Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

Internationaleries 29
of the fourth and Wnal group discussed in this chapter, the Situationist International.
The SI reached its peak in the sixties, but continued on into the
early 1970s. More theoretically poised than the LI, the SI was also more orientated
toward radical politics. Their substantial work in cinema, graphics,
theory, and publishing is today highly inXuential and increasingly studied. 50
Certainly from the perspective of the grotesque the group’s détourned movies
are exemplary. Seeking to undermine the usual mimetic experience of viewing
cinema they destroyed the mirror-like, imaginary identiWcation viewers
typically have with the Wlmic image. However, it was the SI members’ many
experiments in publishing that most clearly express their approach to collective
practice. Collaborative works such as Fin de Copenhague in which
Asger Jorn and Guy Debord exchange artistic ideas are what we would call
today “artist’s books.” Self-published in a limited edition, Fin de Copenhague
consisted of two hundred printed copies and bore the unmistaken imprint
of a rough, samizdat publication including irregularly Wnished pages, uneven
coloration, and assorted other imperfections typical of non-mass-produced
objects. Even its title acknowledged a grotesque experiment by invoking
the idea of “ends” as well as “means” and further mocking the bureaucratic
mystiWcation of everyday life. In addition, just as in their Wlms, Fin de Copenhague
was a pilfered assemblage of cut-out materials appropriated from Danish
newspapers, French advertising commercials, city maps, comic pages,
and various stolen sentences pulled out of their original context including
especially various political slogans of the day. SigniWcantly, in keeping with
other aspects of their practice, the book was also freely distributed.
As has been widely acknowledged, the most important “grotescoserious”
experimental tool of the SI was without doubt their journal, the
Internationale Situationniste. The journal’s twelve issues between 1958 and
1969 were “luxuriously produced,” and not without ample reference to
avant-garde and constructivist aesthetics. However, instead of the primary
colors associated with Kalte Kunst, the journal displayed glowing metallic
covers in blue and pink, gold and silver, thus ironically framing the “new
machine age.” The magazine’s initial layout also included photographs of
the members with misplaced captions and judiciously peppered photographs
of pinups girls in raincoats standing either on beaches or resting supine on
the backs of horses. This visual diffusion functioned as an obvious parody of
Playboy magazine, which had recently been launched in 1953. It mocked
the new magazine’s thinly veiled treatment of sexual desire as a product of
political economy. 51 Inside, its pages contained detailed diagrams of modern
cities, assorted maps of an unknown, dystopic suburbia, as well as a line
drawing of an apparatus for generating a “Gaussian distribution” of drifting
paths. 52