Tom McDonough

This volume is a revised and expanded version of a special issue of the journalOctober (Winter 1997) that was devoted to the work of the Situationist International (SI). The firstsection of the issue contained previously unpublished critical texts, and the second sectioncontained translations of primary texts that had previously been unavailable in English. Theemphasis was on the SI's profound engagement with the art and cultural politics of their time(1957-1972), with a strong argument for their primarily political and activist stance by two formermembers of the group, T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith.Guy Debord and the SituationistInternational supplements both sections. It reprints important, hard to find essays by GiorgioAgamben, Libero Andreotti, Jonathan Crary, Thomas Y. Levin, Greil Marcus, and Tom McDonough anddoubles the number of translations of primary texts, which now encompass a broader and morerepresentative range of the SI's writings on culture and language. In a field still dominated byhagiography, the critical texts were selected for their willingness to confront critically thehistory and legacy of the SI. They examine the group within the broader framework of the historicaland neo-avant-gardes and, beyond that, the postwar world in general. The translations trace the SI'sreflections on the legacy of the avant-garde in art and architecture, particularly on the linguisticand spatial significance of montage aesthetics. Many of the translated works are by Guy Debord(1932?1994), the impresario of the SI, especially known for his book The Society of theSpectacle.

Texts and Documents

Guy Debord and the Situationist International

The Situationist International (SI), led by the revolutionary Guy Debord, were active throughout the 1950s and 60s. They published the journal Internationale Situationniste that included many incendiary texts on politics and art, and were a galvanizing force in the revolutions of May 1968. The importance of their work has been felt particularly in their revolutionary analysis of cities. The SI were responsible for utopian imaginings of the city, where its alienating effects from its routine use as a site of consumption and work were banished and it was instead to be turned into a place of play. Tom McDonough collects all the SI's key work in this area for an essential one-stop collection. Including such essential works as 'The Theory of the Derive', 'Formulary for a New Urbanism', and many previously untranslated texts, the book will also be strikingly illustrated by the images that were core to the Situationist project.

A Reader

The Situationists and the City

Boredom in modern and contemporary art: as something to be struggled against, embraced as an experience, or explored as a potential site of resistance. Without boredom, arguably there is no modernity. The current sense of the word emerged simultaneously with industrialization, mass politics, and consumerism. From Manet onwards, when art represents the everyday within modern life, encounters with tedium are inevitable. And starting with modernism's retreat into abstraction through subsequent demands placed on audiences, from the late 1960s to the present, the viewer's endurance of repetition, slowness or other forms of monotony has become an anticipated feature of gallery-going. In contemporary art, boredom is no longer viewed as a singular experience; rather, it is contingent on diverse social identifications and cultural positions, and exists along a spectrum stretching from a malign condition to be struggled against to an something to be embraced or explored as a site of resistance. This anthology contextualizes the range of boredoms associated with our neoliberal moment, taking a long view that encompasses the political critique of boredom in 1960s France; the simultaneous aesthetic embrace in the United States of silence, repetition, or indifference in Fluxus, Pop, Minimalism and conceptual art; the development of feminist diagnoses of malaise in art, performance, and film; punk's social critique and its influence on theories of the postmodern; and the recognition, beginning at the end of the 1980s, of a specific form of ennui experienced in former communist states. Today, with the emergence of new forms of labor alienation and personal intrusion, deadening forces extend even further into subjective experience, making the divide between a critical and an aesthetic use of boredom ever more tenuous. Artists surveyed include Chantal Akerman, Francis Alÿs, John Baldessari, Vanessa Beecroft, Bernadette Corporation, John Cage, Critical Art Ensemble, Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli & Weiss, Claire Fontaine, Dick Higgins, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov, Robert Morris, John Pilson, Sigmar Polke, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Gerhard Richter, Situationist International, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andy Warhol, Faith Wilding, Janet Zweig Writers include Ina Blom, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jennifer Doyle, Alla Efimova, Jonathan Flatley, Julian Jason Haladyn, The Invisible Committee, Jonathan D. Katz, Chris Kraus, Tan Lin, Sven Lütticken, John Miller, Agné Narušyté, Sianne Ngai, Peter Osborne, Patrice Petro, Christine Ross, Moira Roth, David Foster Wallace, Aleksandr Zinovyev

Boredom

Since Wolfgang Tillmans first exhibited his multi-part installation on tables with the title Truth Study Centre ten years ago, this group of works has become an integral component of his exhibitions. Frequently rooted in the local conditions and the period of their inception, these collages composed of texts, images and objects seek to gain a clear perspective on our increasingly complex age. The question of redistribution also plays an important role for Tillmans in the majority of his other truth study centre installations: 'asking this question kind of innocently, may remind oneself that the specific way something is distributed today, is not done so by following a law of nature, but by a complex set of moral and political choices', states Tillmans. The scope and complexity of this long-term project is revealed for the first time in this book and in the parallel exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof. An essay by Thomas McDonough places Tillmans' project within the context of twentieth-century collage, from Hannah Höch to Robert Rauschenberg.

What's Wrong with Redistribution?

Wolfgang Tillmans

Noam Chomsky

Pier Luigi Tazzi

Adel Abdessemed

Jane Farver

Since the mid-1990s, Algerian-born, New York-based Adel Abdessemed has unerringly located and triggered the religious, sexual and racial taboos of our culture. This volume takes a broad look at Abdessemed's activities, from his "street acts" to more recent works.

Situation and Practice

In postwar France, the aesthetics of appropriation and collage gave cultural form toa struggle over meaning. A new wave of avant-garde experimentation used -- or stole, plagiarized,and expropriated -- elements from advertising, journalism, literature, art, and other sources ofcommon discourse (the ironically named "beautiful language" of this book's title, itself anappropriation from Guy Debord's collaged Mémoires). Redeployed, often in startling or pointedjuxtapositions, these elements took on newly oppositional meanings. A famous photograph taken insidethe occupied Sorbonne in May 1968, for example, shows a massive academic painting altered by aclever cartoonish speech bubble that transforms the painting into a parody of itself andmemorializes an event very different from the one captured by the original artist."The BeautifulLanguage of My Century" describes the various forms of critical culture that culminated in theevents of May 1968, and investigates the ways those forms have come down to us today.McDonoughexplores the montage practice developed by Guy Debord and his situationist colleagues under the nameof détournement and its expression in the later fifties as a form of cultural theft. He addressesthe influence of colonialism on these practices, examining a 1961 exhibit of torn posters of theAlgerian War ("La France déchirée"), Godard's early film Le Petit Soldat, and Christo's Project fora Temporary Wall of Steel Drums. He discusses the French left's adoption in the mid-sixties of the"end of art" as a theoretical position and describes the leftist idea of the fête as a Rabelaisianand revolutionary upwelling of everything that is low. This influential conception, inspired equallyby the American urban revolts of the sixties and the writings of theorists Marcel Mauss and GeorgesBataille, coalesced into a new image of revolution, a new model of contestation, in the events ofMay 1968 -- when the struggle over language and culture merged with a broader resistance tocapitalist modernization.

Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968

The Beautiful Language of My Century

Aruna D'Souza

Tom Mc Donough

This collection of essays revisits gender and urban modernity in nineteenth-century Paris in the wake of changes to the fabric of the city and social life. In rethinking the figure of the flâneur, the contributors apply the most current thinking in literature and urban studies to an examination of visual culture of the period, including painting, caricature, illustrated magazines, and posters. Using a variety of approaches, the collection re-examines the long-held belief that life in Paris was divided according to strict gender norms, with men free to roam in public space while women were restricted to the privacy of the domestic sphere.

Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-century Paris

The Invisible Flâneuse?

The Situationist International (SI), led by the revolutionary Guy Debord, were active throughout the 1950s and 60s. They published the journal Internationale Situationniste that included many incendiary texts on politics and art, and were a galvanizing force in the revolutions of May 1968. The importance of their work has been felt particularly in their revolutionary analysis of cities. The SI were responsible for utopian imaginings of the city, where its alienating effects from its routine use as a site of consumption and work were banished and it was instead to be turned into a place of play. Tom McDonough collects all the SI's key work in this area for an essential one-stop collection. Including such essential works as ‘The Theory of the Derive', ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism', and many previously untranslated texts, the book will also be strikingly illustrated by the images that were core to the Situationist project.

Tom McDonough

Books

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