this sequence of two different scenes: a worried young woman, in the luxurious decor of a detective film, telephones someone to urge him to wait; the Russian general in For Whom the Bell Tolls, seeing planes pass overhead, replies to a telephone that it is unfortunately too late, that the offensive is already launched and that it will fail like so many others). These extensive film-quotations were ultimately prevented because several distributors refused to sell reproduction rights for at least half of the scenes selected, which refusal destroyed the montage envisaged. Instead, more extensive use was made of the Monsavon soap ad, whose star was to have a brighter future.André Mrugalski is responsible for the sequence of detail photos detourning the style of “art documentaries.”This short film can be considered as notes on the origins of the situationist movement; notes which thus naturally include a reflection on their own language.Technical Notes on "The Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time," Guy Debord

• In 1961, the group expelled all artists and turned its focus entirely to political critique. Debord, Bernstein and Raoul Vaneigem were involved in the student uprisings in Paris in May, 1968. Situationist theory influenced contemporary architecture, urbanism and industrial design, from the utopian projects of the 1960s to the contemporary work of Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi. In critical theory, it shaped the thinking of Jean Baudrillard, T. J. Clark (himself a former Situationist), Jonathan Crary and MacKenzieWark. Its artistic descendants include punk and Appropriation art, artistic activism, interventionist art, and tactical media.

• "Sous les pavés, la plage"• Influenced by the Situationist International, this is a slogan from the 1968

protests in France. It basically means, 'underneath the pavement, is the beach'. You never know what you might discover about the city unless you look deeper.

Many of the most famous slogans which were scribbled on the walls of Paris were taken from their theses, such as FREE THE PASSIONS, NEVER WORK, LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME. Members of the Situationist International (SI) co-operated with the _enrages_ from Nanterre University in the Occupations COmmittee of the Sorbonne, an assembly held in permanent session. On 17 May, the Committee sent the following telegram to the Communist Party of the USSR:

SHAKE IN YOUR SHOES BUREAUCRATS STOP THE INTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS' COUNCILS WILL SOON WIPE YOU OUT STOP HUMANITY WILL NOT BE HAPPY UNTIL THE LAST BUREAU- CRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST STOP LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE KRONSTADT SAILORS AND OF THE MAKHNOVSCHINA AGAINST TROTSKY AND LENIN STOP LONG LIVE THE 1956 COUNCILIST INSURRECTION OF BUDAPEST STOP DOWN WITH THE STATE STOP

Rem Koolhaas who is a Dutch architect, a former journalist and also a genius who dared to reverse the methodologies of Modern Architects by producing works that challenge them. For example, in one of his house Villa Dall’ava he puts a swimming pool on the rooftop just to prove that he can.

Despite the acuteness of their critique of modern capitalism, the Situationists mistakenly took a temporary economic boom in post-war France for a permanent trend in capitalist societies. Their belief in economic abundance now seems wildly optimistic; not only underproduction but also underconsumption continue in advanced industrial societies. In many parts of the globe, especially in the southern hemisphere, so-called "natural alienation", let alone social alienation, has yet to be overcome. Nevertheless, for all their weaknesses, the Situationists have undoubtedly enriched anarchist theory by their critique of modern culture, their celebration of creativity, and their stress on the immediate transformation of everyday life. Although the SI group disbanded in 1972 after bitter wrangling over tactics, their ideas have continued to have widespread influence in anarchist and feminist circles and inspired, at times almost subconsciously it seemed, much of the style and content of punk rock.

Street poster favoring the May 1968 uprisings in France. It depicts a woman protestor throwing a paving stone. The text reads: "beauty is in the streets."

Two Cowboys, punk T-shirt by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.