UN MODE SATISFAISANT D'EXPRESSION

Un mode satisfaisant d'expression devrait livrer spontanément l'incertitude du vécu, et la certitude du réel (donc du possible, de l'avenir, du « destin ») qui s'y trouve. Il ne se fonderait donc ni sur la liberté de l'acteur ni sur le déterminisme du caractère ou du « personnage «, mais sur les degrés variables de la liberté et de la volonté, sur les défaillances de la liberté et de la volonté, sur le devenir qui déçoit et emporte la liberté et la volonté ; sur le conflit infiniment compliqué de l'aliénation et de la lutte contre l'aliénation.


Henri LEFEBVRE, La Somme et le Reste, 1959 (cité par Michèle BERNSTEIN, La Nuit, 1961 )

« THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL » (Michèle BERNSTEIN, Septembre 1964)

The Situationist International

Michèle BERNSTEIN

The Situationist International was founded in 1957 at a conference held in Italy and attended by a number of artists from several European countries. Some of them came from those avant-garde movements that had emerged around 1950 but were still almost completely unknown at that time : Cobra in northern Europe and Lettrisme in Paris.

As a start they aimed to go beyond artistic specialization — art as a separate activity — and delve beneath that whole movement of the breaking-up of language and dissolution of forms that had constituted modern art at its most authentic. It was decided that the first field of their future creativeness would embrace experiments in behavior, the construction of complete settings, moments of life freely created.

As any definition of such researches is simply another way of criticizing not only the whole of our present social life but any hierarchical social pattern at all, the situationists at the same time were rejecting the ineffectiveness and mystification of political specialization as a means of transforming the world. They claim that the creative activities initiated by them over the whole range of everyday life are the one and only basis for a new definition of the revolutionary ideal in our time.

This operation to which the situationists had committed themselves was so large in scale that the movement initially concentrated mainly on the formation of a new coherent theory of the modern world, as originally worked out in the Situationist International's reviews Internationale Situationniste (nine issues to date. P.O. Box 75-06, Paris), Situationistisk Revolution and Der Deutsche Gedanke. This theory at once sets forth — and attacks — our culture's trend towards organization of passive "spectacles" and all other aspects of the life of consumer society, outlining new counter-forms, from distortion of our artistic language — "communication containing its own criticism" — to unitary town planning "which is not a doctrine of town planning but a criticism of town planning." Our International, the IS, coming after the development both of our philosophy and of our art, at once refuses to proclaim any sort of doctrine and rejects the term "situationism" as used only by enemies of the situationist program.

The working-out of this theory goes hand in hand with the practical organization of collective activity. The situationists refuse to accept disciples ; insist on recruiting only geniuses for the avant-garde task they have set themselves ; reject any compromise and even any contact with conformism or with the repetitious mock-modernism of the culture we now have.

The situationists immediately exclude those of their number who fail in practice to maintain any of the strict positions of the group ; they have often been reproached for this as a sign that they take their own declarations too seriously. As a result the situationist label has sometimes been usurped by certain intellectuals who have been expelled from the IS or even never been members of it : e.g., the followers of Nash in Sweden, the Germans who published the magazine Spur, the Dutch Nashists grouped round the Situationist Times, or technocratic town planners in the style of the architect Constant. True situationists are much more strongly opposed to all the prevailing mechanisms of culture and information ; and so far they have carried out the main part of their work underground.

Important undertakings by the Situationist International are at the moment in course of completion. There are three books on the point of publication : Raoul Vaneigem's Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations, Guy Debord's La Société du Spectacle, Rudi Renson's L'Architecture et le Détournement. There is also the reversal of "pop-art" practiced by the painter J.V. Martin in his series of Nouvel Irréalisme, and some experimental documentary films. At the same time, the situationists flatter themselves that they influence radical minorities in certain revolutionary waves observable in Spain, the Congo, Scandinavia and Japan.

In a short space it is obviously impossible to develop any argument about situationist principles, or even to explain them with the necessary precision. The need to show their mutual interdependence and its relation to the whole forbids any summary by means of a few isolated points. Among the first intellectual groups who have so far had a chance to get to know these theses, the usual reaction is to ask if the situationists are serious, or if they are utterly mistaken and destined for unparalleled depths of stupidity. The situationists can guarantee that none of these doubts about them will be tenable in a hundred years' time.


Michèle BERNSTEIN, «The Situationist International », The Times Literary Supplement, September 1964

« WHO ARE THE SITUATIONISTS » (NASH, Septembre 1964)

Who are the Situationists ?

Jørgen NASH

The first manifestation made by the Second Situationist International after it broke away from the I.S. was a leaflet signed by Jaqueline de Jong, Ansger Elde and myself. Shortly after the group Seven Rebels was formed at Bauhaus Situationiste Drakabygget, founded in 1960 in southern Sweden. It is a situationistic centre for experiments in film, painting, décollage, urbanism, poetry, archaeology and music.

The Franco-Belgian situationists base themselves on the same principles as Pascal, Descartes, Croce and Gide. Action precedes emotion. You only begin to feel religious after you have muttered your prayers. According to Scandinavian situationist philosophy action is the result of emotion and arises out of emotion. Emotion is a primary, non-reflective intelligence; passionate thought/thinking passion. We are not saying that the French method is wrong or that it cannot be used successfully. We merely say that our two outlooks are incompatible, but they can be made to supplement one another.

The Second Situationist International is a freely organised movement. It is a voluntary association of autonomous work groups. At the moment there exist four such groups on the Hallandsåsen in the southern part of Sweden, and two more in Denmark and Finland. It also works together with the German avant-garde group SPUR in Munich, whose books have partly been published at Drakabygget ... A periodical against popes, politicians and atomic bombs called Drakabygget has been edited since 1962, with the journalist and painter Katarina Lindell as editor. The following declaration is a quotation from this magazine :

1) I promise that I shall never, personally, under any circumstances set foot in an atomic shelter. It is better to die standing with all the cultural heritage of humanity, the perpetual modification of which must be our task. The labour movement was once considered to be the salt of the earth. Today it is more like a milch cow, whose udders are being pumped in an effort to get more and more material benefits - at the expense of the mind.

2) I refuse to have anything whatsoever to do with the aristocracy of the caves, and never to drink in the company of an owner or a builder of an atomic shelter; for this subterranean aristocracy, even if it man-ages to survive the disaster, will be of the quality of sewer rats, and could in no case be considered a continuation of the human race.

3) At this point in our present situation it is not so much the thermonuclear war, but rather the threat of this war, which shows the absolute bankruptcy of all the politi-cians in the world. The capitalist or bureaucratic leaders of both east and west already make use of their bombs every day, in order to secure power for them-selves. Only if one realises that they have placed themselves beyond the law can one establish a new legality. I therefore pledge myself not to expect the necessary upheavals of society by any of the existing formations of specialized politics.

This is part of the Mutant-manifesto, signed by all the members of the movement. But as we are no missionaries, and our movement is absolutely anti-authoritarian, we don't run around forcing people to sign our manifesto. The Bauhaus production of books, booklets, lithographs and periodicals is thoroughly non-commercial. Our job is to produce then our public has to act to get hold of our publications ! ...

In the Manifesto of the Second Situationist International we wrote the « Modern industrial society has so far been organized along classical lines as developed in Greece and in Rome. During the industrial period following the French revolution there have been cycles in which all the different forms of such a method of government have been explored. This has been a valuable experience. It has shown that the enlightened autocracy of Plato and the more or less aristocratic military dictatorship which replaced legal govern-ment, as well as the various forms of democracy (including the latest edition, the so-called « people's » democracy) - that none of these have been capable of creating a form of government to meet and satisfy human needs, still less to allow life to flourish and prosper.

« The new phenomenon which has dominated industrial society from the beginning, despite some pioneer romanticism, is a growing socialization of all the means of life - which is itself the ineluctable consequence of machine techniques. By socialism we understand the inclusive principle which makes society the centre, meaning and purpose of all human activity. It is all the same whether one takes this evolution to mean progress or whether one interprets it as a growing threat to human freedom. Both attitudes amount to the same thing. Socialisation will spread in one way or another. Man can only dominate his future environment if we face this fact. We must use this knowledge to evolve the means of liberation. In order to win it is essential for us to extricate ourselves from the principle of fatalistic necessity and to regain a new potential of choice and self-determination.

« The social structure which fulfils the new conditions for freedom we have termed the situcratic order. The point of departure is the de-christianisation of Kierkegaard's philosophy of situations. This must be combined with British economic doctrine, German dialectic and French social action programmes.

« It involves a profound revision of Marx's doctrine and a complete revolution whose growth is rooted in the Scandinavian concept of culture.

« This new ideology and philosophical theory we have called situology. It is places on the principles of social democracy inasmuch as it excludes all forms of artificial privilege. It is the only existing guarantee which ensures that human life can exist in all its cultural variety and without crushing the special abilities of the individual in an anonymous society designed for the unfit. Sartre says that we should always ask what would happen if everyone acted like me. Our answer is that we should all die of boredom. We want to make it possible for man to be free to gamble his life. This can only happen if everyone is allowed to have individual freedom of action. »

Greco-Roman thinking is rooted in political and social theory. It is opposed to our own way of thinking because we believe that man as a human being, an individual stands at the centre of all worthwhile activity. Sartre's scolasticism has been called humanistic, but in fact his human being is a socio-centric creature.

There are some people who will fail to grasp the significance of the Situationist struggle. The head-on collision in which we are involved will strike them as inexplicable. But we are convinced that one day this phase will be seen as an event of primary importance for Europe: the moment before a decisive breakthrough. To those who think that a verbal battle is not worth fighting, we would like to say this : A word war is better than a world war.


Jørgen NASH, « Who are the Situationists ? », Times Literary Supplement, numéro spécial sur l'Avant-garde, September 1964, 1964.

ART and ORDERS (Asger JORN, 1964)

Asger JORN, 1964. Photographie : Børge VENGE, Ebeltoft (Lokalhistorisk Arkiv, nr. 13236).

Art and Orders
On Treason, the Mass Action of Reproduction, and the Great Artistic Mass Effect

Asger JORN


The eminent American art critic Harold Rosenberg called attention some years ago to the peculiar fact that the whole team of individualists who, as the sharpshooters of art during and after the war had raised American art to an international level, had without transition been transformed into the country's most responsible academicians and had never formed the cultural oppositional group which is called the avant-garde. These teddy-boys in Davy Crockett style had suddenly become official generals in red coats. The transitional form which the French general Lafayette had created by gathering the sharpshooters in a resistance movement which severed America from England had not come into existence, and the so-called Abstract Expressionism, which was to appear as a purely American affair, had no longer any possibility of operating as an artistically propelling factor in society.

The parallelism with conditions in Europe as regards the resistance movement against Nazism is striking. De Gaulle's tenacity in sticking to his starting-point in the French resistance movement, however communistic it might be, has shown that he is capable of doing the same in his own country as his countryman Lafayette did for the U.S.A. This is the cause of the helpless attitude which today characterizes the policy of the American and the British towards France.

The reason why I wish to emphasize this parallelism is that I belong to that part of the resistance movement which was officially declared to be treasonable after the war by the Danish Prime Minister, and that today I belong to those who spend the years following both as sharpshooters and as members of French avant-gardism, and now, by another avant-gardism, under the leadership of, amongst others, Jørgen Nash and J.J. Thorsen, in a feature-article in Politiken 14/8, I am charged with a new treason, this time against humanity as well as myself because I permit the bourgeoisie to isolate art as an elevated and admirable phenomenon. The time has now come when unique art, which today is a barely allowable luxury on the periphery of welfare, is to be definitively exterminated for the benefit of a "ritual status". In principle this ritualistic art is not anti anything at all, but as an alternative or antiposition has extreme individualism and wants to create a dialogue which as it is put so beautifully, can extend our field of cognition.

I have no doubt that this is a sincere opinion, but if this extension is to begin, it is first necessary to establish what, with this formulation, is already within the field of our experiences. What can be known beforehand about the character of this dialogue when one side of the alternative declares not to be anti anything at all ?

It means that the programme is an absolute and definitive eradication of the contrast forming the alternative. The purpose of the dialogue is ruthless war. The reason I write about this is that through the years I have created some material which, without my name being mentioned, enters into the argument in favour of this declaration of war against myself, so that the uninformed could assume that I am backing the setting up of this alternative, which I have never accepted and whose chief effects I have exposed for several years through theoretical publications because I knew that its official formulation was a necessary consequence of the historical and political development during the post-war years.

Asger JORN, Sans titre, 1964, 141 X 105, Silkeborg Kunstmuseum

It may perhaps be justly maintained that it is I who have provoked this situation. I have done so from the point of view that what raises man above the animal is his faculty to foresee an external event and provide against it at a stage at which he is not yet subject to the fatalistic destiny of these external events. The respite which in this way is given to man is in many cases extremely short, but may be extended by means of experiments, by man, as it were, playing with fire. This Promethean task, this Loke position, I have not only myself accepted, but made it a Danish item of a programme for art when, before Cobra was started, I introduced the group of "Helhesten" ('the Ghost Horse') as a Danish movement for experimental art. This name later became the programmatic name proper of Cobra. Throughout the years this experimental programme has to a higher and higher degree become opposed to the methods of Modernism. Today the point has been reached where it remains to be seen whether it can exist independently.

In his book "Kunst og Etik" ('Art and Ethics') Professor Løgstrup points out that Anglo-Saxon-Scandinavian and Continental-European philosophy have never in the course of history been so independent of and indifferent to each other as they are today. It is the widening of this gulf which, as a Scandinavian in Paris, I have witnessed during these years. Only by leaning on Bohr's complementary theory and going more and more into detail, I have been able to experience this schism without giving up either of the sides, and without splitting my mind. Today I am ready to give the French a dignified and kindly answer, consisting of the presentation of 10,000 Years of Scandinavian Folk Art in 24 volumes, each with 256 pages of wonderful illustrations, published by Det Skandinaviske Akademi for Kunstnerisk Forskning. I have accepted the fact that my time as a sharpshooter is drawing towards its close and that conditions in Scandinavia are at least as severe as in the U.S.A. I must accept the red coat of the academician, but I do so only on condition that the academy is one which permits me to expand and corroborate the perspective on which I have been working throughout my whole life, making independent a definite view of art. As such an academy did not exist, I had to found it myself.

My agreement to give up my liberty in this way is made from an extremely realistic point of view. In my triolectics I have shown that every alternative is set up in such a way that out of its elements two others can always be combined, so that in any situation and at any time there are three alternatives or contrasts among which to make a choice.

As regards myself, I long ago came to a decision concerning the alternative: free art or ritual, in my book "Guldhorn og Lykkehjul" ('Gold Horn and Wheel of Fortune') and I have very profitably collaborated with Paolo Marinotti on this very problem, which forms the programme of his international centre for art and custom (customs and rituals). The fact that he as the only person in the world, in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, who has attached the main importance to Danish art, is by no means due to my effort, but to his personal instinctive and intelligent impression that we in the North have something very significant and valuable to give the world on this very point. My knowledge that this was correct, but also my knowledge of our ignorence of the nature of this valuable contribution, has on the contrary made me extremely cautious and reserved in this collaboration.

The alternative set-up from American quarters as presented by the so-called Co-Ritus Group may seem hopelessly comical, but in coming years it will force itself upon us with a power which will terrify many people. With the 24 volumes about Scandinavian art I want to show the world that this alternative is invalid for Scandinavia, has always been so, and will remain so as long as there is anything called Scandinavian culture at all. I have not undergone for thirty years the sufferings which have caused us to be unable to set up such an alternative as is absolutely valid in other modern civilized countries in order suddenly to be involved in a pro or con which I have become resigned to ignore in ourselves. If the Scandinavians do so, we have become spiritual slaves in a conflict which we have the means to suppress.

So-called "open" art is based on two new realizations. I formulated one in the second number of "Helhesten" ('The Ghost Horse') as the conclusion of the article "Intime banaliteter", which was re-printed in the catalogue for the exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, where they wanted to award me a prize. By reading the article on "Anti-art or New Rituals" some people perhaps will understand for what I was to be used, and why I refused. In 1940 I concluded: "The spectator does not exist any more," in part inspired by Bohr's well-known thesis, in part by the fact that an art periodical of this name had ceased publication, auguring a new attitude towards art. Bohr's cognition consisted in the fact that pure objective intuition or observation was impossible, that every observation consumes the object. But this by no means justifies the identification of observation with consumption, as is done in the antagonism to which we are introduced. Pure science no longer exists on the day when we in our conceptual world desist from maintaining the possibility of a contrast between observation and consumption or use.

The other realization was worked out, but formulated only orally by the present Professor Egill Jacobsen. It was discussed, and today, imported from America, has been named the "key to 'open' art". He disclosed a wealth of poetical experiences which his father invented to animate a dull painting of a lake in a wood. I have elsewhere shown that this method is typically Scandinavian and in the Viking Age was called Husdrapa. As early as the Migration Period it came to Lombardy, where this free poetic interpretation was called Titoii and became the name of what today is called captions, especially when these are not given to the picture until they are finished, as I myself do, but as Klee also practised. If this is conceived as an artistic possibility, it is a value which perhaps nobody has utilized to the same degree as the great Swedish art historian Jonny Roosval, if we disregard purely artistic talents like Ole Sarvig.

A possibility may become a new freedom or a new compulsion. The latter is expressed by the view that one absolutely must or shall. This new artistic freedom is flow returned to us as a moral compulsion in the form: "It must be oneself who on meeting the thing is provoked to attribute something to it, i.e. to experience oneself in it regardless of whether the thing is a piece of pop art or not. It must necessarily be added: The artist has no right to put anything of himself into his art, as it prevents the spectator from completely experiencing himself. The work of art must be wholly the obedient tool of the spectator. It is the spectator who decides what the work of art is to be like. This must mean that the artist is forbidden to pretend to be the creator of his work and to sign this with his name. When the Lombards' power as an independent factor was broken in Italy by the Pope with the assistance of the French, this prohibition was adopted at the Council of Nicaea in the middle of the ninth century. By this, Arianism was also officially stamped out of the Christian church, but this did not prevent Scandinavia throughout the Middle Ages to produce more signed works than the whole of the rest of Europe, a tradition which we know from runic stones and from the gold horn.

In order to fight for a renewal it is necessary to take a stand in the present time. This standpoint characterized by the time is harmless as long as the work itself is a renewal, but the followers do not become innovators by taking over these standpoints, only by continuing the renewal of their predecessors on the basis of new standpoints. This has brought me into a false position as regards two giants in Danish cultural renewal, viz. Broby-Johansen and Poul Henningsen. Today they will probably understand that one must either in an orthodox way adopt their standpoint, but then maintain that their influence on Danish cultural life was a failure, which only made matters worse, or they must admit that what they started, or rather continued, could not be continued by us, except from completely different standpoints because the approach to the problems had changed. My teacher, Fernand Legér, raged against my standpoints as much as Axel Jørgensen, and I can by no means maintain that Antonin Artaud or André Breton ever agreed with me. But it may be stated with certainty that they would never voluntarily have submitted to being used as the foundation of the artistic programme outlined in the theory of ritual or conventional art. André Breton last winter clearly cried off here in Paris, and together with Richard Mortensen, the painter, I have declared our solidarity with him on that point.

It is maintained that various forms of "open" art today constitute a programmatic joint front yearning to obtain a ritual status and to be liberated from the enclosed, lonely position. The reverse is the case. It is the powers that be who today need an artistic status, indeed a direct economic profit into the bargain. When the description of these points of view begins with a sympathetic mention of the Beatles, the statements of the British ministers about their astonishing importance for the British economic balance as regards foreign countries should not be left out, for there's the rub: the profit of artistic reproduction.

Artists who constantly and systematically have felt it their duty to appear as popular entertainers in daily organs for information and entertainment with cheap ideas can only look silly the day they maintain that artists live an isolated life with-out contact with the masses, if, indeed, they them-selves want to be considered as artists. The fact that they will one day discover that this activity has not given them any prestige or appreciable economic status has long been known to the rest of us. If, after this blundering, they hit upon something which they maintain to be a solid basis, it is only natural that it should be subjected to a critical examination so that, apart from all platitudes, we can see where it leads. This basis is said to be the ritual. Any rite is a repetition, and if the demand for renewal is removed from art, imitation has the same value as the original. This does not prevent the fact, however, that there is always, and always must be, an original. It only makes one feel morally justified in concealing it. This right has existed as long as creative art has been working, so to say, "illegally", but then, when all the artists are dead, the history of art comes and arranges everything according to the principle of originality. In America a situation may become a happening, and John Cage can write important books about silence without mentioning the scandal in connexion with Guy Debord's film "Hurlement en faveur de Sade", which has lent the same pause effects to the film "Hiroshima, mon amour". When the latter film in a Danish literary periodical was once singled out as a proof that originality and recognition can very well go together, one could not help smiling and understand why all this talk would one day historically be characterized as derived provincialism with no function at all but to inflate things, what scholars term amplification. The fact that this amplification is an essential function in artistic effort, does not alter matters. Only 'one must avoid inflating the balloon so much that it bursts.

It is not John Cage who has invented happenings or events, as it is now termed. It is Søren Kierkegaard, though, indeed, with another label. Here we are at the fundamental problem, which we in Scandinavia cannot today venture to disregard, and which has caused me to secure such solid collaborators for the Scandinavian academy as Erik Lundberg in Sweden, Guttorm Gjessing in Norway, and P.V.Glob in Denmark, besides a good many others. In the ritual programme there is much talk of the central perspective, the centralization principle. The communication problem is mentioned as the crisis problem of our age, the fear of a spiritual display of power instead of instrumentality, and a development which does not oppose Nazism and threatens the mental health of the people. But I do not believe that the mental health of a people can be preserved if the artistic independence of the individual is disclaimed. National Socialism is a collective system based on absolute national solidarity and community. But any community must, if it is to function, have an administration. Everybody who has any knowledge of culture knows that this administration is based on and completely depends on a ritual status, and that this status has always a tendency to become more and more centralized. The peak of this ritual status is in Scandinavia the royal family and in the South the Catholic Papal Court.

If artists start experimenting with new accidental rituals, only one of two things can happen. Either the established ritual status must begin to be broken up from the inside, or this activity must be integrated as a fruitful component, a renewal of the status already established. Indeed, the experiment in Russia shows that even an apparent upheaval is very slowly adapted to the fundamental structure of the traditional status. It appears that the possibilities of variation of such a ritual status are actually much smaller than would have been supposed. We may borrow the pattern from the ritual status in a foreign culture, and this is no doubt necessary to get out of a period of stagnation, but neither the Scandinavians nor the North Americans have so far been willing to recognize the pattern which they will sooner or later inevitably fall back upon.

This free and accidental ritual-creating activity will therefore soon be over. It is too dangerous for a community to allow amateurs to fumble about with ritual experiments on a large scale. The free existential period in St.Germain lasted exactly until the professional prostitutes moved in; then it had to clear out. This will also happen to the American pop artists, who like Marie Antoinette play at democracy and instead of bread offer people giant cakes of foam rubber. The same thing happened to Majakovsky and, in a certain way, to Marinetti.

It is only necessary to think of the book "Fin de Copenhague", which has been such a great success and which could never have been planned except on the basis of Broby-Johansen's book-craft enlarged to American size, - and to compare the dates in order to understand to how high a degree Denmark and Scandinavian culture are directly involved in this whole complex of new-created problems.

Nothing new is created except on the basis of dissatisfaction with the existing state of things, that is, a critical attitude. "Fin de Copenhague" is critical of publicity. American pop art is not. It is publicity art and we need only to wait and see for whom and for what. But any novelty is in itself a critique of the established order. What then does this tendency criticize? It criticizes the personal relation to the work of art created. But if this relation is not personal, then it must be administered by others. The reason J.J. Thorsen in "Paletten" criticized the Danish government for not using my art at international exhibitions without my consent is that this national-socialization of art as well as the artist is a necessary conclusion of the tendency which it represents. The reason why, as a counter-stroke to this tendency, I have insisted that the 24 volumes about Scandinavian art be published by a private foundation, independent of mercantile as well as political dispositions, founded on the development of a much needed economic basis for Scandinavian art research, is that I have not been able to find any other durable basis to preserve the liberal attitude towards art in Scandinavia which is necessary for its continuing free growth. I think that any thoughtful person today is qualified to judge whether I have calculated the situation correctly, whether the work I have done here was loss of time or worth while.

It is no mere coincidence that American artists of today believe that they can extricate themselves from the central perspective by painting targets instead. The centralization plan has now only been freed from any unnecessary distracting encumbrance. In this connexion it is a question of the mass and of communication problems, of electronic brains and machines which can make a decision. A simple demand for linguistic soberness is sufficient to dissolve these complexes. If it is acknowledged that quantity and mass are two fundamentally different things, the former being expressed in quotas, the latter in quanta, we shall indeed see two opposite economic systems and realize that the system of value of modern industry is exclusively determined by quotas built on the value of the greatest quantity of like objects produced, while the valuation of the more and more compact mass effect characterizes politics. The result will invariably become an increasing conflict. Communication is defined by the establishment of a dialogue, or what is called a reversible situation. The telephone and the train are means of communication. The radio, the press, and art, on the whole, are not. They are irreversible, one-sided means of Communication. A piece of information only becomes a communication when it is answered by a piece of counter-information. Only then has communication been established. Art and information can only give orders. These orders can only be controlled and neutralized by counter-orders. Therefore a discussion on the radio is only a stage play. A control cannot think, cannot make decisions, however complicated it is.

It can only conclude, finish, or infer. It can never start anything at alI, make what we call a decision. Only when the consequences of this realization have been generally understood and recognized, will it be possible to start a conversation about the question of what can be done about the elementary artistic problems that open before modern man today.

In principle a feature article cannot be answered. The above is not an answer to what has been stated in "Anti-art or Rituals". It is quite another report on the same subject. There is no possibility of the two standpoints coming to an understanding. It is a choice between two alternatives, unless one does not want to commit oneself. One does not, of course, need to until the day one is forced to do so. That day will soon come; therefore I emphasize that my opinion of intelligence is that it is the ability, beyond the prejudices necessary to all of us, to be able to adopt an active attitude to a new and unexpected situation before it forces itself upon us to such a degree that we are unable to utilize it.

Perhaps it will be maintained that the critical situation mentioned here is self-created, that it is I who have provoked it all. This would, however, be an overestimation of my powers to a degree for which I cannot take the responsibility. One can accelerate certain events and in this way demonstrate what will happen later on a larger scale. Having experienced what happened before the war, I have not, however, any appreciable confidence in any essential significance of such demonstrations. It would, however, be awkward if I omitted to clarify my attitude in this matter.

Asger JORN, « Art and Orders On Treason, the Mass Action of Reproduction, and the Great Artistic Mass Effect » , Situationist Times, no.5

MIND AND SENSE (Asger JORN, 1963)

Mind and Sense - On The Principle Of Ambivalence In Nordic Husdrapa And Mind Singing

Asger Jorn

I have been asked whether there is anything Nordic in art to keep watch over, but how is it possible at all to keep watch over the Nordic in art ? A Dane has once expressed it : "Always think of it, never speak about it". For fifteen years I have turned this question over and over in my mind as to whether I should speak of Nordic art or not, for I know that this very speaking at the same time sacrifices something; is a sacrifice, perhaps, of the best, the chief element.

Thus the question of there being anything Nordic in art to keep watch over, meant to me whether or not it was better to leave everything alone. But then the politicians in Norway and Denmark demanded that we should give up our sovereignty and enter into a union of "European" states. This made the secret a burden, because foreigners do not appreciate that watch is kept over everything in Scandinavia, because it is done discreetly without words. That this discretion had even convinced our politicians, indeed, even our people, that they had nothing to answer, caused a complete change in the situation. Today the question has been reversed. Today we say : Can our art defend the Nordic against extermination ? If this is possible, we ought to mobilize it from time immemorial to the present day, for it is the only means we possess to show what we are and always have wanted to be. Even we have to sacrifice the whole of our artistic past by throwing it on the public alter, the sacrifice is not too great.

I do not know how much Scandinavian art is worth in other people's eyes on the day they really get to know it. Today it does not exist in the cosmo-political art life. It's all the same to me. The only essential thing is that people learn to understand that there is no mistaking it, that it is as it is, and that it is as we are. Thus it is not today a question of keeping watch over Nordic art, but of throwing it into the scale, of opening chests and drawers and buying our liberty by means of it.

I have started organising the publication of 21 volumes about Nordic ancient art, medieval art, and folk art, together with the most eminent specialists of Scandinavia in an international edition. I can do no more, but indeed, then a solid background will have been created for all the rest which will follow.

To keep watch over Nordic art thus actually means to keep it down and only to make it grow unnoticed underground. But why should we do so ? Because Nordic art is dangerous art - perhaps the only art which can be rightly characterized as dangerous, because it concentrates all its power in ourselves. It is not an art which concentrates on the enjoyment of the immediate emotivity of sense perceptions. Nor is it an art which speaks to the objective understanding through a clear and conscious set of symbols. The Danish author Jacob Knudsen seems to have hit upon the essential element when he says that Nordic art has mind, is the expression of the mind and influences the mind more than the senses and the understanding.

The distinction between the concepts of the mind and senses is in itself a conscious division allowing a cultivation of this distinction. In other languages, in which this division is unknown, people make shift with romantic words like feeling and sentiment. But if the mind has anything to do with sentiment, then it is, indeed, something much more radical and profound than sentimentality, something sharper and harder; a world in which only we ourselves seem to feel at home, a world which makes other afraid, indeed ourselves, too, occasionally, and not without reason. No doubt Nordic art is the only art, at any rate in Europe, which sounds the depths in the dimensions of the mind. It is an art which must be taken seriously or left alone, but which cannot be taken quite seriously because it may fluctuate from the most reckless frivolity to the most distorted, brooding melancholy, and no reasonable man can take any of these states seriously.

The artist who in this sense, since my earliest youth, has appealed most to me is Gustaf Froding. This is hardly a coincidence, for it is probably in signing and music that the Scandinavian mind has sought its strongest expression. I think also here of Grundtvig. Nothing, perhaps, gives a clearer picture of the artistic, spiritual, and Scandinavian failure of the Danish Folk High-School than the fact that singing has no longer its place there. I have myself ascertained this. When I offered to give a talk at Askov Folk High-School about this subject, my offer was rejected, because they had not the time, as they had invited an American Jazz band to entertain the students, and of course they could not miss that.

In his account of the Teuton's origins, their manners, customs and tribes, Tacitus writes that there is a kind of heroic lay from whose consonance one could augur the issue of the coming battle. This consonance is called bardilus, and Tacitus's account is probably the first report on the attempt at producing polyphonic musical harmonies. As the tones organised themselves along the rows of the warriors, the listener could decide whether there was a possibility of victory or defeat according to whether there was harmony or not. This singing, he says, is, as it were, one of valour rather than voice. Tacitus is not the only Roman historian who tells about the panic which the singing of the Teutons instilled in the Roman soldiers, and also among other narratives, in those of the victory of the Goths over the Roman armies these songs play a prominent part. Tacitus explains the technique in the following way: What they aim at most is a harsh tone and hoarse murmur, and so they put their shield before their mouths, in order to make the voice swell fuller and deeper as it echoes back. This is undeniably a somewhat more interesting explanation of the singing of the bards and of the story of the Berserkers biting their shields than the stupidities otherwise heard about them. It must lead directly to a study of the medieval English traditions of consonance in church choirs.

From English sources we know that it was the Vikings who taught Europe part-singing. This is not to be wondered at, considering the descriptions given by Tacitus and other Roman chroniclers. The chief element for the understanding of the naturalness of this Scandinavian tendency towards harmonic musical polyphony or multiplicity of meanings, is, however, to be found in the fundamental polyphony or polysemy of our linguistic expression itself, in contrast to the unambiguous and clearly oriented or, as they say, discursive character of the Latin language. This difference is clearly apparent if we compare the meaning of the concepts which in the South and in our countries are contrasted with the chaotic and absurd. In the North it is termed meaning, and in Latin usage is named sense. The dictionaries interpret these two concepts a identical. A somewhat closer analysis, however, will reveal how dangerous and mistaken such an identification must be. Meaning has something to do with mind, and is not an expression of clear sense perception like the word sense. The German say sinnvoll and wahnsinn and sinnlos. But what is sinnlos is not distracted nor what is termed nonsense, for nonsense may have mind and meaning, even several meanings, indeed become poetry, through its very symbolical ambiguity or ambivalence. What the French term sens, can have only one meaning, or, to be more precise, one direction, for sens means direction, orientation, as meaning does not. Sens denotes something objective, but nothing can have a meaning if it is not a meaning for or with oneself, that is a subjective meaning. A meaning may be implicit, a sens is to be understood, is an expression of the very understanding.

Meaning may be ambivalent. Sens may be at most equivoque. If we talk about the meaning of art, we mean its signification. If we talk about the sens of art, we mean its orientation, its direction. Harmonic polyphony is non-sens, is non-orientated, but in the highest degree has meaning. I cannot help thinking of this, when in Paris the Scandinavians' mutual aversions are so often mentioned, their reluctance to being merged in a Great Power, ad the pleasure they find in annoying, teasing and taunting each other. If a polyphonic orientation is wanted, the tones must be separated while at the same time they are interwoven, and therefore the image of the unity of Scandinavia as represented in the Middle Ages by means of the picture of interwoven strings seems to me as natural as LENIN'S LINKING TOGETHER OF THE EASTERN EUROPEAN STATES, on the Greek-Olympian principle according to which THE CHAIN IS NEVER STRONGER THAN ITS WEAKEST LINK. These two principles of union, the Scandinavian and the Byzantine, again differ fundamentally from the Roman principle, according to which the FASCES OR BUNDLE OF MUTUALLY INDEPENDENT UNITS ARE ONLY TIED TOGETHER BY ANOTHER ELEMENT WHICH FORMS A STRONG RING THAT CAN BE UNTIED AND KNOTTED AGAIN, and whose type is found again in the Stars And Stripes of the American flag. We are really here faced with three topologically basic types, three constructive methods, which mutually and absolutely exclude one another, in so precise a way that it can even be expressed mathematically, although no one can say that one type is better than another. They obtain their value just by virtue of their dissimilarity. This by no means signifies that these three principles of construction are exclusively used within each of the three cultural areas; on the contrary, the important thing is the final result. But the development of this complex has already, in an ingenious way, been treated by the founder of the modern study of the use of form in architecture and style: Erik Lundberg. As to the poetical form of ambivalence, reference may be made to William Empson's "Seven Types Of Ambiguity", and in the case of pictorial art, to my article about the "ambiguity in the interpretation of pictorial art" from 1946. As regards the view of cultural structure in general, reference may be made to the Norwegian Guttorm Gjessing's writings.

The reason why I thus maintain that our artistic tradition today is the only thing which clearly seems to be able to defend what is Nordic, then, is that I think this pictorial tradition, throughout its development, shows this Nordic special characteristic whose specific character I have defined here, and the consequences of which I have pointed out. For as a matter of fact, any structure, in order to be able to develop, is bound to a taboo which cannot be broken, a door which must never be opened, if one does not want the whole castle to tumble down in ruins and become a pile of rubble.

The French know that the DISCURSIVE SYSTEM, THE SPOOLING OR LABYRINTHINE SYSTEM, demands that one never crosses one's track, which, on the contrary, is necessary in any interweaving, where, on the other hand, the whole is unravelled if one follows the lead of the labyrinth rule. For this reason there is a fundamental contrast between Nordic and Latin pictorial tradition. In Nordic art the picture exists before the word. The word illustrates the picture, as in the husdrapa of the Viking Age, which was varying poetical improvisations on the same pictures. The pictures here are the theme. The words are the variations. In the Latin tradition things are exactly the reverse. The word is the origin. The word or concept gives the clearly established motif or idea, and pictorial art then may vary this theme as it likes in the still life or in figure studies, and then orient the style according to constantly varying fashions. In the iconographical Byzantine tradition, on the other hand, the picture has a completely invariable, absolute and untouchable, independent value, which only allows changes of the pictorial world if the world-picture of the whole community is overturned. Thus, all at once the old pictures lose all their value.

Today's question, then, is not our art itself, but the necessity of demonstrating the peculiar way in which we observe and appreciate art. The works of art reflect in their form this artistic experience, which, as such, is only a reflection of the way in which we experience and respond altogether. Unfortunately this is something which we can no longer permit ourselves to overlook, as it has opponents, but sooner or later it will become recognised.

The fact that the character of art in Scandinavia is implied in the influence of the state of mind, from laughter to weeping, from weeping to mortal rage, makes us understand how dangerous this art is, because we can be tyrannized by a cynic who has art in his power. Much has been said about this fantastic demonry. This is the reason for the severe demands on the artist to bear the responsibility of the states of mind he produces, by at any rate vouching for them, by recognising them in himself. This psychic strain in the artist is what in so many cases breaks up his mind and gives our culture this reputation for madness. It is the risk which one does not run if only one disclaims the wealth of meaning implied in perceived nonsense, that is, if one adopts the Latin form of art. This risk is still smaller in Byzantine art. But the attitude of the people cannot be changed. It is this psychic demand on artist as well as onlooker which makes the so-called expressionist art so hated among worshippers of beauty and among formalists. Johannes V. Jensen referred this tradition to shamanism ; I think he was right.

The importance of this cultivation and artistic control of the mind's wealth is perhaps most clearly seen in Swedenborg's influence of Balzac and in the literary work of Scandinavia on the whole. The reason for this is most evident in Grundtvig, who in order to maintain his Christian basis, accepted the word as the original, and only liberated the word from dead literature. The fact that this demand for a Folk High-School based on the living word failed to such a degree that Jeppe Aakjaer could pronounce the judgment: "From living men's dead speech I learnt nothing, from dead men's living speech I learnt everything. Long live the dead", this failure, as shown by my analysis, is due to the word in Scandinavia obtaining its life from music and from pictorial art, these arts here being the original ones in relation to literature. The error is that the Folk High-School has always excluded these arts from their centres. - Let others, then, advance their opinion on the matter, if, indeed, they have any.


Asger JORN, « Mind and Sense - On The Principle of Ambivalence in Nordic Husdrapa and Mind Singing », Paletten, Gothenborg 1963 & Situationist Times, No.5, 1964

GUY DEBORD AND THE PROBLEM OF THE ACCURSED (Asger JORN, 1963)

Hurlements en faveur de Sade. 1952, 1h04. Films lettristes. Voix de Gil J. Wolman, Guy-Ernest Debord, Serge Berna, Barbara Rosenthal, Jean-Isidore Isou. ; Réalisation : Guy-Ernest Debord ; Numéro de visa : 113959; Longueur : 1751 m ; Film noir & blanc

Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps. 1959, 20 minutes, 35 mm, film noir & blanc. Dansk-Fransk Experimentalfilmskompagni. Réalisation : Guy-Ernest Debord ; Chef opérateur : André Mrugalski ; Montage : Chantal Delattre ; Assistant-réalisateur : Ghislain de Marbaix ; Assistant-opérateur : Jean Harnois ; Script : Michèle Vallon ; Machiniste : Bernard Largemain; Speakers : Jean Harnois, Claude Brabant et Guy-Ernest Debord. Musique : Haendel (Thème cérémonieux des aventures) ; Delalande (Thème noble et tragique - basson en solo) ; Delalande (Allegro d'une musique de cour)

Critique de la séparation. 1961, 20 minutes, 35 mm, film noir & blanc. Dansk-Fransk Experimentalfilmskompagni. Réalisation : Guy-Ernest Debord ; Chef opérateur : André Mrugalski ; Montage : Chantal Delattre ; Assistant-opérateur : Bernard Davidson ; Script : Claude Brabant ; Machiniste : Bernard Largemain ; Speakers : Caroline Rittener et Guy-Ernst Debord. Musique : Couperin (Marche du Régiment de Champagne) ; Bodin de Boismortier (Allegro du Concerto à 5 parties en mi mineur, opus 37)

Guy Debord and the Problem of the Accursed

Asger JORN

". . . outlaws impelled by that energy springing from bad passions, alone capable of overthrowing the old world and giving back to the forces of life their creative liberty."

Alain Sergent and Claude Harmel, Histoire de l'Anarchie


"It would have been better for mankind if this man never existed." This is what The Gentlemen's Magazine wrote on the occassion of the death of Godwin, who was an inspiration to Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, William Blake, and many others, just as Proudhon is the inspiration for Courbet's painting. From this group comes a large part of modern poetry, the "plein air" school in landscape painting, Impressionism, and a whole continuous creative development whose continuation belonged and still belongs to the forces of life, constituting creative freedom itself. But such a development cannot be understood if one separates it from its solidarity with this bad passion that is "alone capable of overthrowing the old world" - the passion carried by creative rule-breakers who are cursed as such.

This state of affairs no longer is at odds with society's general attitude toward modernism. Paradoxically, the general sympathy toward modernism since the turn of the century, and especially since World War II when it was proclaimed that "the accursed artist no longer exists," represses these creative forces even more radically. The reality of social malediction is wrapped in a tranquilizing and antiseptic appearance of emptiness: the problem has disappeared ; there never was a problem. At the same time, the journalistic label of "accursed" becomes, on the contrary, an immediate valorization. It is enough to get yourself cursed, to be all the rage. And this is fairly simple, since any kind of aggression provokes curses from its victim. Thus the very principle of the accursed is altered; we rediscover the simple romantic notion of the unrecognized genius. He's the thinker whom one willingly considers as "ahead of his time," and one attempts, further, to leave him unrecognized for as brief a time as possible.


I believe that no other creative person in the world reveals to us the futility of such false explanations as does the enigmatic personality who is Guy Debord. We can already read in certain critical analyses - the most well-informed of our era - that he is considered as one of the greatest innovators in the history of cinema. Thus those who are knowledgeable in this area are able to recognize his true stature. And so we cannot claim that he is unrecognized. The hitch is between this confidential appreciation and his reputation in the world of "gentlemen," where one would like to recycle, as soon as possible, the same obituary for Debord as was used for Godwin. We must conclude from this that valorization and malediction are clearly simultaneous. Debord is of his time; he can not "be bettyer than his time ; but, at best, be his time" (Hegel). But this time has become a space where strange things happen, which are not in accordance with the simplistic idea one has of the historic instant. For us, the present is not hte instant, but is, as defined by modern physics, the moment of dialogue, the time of communication between question and answer. The problem of the accursed is circumscribed in this immeasurable space, where for some people, the answer is already given, while others don't yet know the question. The methods of our era's "instantaneous" pseudo-communication obviously do not transmit the questions and the answers of this era, but, rather, a unilateral spectacle, as the Situationists have amply shown.


Communism was the great accursed movement of the last century. After the Russian Revolution, Marxism was officially presented as the basis of society in the Eastern Bloc, and even more cursed in the West, especially in the United States. But what is the truth of thos spectacular conflict ? John Kenneth Galbraith, who spent World War II in strategic bomb administration, who is an officer in military itellegence that and has been duly awarded various honors, admits in his book The Affluent Society that modern capitalism, while still believing itself to be anti-socialist, today has latched onto a few of the more obviously Marxist dogmas, while ignoring their origin and still cursing Karl Marx. In a parallel development, one can see how Russian society, whether or not it believes itself to be Marxist, has managed to essentially curse Marx's doctrine, while honoring him. There are clean breaks between the person who formulates ideas, those who consciously appreciate his ideas and his value, and the spreading of these "outlaw" ideas, which return discreetly and anonymously to the forces of life through creative freedom.


Guy Debord's cinematic achievements give us an example whereby we can uncover the dominant method of suppression in all its complexity. Without the definite overthrow of cinematic art brought about by research during the lettrist era, of which Guy Debord's Hurlements en faveur de Sade clearly represents the acme, one can rightly wonder if films like Hiroshima mon amour could, seven years later, have been made and celebrated. But who knows? And more to the point, who can say ? Those who know it keep it quiet, so that the public at large, on a world-wide scale and including intellectuals, remains stupefied by a work considered absolutely original. Thus one does not allow oneself to recognize the subsequent regression of Resnais in the films he has made since then; such a decline is in fact typical of calculated adaptions, considering the degree of profundity allowed based on the radical creation itself. This is where the great hypocrisy necessary to the necessary to the illusion of official "modernism" sets in. A Danish literary journal Perspektiv, uses in fact the film Hiroshima mon amour as substantial proof that there is no renewal among the rebels. Renewal can only come from the heart of official production. And since the general public knows nothing of the creative efforts necessary to bring about such a work, everyone lashes out in good conscience against these bad boys who represent true originality, in order to cut them off permanently from creative activity. But for Debord, this is not possible. They don't realize that his filmic activity is only a random grasping of whatever tools are available, in order to make a specific demonstration of more general abilities. What stands to lose the most in this affair is simple the development of cinema.


Here we encounter another extremely important question: it seems that in every development there are crucial moments when a single act - a stroke of genius - completely changes the order of basic assumptions. And after such a moment, whether one likes it or not, whether one admits it or not, the conditions have changed for everyone. One could also say that this change, obviously produced by the movement of general conditions and collective activities, can only be realized in the mind of a single individual. He seems to have done nothing else during his entire life but prepare for precisely that, and nothing else. And once that act is accomplished, he has nothing else to do except to see and control its effects. It is precisely this element of control that will be denied to him, and will pass to others at the moment when, profitting from this act and exploiting its attendant power, they simultaneously acquire the means to condemn its author. This phenomenon has been so common since ancient times that in certain cultures it has even become sacred. In the end it reveals what is called "the mystery of sacrifice." Today, since we must be more civilized, we no longer literally sacrifice; we curse. There is no more mystery, and the shrewdest form of sacrifice is sanctification by praise. So it is fairly clever to place Debord at the summit of the cinematographic hierarchy. Thus, it is thought, he can no longer surpass himself; the next chapter can be written by other hopefuls, the chiselers and the amplifiers. Perhaps specialization requires such a division; it has never bothered Debord - he is entertained by it. But there are others who are less amused. I am one of them. In fact, I am hardly amused by these questions of cinema. I am not talking about films that are entertainment. I am talking about the joy of witnessing the birth of something essential, yet indefinable, that each of Guy Debord's new films brings to me. He can say rhat what is done is done, that all one can do is watch the results. This is where I sense that in the unfolding of events provoled by his perspective of general change, which surpasses by far the world of cinema, he observes many things that we overlook, and whose interest he communicates to us.


To be the great, secret inspiration of world-wide art for some ten ten years - from the silence John Cage introduced into modern music a few years after Hurlements en faveur de Sade to the craze for communicating through comic book frames taken out o context, which has become the cutting edge of new American painting - is already not so paltry. It would be possible to continue in this way, were there not an accumulation of consequences to this intransigent activity, making Debord indespensable to the new awareness of our general situation as creative creatures. This awareness becomes inevitable with the abandonment of the officially modernist and progressive attitude that hid the true state of affairs since the end of World War II. Once this mask is stripped away, Guy Debord's secret is immediately understood.


There is no such thing as a naturally "unrecognized genius," or an unacknowledged innovator. There are only those who refuse to be known through false appearances - in blatant contradiction to who they really are. Those who do not wish to be manipulated in order to appear in public in a totally unrecognizable form, and likewise alienated, reduced to the status of instruments hostile to their own cause, or impotent, in the great human comedy. We must not limit ourselves to cursing those who themselves curse, with good reason, what is proposed to them, and who are then scorned by "gentlemen" - those same "gentlemen" who elsewhere smile at anything and everything and go so far as to cite this false stoicism as proof of theit own worth. The people of taste arbitrate behind the formal pretexts; they pretend to find simply "ill-expressed" what's new, what damns them, what says they are bad. Thus in modern culture, Guy Debord is not badly known; he is known as the Bad.


Obviously it is not possible to curse something without having in mind something that is better, to which you are comparing what you reject. This is the secret of Guy Debord, who is the only one of the lettrists to have this vision, which explains all his undertakings. If you do not take this vision into account, if you rely simple on the established order to make your judgements, everything that he has created can only be understood as eccentric and bizarre - unbalanced, like so many others. The great lesson to be drawn from Guy Debord, since the Potlatch era, is frankness, that it was clearly necessary to frankly curse, in a world that was more and more faked, what deserved to be cursed: the great fundamental hypocrasies, festering for centuries, nut always used as the shaky foundations of appalling vestigial forms, which claim a long future. But all of that was merely the external effect of a much deeper exploration.


Theoretically, it would be easy for the general public to be confronted with Guy Debord's work. For example, if Hurlements en faveur de Sade were screened at all theaters in the country, this public, starting with its elite of "cinéphiles," would neither be entertained nor delighted. They would be raving mad, like the child who sees the nice piece of pie that already was making him drool thrown on the floor. These viewers might partly misunderstand this spiritual slap in the face, this tactless disciplining. But there is no doubt that it would do them good. It is here that the true problem of the accursed artist arises. This is where Debord cut through all the aesthetics of pleasantness in favor of an artistic action that provokes action, even if the action has every chance of spontaneously turning against the person who violently wrenches the spectators from their chairs, from their somnolence. Debord reveals an importance in art, which is carefully hidden in the "beaux-arts," but is scientifically and secretly manipulated in propaganda and in advertising, both commercial and political. Thus a charade was denounced: the constructed distinction between an elite art and an art that did not even claim the name, in order not to disturb the status quo, appeared in all its falseness. This way Debord and his friends envisioned culture, as the end of a prehistory, is in fact a way to envision current society. According to them and because of them, what is happening now in this culture comes from society and will return to it.


To the extent that Debord has been able to occassionally express himself on art and the self-criticism of art, his works carry the same meaning and verify my interpretation : all executed swiftly, they are like experimental jottings made during the development of the general theory of détournement. Guy Debord's callaboration in Fin de Copenhague, a small, spontaneous book written in 24 hours, has been commented on: its effects have spread with astonishing speed, in just a few months among specialists of art books and typography, both in the United States and in Europe. This widening influence has not ceased to grow. Thus the moment was ripe for our hero to write his Mémoires, which was done with the grating effect of broken glass - a book of love bound in sandpaper, which destroys your pocket as well as entire shelves in your library, a nice reminder of time past that refuses to end and distresses everyone with its obstinate presence. And yet these Mémoires were more a work of relaxation, a temporary retreat, apparently. So he hurried to write his Mémoires before beginning to appear in the world. He used them as an opening, and thus they were definitely not received with the same warmth and pleasure as greeted former agitators when they indicated through similar means that they surrendered, that they were abandoning the present. Next he undertook those curious documentaries, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Period of Time and Critique of Separation (Dansk-Fransk Eksperimentalfilmskompagni) , documents on a new world-view. Apparently they are not liked. This must be due to their time-bomb effect. Debord knows all the effects, and uses them with mastery, with no constraint. But obviously those people who see only fire, and then begin to think that they were mistaken, without being able to say exactly why, feel a certain malaise.


One is never at ease before the works of Debord. Further, this is intentional. He has never smashed a series of pianos; he leaves such bizarre behavior to the clowns who imitate him, from Yves Klein's "monochrome" paintings to the recent "Visual Art Research Group," for which a certain Le Parc proposes to invent "non-action spectators, in complete darkness, immobile, not speaking." Debord has an unplumbed subtlety. He has never been accused of a flat appearance. This is the reason for the great respect - one could even say awe - that he commands in the domain we call the artistic and cultural avant-garde.


France's role in human culture takes on an entirely different appearance, according to whether it is viewed from the outside or from within. I myself see this role from the outside, and I always see him, transhistorically, as the great exception that transforms the rules. Since the end of the war, I have not seen anyone ecept Guy Debord who, ignoring all other problems that might command attention, is concentrating exclusively, with an obsessive passion and the ability it brings, on the task of correcting the rules of the human game according to new "givens" that are imperative in our era. He is determined to carefully analyse these givens, and all the possibilities that are excluded or that open up thereafter, without any emotional attachment to a past that has given up. He demonstrates these corrections and indicates the rules he has decided to follow. He invites others who want to march in the avant-garde of this era also to follow these new rules, be he absolutely refuses to impose them throught any of the numerous means or the prestige of authority, on anyone who does not yet see their point. However, on one point he is rightly dreaded by the entire artistic milieu. He will not stand being denigrated by anyone who pretends to accept these rules but who uses them as stakes in another game - that of wordliness, in the broadest sense: being in accord with the accepted world. In such cases he is without mercy, and yet one can say that these problems of compromise or submission have arisen, sooner or later, to end nearly all his relationships. He has broken completely with these people. He has found others. This is how this man of uncommon generosity has come to figure in postar wordly mythology as the man without pity.


Finally, I will return to the paradox of the "outlaw." The exceptional person who transforms the rules excludes himself from participation in the game because he would always be the winner, since he invented the game and knows all its limits. Others can take up these rules, either by accepting their creator as the leader of the game, or by crushing him, by excluding him. This is the point where Debord rightly refuses to shoulder the full burden of absolute responsibility. The rules of his game were imposed on him by circumstances, and their complexity goes beyond his knowledge. The current Situationist movement is only the beginninf of an example of this game. By his refusal of exclusiveness and of the role of leader, Debord saves his rights to the game, as well as the very opening of the future game. In so doing, he surpasses the purely Fench conditions that set the limits of André Breton's Surrealism. Unlike the latter, the effects of Guy Debord's importance are felt everywhere, on the other side of the world, and will spread from there toward Paris, where he lives out his life unnoticed. Perhaps he has more or less chosen the difficulties of this life by doing everything necessary to continually smash any possibility of celebrity; perhaps in order to remain free in the games currently possible. Nonetheless, I believe I have justified the indiscretion I have commited with this insistent presentation. In any case, I hope so.



Originally appeared as the preface to Guy Debord's Contre le Cinema published by Institute Of Comparative Vandalism (1964). Translated by Roxanne Lapidus.

ANNONCE (Août 1964)

ANNONCE

Aucun des situationnistes n'ayant du goût pour les jardins du Palais-Royal au point de s'y promener chaque jour entre midi et une heure, c'est en écrivant à la Boîte Postale 75-06 à Paris que peuvent nous joindre les éditeurs, mécènes, producteurs de cinéma, etc., etc.

Que ce soit par pur désintéressement, ou dans l'attente des super-profits afférents à certains placements intelligents, nous n'y voyons pas d.obstacle. Il suffit de savoir que nous n'aurons à discuter en aucun cas du contenu - ou de la forme - de nos livres, revues, films, et ouvrages de toute nature, dont la liberté complète ne peut rendre de comptes qu'à l'I.S.


« Annonce », Internationale Situationniste, numéro 9, août 1964 (Comité de rédaction : Michèle BERNSTEIN, J. V. MARTIN, Jan STRIJBOSCH, Raoul VANEIGEM ; Directeur : Guy DEBORD)

Tous les textes publiés dans « INTERNATIONALE SITUATIONNISTE » peuvent être librement reproduits, traduits ou adaptés même sans indication d'origine.

LE QUESTIONNAIRE (Août 1964)

Le Questionnaire


1. Que veut dire le mot « situationniste » ?

Il définit une activité qui entend faire les situations, non les reconnaître, comme valeur explicative ou autre. Ceci à tous les niveaux de la pratique sociale, de l’histoire individuelle. Nous remplaçons la passivité existentielle par la construction des moments de la vie, le doute par l’affirmation ludique. Jusqu’à présent, les philosophes et les artistes n’ont fait qu’interpréter les situations ; il s’agit maintenant de les transformer. Puisque l’homme est le produit des situations qu’il traverse, il importe de créer des situations humaines. Puisque l’individu est défini par sa situation, il veut le pouvoir de créer des situations dignes de son désir. Dans cette perspective doivent se fondre et se réaliser la poésie (la communication comme réussite d’un langage en situation), l’appropriation de la nature, la libération sociale complète. Notre temps va remplacer la frontière fixe des situations-limites que la phénoménologie s’est complue à décrire, par la création pratique des situations ; va déplacer en permanence cette frontière avec le mouvement de l’histoire de notre réalisation. Nous voulons une phénoméno-praxis. Nous ne doutons pas que ceci sera la banalité première du mouvement de libération possible de notre temps. Que s’agit-il de mettre en situation ? À différents niveaux, ce peut être cette planète, ou l’époque (une civilisation, au sens de Burckhardt par exemple), ou un moment de la vie individuelle. Allez, la musique ! Les valeurs de la culture passée, les espoirs de réaliser la raison dans l’histoire, n’ont pas d’autre suite possible. Tout le reste se décompose. Le terme situationniste, au sens de l’I.S. est exactement le contraire de ce que l’on appelle actuellement en portugais un « situationniste », c’est-à-dire un partisan de la situation existante, là donc du salazarisme.


2. L’Internationale situationniste est-elle un mouvement politique ?

Les mots « mouvement politique » recouvrent aujourd’hui l’activité spécialisée des chefs de groupes et de partis, puisant dans la passivité organisée de leurs militants la force oppressive de leur pouvoir futur. L’I.S. ne veut rien avoir de commun avec le pouvoir hiérarchisé, sous quelque forme que ce soit. L’I.S. n’est donc ni un mouvement politique, ni une sociologie de la mystification politique. L’I.S. se propose d’être le plus haut degré de la conscience révolutionnaire internationale. C’est pourquoi elle s’efforce d’éclairer et de coordonner les gestes de refus et les signes de créativité qui définissent les nouveaux contours du prolétariat, la volonté irréductible d’émancipation. Axée sur la spontanéité des masses, une telle activité est incontestablement politique ; à moins qu’on en dénie la qualité aux agitateurs eux-mêmes. Dans la mesure où de nouveaux courants radicaux apparaissent au Japon (l’aile extrémiste du mouvement Zengakuren), au Congo, dans la clandestinité espagnole, l’I.S. leur consent un appui critique, et donc s’emploie à les aider pratiquement. Mais contre tous les « programmes transitoires » de la politique spécialisée, l’ I.S. se réfère à une révolution permanente de la vie quotidienne.


3. L’I .S. est-elle un mouvement artistique ?

Une grande part de la critique situationniste consacrée à la société de consommation consiste à montrer à quel point les artistes contemporains, en abandonnant la richesse de dépassement contenue, sinon exploitée, dans la période 1910­-1925, se condamnèrent pour la plupart à faire de l’art comme on fait des affaires. Les mouvements artistiques ne sont, depuis lors, que les retombées imaginaires d’une explosion qui n’a jamais eu lieu, qui menaçait et menace encore les structures de la société. La conscience d’un tel abandon et de ses implications contradictoires (le vide et la volonté d’un retour à la violence initiale) fait de l’I.S. le seul mouvement qui puisse, en englobant la survie de l’art dans l’art de vivre, répondre au projet de l’artiste authentique. Nous sommes des artistes par cela seulement que nous ne sommes plus des artistes : nous venons réaliser l’art.


4. L’I.S. est-elle une manifestation nihiliste ?

L’I.S. refuse le rôle, qu’on est tout prêt de lui accorder, dans le spectacle de la décomposition. L’au-delà du nihilisme passe par la décomposition du spectacle ; et c’est à quoi l’I.S. entend bien s’employer. Tout ce qui s’élabore et se construit hors d’une telle perspective n’a pas besoin de l’I.S. pour s’effondrer de soi-même ; mais il est aussi vrai que, partout dans la société de consommation, les terrains vagues de l’effondrement spontané offrent aux valeurs nouvelles un champ d’expérimentation dont l’I.S. ne peut se passer. Nous ne pouvons construire que sur les ruines du spectacle. Par ailleurs, la prévision, parfaitement fondée, d’une destruction totale oblige à ne construire jamais qu’à la lumière de la totalité.


5. Les positions situationnistes sont-elles utopiques ?

La réalité dépasse l’utopie. Entre la richesse des possibilités techniques actuelles et la pauvreté de leur usage par les dirigeants de tout ordre, il n’y a plus à jeter un pont imaginaire. Nous voulons mettre l’équipement matériel à la disposition de la créativité de tous, comme partout les masses s’efforcent de le faire dans le moment de la révolution. C’est un problème de coordination, ou de tactique, comme on voudra. Tout ce dont nous traitons est réalisable : soit immédiatement, soit à court terme, du moment que l’on commence à mettre en pratique nos méthodes de recherche, d’activité.


6. Jugez-vous nécessaire de vous appeler ainsi, des « situationnistes » ?

Dans l’ordtre existant, où la chose prend la place de l’homme, toute étiquette est compromettante. Cependant, celle que nous avons choisie porte en elle sa propre critique, fût-elle sommaire, en ce qu’elle s’oppose à celle de « situationnisme », que les autres choisissent pour nous. Elle disparaîtra d’ailleurs lorsque chacun de nous sera situationniste à part entière, et non plus prolétaire luttant pour la fin du prolétariat. Dans l’immédiat, aussi dérisoire que soit une étiquette, elle a le mérite de trancher entre l’ancienne incohérence et une exigence nouvelle. Ce qui avait le plus manqué à l’intelligence depuis quelques dizaines d’années, c’est précisément le tranchant.


7. Quelle est l’originalité des situationnistes, en tant que groupe délimité ?

Il nous semble que trois points remarquables justifient l’importance que nous nous attribuons comme groupe organisé de théoriciens et expérimentateurs. Premièrement, nous faisons, pour la première fois, une nouvelle critique, cohérente, de la société qui se développe actuellement, d’un point de vue révolutionnaire ; cette critique est profondément ancrée dans la culture et l’art de ce temps, en tient les clés (évidemment, ce travail est assez loin d’être achevé). Deuxièmement, nous pratiquons la rupture complète et définitive avec tous ceux qui nous y obligent, et en chaîne. Ceci est précieux dans une époque où les diverses sortes de résignation sont subtilement imbriquées et solidaires. Troisièmement, nous inaugurons un nouveau style de rapports avec nos « partisans » ; nous refusons absolument les disciples. Nous ne nous intéressons qu’à la participation au plus haut niveau ; et à lâcher dans le monde des gens autonomes.


8. Pourquoi ne parle-t-on pas de l’I.S. ?

On en parle assez souvent, parmi les possesseurs spécialisés de la pensée moderne en liquéfaction ; mais on en écrit très peu. Au sens le plus général, c’est parce que nous refusons le terme « situationnisme », qui serait la seule catégorie susceptible de nous introduire dans le spectacle régnant, nous y intégrant sous forme de doctrine figée contre nous-mêmes, sous forme d’idéologie au sens de Marx. Il est normal que le spectacle que nous refusons, nous refuse. On parle plus volontiers des situationnistes en tant qu’individus, pour tenter de les séparer de la contestation d’ensemble, sans laquelle, d’ailleurs, ils ne seraient même pas des individus « intéressants ». On parle des situationnistes dès qu’ils cessent de l’être (les variétés rivales de « nashisme », dans plusieurs pays, ont cette seule célébrité commune de prétendre mensongèrement à une relation quelconque avec l’I.S.). Les chiens de garde du spectacle reprennent sans le dire des fragments de théorie situationniste, pour la retourner contre nous. Ils s’en inspirent, comme il est normal, dans leur lutte pour la survie du spectacle. Il leur faut donc cacher la source, c’est-à-dire la cohérence de telles « idées ». Ce n’est pas seulement par vanité de plagiaire. De plus, bien des intellectuels hésitants n’osent parler ouvertement de l’I.S., parce qu’en parler implique une prise de parti minimum : dire nettement ce que l’on refuse, en contrepartie de ce que l’on en retient. Beaucoup croient, bien à tort, que feindre en attendant l’ignorance aura dégagé leur responsabilité pour plus tard.


9. Quel appui donnez-vous au mouvement révolutionnaire ?

Par malheur, il n’y en a pas. La société contient, certes, des contradictions, et change. Ce qui rend, d’une façon toujours nouvelle, possible et nécessaire une activité révolutionnaire qui, actuellement, n’existe plus, ou pas encore, sous forme de mouvement organisé. Il ne s’agit donc pas d’« appuyer » un tel mouvement, mais de le faire : de le définir et, inséparablement, de l’expérimenter. Dire qu’il n’y a pas de mouvement révolutionnaire est le premier geste, indispensable, en faveur d’un tel mouvement. Tout le reste est replâtrage dérisoire du passé.


10. Êtes-vous marxistes ?

Bien autant que Marx disant « Je ne suis pas marxiste ».


11. Y a-t-il un rapport entre vos théories est votre mode de vie réel ?
Nos théories ne sont rien d’autre que la théorie de notre vie réelle, et du possible expérimenté ou aperçu en elle. Aussi parcellaires que soient, jusqu’à nouvel ordre, les champs d’activité disponibles, nous nous y comportons pour le mieux. Nous traitons l’ennemi en ennemi, c’est un premier pas que nous recommandons à tout le monde, comme apprentissage accéléré de la pensée. Par ailleurs, il va de soi que nous soutenons inconditionnellement toutes les formes de la liberté des mœurs, tout ce que la canaille bourgeoise ou bureaucratique appelle débauche. Il est évidemment exclu que nous préparions par l’ascétisme la révolution de la vie quotidienne.


12. Les situationnistes sont-ils à l’avant-garde de la société des loisirs ?

La société des loisirs est une apparence qui recouvre un certain type de production-consommation de l’espace-temps social. Si le temps du travail productif propremment dit se réduit, l’armée de réserve de la vie industrielle va travailler dans la consommation. Tout le monde est successivement ouvrier et matière première dans l’industrie des vacances, des loisirs, du spectacle. Le travail existant est l’alpha et l’oméga de la vie existante. L’organisation de la consommation, plus l’organisation des loisirs, doit équilibrer exactement l’organisation du travail. Le « temps libre » est une mesure ironique dans le cours d’un temps préfabriqué. Rigoureusement, ce travail ne pourra donner que ce loisir, tant pour l’élite oisive — en fait, de plus en plus, semi oisive — que pour les masses qui accèdent aux loisirs momentanés. Aucune barrière de plomb ne peut isoler, ni un morceau du temps, ni le temps complet d’un morceau de la société, de la radioactivité que diffuse le travail aliéné ; ne serait-ce qu’en ce sens que c’est lui qui façonne la totalité des produits, et de la vie sociale, ainsi et pas autrement.


13. Qui vous finance ?

Nous n’avons jamais pu être financés, d’une manière extrêmement précaire, que par notre propre emploi dans l’économie culturelle de l’époque. Cet emploi est soumis à cette contradiction : nous avons de telles capacités créatives que nous pouvons « réussir » tout presque à coup sûr ; nous avons une exigence si rigoureuse d’indépendance et de parfaite cohérence entre notre projet et chacune de nos réalisations présentes (cf. notre définition d’une production artistique anti-situationniste) que nous sommes presque totalement inacceptables pour l’organisation dominante de la culture, même dans des affaires très secondaires. L’état de nos ressources découle de cette composante. Voir, à ce propos, ce que nous avons écrit dans le numéro 8 de cette revue (page 26) sur « les capitaux qui ne manqueront jamais aux entreprises nashistes » et, à l’inverse, nos conditions (dernière page de cette revue).


14. Combien êtes-vous ?

Un peu plus que le noyau initial de guérilla dans la Sierra Maestra, mais avec moins d’armes. Un peu moins que les délégués qui étaient à Londres en 1864, pour fonder l’Association Internationale des Travailleurs, mais avec un programme plus cohérent. Aussi fermes que les Grecs des Thermopyles (« Passant, va dire à Lacédémone… »), mais avec un plus bel avenir.


15. Quelle valeur pouvez-vous attribuer à un questionnaire ? À celui-ci ?

Il s’agit manifestement d’une forme de dialogue factice, devenant aujourd’hui obsessionnelle avec toutes les psychotechniques de l’intégration au spectacle (la passivité joyeusement assumée sous un déguisement grossier de « participation », d’activité en peau de lapin). Mais nous, nous pouvons soutenir, à partir d’une interrogation incohérente, réifiée, des positions exactes. En fait, ces positions ne « répondent » pas, en ceci qu’elles ne renvoient pas aux questions ; elles renvoient les questions. Ce sont des réponses telles qu’elles devraient transformer les questions. Ainsi le véritable dialogue pourrait commencer après ces réponses. Dans le présent questionnaire, toutes les questions sont fausses ; et nos réponses vraies cependant.


« Le Questionnaire », Internationale Situationniste, numéro 9, août 1964 (Comité de rédaction : Michèle BERNSTEIN, J. V. MARTIN, Jan STRIJBOSCH, Raoul VANEIGEM ; Directeur : Guy DEBORD)

Tous les textes publiés dans « INTERNATIONALE SITUATIONNISTE » peuvent être librement reproduits, traduits ou adaptés même sans indication d'origine.

HOMO LUDENS (Else STEEN HANSEN, 1963)

J.V. MARTIN, Au second jour on prévoit 82 millions de morts, cartographie thermonucléaire, 1963

Homo Ludens


Såfremt ordet avantgarde skal bekræfte en virkelig nyskabende gruppe eller bevægelse, kan det ikke anvendes bedre end på den bevægelse, en række kunstnere fra alverdens lande har samlet sig i og kalder for Situationistisk Internationale.

Vendt mod det sterile samfund sætter de legen, det skabende menneskes leg, i højsædet og tager sig endog tid til at skabe en række teser for funktionen af det legende menneskes, eller som de selv ønsker at kalde det, det situationistiske samfund. Situationisterne betegner det nuværende samfund med tre punkter: Passive tilskuere, isolation og jeg'ets opgivelse. Kun disse tre punkters direkte modsætninger kan situationisterne anerkende som et virkeligt helhedssamfund : Aktive deltagere, kontakt og jeg'ets realisering.

På et tidspunkt, hvor Dadabevægelsen fra tyverne selv er gået hen og blevet en kulturel mode, og hvor neodadaisterne taler om at oplade f. eks. Marcel Duchamp's samfundsbenægtende værker med positivitet (æstetisk), mener situationisterne, at uanset hvad man for dem vil holde frem som positivitet i vort samfund, da kan det kun medføre en opladning af negativiteten hos dem, i deres samfundsbenægtende værker. Skønt f. eks. Tristan Tzara og medarbejdere klart kunne påvise det politiske livs syfilis, kunne vende satirens projekter mod det, der måtte og skulle ødelægges, så kunne de dog ikke fremkomme med et alternativ til den eksisterende samfundsorden. Hvad skulle man gøre efter at have malet overskæg på Mona Lisa ? - ønskede man virkelig, at Djengis Khan skulle opstalde sine heste i Louvre ? - Og hvad så ?

Ved dette punkt sker situationisternes overskridelse af ikke blot dadaisterne men også surrealisterne. Deres teorier, hvori det går igen, at intet må dominere mennesket, er af det italienske tidsskrift "Nuova Presenza" blevet betegnet som "virkelige værdier i kampen mod teknokraternes totalitarisme og den forstenede ideologi hos stalinisterne og socialismens bureaukrater. Andre tidsskrifter og blade har anvendt betegnelser som bl. a. "socio-kulturelle kosmonauter" - "læderjakkernes teoretiker" og "et mareridt, kulturens søvn ikke kommer over". Jovist er det revolutionære kunstnere, de viger ikke tilbage for at iscenesætte politiske eller kunstneriske skandaler. De spiller et spil mod magthaverne, og i puljen er menneskets ret til frit at konstruere sit eget liv. De skaber teorier for en byplanlægning, de kalder den unitære urbanisme, hvilket vil sige en teori for en planmæssig anvendelse af kunst og teknik, der kan bidrage til en fuldstændig konstruktion af et milieu i dynamisk forbindelse med erfaringerne om adfærd. Sagt på en anden måde, skulle omgivelserne komme til at passe til mennesket, ligesom vandet passer til fiskene. De eksluderer omgående deres egne, såfremt disse vil gøre sig til talsmænd for, at deres bevægelse skal føre en moderat og reformistisk kurs. Således f. eks. den tyske kunstnergruppe SPUR og den danske digter Jørgen Nash. Under processen i München blev den tyske kunstner Uwe Lausen idømt tre ugers fængsel for sin deltagelse i Situationistisk Internationales daværende tidsskrift SPUR. - I modsætning til de øvrige dømte kunstnere måtte Uwe Lausen afsone sin straf. Som medlem af bevægelsens centralråd havde de tyske dommere måske fundet ham uforbederlig. Med eksklusionen af Jørgen Nash flyttedes situationisternes center i Skandinavien til den danske ødegård "Kristinelyst" ved Randers, hvorfra de udsender tidsskriftet "Situationistisk Revolution".

Deres seneste manifestation fandt sted i Danmark og indebar i sig både en politisk og kunstnerisk skandale. Manifestationen havde fået navnet Destruktion af RSG-6 og var en hyldest til de anonyme englændere, der for menneskets skyld og under navnet Spies for Peace havde afsløret og distribueret den engelske regerings planer for en atombombesikker regeringsbunker kaldet RSG-6.

Galleriet havde de delt op i tre sektioner, hvoraf den første var udstyret som en atombunker. Her fandtes alt det, der skulle være en forudsætning for en periodisk opretholdelse af "livet" - uhyggeligt og deprimerende virkede det på publikum at mærke lysets svigten, sireners uafbrudte hylen, kvindelig på brikse og to assistenter i atomdragter uddele "den sidste pille". Man ville slå hårdt - og gjorde det.

I næste sektion fik publikum lejlighed til at afreagere gennem opkvikning. Her var placeret fotografier af politiske ledere, der er parate til at tage ansvaret for en atomkrig. Med rifler skød publikum på disse fotografier, og situationisterne vendte derved publikum om fra at være passive tilskuere til at blive aktive deltagere.

I galleriets tredie sektion, den kunstneriske sektion, fik de aktive deltagere en cocktail, åbenbart en skærende kontrast til "den sidste pille", som udleveredes i galleriets første sektion, de stod som fællesnævner for det nuværende samfund. Her fandtes den franske filminstruktør G. E. Debord's overmaling af et billede af Pinot-Gallizio. Med tydelig skrift havde Debord på dette billede, som situationisterne fandt umeddeleligt, skrevet : FJERN ALT FREMMEDGØRENDE ARBEJDE. - Billedet, der repræsenterede en pengemæssig værdi af 6.000 kroner, solgte situationisterne efter overmalingen for kun 300 kr.

Når man har bemærket den møjsommelige søgen, der i de senere år har fundet sted efter en nyfiguration i maleriet, må man konstatere, at situationisternes talsmand i Skandinavien, kunstneren J. V. Martin, med et slag har sat sig udover denne søgen ved på udstillingen at præsentere en billedserie kaldet "Termonukleære kartografier". Gennem en forening af actionpaintings frieste fremgangsmåder med gengivelser af forskellige dele af verden på forskellige tidspunkter af "tredie verdenskrig" har han skabt billeder, der gør krav på at være fuldkommen realistiske. Hans behandling af materialerne sker med en utilladelig frækhed. Disse søndersprængte relief-landkort er fyldt op med gammel brændt ost, hår, jern, slim og mug der stadig vokser på disse arbejder. Processen er stadig under udvikling. Kædereaktion ? - men i det skuespil vi lever i, skuespillet om den tredie verdenskrig, er nægtelsen og den "black humour", der kendtes under skuespillet om første verdenskrig, nu kommet igen. Denne gang i en meget stærk og avanceret form.

Med et krav om kunstnerisk frihed til at gøde lige hvad der faldt hende ind, viste den franske kunstnerinde Michèle Bernstein en række billeder, hvori hun, med en hårdt tiltrængt fornyelse af bataljemaleriet vendte hele verdenshistoriens gang på hovedet. Billederne havde fællesbetegnelsen "SEJRE" og vendte alle de nederlag, revolutionære folkerejsninger har måttet gennemgå, til sejr. Denne serie "SEJRE" fortsætter den ubetinget optimistiske drejning, hvormed Lautréamont allerede med en fanden i voldsk frejdighed har nedlagt påstand om dokumentfalsk over alle ulykkens former, og dens logik :

"Jeg accepterer ikke det onde. Mennesket er fuldkomment. Ånden falder ikke. Fremskridtet eksisterer ... Indtil nu har man skildret ulykken for at indgyde rædsel, medlidenhed. Jeg vil skildre lykken for at fremkalde disse tings modsætninger...Såvel som mine venner ikke dør, taler jeg ikke om døden."



Else STEEN HANSEN, « Homo Ludens », Konstrevy nr. 5/6, Stockholm, 1963