Jacek Wesołowski - Mulhouse - Rue de Metz. 2006 (via Mulhouse - tramshots)

from playground to battleground

the situationist idea to let old city structures like the labyrinths of amsterdam grow into superstructures across the whole planet with psychogeographic zones according to the needs of the inhabitants (titled “new babylon”) was defeated by european cities being a collage of old and new. the old often being a simulacrum (e.g. the goethehaus in frankfurt which was reconstructed as if nazi germany and the bombing of it wouldn’t have existed), and zones of shopping, tourism, finance, industry, housing and regeneration instead of zones being open to consumption and transformation by the users.

le corbusier was recuperated in la défense, the concept of unitarian urbanism was defeated as a whole. the situationist attempt wasn’t the directorial cuts of haussmann, but rather cutting up the whole and to issue a socio-organic growth where the useful parts of present urban structures are approbiated. it wasn’t aimed at being a structuralist, the core idea was the creation of an all-embracing playground (with playing being a serious and open process instead of a superflous activity).

the situationists changed their strategy before the defeat. the core group gave up the plans of new babylon, its former member constant nieuwenhuys moved to producing artistic instead of architectonic models of it (judging from an art historian point of view, for himself this step most probably doesn’t exist). the last situationist after all splits, guy debord, whose own artistic mode had become the essay film as an attack on the images of culture industry, later moved on to creating a game to train the people of the importance of communication networks on battlegrounds.

(thoughts after receiving a postcard from mulhouse with the picture above)

(pic via the-meccano-grape)

“Describing precisely what’s so grating about this is tough. Broadly, though, it’s the insincere stab at starry-eyed ingenuousness which comes to the fore particularly, though not exclusively, in the saccharine metaphor, fridge-magnet capitalisation, and exaggeratedly remedial punctuation. It’s bad enough that supermarkets will rename products to please the demands of annoyingly precocious three-year-olds, a symptom of the current ubiquity of twee tropes in marketing, without self-declaredly radical art getting in on the nicey-nicey act.

‘Radical’ is how Montgomery styles himself. Interviewed in the Independent recently, he recounted how Situationism had been a “point of obsession” for him since his art school days. Situationism, to offer a – very - brief summary, was a 60s strand of French post-Marxism which proposed that consumer capitalism reduced all experience to mere spectacle, diminishing the individual’s capacity for self-realisation and mediating all encounters with the external world. In Montgomery’s usefully concise précis, the movement’s figurehead Guy Debord sought to describe “a society where we live divorced from real life, surrounded by images designed to sell us things and give us paranoia”.

Artistic responses to Situationism’s theorising have attempted to undermine the spectacle in order to provoke a radical questioning of the everyday, an act which might serve as the beginning of some form of return to ‘real life’. However, the character of the image has changed. Disregarding the fact that KK Outlet is, in its own words, a ‘hybrid environment […] designed to help deliver original creative solutions for the development of brands, products and contents’, the problem with Montgomery’s rehearsed naivety is that it corresponds precisely to the note struck by so much of the media ‘designed to help sell us things’.

Everywhere we look, we see companies (not to mention reactionary politicians) playing up their chumminess, their just-wanting-to-be-there-for-you, their ethical commitment, their passion, their desire to envelop the customer in glutinous love. The spectacle no longer promises financial or even sexual success as an incentive to spend or borrow money: more perniciously, it insists that it will help us to revert to a state of cosseted infancy. Every ad break is a relentless confection of prelapsarian kitsch, depicting sunnily undulating pasturelands on which uncontaminated food is grown and reared, and tableaux of unadulterated, yet strangely unsatisfying-looking, ‘happiness’ in which no-one is ever asked to deal with a tax return, undertaker, or speeding ticket. Everybody is permanently twenty-eight, drinking bottomless pints of Magners on an endless Sunday afternoon somewhere not too far from Chipping Norton.

It’s this trend that leads you to wonder if Montgomery doesn’t really know his enemy. As another of the billboards shows, his is effectively a black-and-white world in which the moral failures of capitalism can be corrected by simply sending the archetypal city bloke back to the land: ‘YOU WILL HAVE TO LEARN TO LOOK AT THE SKY AGAIN, YOU WILL HAVE TO LEARN TO EAT FOOD THAT GROWS WHERE YOU LIVE AGAIN.’ If only it were so simple. Oppositions between belligerently acquisitive urban capitalism and an idealised pastoral ignore the new set-up, in which everybody seems to want to repudiate modernity in favour of some long-lost innocence and ease. The reclamation of lived experience from the spectacle is a long-held cornerstone of Situationism, but it has been cheapened by lifestyle-mag imperatives to ‘seek out the magic of the everyday’ (exhortations, in other words, to live childishly) which foreclose the possibility of considering the political landscape with an adult conscience. There’s a very, very fine line between transforming the urban environment into a livable poem and whimsical escapism, and Montgomery seems to fall on the wrong side of it.”

Joe Kennedy - Against The New Naive: ‘Innocence’, branding and Michel Houellebecq.

(via interstate808)

effettobeaubourg:L’ordre des Simulacres | What if Capitalism has finally conquered our Utopias? »

(via radicalbooks.co.uk)

texts here.

Glen Matlock ex-Pistol and Chris Spedding (ex-Nucleus member) and session musician on Pistols’ albums have formed a new band called KING MOB (via Principia Dialectica | More musick news)

Isaac Cronin and Terrel Seltzer: Call It Sleep (1982)

“Call It Sleep is the first visual work produced in the United States which makes use of the situationist technique of detournement - the devaluation and reuse of present and past cultural production to form a superior theoretical and practical unity.” via

dasnachleben:

Guy Debord, La société du spectacle, Buchet-Chastel, Paris, 1967.

(Inscription à l’encre rouge sur la page de titre: De Guy, Antonio Ubierna [signature] Paris, 1/12/67. Exemplaire sur lequel Guy Debord a indiqué et identifié au crayon, de sa main, les auteurs qu’il a cités ou détournés.) http://www.lecointredrouet.com/situ/situ.html