Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

10. Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics:
Cartographies of Art in the World
BRIAN HOLMES
What interests us in the image is not its function as a representation
of reality, but its dynamic potential, its capacity to elicit
and construct projections, interactions, narrative frames. . . .
devices for constructing reality.
—Franco Berardi “Bifo,” L’immagine dispositivo
Vanguard art, in the twentieth century, began with the problem
of its own overcoming—whether in the destructive, Dadaist mode, which
sought to tear apart the entire repertory of inherited forms and dissolve the
very structures of the bourgeois ego, or in the expansive, constructivist mode,
which sought to infuse architecture, design, and the nascent mass media
with a new dynamics of social purpose and a multiperspectival intelligence
of political dialogue. Though both positions were committed to an irrepressible
excess over the traditional genres of painting and sculpture, still they
appeared as polar opposites; and they continued at ideological odds with
each other throughout the Wrst half of the century, despite zones of enigmatic
or secret transaction (Schwitters, Van Doesburg, etc.). But after the war, the
extraordinarily wide network of revolutionary European artists that brieXy
coalesced, around 1960, into the Situationist International (SI), brought a
decisive new twist to the Dada/constructivist relation. With their practice
of “hijacking” commercial images (détournement), with their cartographies
of urban drifting (dérive), and above all with their aspiration to create the
“higher games” of “constructed situations,” the SI sought to subversively
project a speciWcally artistic competence into the Weld of potentially active
reception constituted by daily life in the consumer societies.
The Wrebrand career of the Situationist International as an artists’
collective is overshadowed by the political analysis of the Society of the Spectacle,
a work that deliberately attempted to maximize the antagonism between
the radical aesthetics of everyday life and the delusions purveyed, every day,
by the professionalized, capital-intensive media. The SI Wnally foundered over
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