Tom McDonough

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.

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