Vive le détournement! One More Try if you Want to be Situationists

Slought Foundation, a non-profit organization rethinking contemporary art, is pleased to announce "Vive le détournement! One More Try if you Want to be Situationists...," a vault installation in the gallery from April 6-May 25, 2006 featuring original documents and publications of the Situationist International, courtesy of Thomas Levin, including the complete edition of its magazine Internationale Situationiste (IS), psychogeographic maps, and Guy Debord's handwritten notes for Oeuvres Cinématographiques Complètes, 1952 - 1978. The public reception will take place on Thursday, April 6th, 2006 from 6:30-9:00pm, in conjunction with a public conversation with Thomas Levin, Anthony Vidler, and Jean-Michel Rabaté, and the Philadelphia premiers of Guy Debord's first and last films, “Hurlements en faveur de Sade" (1952) and "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" (1978). (here for more information).

The Situationist International (SI), an international political and artistic movement, emerged from several tendencies which radically redefined the role of art in the twentieth century: the Lettrist International, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association. Influenced by Dada, Surrealism, and COBRA, the Situationists developed their theory and practice through direct artistic and intellectual confrontation with their predecessors and contemporary figures from Lefebvre to Godard. Renewing Marx’s critique of capital, the Situationists viewed the banalization of art as the totalizing effect of capitalist alienation. The Situationists saw their task as artists and revolutionaries to supersede art as a separate and specialized activity, transforming it so as to become the practice of everyday life. Suffering from constant splits and expulsions, the SI dissolved in 1972.

The artist and theortician Guy Debord was a leading member of the Situationist International and author of the group’s most influential text, "Society of the Spectacle." In his book, Debord develops his critique of “spectacular society” as the moment of the total occupation of social life by the commodity relation. As a filmmaker, Debord adopted an ambivalent attitude towards the cinema in the first issue (1958) of its magazine Internationale Situationiste (IS). On the one hand, he insisted that the existing cinema should be destroyed, along with all forms of specialized artistic practice. However, Debord and the SI continued to develop strategies for artistic intervention, e.g. recontextualizing sound and imagery (détournement), which was deployed to reinterpret films and other popular cultural materials. Debord resumed his role as a filmmaker after the dissolution of the Situationist International and screened his films in a dedicated cinema in Paris. Debord withdrew his films from circulation in 1984 to protest the slander he suffered in the French press, after the murder of his friend, patron, and publisher Gerard Lebovici. He kept the films under lock and key until giving permission for them to be shown again on television a few weeks following his death (he committed suicide in 1994). This strategy of withdrawal, followed by the duplication of the films on television, once again reflects Debord's ambivalent attitude towards the cinema. They also suggest a practical reflection on television as a medium, which had started to use films for a different purpose in a completely different way, and at the same time identify the cinema as a device, i.e. as a specifically historical disposition of social media practice.

“The specialists of cinema have said that my film’s revolutionary politics were bad; the left-wing political illusionists have said that it was bad cinema. But when one is both a revolutionary and a filmmaker, it is easy to demonstrate that their shared bitterness stems from the fact that the film in question is a precise critique of society they do not know how to combat; and the first example of a kind of film they do not know how to make.”

-- Guy Debord, Refutation of All the Judgments, Pro or Con, Thus Far Rendered on the Film "The Society of the Spectacle" (1975)

"Vive le détournement! One More Try if you Want to be Situationists..."
Guy Debord (Situationistische Internationale)

Kuratoren:
Aaron Levy, Thomas Levin