ARTIFICIAL HELLS

je participe, tu participes, il participe
embody a de- hierarchised collective consensus, the constructed situation
necessitated a clear structure, headed by a temporary but clearly defined
leader, who would organise the situation’s viveurs (those who live it).
While today single authorship is perceived negatively, as hierarchical, the
SI largely avoided such criticism through their lack of interest in working
with a general audience. The group seemed to focus only on producing
situations with other members – an exclusiveness that matched Debord’s
increasingly hard- line membership policy.
The SI’s only notable attempt to construct a series of situations for a
broader public seems to have been the unrealised exhibition ‘Die Welt als
Labyrinth’ planned for the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in May 1960. 44
This project would have combined a three- day dérive within the centre of
Amsterdam with a micro- dérive (between 200m and 3km in length) within
two galleries of the museum, essentially an installation comprising a system
of artificial fog, rain and wind, sound interventions and a tunnel of Pinot-
Gallizio’s industrial painting. The outdoor dérive was to have involved two
groups, each comprising three Situationists, linked by walkie- talkie,
wandering the city and occasionally following instructions to particular
places prepared by the dérive’s director, Constant. Significantly, the I.S.
journal makes no mention of including the public in the Amsterdam dérive
– only of its desire to damage the institution’s budget by demanding a daily
salary of fifty florins a day for the Situationists undertaking it. However, the
group also note that the dérive would have ‘a certain theatrical aspect by its
effect on the public’; this presumably alludes to the visual spectacle of the
group moving around the city, but the point is not elaborated. Even so, it
suggests a fruitful comparison to the visual theatre of the Dada Season
thirty- nine years earlier (discussed in Chapter 2), in which Breton and
others had appropriated the social form of the guided tour to produce a
‘social sculpture’ with the general public in the churchyard of Saint Julienle-Pauvre.
II. GRAV: Perceptual Re- Education
Today there is such widespread desire and expectation that artists will
engage with a general audience that the SI’s apparent reluctance to do so
seems surprising, but it is also consistent with the group’s dismissal of
open- ended modernist art forms that sought to integrate the viewer – be
this in film (Alain Robbe- Grillet), music (Karlheinz Stockhausen), literature
(Marc Saporta) or biennials (‘the Himalayas of integration’). 45 The
Groupe de Recherche d’art Visuel (GRAV), which made consistent
attempts to reach as wide a public as possible, came in for particular attack.
Founded in Paris in 1960, GRAV’s members included a number of international
artists working with kinetic and Op- art; their main theorist, Julio Le
Parc was Argentinian and had studied with Lucio Fontana in Buenos Aires
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