SITUATIONISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Taking for granted that modernism is the attempt to develop a new socio-economic (and therefore political) discourse, the role of a cultural or artistic movement intending to articulate a successful critique of society must always be politically engaged –not to say this is the only form of artistic expression worth pursuing, but rather that this is the only form of art worth pursuing if the goal is the Marxist poetry of the future. This is because Marx’s rejection of past revolutionary ideas is due to the fact that they are charged with a language that ends up favouring a new dominant minority. He was not rejecting history and the past altogether; after all, it is impossible to criticize something without knowing where it comes from and how it came to be.

The rejection of past ideas could be interpreted as a claim for autonomy, however the autonomous work of art faces ipso-facto two problems that conflict with the poetry of the future: the possibility of producing a critique that has no social impact, or simply the problem of elitism and over-academization –or both. Since these problems go hand in hand, the new discourse should be about majorities, not about theoretical connoisseurs praising their avant-garde heroes –see Greenberg. Insofar autonomous is avant-garde, then the avant-garde is, by definition, elitist.
In this way, it seems reasonable to assert that any attempt to develop “a new language of politics” requires some involvement in the current politics of the given epoch, since any such attempt would need to know what it is that should be criticized. But such epistemological commitment would automatically tamper with the theoretic sterility needed for autonomy. Now if the need for autonomy is argued in terms of a defence mechanism, then Situationism is one step ahead insofar it is aware that for every artistic cultural or social movement, some sort of assimilation is imminent. I argue that the modernism as presented by the Situationists is one of the best examples of a critique of society that actually had results. However it will also be shown that Situationism indeed breaks with the aesthetics of both Surrealists and Realists alike.

This rupture is what makes Situationism such a volatile compound. Combining ideas like the struggle against the culture industry as put by Theodor Adorno, and an awareness that if a movement is to produce change, it needs to have as a goal to be assimilated by the people. If later on, the false conscience assimilates it, it does not matter, as long as it produces social movement or change. Another concern of this movement was with how leisure and mass culture play a key role in the subject-alienation process. The important thing about alienation, for the purposes of this movement, is that it prevents people from gaining the consciousness needed for their own liberation. Thus, the situationists aimed to show that it is possible to have a positive application of Marxism (as in the social movements of ’68), if only with the condition of the kamikaze, this is, by accepting self-destruction for the greater good.

René M. Albers’ essay entitled ‘Jean Paul Sartre: philosopher without faith’, explains that for Sartre, consciousness is the source of collectivity therefore, although maintaining its dialectic source, he “transports the dialectical movement from collectivity to the individual… it is the individual that experiences social realities… and creates the social dialectic”[1]. Situationism tries to achieve social change by negating culture altogether. The negation of culture occurs because under the Situationist point of view, Culture is a showcase for the display of capital surplus; culture is the spectacle of the everyday life.

The Situationist International comes into being as the result of the merging of the Lettrist International, led by Frenchman Guy Debord, and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, wherein Dane, Asger Jorn was the main figure at the moment. The former grows out of the Lettrist group, founded in 1946 and the latter out of the CoBrA movement (1948-51). It is worth mentioning that CoBrA (an acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam) was a movement sceptical of both “Social Realism in the east…[and] of Abstract Expressionism in the west”[2]. CoBrA “sought a collective basis of art and society” as an attempt to bring down Surrealism and Abstract expressionism nevertheless, the project failed and the movement broke apart in 1951.

The Lettrist International grew out of the Lettrist Group which, came into being in 1946, is still alive today. The Lettrist Group is the post-war version of the Dada movement. They worked with the decomposition of word and image in both poems and collage. Dada is born in 1916 as a reaction to WWI and the “provocations of futurism and expressionism”[3] and dies in 1933 after a years long chase by the Nazis. Dada has two phases. Cabaret Voltaire is the first and it appeared in Zurich (Switzerland being neutral territory during the war) due to the migration of artists from all around Western Europe. Dada blames bourgeois culture for the war, and the bourgeois is compared with the child that buries traumatic experiences and behaves as if nothing is wrong but someday explodes. Dadaism was full of complains against the way the world was, and the way in which the artists were partaking of the situation. Their response was to raise their voices against that situation was via mockery –the famous phrase ‘dada is anti-dada’.

The second Dadaist phase commences with Hans Arp and his cubist collages, intended as “a medium less of semiotic analysis than of chance composition” [4]. Chance composition is related to the psycho-geographical maps by Debord, but also, if we acknowledge the relation between chance and randomness, it can be argued that they experimented with techniques that would later be credited to the Surrealists –like the random flowing of ideas from the subconscious and Arp’s experiments with automatic drawing.

The intention of anonymity of the work is Duchamp’s influence in Arp, except for the argumentative variant of picking objects with no value with the intention of challenging scientific rationality. According to Dada, “Expressionism… failed the role to appeal to universal terms of human existence”[5]; it also talks about universality without realizing that that is only the part of the picture described by human rationality. Dada’s model of anti-aesthetics claims universality of human experience by introducing the mystical element. An important member of the Dada in Berlin (during the Dada fair, 1920) is John Hartfield (Helmut Herzfelde), whose intention was “to create a work within the emerging proletarian sphere”. He was aiming to attack the bourgeois model with the bourgeois model; to inform, to educate, using the means that mass culture uses to alienate.[6] Debord had trouble with being so close to Dada and decided to split from the Lettrist Group to form the Lettrist International in 1952.

Marked by his involvement in CoBrA, Jorn was reluctant to accept Max Bill’s proposal of forming a ‘new Bauhaus’. The Bauhaus was born in the Weimar republic in 1919 and although in the beginning and up to 1923 it strived to unite art and craft, it was meant to backfire. In 1932 it moved to Berlin, and after the arrival of Laslo Moholy-Nagy as its new director, the purpose shifted from craft to industry; “[the] Bauhaus carries the mark of the historical shift from pre-industrial craft to industrial design”[7]. Thus, the Bauhaus became the Fordist version of the craft workshop. These are the reasons that made Jorn doubt. But remember that the initial idea was to have a guild-like workshop where art and craft are given the same respect or value, and where artists would learn crafts and vice versa. With that in mind, the plan of forming a new Bauhaus materialized in the form of the Imaginist Bauhaus, with the idea of creating experimental art that appropriates industrial means, while subjecting them to non-utilitarian means.

In 1956 the representatives of both the Imaginist Bauhaus and the Lettrist International met and formed the Situationist International. Critical of both Surrealism and the misinterpreted application of Marxist theory that resulted in Stalinism (the critique encompassed Social Realism, used in support of the totalitarian praxis of political power), the Situationist International “confronted the rise of consumer society”[8] and how alienation is caused by the commodification of leisure. It seems that Situationism is the post-war version of Heartfield’s project, by refusing to depict randomness and choosing to use bourgeois methods to attack bourgeois culture.

In 1959, Debord and Jorn make ‘Memoires’ as a remembrance to the short life of the Lettrist International, which by adapting the Lettrist notions, came to develop a theoretical project involving ideas from Marx and Lefevre. The idea was to construct “subversive situations… [and] advance the class struggle through the battle of leisure”[9] – and this is what Lefevre had in mind with his critique of everyday life. Situationism was to fuse Debord’s Marxist ideas with the different implementations by Lukaks (for whom the dominant ideology was equated with false consciousness, and cultural production was the dialectic operations that depended on class ideology and the generation of counter ideological models)[10] and Lefevre’s ideas.

Debord defines ‘spectacle’ as  “capital accumulated to the extent that it becomes an image”10. Debord analyzed this mass-consuming society, absorbed and alienated by mass media in terms of this spectacle. He realized that culture was bivalent, and that in the same way in which it reflects the structure of society, it determines it. It is at this point that the notions of dérive and détournement crystallize. To explain dérive, it would be useful to recall ‘The naked city’ by Debord in 1957. The naked city is a psycho-geographical map that records “the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”[11]. Dérive is a recoding of urban spaces and symbols. This reconstruction is important in terms of the dialectic critique of leisure. In this regard, Adorno and Horkheimer, although their thesis is extreme, it is insightful when it comes to leisure and alienation. According to ‘the culture industry’[12], leisure was part of the instruments used by the culture industry (the result of the cultural signs produced within capitalism) to numb the masses and acculturate or condition them to accept consumerism as part of the everyday life; leisure as a means to condition and prepare the masses for alienating work –recall Hartfield’s project.

Thus, Debord’s critique of leisure shows a side of alienation that is not charged with the negative discourse about individuality. But neither does it embrace the belief in an honest totalitarian society. It is here where Sartre’s idea of ‘situations’ becomes important. When in dérive, and due to our biological social nature, one becomes of aware that collectivity is the result of the phenomenology of social realities (the individual experiencing social reality and creating what Albers reads in Sartre as the social dialectic). In this regard, the Situationists present a novel reading on the Marxist critique of leisure. Although ideally the Baudelairean flâneur should become the critic, rather than the connoisseur of leisure, in the present day we can see that the culture industry has proven to be more effective than the Situationist efforts. A good example is the case of Clement Greenberg, who from being a Marxist oriented theorist, became absorbed by abstract expressionism, a high art gear of the culture industry.

Even more important than dérive, is the concept of détournement, which refers to the re-evaluation of the diverted artistic element (sign). Thus far, dérive can be understood simply as the process of mass culture appropriation, whereas détournement is the dialectic re-representation of it, showing its negative consequences. As a result, the diverted element is not intended as art or anti-art; “there can be no Situationist art” rather the artistic practice serves only as a vessel to Situationist means. This was meant to unmask “the ideological nature of a mass-cultural image or the dysfunctional status of high-art”[13]. This echoes both the Dada phrase of ‘dada is anti-dada’ (adding the purpose of parodying the capitalist logic of production and consumption) and the Imaginist Bauhaus’ idea of ‘appropriation and subjecting to non-utilitarian ends’. With this in mind, we can now understand how ‘Mémoires’ constitutes an example of this process involving dérive and détournement.

The ‘Modifications’ by Jorn, in 1959, bring these terms into the discussion about the role of the avant-garde. The critics are not sure of whether the intention was to reduce the avant-garde to kitsch or to prevent that from happening. Whichever the case, the SI avoided to become another post-war movement that is just a repetition of a previous. Indeed, it intended to surpass “both the pre-war avant-gardes and the movements that resulted from them”. Perhaps the reason of this confusion is due to the schism that occurred inside the SI around 1962 –when Jorn made his ‘New disfigurations’. The schism divided the activists from the artists. While Jorn was echoing Duchamp and the Dada with the ‘Modifications’ and the ‘New disfigurations’, Debord was attempting to gain independence from these influences –Debord was after the poetry of the future, while Jorn seemed more interested in the idea of autonomous art. Between the two projects, the result was ambiguous, resulting in the split of the movement.

Despite the schism, in 1966-7 Situationism produced its two best critiques of capitalist culture: ‘The society of the spectacle’ by Debord, ‘The revolution of everyday life’ by Raoul Vaneigem and ‘On the misery of student life’ by Mustapha Khayati. All of these texts played an important role in the student movements of 1968, which proves a more accurate reading of Marxist theory –achieving, at least partially, what the Communist Manifesto intended. Two important fragments of Debord’s theses[14] in ‘The society of the spectacle’ exemplify the strength of the movement as well as they show the volatility of the project and its necessary disappearance: “Art… in a historical society where history is not yet directly lived, is art of change and a pure expression of the impossibility of change… This is an art that is necessarily avant-garde and is an art that is not. Its vanguard is its own disappearance.” And the overt negation of Dada and Surrealism to re-state that the SI is not another post-war avant-garde “… Dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing it, and Surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it… [therefore] the abolition and the realization of art are inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.”15. In 1969 the SI published its last journal and in 1972 it disappeared.

The strength of the SI lies in that the project, as a whole, transcended from the artistic to the social sphere and created a positive impact and social change à la Marx. This entails that the SI had a great balance of theory and creative input personified in Debord and Jorn. Debord found the rift in the conjunction or collage of ideas by Adorno, Sartre, Lukaks, and theorists from other artistic movements. Jorn brought the instinctive impulse, the creative element and the quotes from previous radical movements as Dada and Art Brut, not to mention the brilliant modification on the Bauhaus’ ideas. In the course of this essay, it was proved that the main contributions of the SI to the artistic sphere are: an accurate critique of the subject alienated via mass culture without falling in the nihilist narrow-mindedness of Adorno and Horkheimer. The greatest contribution of the SI is the fact that it was aware that the movement carried within it the seed of its own destruction and yet it was brave enough to push the consequences to the end –which is an uncanny feature because of taking the choice of destruction before assimilation.

1/www.jstor.org/search/3dJean%2bPaul%2bSartre%253A%2bPhilosopher%2bwithout%2bFaith2bRene%2bM.%2bAlberes
[2] Rosalind Kraus, Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Yve-Alain Bois. Art since 1900: modernism, anti-modernism, post-modernism. Vol. II, 1945 to the present. Thames and Hudson, 2004. Pg. 391.
[3] Ibid. Vol I. 135.
[4] Ibidem. 137.
[5] Ibidem. 168.
[6] Ibidem. 171-3
[7] Ibidem. 187.
[8] Ibid. Vol II. 391.
[9] Ibid. Vol II. 393.
[10] Ibidem. Introd. 22-31.
[11] Ibidem. 394.
[12] In the Dialectic of Enlightment. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. 1944.
[13] Ibidem. 395.
[14] Ibidem. 393.

The only fact about art is that it is a language, besides this, there if no conclusive definition because along with its practice and evolution of it being bound to a paradigm-breaking nature there is also the subjective aesthetic experience that it creates on the perceiver. The distinction between good and bad art is rendered useless if we accept the subjectivity of both art as a language and of the aesthetic experience of the perceiver. The second part deals with the socio-economical context on which art-making process is done. Art will not flourish as long as it is subjected to a business-like structure, to the whim of the capital.

Languages are meant to provide a common ground for human understanding by means of communication. The mathematical language creates a common ground for abstract ideas; it is the most objective of human languages and in this sense, it describes reality as it is. Oral communication-based languages allow us to give concrete descriptions about our reality but from a not so objective point of view; these languages describes things as they seem to us, nevertheless they allow for agreement. Few people would argue that art is not meant to communicate something, however, it is difficult to accurately define this object of communication –what art is meant to communicate. If the aesthetic experience is posited as the object of communication for art, it has to be defined as ‘input’ received by the senses and interpreted by the brain in a sensible way. Sensibility is related to emotions or feelings, which are abstract constructions. In this sense, sensibility is the abstract and subjective side of artistic language; the concrete side is the sense-perceived component of the aesthetic experience.

1.
The critical relationship between modernism and postmodernism is that while modernism was centred in the analysis of life within the context of a “western industrialized world”, postmodernism represents a critique both to modernity and to the western world it analyses. Modernism was the term coined by Baudelaire (1821-1867) to refer to the socio-cultural transformation brought-about by modernity. It is about what it feels like to live in modernity and it is not particularly attached to art –for which Clement Greenberg is credited. Greenberg provides a thorough explanation about modernism in art in his essay “Modernist Painting”, where he dates modernism as ranging from the second half of the nineteenth century to the 1960’s. Greenberg picked Manet as his earliest example of modernist painting; this is because of the new vision one is required to have in order to understand the depiction. However, modernism, as a conception of art in general, was rooted in French practice as soon as 1914. Modernism was a break with the mimetic ways of representation.

Postmodernism is the paradigm of thought that resulted from the intellectual stir-up in the late sixties, particularly 1968, time when social movements were popping all over the world. The term was coined by Leo Steinberg as a critique to the formalist orthodoxy, this is, modernist theory and practice. Autonomous art is that which cuts loose from the matrix of modernity just as modernist ways of thinking were happening before Greenberg, Robert Rauschenberg (mid fifties) had already broken with the modernist visual paradigm (sensibility). In this sense played the role that Greenberg attributes to Manet with respect to modernism. Postmodernity forces us to see with different eyes, in this sense, postmodernism forces us to see with different eyes; in Jasper Johns’ words it is the detachment of retinal art. This new vision is to be applied not only to the artistic sphere, but it is focused on marginalized aspects of the modern tradition overall. The postmodernist theorists replaced Duchamp; instead of being a “peripheral figure around the edges of Dada and Surrealism”, postmodernity aimed to place him as “the avatar of the entire spectrum of posmodernist art activity” (Frameworks, 35).
Photography plays an important definition on Baudelaire’s definition of modernity. It was part of that seducing world created by order, technology and humaneness. Although he didn’t like photography as art, he did enjoy the pleasures of being a flaneur; a proud French intellectual who enjoyed the glamour and benefits of modern-Paris after the Haussmannization. Seurat was also a flaneur and he is, I would say, the epitome of modernist painting especially because of his ambiguity, or as Zygmunt Bauman[1] would say, ambivalence. Seurat has been quoted as ambiguous because his pictures can be interpreted as both utopian and dystopian with respect to the society they depict. To Bauman, modernity reaches its mature stage, as a cultural project, with the Enlightment; and as an institutionalized way of living, with the development of the industrial society. Thus, the orderly society, perfectly organized and with the perfect proportions portrayed by Seurat, reflect the ambivalence between modernity and the need for order –scientifization of all languages, even the artistic one; for Baudelaire, in the example of photography. Modernity creates robots, at the same time, cameras exist to record the existence of the robots; Seurat chooses to depict them in a way that was not accessible to photography until digital photography came –and even now, although we have the technological resources to manipulate the image, we cannot make a human being with perfect Greek proportions. Seurat’s technique and Bauman’s theory match-up perfectly. Bauman is talking about ambiguity as the resultant product of the process of ordering, which is characteristic of the modernity. Seurat says, if there is another media to allow mimetic representation (acquired through scientific language), therefore painting will be non-mimetic. This echoes what Johns had in mind by saying that postmodernism was a detachment from retinal art. On the other hand, Gerhart Richter is also concerned with the relation of photography and painting but in the postmodern context. In the nineteenth century, photography was trying to find its place in the fine arts. Once it got a place, there was a point where photography was explicitly non-mimetic, and so, verging with painting. The role Richter plays is that of the redeemer of painting at a time when postmodernist culture believed it dead; the inverse process of what happened in the nineteenth century.

I think that postmodernism itself is an unnecessary category created by what Bauman identifies as the defining feature of modernism –ambivalence. Postmodernism is nothing but modernism with better technology and global means of distribution; the artistic practice changes to adapt itself to the relatively new conditions of an already existing category –modernism.
2.
The issue of gender has been a recurrent theme that was (arguably) first explored in an open way by Duchamp in the persona of Rose Selavie. Female artists like Ana Mendieta have also explored gender transfiguration; the statement in these kinds of works is that we are all human beings. It is a complaint to the useless and yet inevitable distinction between men and women. Gender wise, inequality has always been a problem because the natural differences between men and women (like strength and birth) have been serving as the platform to oppress women and by doing so; eliminate the competition for men in the modern bourgeois world. The nuclear family is an example the social construction that allowed the bourgeoisie to cut the competition (within the workforce) in half from the beginning.

This is just a little example of how men have been shaping the world into patriarchal forms. Under the patriarchal structure is obvious that most of the art that deals with gender issues is made by women, mainly because they have been gaining terrain as society advances. Even so, escaping constructs that have been built into our heads from the beginning of mankind is as difficult for women as it is to man. Examples of this can be seen in works like The dinner party, by Judy Chicago. In this piece, Chicago attempts to make homage to important women in history; the problem is that she portrays them as vaginas. Many of the gendered art was made as a critique to the objectification of women; as examples we have Jeff Wall with Picture of a woman which besides critiquing the view of the woman as an object of male visual pleasure, is also a historical reference to Manet’s A bar at the folies-bergères. I think that representing women whose achievements were accomplished via intellectual or similar kind of work as only their vaginas is a terrible, objectifying mistake. Perhaps her idea was to critique the objectification by making it obvious; to question that side of patriarchy that regards women as objects independently of their other attributes but I think that this could have been accomplished in a more direct way, without having to appeal to sexuality in such an obvious manner. In the end, Freudian interpretations of art are one of the most male centred theories there are, and I think that, for the most part, they are weak.

Within gendered art, we can also find examples that either critique or support the ideals of beauty imposed by the dominant ideology. Ana Mendieta is a good example of how these ideals of feminine beauty can be challenged; she shows her body pressed against plates of glass or acrylic, alluding to the idea of distortion and damage –of feminine bodies. Lisa Steele gives the same example but in different media; her video Lisa’s birthday suit, is a record of her history trough her scars, showing the human side of feminine beauty. I find this example a particularly interesting one because not only does it criticize the male idealization of femininity, it also dignifies the little details (often called imperfections) that help to make us unique; the impressions of the world in us. At last, I think it is worth mentioning Cindy Sherman, who is considered as another critic woman because she mocks Hollywood’s iconography with respect to women. Nevertheless, my instinctive reaction towards her work is not as a mock or critique but rather as advertising or supporting those ideals. The problem is that gendered art (and art in general) can be ambiguous. As such, art can always be manipulated by the institutions in charge of legitimizing the artists (i.e. Museums, “important” galleries, etc.), therefore we can be skeptical about gendered art that we can find in the big museums (the same applies to art that is supposed to criticize the dominant ideology) because we can assume that it has gone trough a filter that, to a certain extent, contaminates it.