Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

notes to pages 80– 3
‘40˚ au- dessous de Dada’ (40 degrees below Dada) at Galerie J, Paris,
in 1961.
18 Cited in Sarah Wilson, ‘Paris in the 1960s: Towards the Barricades of the
Latin Quarter’, in Paris: Capital of the Arts, 1900– 1968, London: Royal
Academy of Art, 2002, p. 330.
19 Greil Marcus is typically strident on this point, siding with Debord and
Wolman to describe Isou as ‘unoriginal, academic and precious . . .
Lettrisme was a screaming oxymoron, systematised dada’. (Marcus,
Lipstick Traces, p. 256.)
20 Unsigned, ‘Amère victoire du surréalisme’, Internationale Situationniste,
1, 1957, p. 3, my translation.
21 Unsigned, ‘Le bruit et la fureur’, Internationale Situationniste, 1, 1957, p.
5, my translation.
22 Bernstein, cited in Marcus, Lipstick Traces, p. 181.
23 Lefebvre was expelled from the French Communist Party in 1958 and
pursued a less orthodox form of analysis, combining Marxism with sociology,
literary analysis, philosophy and poetry. In his Critique de la vie
quotidienne (1947), a key text for the SI, Lefebvre called for an art to
transform everyday life, attacking Surrealism for its recourse to the
‘marvellous’. Debord, Bernstein and Vaneigem held long working
sessions with Henri Lefebvre in 1960 and 1961 in Strasbourg and
Nanterre, but relations between them became tense. In 1967 Lefebvre
mocked their hopes for the people rising up to a successful revolt before
proceeding ‘to the eternal Festival and the creation of situations’. (Lefebvre,
cited in Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, p. 96.)
24 Guy Debord, ‘The Situationists and New Forms of Action in Politics or
Art’ (1963), in Sussman (ed.), On the Passage of a Few People Through a
Rather Brief Moment in Time, p. 151.
25 ‘It is even a notable fact that of the 28 members of the SI whom we have
had to exclude so far, 23 were among those situationists who had an individually
characterised artistic practice, and even an increasingly profi table
success from this.’ (The SI [J. V. Martin, Jan Strijbosch, Raoul Vaneigem,
René Viénet], ‘Response to a Questionnaire from the Center for
Socio- Experimental Art’, Internationale Situationniste, 9, 1964, p. 43, my
translation.)
26 Peter Wollen, ‘The Situationist International’, New Left Review, 1: 174,
March–April 1989, p. 94.
27 T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson- Smith, ‘Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist
International’, October, 79, Winter 1997, pp. 15– 31. The authors
adopt a hectoring tone to dismiss Wollen, but usefully point out that the
SI was directed as much at the orthodox left and Stalinism as it was at
consumerist spectacle.
28 Tom McDonough, ‘Rereading Debord, Rereading the Situationists’,
October, 79, Winter 1997, p. 7.
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