The conditions of the SI’s activity explain both its discipline and the forms of hostility it encounters. The SI is not interested in finding a niche within the present artistic establishment, but in undermining it. The situationists are in the catacombs of visible culture.

Anyone who is at all familiar with the social milieu of those with special status in cultural affairs is well aware of how everyone there despises and is bored by almost everyone else. This fact is not even hidden, they are all quite aware of it; it is even the first thing they talk about whenever they get together. What is the cause of their resignation? Clearly the fact that they are incapable of being bearers of a collective project. Each one recognizes in the others his own insignificance and his own conditioning — the resignation he has had to accept in order to participate in this separate milieu and its established aims.

Within such a community people have neither the need nor the objective possibility for any sort of collective discipline. Everyone always politely agrees about the same things and nothing ever changes. Personal or ideological disagreements remain secondary in comparison with what they have in common. But for the SI and the struggle it sets for itself, exclusion is a possible and necessary weapon.

It is the only weapon of any group based on complete freedom of individuals. None of us likes to control or judge; if we do so it is for a practical purpose, not as a moral punishment. The “terrorism” of the SI’s exclusions can in no way be compared to the same practices in political movements by power-wielding bureaucracies. It is, on the contrary, the extreme ambiguity of the situation of artists, who are constantly tempted to integrate themselves into the modest sphere of social power reserved for them, that makes some discipline necessary in order to clearly define an incorruptible platform. Otherwise there would be a rapid and irremediable osmosis between this platform and the dominant cultural milieu because of the number of people going back and forth. It seems to us that the question of a present-day cultural avant-garde can only be posed at an integral level, a level not only of collective works but of collectively interacting problems.

This is why certain people have been excluded from the SI. Some of them have rejoined the world they previously fought; others merely console themselves in a pathetic community with each other, although they have nothing in common but the fact that we broke with them — often for opposite reasons. Others retain a certain dignity in isolation, and we have been in a good position to recognize their talents. Do we think that in leaving the SI they have ceased being avant-garde? Yes, we do. There is, for the moment, no other organization constituted for a task of this scope.

The sentimental objections to these breaks seem to us to reflect the greatest mystification. The entire socioeconomic structure tends to make the past dominate the present, to freeze living persons, to reify them as commodities. A sentimental world in which the same sorts of tastes and relations are constantly repeated is the direct product of the economic and social world in which gestures must be repeated every day in the slavery of capitalist production. The taste for false novelty reflects its unhappy nostalgia.

The violent reactions against the SI, especially those coming from people who were previously excluded from its collective activity, are first of all a measure of the personal passion that this enterprise has been able to bring into play. Reversed into a boundless hostility, this passion has spread it about that we are loafers, Stalinists, imposters and a hundred other clever characterizations. One person claimed that the SI was a cunningly organized economic association for dealing in modern art. Others have suggested that it was rather for the purpose of dealing in drugs. Still others have declared that we have never sold any drugs since we have too great a propensity for taking them ourselves. Others go into detail about our sexual vices. Others have gotten so carried away as to denounce us as social climbers.

These attacks have long been whispered around us by the same people who publicly pretend to be unaware of our existence. But this silence is now beginning to be broken more and more frequently by sharp public critiques. The recent special issue of Poésie Nouvelle, for example, mixes several accusations of the above sort with two or three possibly sincere misunderstandings. These people characterize us as “vitalists,” despite the fact that we have made the most radical critique of the poverty of all presently permitted life; and they are so completely caught up in the world of the spectacle that when they try to relate our notion of a “situation” to something they are familiar with, they can only imagine that it must refer to some form of theatrical presentation. Last June these same neo-lettrists put on an exhibition of “supertemporal” art calling for audience participation, and wanted to include in it the SI’s antiart, particularly some of Asger Jorn’s détourned paintings. This would have amounted to putting our antiart in the context of their metaphysical system of permanent, signed spectacles, thereby attributing the ridiculous ambitions of the official art of the last century to a total attack on art itself.

Certain expressions of critical art now being used by the situationist current could be considered part of the general cultural disintegration. Not only détourned painting, but a film like Critique of Separation, for example, or the “scenic unity” evoked elsewhere in the present issue of Internationale Situationniste. The difference is that our actions within culture are all linked to the project of overthrowing this culture itself, and to the formation and development of a new organized situationist instrumentation.

Strange emissaries journey across Europe and beyond, meeting each other, bearing incredible instructions.

To the question, Why have we promoted such an impassioned regrouping in this cultural sphere whose present reality we reject? the answer is: Because culture is the center of meaning of a society without meaning. This empty culture is at the heart of an empty existence, and the reinvention of a project of transforming the world as a whole must also and first of all be posed on this terrain. To give up demanding power in culture would be to leave that power to those who now possess it.

We are quite aware that the culture to be overthrown will really fall only with the totality of the socioeconomic structure that supports it. But without waiting any longer, the Situationist International intends to confront it in its entirety, on every front, to the point of imposing an autonomous situationist control and instrumentation against those held by existing cultural authorities; that is, to the point of a state of dual power in culture.

Translated by Ken Knabb. Text from: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/adventure.html

"The undersigned, considering that each person must take a position concerning the acts that are henceforth impossible to present as the diverse deeds of individual adventures; considering that they themselves, in their places and according to their means, have the duty to intervene, not to give advice to the men who have personally decided to face such serious problems, but to ask those who judge them to not let themselves be equivocal in their words and values, declare:

"-- We respect and judge to be justified the refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people.

"-- We respect and judge to be justified the conduct of the French people who estimate it to be their duty to bring aid and protection to the oppressed Algerians in the name of the French people.

"-- The cause of the Algerian people, which contributes in a decisive fashion to the ruin of the colonial system, is the cause of all free people."

Such are the conclusions of a Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War, signed by 121 artists and intellectuals, which was published at the beginning of September [1960]. Due to actions soon thereafter taken and the first indictments made, during the course of September, 60 or 70 people1 added their names to the first list; some of these people were known to be quite far from any political radicalism. To break the movement, the government did not hesitate to resort to exceptional sanctions, announced on 28 September. While civil servants (generally in education) were suspended, all of the signatories were banned from [French] radio-television, their very names could no longer be mentioned on it, and rejected from the subsidized theaters and films normally registered by the National Center for Cinema. In addition, at this date, the maximum penalties relative to the offense recognized in this text were raised from several months to several years in prison. By taking these measures, the government admitted that it could only contain the extension of the scandal through the means of an open war against all cultural freedoms in the country. These extreme actions, moreover, appeared to have little pay-off, since more than 60 [more] names were added to the prohibited declaration after the 28th -- which adds up to at least 254 signatures -- [and] since the indictments were only handed down with great slowness.

The effect of the "Declaration of the 121," thanks to the publicity that the repression assured it in France and abroad, has been far from negligible. One saw the sheltered French intelligentsia count on a noble manifesto that summoned power to strike quickly and strongly2 against the anti-France; the sacred newspaper of the intellectual Poujade3 stigmatized (eight columns to one) "the manifesto of the pederasts"; and some old specialists of the total questioning of several "perspectives" promptly questioned themselves about their own participation in this excess and immediately did their best to divert the signatories towards a respectful petition, through which the Federation of National Education made it known that it desires that the way be ended through negotiation (one thinks here particularly of E. Morin and C. Lefort).4

In the cultural stratum, the merit of this declaration is having drawn a very clear line of separation. The signatories did not at all represent a political avant-garde, nor a coherent programme, nor even an assembly in which -- beyond this gesture -- one could approve of the majority of the individuals. But all those who, in these circumstances, have not wanted to take sides concerning the joint cause of the Algerians' liberty and [that of] the indicted intellectuals have, on the contrary, counter-signed the confession that all of their pretenses to prowl around the vicinity of any "avant-gardism" must now be greeted with laughter and scorn. Thus one is hardly surprised at having hardly seen involved in such drudgery the cretins who, several months ago, organized an anti-trial, in which their sole idea -- so as to compensate for their hideous artistic, social and intellectual deficiencies -- was that one must reject any judgment so that liberty is truly defended. Faithful to themselves, they have not judged that there was some liberty to defend in the case of the 121.

Politically, this declaration was not without use in the relative awakening of French public opinion over the last three months. The evening of 27 October, despite the dazzling sabotage by the Communists5 and the brakes applied by all of the bureaucratic unions, the youth -- college students, especially -- led the first street demonstration against the war. After years of mystifications and resignation, a certain awakening is taking place.

On 11 December, the Algerian Revolution6 -- with the intervention of the masses in the streets of Algers and Oran -- made the people who are the most resolved to be deaf hear that it was indeed "the cause of the Algerian people" as a whole. The scandal is no longer expressed by a tract written by intellectuals, but by the blood of the unarmed crowds, which still addresses itself, finally to the proletariat of France, the intervention of which can only end the war quickly and properly.

Translated from the French by NOT BORED! July 2007. Footnotes by the translator.

• 1Including Guy Debord and Michele Bernstein.
• 2Rather than be "equivocal."
• 3Pierre Poujade (1920-2003), a right-wing publisher and politician.
• 4Edgar Morin and Claude Lefort, former members of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
• 5The French Communist Party.
• 6Not just Algerian independence from France, but Algeria's independence from the global capitalist order.

One knows what the SI isn't; what terrain it elects not to occupy any longer (or only in a marginal way, in its struggles against all existing conditions). It is more difficult to say where the SI is headed, to positively characterize the situationist project. Nevertheless, one can delineate, albeit fragmentarily, certain provisional positions along its way.

Unlike the hierarchical bodies of specialists that increasingly make up the bureaucracies, the armies and even the political parties of the modern world, the SI, it will one day be seen, evinces itself as the purest form of an anti-hierarchical body of anti-specialists.

Situationist critique and construction concerns, at every level, the use value of life. Just as our conception of urbanism is a critique of urbanism; just as our experience of leisure is in fact a refusal of leisure (in the dominant sense of separation and passivity); our designation of everyday life as our field of action means a critique of everyday life, one that will have to be "radical critique accomplished, and no longer advocated or indicated" (Frankin, Programmatic Sketches), since this practical critique of everyday life must veer toward its sublation into the "everyday that has become impossible."

We do not claim to have invented extraordinary ideas within modern culture, but rather to have begun to draw attention to how extraordinary the nothingness of modern culture is. Specialists in cultural production are the ones who resign themselves most easily to their separation, and thus to their deficiency. But it is the whole of present society that cannot avoid the problem of the recuperation of its countless alienated, uncontrolled capabilities.

Abundance, as human becoming, could not be abundance of objects, even of "cultural" objects of the past or created on that model, but abundance of situations (of life, of the dimensions of life). Within the current framework of consumerist propaganda, the fundamental mystification of advertising is to associate ideas of fulfillment with objects (televisions, or garden furniture, or automobiles, etc.) and furthermore by destroying the natural link these objects may have with other objects, so as to have them above all become a material environment with "status." This imposed image of fulfillment also constitutes the explicitly terrorist nature of advertizing. Nevertheless, "fulfillment" (the moment of happiness) depends upon a global reality that involves nothing less than people in a given situation: living persons and the moment that gives them light and direction (their margin of possibility). In advertizing, objects are treated as embodying passion in a passionate way ("how changed your life will be when you own a marvelous car like this"). But anything that would be worthier of interest cannot be treated without endangering the condition of the whole: when advertizing busies itself with a real passion, this means only the advertizing of a spectacle.

The architecture still to be made must keep its distance from preoccupations with the spectacular beauty of the old monumental architecture, and must privilege topological organizations that command general participation. We will play on topophobia and create a topophilia. The situationist considers his environment and himself as plastic entities.

The new architecture shall undertake its first practical exercises with the detournment of once well-defined affective blocks of ambiance (the castle, for example). The use of detournement, in architecture as in the constructing of situations, signifies the reinvestment of products abstracted from the ends contemporary socio-economic organization gives them, and a break with the formalist wish to abstractly create the unknown. This means liberating existing desires at once, and deploying them within the new dimensions of an unknown actualization.

This is how researches toward a direct art of situations have recently and, no doubt, considerably advanced with the first outline of a basic notation of the lines of force of events within a projected situation. It is a matter of schemas, of equations in which the participants can choose which unknowns they are going to play, seriously, without spectators, and with no other goal than this game. Here, assuredly, is a prototype weapon that is effective in the struggle against alienation, useful in any event for breaking with the sad convention of libertinage; here is a first step forward along the Fourierist path of the "routes to fulfillment." It must be added that we do not affirm any desirable form or give any guarantee of fulfillment, and that these more or less precise and complete schemas can only serve as starting points, opened up by a calculated arrangement of events, for making a leap into the unknown. These schemas are, morover, an application of the situationist principle of the catapult, observed during the course of the derive of 29-31 May in Brussels and Amsterdam.

In this case, the experiment revealed that an extreme acceleration of the traversal of social space, organized temporarily and under utilitarian pretexts, has the effect of suddenly launching the subjects, at the moment the acceleration ceases, into a derive that can proceed at faster, newly-acquired speeds. Obviously the fact should not be overlooked that any experiment that may be set up on a restricted basis, despite its informational and propagandanist value — being only at the laboratory stage, at an infinitesimal point of social totality — will exhibit not only a difference in scale but also a difference in kind in relation to the future construction of life. But this laboratory is heir to all the creations of an exhausted cultural sphere, and it opens the way to their practical supersession.

Here, then, are the latest advance-posts of culture. Beyond them begins the conquest of everyday life.

Translated by Paul Hammond. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/frontier.html

The first issue of the magazine Spur (the trail), organ of the German section of the S.I., was published in Munich in August 1960, opening with a translation of the Situationist manifesto of the 17th of May [1960]. The second issue, published in November, is mostly devoted to rendering an account of the Conference in London.

●

Pinot-Gallizio and G. Melanotte were excluded from the S.I. in June [1960]. Through naivety or opportunism [arrivisme], they made contacts, then developed collaborations, in Italy, with unacceptable ideological milieus. An initial criticism (cf. Situationist News in our 4th issue in regards to the critique of Guasco, notoriously tied to the Jesuit Tapié) had not corrected their politics. The decision to exclude them has thus been taken without hearing more [from] them.

Constant, however, who had rightly denounced their conduct, was not happy with this break. He deplored, moreover, that we had to resort to the same measure some months before against the architects of the Dutch section, who had had no fear of undertaking the construction of a church. More profoundly, Constant found himself in opposition to the S.I. because he has been primarily concerned, almost exclusively, with structural questions of certain assemblies [architectural models] of unitary urbanism, so that other situationists had to recall that at the present stage of the project it was necessary to put the accent on its content (play, free creation of everyday life). Thus Constant’s theses promoted the technicians of architectural forms over any search for a global culture. And the simple equality of treatment, regarding the minimum required behaviour toward each other, appeared to him already disproportionate and severe. Thus Constant declared, in the same month of June, that because he disagreed with the discipline of the S.I., he wanted to regain his freedom in this regard, for a period that the course of the events would determine.

We replied, without any idea of hostility or demerit, that for a long time we have assured that breaks recorded by the S.I. have the meaning of a practical weapon, [and] allowed only the immediate choice between a definitive resignation or the renunciation of this form of pressure. Constant chose to quit the S.I.

●

In June, the first issue of the journal Cahier pour un paysage à inventer1 was published in Montréal. This first issue brings together around ten articles reproduced from the Internationale situationniste with texts by Patrick Straram, who is the editor, and some of his Canadian comrades. This is the first publication which openly manifests the extension of situationist propaganda onto the American continent.

●

Christian Christensen, to whom Jorn dedicated his Critique of Political Economy, died on the 10th of June 1960, in Denmark.

●

On the 20th of July a document drawn up by P. Canjuers2 and Debord on capitalism and culture was published, in France: Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program. It is a platform for discussion in the S.I.; and for linking with the revolutionary militants of the workers’ movement.

●

The museum of Silkeborg in Jutland [in Demark], which has found itself already to be the principal museum of modern art in all the Scandinavian countries, has just founded a Situationist Library. This library is itself subdivided into a pre-situationist section, bringing together all the supporting materials on the avant-garde movements since 1945, which held some role in the preparation of the situationist movement; a situationist section—properly so called—composing all the publications of the S.I.; a historical section destined to receive works on the S.I. and which, in fact, for now, accommodates only anti-situationist propaganda which has started to appear here and there. Finally—and this is probably its most interesting initiative—this library opened a section of imitations where will be kept all works imitating the achievements of any of our friends whose strange role in contemporary art is clearly not readily acknowledged, precisely because of membership in the S.I. The available diagrams indicate with scientific certainty the release dates of the [original] model and of its after-effects, which have often been almost immediate. Thus very far from the miserable discussions between “avant-gardists”, in which the situationists have never wanted to participate, the library of Silkeborg will objectively supply a yardstick of the cultural avant-garde. We do not doubt that, in the coming years, many specialist historians from Europe and America, and ultimately from Asia and Africa, will make the journey to Silkeborg with the sole end of completing and checking their research at this “Pavilion of Breteuil” of a new genre.

And we hope that the intelligent plan, elaborated by the museum of Silkeborg, to complete this library with a cinematographic annex, in which copies of any relevant film will be deposited, soon finds all the material means for its realisation.

●

At the beginning of September [1960], the S.I. received the request from the German group Radama to collectively join us by sending one or more representatives to the Conference in London, which was to meet on the 24th of this month. After hearing a report on this question, asked for from the German section, the S.I. concluded that it was not acceptable to recognise in Germany a second situationist formation independent from its first section, with a program more or less different and unknown; and this group unilaterally decided that these differences were small enough in order to join the S.I., but great enough to remain organised as a distinct group on the national level. This group was thus told that it would not be invited to the conference; and that its members could eventually join the S.I. only by means of individual membership to our German section. With the exception of one of them, who in no way may be considered because of his previous personal positions.3

●

Informed of the arrest of Alexander Trocchi in New York—considered a gangster simply because the police found him carrying three kinds of narcotics—the London Conference immediately adopted on the 27th September [1960] a resolution in his favour, which was read the following day before a public meeting at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

In execution of the mandate given to them by the Conference, three situationists signed a tract distributed on the 7th October: Hands of Alexander Trocchi.4 This text, moderate enough to be signed by those people capable of defending the freedom of artists—in the absence of more—is indeed deliberately placed on merely artistic grounds, in order to serve in this specific legal case. And it notes that this artistic status cannot be denied Alexander Trocchi “for the sole reason that he represents a new type of artist,” like all the Situationists. Besides them, this appeal has already brought together 81 names of artists, writers or critics of many countries (Great Britain, Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Israel, Denmark, Canada and the Unites States). So far only two individuals have dared to say they judge him as too compromised. Many people, who have still not communicated their response, will certainly have the opportunity of making it known before too long. We will publish here shortly the results of this affair, as well as all the details and useful commentaries on the positions taken by all sorts.

●

Interrogated on the 21st of November, in Paris, by the judicial police, for his participation in the “Declaration of the 121”, Debord responded that he immediately signed [as soon as] it had been given to him, which it turns out was not before the 29th of September, therefore on the day following the publication of the ordnances by which the Gaullist government, excessively increasing the legal sanctions incurred, challenged those who condemned it to dare to speak. Because no one had furnished him with the opportunity, he had not participated in the publication or distribution of this text. However, as the current statement seemed to be trying to isolate a small number of signatories more responsible than the others, he was obliged to add to his testimony that, due to the sole fact of having signed the aforementioned Declaration, he assumed complete responsibility for its publication and distribution, “equal to that of any one of its signatories, regardless of the personal responsibility that he wants to acknowledge”.5

●

The Central Council of the S.I., whose form and composition was decided by the London Conference, held its first session in Belgium, near Brussels, between the 4th and 6th of November.6 The Council deliberated on the undertaking of a campaign in favour of Alexander Trocchi; the conditions of the activity of Situationists in Germany (the beginning of a repression in favour of moral order which had already succeeded in condemning the student Döhl for blasphemous writing) and France; our relations with revolutionary political tendencies; the preparations for our intervention against U.N.E.S.C.O. (the publication of a questionnaire to serve in the recruitment of new members); and the publication in 1961 of a Situationist journal in English: The Situationist Times.

The Council made several important decisions concerning the organization, legal and practical, of our projected construction in urbanism. It also studied some forms of control, by the Situationists, of the atmosphere and events in isolated micro-societies.

Finally, the Council has decided to take advantage, without delay, of progress made by the S.I. and the support that it has begun to gain, to make an example of the most representative tendencies of the pseudo-leftist and conformist intelligentsia who have painstakingly organised so far the silence around us; and whose resignation in all fields begins to appear before the eyes of informed people: [i.e.,] the French journal Arguments. The Council has decided that all people who collaborate with the journal Arguments starting from January 1st, 1961, cannot be admitted under any circumstances, now or in the future, among the Situationists. The announcement of this boycott draws its force from the importance that we know the S.I. secures at least in the culture of the years ahead. Interested parties can bet, on the contrary, on the dubious company it will attract.

●

Specifically, this Edgar Morin, director of Arguments, begins to perceive that he is the butt of public contempt (which the Situationists come to officially affirm has been expressed spontaneously by many people solicited to participate in the current issue of Arguments; but discretely, which risks harming the soundness of the boycott which we imposed). After trying to meet with several Situationists—who refused without comment, or responded that he was much too late—[Morin] works to spread a smoke screen over his case. While he is obviously completely condemned for the pitiful evolution of the ex-revolutionary journal which he directs; for his complicity with the Royalist and anti-Semite Georges Mathieu (see the stupid issue no. 19 on “Art in question”); and for his crude sabotage of the movement of signatures which concerns the “Declaration of the 121” fought at this time with the great resources of the Gaullist power (cf. his article in the Observateur on the 29th September); the Morin in question spreads the rumour—always by word of mouth—that Situationists everywhere have accused him of having plagiarised an experimental film made by one of them in 1959, and only shown in France, in another film which he worked on this year.7 This rumour is absolutely false; and all the more so as anyone in the S.I., where one is habituated enough to being copied on a number of available details, has never found [it] useful to make declarations about it, even on the most striking of occasions. A Situationist (Asger Jorn) simply formulated one time the suspicion of imitation in this instance, speaking to a third person who had inaccurately warned him of the cinematographic occupations of the shady Morin. The hypothesis of Jorn’s is amply explained by what he knows of the bad faith and the impoverished hostility of this character. Besides, if Morin had to make a film, given his artistic imbecility, it would have been necessary that he copied someone, consciously or not. But this year, no problem: it was Jean Rouch who made the film.[8] 8 And Morin, obviously a specialist of distraction, has only spoken of this [in order] to use the only talent that everyone is forced to recognize in him.

Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, with help from NOT BORED!, October 2012. A section of this Situationist News, specifically the section on the exclusion of Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio and Giors Melanotte and the resignation of Constant Nieuwenhuis, was previously translated by Tom McDonough and published in the situationists and the city, Verso 2009, pp. 137-38. Text from https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/situationist-news-december-1960/

• 1Notebook for a Journey to be Invented.
• 2Pierre Canjuers was the pseudonym of Daniel Blanchard, member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.
• 3It is clear that the person referred to here, the ‘one of them, who in no way may be considered because of his previous personal positions’, is Erwin Eisch. Erwin Eisch, along with Gretel Stadler and Max Strack set up the Radama group in Germany in 1960. Eisch had been a founding member of the SPUR group in 1957. According to Raspaud’s and Voyer’s 1972 book, l’internationale situationniste: chronologie, bibliographie, protagonistes (avec un index des noms insultés), Eisch was excluded from the SI in February 1962 along with other members of SPUR. However this is false. In a letter to Heimred Prem of the SPUR group, Guy Debord wrote: ‘I understand that [Erwin] Eisch is no longer with the Spur group. At this moment, you are the only representatives of the SI in Germany and, if Eisch has been separated from you, he can no longer be counted as a situationist; and the SI is no longer interested in him.’ (Letter from Guy Debord to Heimrad Prem, 26 July 1960). Just over two weeks later, in a letter to the SPUR group, Guy Debord wrote further on Eisch: ‘It is good that [Erwin] Eisch is no longer with you because, if he is now a slightly modernist version of old monuments to dead heroes, he doesn’t deal a blow to cultural conformism: conformism deals a blow to the avant-garde that takes Eisch into its camp. The dominant conformism of today no longer believes in the Hitlerian style of art. It annexes Eisch, who immediately sells off the subversive reputation that he has obtained by participating in our scandals’ (Letter from Guy Debord to Hans-Peter Zimmer and the Spur Group, 8 August 1960). Debord’s criticism of Eisch was elaborated further in an article against so-called ‘neo’ avant-gardists in the August 1961 issue of the SI’s journal. The article, Once Again, on Decomposition, briefly described a stunt carried out by the Radama group without mentioning either the group’s name or its central figure (i.e. Eisch): ‘In Munich, in January [1961], a group of painters inspired by Max Strack arranged simultaneously for the biography, as sentimental as could be wished, and the exhibition of the complete oeuvre of Bolus Krim, a young Abstract Expressionist painter prematurely deceased — and just as imaginary. Television and the press, including almost all the German weeklies, expressed their enthusiasm for so representative a genius, until the hoax was proclaimed, leading some to call for legal proceedings against the tricksters.’ Clearly Eisch is beyond the pale. However the article is far more interesting for its elaboration of the theory of ‘cultural decomposition.’ The Radama group’s stunt is used to illustrate the SI’s criticism of the pseudo nature of the so-called ‘neo’ Dadaists and avant-gardists of the 1950s and 60s: ‘The truth is that even when they exhibit a certain sense of humour, all these inventors get quite excited, with an air of discovering the destruction of art, the reduction of a whole culture to onomatopoeia and silence like an unknown phenomenon, a new idea, and which was only waiting for them to come along. They all dig up corpses to kill them again, in a cultural no-man’s-land beyond which they can imagine nothing. Yet they are precisely the artists of today, though without seeing how. They truly express our time of obsolete ideas solemnly proclaimed to be new, the time of planned incoherence, isolation and deafness assured by the means of mass communication, higher forms of illiteracy taught in the university, scientifically guaranteed lies, and overwhelming technical power at the disposal of ruling mental incompetence.’
• 4This title is in English in the original.
• 5For more on the SI’s relations with the “Declaration of the 121,” see also the article The Minute of Truth in the same issue.
• 6For more on the new Central Council see the SI’s The Fourth SI Conference in London in the same issue.
• 7The reference to the film made by a Situationist in 1959 is Debord’s Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps, first shown on the 31st of December, 1959.
• 8The film is Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a summer), filmed by Morin, Rouch and others in the summer of 1960, first shown in October 1961.

Translator's note: This translation is a first draft, and has not been independently proofread. However, to the best of my knowledge this text has never been translated into English. Therefore I am making it available in this form with the caveat that there are likely to be mistakes in it. PLEASE APPROACH IT WITH CAUTION! Draft 0.2 (revised 5 August 2013)

Germany

“The members of the Munich group (“Spur”) follow the current of the Situationist International (leader: A. Jorn) … While Courageous in words, their progress is slowed, handicapped by their cumbersome mentality. Desires; ability : what a contrast! ”

Vernissage, October 1960.

“But what do these young Samsons intend to take the place of the corrupt order they wish to tear down? Here they look to the Situationists, a movement to which they belong. They cite the manifesto of May 17, 1960 … This is evidently some form of international group, which held a Congress (naturally an international one) in 1959. So, what is it?

“Artists,” the manifesto says, “have been completely separated from society, just as they are separated from each other by competition.” Well said! And here, our Situationists have discovered the origin of the greatest ills. In it’s place, Guy Debord and his friends imagine the creation of a “situationist culture,” which would require a “general participation” of everyone. In place of preserved objects, art would be “in community with the directly lived moment” – a universal and anonymous creation. This would imply, we suspect, “a revolution of behaviour” … There are actually many signs of growing dissatisfaction, a “crisis of culture”.

But the goals of these rebels are not so different from those of others. Before declaring the monochrome to be an unproductive polemic – are they not themselves polemicists? – the partisans of “Spur” should study the theatre of Gelsenkirchen, and the manifestos of Yves Klein. The “gouvernement de la sensibilité” is not as far away as they think from their own “situationist culture.” Only it was devised with much more precision. ”

John Anthony Thwaites, “Furious Pioneers”
(Deutsche Zeitung, 23-9-60).

“To break the impasse, this young group sees only one alternative: to renounce painting as an individualist art in favour of it’s use in a new “situationist” setting. What a monstrous word! Such manifestos are interesting as symptoms of anxiety and discomfort, they can also contain elements of the truth, but the authors are so attached to their ideas and slogans that the truth escapes them. ”

Fritz Nemitz
(Die Kultur, October 1960).

France

“In addition to the achievements of their “critical” aesthetic, the protagonists of this movement have considered in their theory a third horizon, in which painting seeks to transcend itself – where it acknowledges that it is outdated and and should be replaced by a universal, more concrete art. Doesn’t the development of technology, in effect, create new structural possibilities, not simply imaged, but practically realisable in the form of new situations? Their direct relationship with action shows that the old, seemingly lost, sense of immediacy is still there in spirit.”

François Choay.
(Arguments, No. 19, October 1960).

“Cultural research (into material and artistic forms, philosophical mechanisms and scientific truths about man and nature) involves a long and patient effort, and any break with this concept can only signal a return to barbarism …

“However, some intellectuals who are unable to integrate their vague and distorted vision – contradicted by experience – into culture, prefer to reject the culture itself rather than review their concepts or review themselves … The Situationists, who claim (in the name of working towards the society of the future) to break with the elements of culture, go so far as to reject them in order to substitute brutally “vitalist” values. Values which are sub-cultural, not even Marxist, but worse, troglodyte.

“I say worse, because here we go beyond the basest Marxism to approach outright fascism – the reaction (repeated under various pretexts) that we have known ever since Caliph Omar and the total destruction of the Library of Alexandria, right up to cultural destuction of Goering. Intending to increase its power in society, the Situationist International, like other “neo” proletarian or nationalist groups can try at times to stifle (from the outside) the natural growth of the culture, but in the end the research of those who respect knowledge will reject and punish these ignorant reactionaries, as it has rejected and punished others in the past.

“And when I consider how many offences there have been over the years as striking as Nazism, Communism or, on a smaller scale, the expression of the Situationists – which have unnecessarily destroyed so much energy – I understand why some want me to commit myself to applying some of my resources to reveal these deceptions. ”

Poésie Nouvelle, Special Issue on the SI (N° 13, October 1960).
Found in Paris, 13, rue de Mulhouse.

“Megalomaniac egotism, in the relationships between artists. leads to a thirst to overtake all others while taking care not to push yourself too hard.

As I have written and said.”

Robert Estivals, “Letter to Debord on the consequences
of megalomania …” (Grammes, No. 5).

Canada

“Well, No! I refuse to assume that there is deep thinking behind hollow words and the use of expressions without knowledge of their exact meaning … It is really necessary [to stand up when someone] kills the French language as blithely and with such assurance.

It will nevertheless one day end, with these pseudo-intellectuals of a false avant-garde who are still to show ”their wee-wee”. When one embarks on a Critique for a Construction of Situation, one is in danger of going too far, especially with a helmsman like Patrick Straram who publishes texts rejected elsewhere without asking if his little writings were rejected not because of their courage, but simply because they are insignificant and pitiful.”

Jean-Guy Pilon (Liberté 60, n° 9-10, été 1960).

“I stumble over a vocabulary at the same time scatty and already sclerotic, which still fails in any renewal of the commonplace. I note, once again, this more or less conscious desire for the intellectual safety of another scholastic system – which has the same freshness and spontaneity of terminology and context as medieval thought. ”

Clément Lockquell (Le Devoir de Montréal, 16-7-60).

“I cannot say how disappointed I was. The tone of it, the words used, call for an entire scenario to be reinvented. And this Situationist International, which calls itself an “International”… Life is too cruel for us to take it seriously. Surrealism was true, Situationism remains a construction of some cultivated minds … But we must speak clearly. Henault, Miron, Portugais, Lapointe, Dubé speak clearly. But they don’t seem to be Situationists and are in appendices to Patrick Straram’s book. We learn to separate our own personal and sexual problems from those of other people. To prefer the people … say it all, but speak clearly. Only then will we invent the scenario in which others are able to live. Our children for example.”

Jacques Godbout (Liberté 60, n° 9-10).

Translated by Ian Thompson (July 2013). From https://isinenglish.com/2013/07/13/430/

The delegates to the fourth conference of the Situationist International, being informed of the arrest in the United States of their friend Alexander Trocchi, and of his charge of use of, and traffic in drugs, declare that the Situationist International retains full confidence in Alexander Trocchi.

The conference DECLARES that Trocchi could not have, in any case, traffic in drugs; this is clearly a police provocation by which the situationists will not allow themselves to be intimidated;

AFFIRMS that drug taking is without importance;

APPOINTS Asger Jorn, Jacqueline de Jong and Guy Debord to take immediate action on behalf of Alexander Trocchi and to report upon such action to the Situationist International at the earliest moment;

CALLS in particular upon the cultural authorities of Britain and on all British intellectuals who value liberty to demand the setting free of Alexander Trocchi, who is beyond all doubt England's most intelligent creative artist today.

London, 27th September 1960

Libcom note: This appeared in English in the original.

The 4th conference of the Situationist International was held in London, at a secret address in the East End, 24-28 September 1960, seventeen months after the Munich Conference (April 1959). The situationists assembled in London were: Debord, Jacqueline de Jong, Jorn, Kotányi, Katja Lindell, Jörgen Nash, Prem, Sturm, Maurice Wyckaert and H.P. Zimmer. In fact, to ensure that the proceedings were kept well away from any contact with London journalists or artistic circles, the conference took place at the British Sailors Society hall in Limehouse, "an area famous for its criminals" (Spur #2).

The first session began on 25 September with a debate on the adoption of an order of the day on seventeen integral points, the discussion of three of which was postponed and rescheduled for a later SI debate. Asger Jorn acts as this session's chairman, a function he performs for the remainder of the conference.

The conference then hears a report by Attila Kotányi; it lasts a only few minutes but is followed by two days of discussion. For Kotányi, the SI is characterized primarily by the appropriation of resources for contructing fields of encounter. Commenting on the definitions he has proposed, he shows that the philosophical concept of dialogue and the encounter as alienation and tragedy, as attempted communication filtered negatively through its means, is an insufficient critique because "we know that, for very different reasons, these encounters don't produce themselves." The role of the void, of lost time, in possible displacements can be calculated statistically.

The lack of encounters is expressible by a concrete figure, which could characterize the historical state of the world . . . Following this analysis, our activity must undertake a practical critique of the reasons why there are no encounters (independent of any "progress" of the means of communication, for example); create bases (situationist "castles") representing an accumulation of the elements of the encounter and the dérive: more concretely, buildings of our own; and facilitate communication — permanent or otherwise — between these bases. This is the minimum requirement for the construction of situations.

Kotànyi proposes that this plan be considered within definite limits, and thus the limits of time: a planning of the time necessary for the installation of this basic network that subordinates other situationist instruments, including the devices of its propaganda and its publications.

"We are in on the greatest secret of all. We should give word to Professor Oglianof to avoid any panic."

The discussion of these perspectives leads to posing the question: “To what extent is the SI a political movement?” Various responses state that the SI is political, but not in the ordinary sense. The discussion becomes somewhat confused. Debord proposes, in order to clearly bring out the opinion of the Conference, that each person respond in writing to a questionnaire asking if he considers that there are “forces in the society that the SI can count on? What forces? In what conditions?” This questionnaire is agreed upon and filled out. The first responses express the view that the purpose of the SI is to establish a program of overall liberation and to act in accord with other forces on a social scale. (Kotányi: “To rely on what we call free.” Jorn: “We are against specialization and rationalization, but not against them as means. . . . Movements of social groups are determined by the character of their desires. We can accept other social movements only to the extent that they are moving in our direction. We are the new revolution . . . we should act with other organizations that seek the same path.”) The session is then adjourned.

At the beginning of the second session, on September 26, Heimrad Prem reads a declaration of the German section in response to the questionnaire. This very long declaration attacks the tendency in the responses read the day before to count on the existence of a revolutionary proletariat, for the signers strongly doubt the revolutionary capacities of the workers against the bureaucratic institutions that have dominated their movement. The German section considers that the SI should prepare to realize its program on its own by mobilizing the avant-garde artists, who are placed by the present society in intolerable conditions and can count only on themselves to take over the weapons of conditioning. Debord responds with a sharp critique of these positions.

An evening session returns to the examination of the German declaration. Nash speaks against it by affirming the SI's capacity to act immediately when it comes to social and political organizations. He recommends systematically organizing infiltration by clandestine situationist elements into such groups wherever it would be useful. Nash's proposal is approved in principle by everyone, with a few circumstantial reservations. The debate on the German positions, however, does not end there, returning to its nucleus: the hypothesis of the satisfied worker. Kotányi reminds the German delegates that even if since 1945 they have seen apparently passive and satisfied workers in Germany and legal strikes organized with music to divert union members, in other advanced capitalist countries “wildcat” strikes have multiplied. He adds that in his opinion they vastly underestimate the German workers themselves. Jorn responds to Prem, who has made a distinction between spiritual and material questions, that this distinction to be done away with, that it is necessary "for material values to regain a 'spiritual' importance, and for the value of spiritual capacities to be increased only through their materialization; in other words, it is necessary for the world to become artistic in the sense defined by the SI." In order to simplify the discussion, which is becoming obscure, and complicated further by certain translations (the dominant language at the conference is German), Jacqueline de Jong requests that every participant declare whether or not they approve of Jorn's statement. All are in favor of it. Debord proposes that the majority openly declare that it rejects the German theses. It is agreed that the two tendencies separately decide on their positions. The German minority withdraws to an adjoining room to deliberate. When they return Zimmer announces, in the name of his group, that they retract the preceding declaration, not because they think it unimportant, but in order not to impede present situationist activity. He concludes:

We declare that we are in complete agreement with all the acts already done by the SI, with or without us, and with those that will be done in the foreseeable future. We are also in agreement with all the ideas published by the SI. We consider the question debated today as secondary in relation to the SI’s overall development, and propose to reserve further discussion of it for the future.

Everyone agrees to this. Kotányi and Debord, however, ask that it be noted in the minutes that they do not consider that the question discussed today is secondary. The German situationists agree to delete their reference to it as such. The session is adjourned, very late at night.

While the conference proceeds... "Come in 3-12, do you read me? Come in 3-12" ... "Hey! Pay Attention!"

The fourth session, on the 27th, adopts a resolution on the imprisonment of Alexander Trocchi; and decides on what attitude to take the following night toward the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where Wyckaert is to make a public declaration in the Conference's name. Everyone is of the opinion that this circle of modernist aesthetes should be treated with contempt. With regard to the Manifesto of 17 May, approved by all, Jorn stresses that for us, "the liquidation of the world of privation, in all its forms" means that the end of privation also involves the freedom to deprive oneself, to refuse every obligatory comfort, no matter what; failing which, the disappearance of privation will introduce a new alienation.

The Conference decides to re-organize the SI by instituting a Central Council that will meet in different European cities at six to eight week intervals. Any member of the SI can participate in the affairs of this Council, which must communicate related information and decisions made to everyone immediately after each meeting; but the essential feature of this institution is that a majority of its members — named by each Conference — may make decisions on behalf of the entire organization. The federative concept of an SI founded on national autonomy, established by the influence of the Italian section at the time of the group's founding in Cosio d'Arroscia, is thus abandoned. The clarity of discussions on the SI's direction within such an organism seems preferable to the arbitrariness of an unchecked de facto centralism — inevitable in such a geographically widespread movement — as it leads to real collective action. Every year, the SI Conference, which remains the movement's highest authority, must gather all situationists together and, insofar as this is not realizable in practice, it is decided that, as soon as possible, those absent should either submit a precise mandate to the conference in writing, or nominate another situationist to represent them by proxy. Theoretical debates will usually be dealt with at the Conference, while the Council's primary role should be to ensure the development of the SI's powers. Between Conferences, however, the Central Council does have the right to admit a new section into the SI, and in this case, can invite a delegate of this section to become a Council member.

The first Council, chosen by the London Conference, is composed of members of the old Editorial Committee of the SI bulletin, plus Nash, unanimously named to represent the Scandinavian countries, and Kotányi, invited to occupy the place left vacant by the resignation of Constant.

The session concludes with the choice of where to hold the next conference. Several proposals are turned down, with the vote settled as between Berlin and Gotëborg, in Sweden. Gotëborg is the favorite.
On 28 September, the fifth session adopts a Declaration on Insanity, presented by the German section, which asserts:

As long as society as a whole is insane . . . we will by all means oppose the definition of insanity and the consequences that it may entail for members of the SI. With modern psychiatry's criteria for reason and madness being based, in the final analysis, on social success, we refuse absolutely the definition of insanity when it comes to any modern artist.

The conference adopts a resolution transferring the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism to Brussels, with Attila Kotányi named as director.

Kotányi then declares that he will concern himself with the legislative control of urbanism: "All that is currently built is built not on the ground, but on the law," and failing that, never progresses beyond the stage of maquettes. Jorn talks about establishing a new geometry, for there is an obvious relationship between Euclidian geometry and current legislation. The session ends with a few practical decisions, notably concerning the takeover of UNESCO.

At the Institute of Contemporary Arts the same evening, Maurice Wyckaert closed the conference by reading an official declaration which was, in this instance, not followed by a discussion. As Jorn pointed out to the audience, "the discussion lasted four days; everything is now clear and we are all agreed." Furthermore, the first translation made by the ICA for the evening was found to be so bad, its meaning altered so much that the situationists refused to take the floor until a completely satisfactory translation had been provided. As the SI occupied the place with enough force, and as time was visibly on their side, the ICA's officials immediately set about the task, taking around two hours. The audience began to lose its patience, especially during the last hour, but very few people left in the course of this long wait; far more walked out during Wyckaert's excellent discourse. This was because the text had finally been very well translated.

Edited from translations by Ken Knabb and Reuben Keehan. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/london.html

I should point out that what I'm about to read has already largely been discussed within the SI, and therefore that it has lost a good deal of its interest. Please excuse me for this. I'll confine myself to three proposals for "situating" the Situationist International itself within all other artistic and political problems.

Fundamentally, I ask that we consider:

a) the SI as a materially equipped encounter (which is also a passion and a denunciation), with the accent on "materially equipped";

b) that the preparatory stage for basic equipment (a stage that could be described as pre-situationist or pre-artistic, etc.) is controlled by capitalist automatism;

c) that this basic equipment is the implementation of situationist possibility.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theater.html

From what I've heard so far, I get the impression that a certain pessimism exists in the SI, and this pessimism is expressed quite strongly in the German section's declaration. Nevertheless, our Scandinavian expriments show that with an explosive force and a genuine theory of action, small groups can do far more than could be imagined in England, Germany or France. I've been collaborating with workers' cultural organizations for several years. The working class in the Scandinavian countries has achieved a notable degree of economic well-being. But they obviously don't know what cultural goal this economic well-being might serve, as this raises the question of the very meaning of life. Meanwhile, the workers consume the culture cooked up by capitalism, because it is the only culture around. Despite an awareness that this is only the product of cultural capitalism, the Left in modern democracy has a great deal of interest in organizing the distribution of this product; and naturally, has nothing to gain from real creation.

Just as the communists have organized shock troops simply to develop the possibilities of cultural consumption, it would be possible for the SI to form groups small in size but equipped with great force of penetration, to bring about possibilities for creation.

I myself was an executive in the metallurgists' union for three years. Two years ago, I assisted in a major congress of all Scandinavian union organizations. Someone at this congress pointed out that the strike fund had not been touched for ten years due to permanent full employment and a lack of strikes. Sweden had even imported 60,000 foreign workers. This fund was worth three million deutschmarks, and no-one had any idea what to do with the money. This was assembly's biggest problem.

The SI is the first organization with whom the groups I mentioned are able to collaborate in order to subvert all this. The good old system of infiltration needs to be put to use: there is no better means. I propose that we have secret members, ready to work illegally in various kinds of organizations: in cultural ministries, in UNESCO, governments, unions, newspapers, radio, television, and wherever else it's necessary.

Secrecy would rapidly give these agents far greater freedom of action than if they were to be known as official members of the SI. These methods, which, among other things, are adapted from certain anarcho-syndicalist experiments, would be very effective.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/nash.html

The 4th Conference notes that the "bureau for investigation for a unitary urbanism," opened in 1959 by the SI in Amsterdam, can no longer be maintained, the situationists who were in charge of it having had to be dismissed for engaging in reactionary activities radically opposed to the SI;

agrees to nominate other situationists to ensure the development of the research work and application of UU.

The Conference decides that the SI delegates A. Kotányi to the direction of his bureau of unitary urbanism, taking responsibility for it;

settles on Brussels as the location of the bureau's headquarters.

London, 28 September 1960.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/bureaures.html

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In an error relating to the terms of acceptance that we had communicated to them, the ICA has announced a declaration by the "International Situationism" movement.

There is no such thing as situationism. No doctrine by that name. It is a practical experiment that we call situationist — a practical experiment organized within a disciplined international movement. If you have now understood that there is no such thing as situationism, then already you have not wasted your evening. And in that case, if you understand something more, then you will leave here with a little extra.

First of all, consider that none of the works we are presently capable of producing have reached a situationist stage. We propose only that we will soon realize — collectively — the first pre-situationist ensembles. You could consider the situationist movement as a new passion with material means at its disposal. We are the new revolution. With every revolutionary of the past abandoned or led astray [détourned] by others; to whom can the task belong, if not us?

We are not interested in an artistic use for language when there are more profound artistic problems. We are interested, above all, in actions. If the chatter were to cease, the result would be at the very least the construction of cities of passion. We are capable of creating ambiances, of liberating human behaviour from boredom.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

From 24 September until today, the Fourth Conference of the Situationist International has gathered the representatives of our Belgian, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian and Swedish sections to Limehouse, in the room of the British Sailors Society. We regret that the British section has been prevented from being represented by the scandalous arrest of Alexander Trocchi in the United States.

I now come to the reading of the manifesto submitted to the Conference of the Situationist International, which was adopted unanimously.

(The manifesto that follows appeared in the preceding number of this bulletin.)

See also, in Situationist News, the Resolution of the London Conference on the imprisonment of Alexander Trocchi.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/ica.html

Translated by Fabian Tompsett and then published by the London Psychogeographical Association, 1993. PDF version below published by Unpopular Books, 1994.

Contents

• Preface to the English Edition
• Originality and Magnitude (on the system of Isou)
• Open Creation and its Enemies (below)
• Manifesto
• Commentary

The bankruptcy of the art in power becomes more evident day by day, even in the eyes of those who are its most notable connoisseurs. And, in their despair, they confound the bankruptcy of this art, in which they participate, with the metaphysical bankruptcy of all artistic practice. Thus they distort the meaning of modern experiments, which are still to be made; or which have barely begun in secret. Moreover, these connoisseurs patently bear most of the responsibility for this forced secrecy.

For example, Charles Estienne,1 when he abandoned all of the bluff of his modern art, tried to save some things from the shipwreck by laying hands on “Tachism”.2 Naturally, he was familiar with all the full-time scholars of distorted modernisation. But all of them have hidden the fact that true Tachism had already been done to death, and [even] before the invention of that label. Those who had founded the Tachist practice were already dead, and their imitators were already in the display cases. And, of course—even before one admits Wols and Pollock there—in all the museums of modern art.3

The recent critique of Curt Schweicher is fortunately more radical: he abandons even Tachism.4 There are many good things in his book Art is Dead, Long Live Art (in particular, see the 4th point of his theses), which approach Situationist positions.5 Unfortunately, all the rest is very confused. Curt Schweicher does not understand the role of the negative, which he repudiates in modern art. He does not understand the profound simplicity of all the problems that he falsely considers complex and he does not understand any better the new totality, the superior complexity which develops itself from the awareness of this simplicity—[that is to say] of the crisis of modern art. When Schweicher unilaterally condemns the illustrations that he presents to us, which are the images accidentally obtained in the wastes produced by the work of the machinist [du travail machinist], he neglects the evident fact that such objects only become artistic at the conclusion of the actual experience realised beforehand by the artists who engage in the destruction of the image. And the choice that he makes among the objects is first of all determined by his personal taste, his particular way of understanding a certain stage achieved artistically—in this case, his taste goes as far as the caricature of the average informal painting.6

The fundamental error of Schweicher resides in his belief that too many means have been invested in modern art—when in fact there are far too few.

An enormous number of pseudo-modern artists artificially invest—in order to build-up speed as artists—the resources that they draw from their bourgeois occupations (they are firstly, lawyers, publicity agents, police officers). This process forms a special economic milieu, which finds expression in a new conformism: precisely the non-aesthetic academicism that Schweicher rightly denounces. The confusion of Curt Schweicher’s ideas only reflects the real confusion of his milieu. One believes here, in a spirit of competitive free enterprise, that it is better to help a great number of “avant-garde currents”, [that are] different in their objectives—exactly like the idiots who buy-up the maximum [number] of tickets to be sure of winning the lottery. And yet, in a given moment, there exists only one possible direction for creating other artistic conditions. Moreover there are good, simple criteria for recognising, among them all, the tendency that goes in this direction: it is sole one that cannot be bought.

People sufficiently informed—even if they do not readily speak of it—already know very well that it is at present the Situationist International.

Lothar FISCHER, Heimrad PREM,

Helmut STURM, Hans-Peter ZIMMER.

This article was published as the editorial in the 2nd number of the German Situationist journal Spur, in response to the book by Curt Schweicher, Die Kunst ist tot, es lebe die Kunst [Art is dead, long live Art].7

—

Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, July 2013. Thanks to NOT BORED! for help with the translation. From https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/response-to-schweicher/

• 1Charles Estienne was an art critic who was associated with Tachism and Art Informel—see footnote 2.
• 2Tachism: Also known as ‘Lyrical Abstraction’, is considered by contemporary art criticism as a European variant or version of ‘Abstract Expressionism’ in the late 1940s and 50s. In essence an art movement that formally deployed mostly painterly methods of abstraction already developed by earlier avant-garde artists. The term was coined in the early 1950s and popularized by Michel Tapié in his 1952 book Un Art autre (note that Tapié was particularly loathed by the Situationist International as an advocate of the merely formal modernist style that had come to dominate so-called artistic avant-gardism in the 1950s). The term is derived from the French word for stain, splot or blot (tache). Tachism is often considered as a subset of ‘Art Informel’ by art critics, but also confusedly as an equivalent descriptive term.
• 3Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, better known as ‘Wols’, was a photographer and painter associated with what would become known as Tachism before his death in 1951. Jackson Pollock was perhaps the most well-known painter to be associated with ‘abstract expressionism’ in the United States.
• 4Curt Schweicher, German art critic and historian.
• 5Curt Schweicher, Die Kunst ist tot, es lebe die Kunst [Art is dead, long live Art]; published 1960. Possibly an earlier edition was published in 1953.
• 6‘Art informel’ is one of the terms used for those associated with mostly painterly abstraction in Europe in the late 1940s and 50s. Also see footnote 2.
• 7Presumably the original was in German. It is unclear who translated it into French.