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

je participe, tu participes, il participe
of SI writings (in particular Ken Knabb’s 1981 anthology) create a misleading
impression by obscuring the group’s cultural analyses in favour of
political ones, thereby de- emphasising the SI’s abiding interest in issues of
visual and literary culture. As a consequence, he argues, what makes the
SI (and Debord in particular) distinctive tends to disappear: ‘its paradoxical
blend of the concreteness of the political manifesto with a poetic
elusiveness’. 28
My own position on the SI is one of ambivalent bystander, exhausted
by the SI’s elitism, ad hominem attacks and vitriolic superiority, but invigorated
by their theorisations of détournement, the dérive and ‘constructed
situations’. 29 For Debord, there had been no revolutionary movements in
politics or modern art since the end of the 1930s, and the task of the SI was
therefore not to subordinate art to politics, but to revive both modern art
and revolutionary politics by surpassing them both – that is, by realising
what was the most revolutionary demand of the historic avant- garde, the
integration of art and life. This Hegelian sublation implied a tabula rasa:
art and poetry should be suppressed in order to be realised as a fuller,
more enriching life. 30 Herein lies the central paradox of the SI’s nihilist
romanticism: art is to be renounced, but for the sake of making everyday
life as rich and thrilling as art, in order to overcome the crushing mediocrity
of alienation. This is why their writings are anti- visual, but not
necessarily a rejection of the aesthetic per se: art and poetry remain the
perpetual benchmarks for passionate, intense, experimental, non- alienated
experience. The SI therefore had no reservations about calling itself
an artistic avant- garde, but this was just one aspect of a triple identity, the
others being ‘an experimental investigation of the free construction of
daily life’, and ‘a contribution to the theoretical and practical articulation
of a new revolutionary contestation’. 31
Even so, there could be no Situationist works of art, wrote Debord, only
Situationist uses of works of art. In an article from 1963, he provides some
examples of art’s revolutionary function, including the example of a group
of students in Caracas who made an armed attack on an exhibition of
French art and carried off fi ve paintings which they subsequently offered to
return in exchange for the release of political prisoners. ‘This is clearly an
exemplary way to treat the art of the past, to bring it back into play for what
really matters in life’, remarks Debord, observing that Gauguin and Van
Gogh had probably never received such an appropriate homage. 32 Another
important example was the UK activist group Spies for Peace, who viewed
the British government’s use of the threat of nuclear war as a way to control
a docile populace. The group broke into a high- security military compound
near Reading (RSG- 6, the ‘Regional Seat of Government’) and copied
information concerning the UK government’s emergency- shelter plans for
politicians and civil service personnel. This information was published in
4,000 pamphlets (Danger! Offi cial Secret RSG- 6) and widely distributed,
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