ARTIFICIAL HELLS

je participe, tu participes, il participe
and CoBrA (1948– 51). The core of the group (Guy Debord and Gil
Wolman) had in the early 1950s clustered around the Romanian poet
Isidore Isou, attracted by his ambition to destroy literary language – a
tradition that Isou saw passing from Victor Hugo via Mallarmé and Tristan
Tzara to himself. In 1952 Debord and Wolman split from Isou, perceiving
his ideals to be too aesthetic; they formed the Lettriste International, whose
aim was nothing less than the transformation of everyday life. 19 For this
group (whose average age in 1952 was 23), the purpose of art was not to
produce objects but to critique the commodification of existence. In 1957,
members of the Lettriste International joined with Danish and Italian
artists to create the Situationist International. Their main activities were
spread across Paris, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, with branches in
Germany, Italy and the UK, and took the form of films, collages, discussions
and vast amounts of writing compiled into the twelve issues of their
metallic- covered journal Internationale Situationniste (I.S.), 1958– 72. The
I.S. contains images and essays, many of them anonymous or collaboratively
authored, on topics as varied as racism, the political situation in
Algeria, Spain and the Middle East, reports on SI conferences, analyses of
the first stirrings of youth revolt, and attacks on Jean- Luc Godard, the
media and spectacle. There is very little writing on art, although there are
articles on cultural revolution, and brief dissections of the group’s two
attempts to overturn exhibition formats via the ‘labyrinth’ (‘Die Welt als
Labyrinthe’, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1960) and the ‘manifestation’
(RSG- 6, at Galleri Exi, Odense, 1963).
The immediate context for the emergence of the SI is therefore characterised
primarily by an interest in literature and current affairs rather than
visual art, even if the first issue of the I.S. is preoccupied with statements
about Surrealism: the first article is titled ‘The Bitter Victory of Surrealism’
and argues that capitalism has co- opted the surrealist interest in a revolutionary
unconscious (for example in business ‘brainstorming’ sessions). 20
In the same issue, the group stated that its desire was to ‘appropriate, with
greater effectiveness, the freedom of spirit and the concrete freedom of
mores claimed by Surrealism’. 21 However, the movement rapidly diminished
in importance as a point of reference and was replaced by Dada.
Michèle Bernstein observed, ‘There was the father we hated, Surrealism.
And there was the father we loved, Dada. We were the children of both.’ 22
At the same time, the SI’s relationship to visual art was paradoxical and
fraught with contradictions. In principle, the group advocated that art
should be suppressed in order to be realised as life. In reality, the situation
was more complicated, and histories of the SI tend to be divided over the
extent to which the group can be considered to have had an early and a late
phase, on the basis of its relationship to visual art.
The first phase (1957– 62) is commonly agreed to be a period when the
group was most sympathetic to art: this period saw commercial gallery
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