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Internationaleries 21
Rooskens, Eugene Brands, Lucebert (Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk), Lotti
van der Gaag (Charlotte van der Gaag), Theo Wolvecamp, and Jan Nieuwenhuys
from the Netherlands; Shinkichi Tajiro from the United States;
Stephen Gilbert and William Gear from Scotland; Karl Otto Goetz from
Germany; and Max Walter Svanberg from Sweden.
In a similar vein, the members of the Lettrist International were
active between 1952 and 1957. LI was a rebellious fraction formed out of
departing members of the Lettrist group. 23 Formed around a small, yet very
consistent number of members working in Paris they were, contrary to
Rosenberg’s complaint, truly international and included Guy Debord, Gill
J. Wolman, Michele Bernstein, Andre-Frank Conord, Jacques Fillon, Gilles
Ivain (Ivan Chtcheglov), Moustapha Khayatti, and Mohamed Dahou. From
the very start their practice appropriated a critical reading of “everyday life”
(le quotidien) taken from Henri Lefebvre’s writings. They used this concept
to focus their activity on various “modes of conditioning,” while conceiving
of their practice as a highly sophisticated tactical, rather than strategic,
game 24 whose goal was achieving nothing less than a “permanent cultural
revolution.” 25
The third group, Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus
Imaginiste, or the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (MIBI),
was active from 1953 through 1957 and formed as a collaboration between
some CoBrA artists including Dotremont, Constant, and Jorn, but at various
times also incorporated members from the Nuclear Movement (Il Movimento
Nucleare) such as Enrico Baj, 26 as well as LI members such as Debord, Wolman,
and Dahou. They were joined by musicians, philosophers, architects,
and sometimes simply amateurs from Italy, such as Giuseppe-Pinot Gallizio,
Ettore Sottsas Jr., Pierro Simondi, and Elena Verrone, but also by Prvoslav
Radu from Romania, Jan Kotik from Czechoslovakia, and Echauren Matta
from Cuba. MIBI was responsible for the creation of the First Laboratory of
the Imaginist Experimental Art in Albisola, and for staging the First Congress
of Free Artists in 1956 that led to the UniWcation Congress and the
formation of the Situationist International in 1957.
The SI was active from 1957 through 1972. Of all the internationaleries
the SI has had the most long-lasting inXuence, which is being
revisited today among younger artists, activists, and cultural critics. Extremely
active in getting its ideas into print between 1957 and 1969, the SI published
a journal under the same name, Internationale Situationniste, while various
other SI factions published Spur, Situationist Times, Deutsche Denke, and
Situationiske Revolution, to mention but a few of the highly developed if shortlived
journals that advanced ideas about artistic practice as a purely tactical
game. Accordingly, their grotesque critique of various forms of “spectacular”