Kitsch, Dirt, Mud, and Chaos

Hans-Peter Zimmer, collage, date unknown

At the end of the prior post I had mentioned the Gruppe SPUR. I hadn't had reason to think of them in many years. In fact, I once had a copy of a German-language book on the group; a book that was long ago lost, destroyed, or came to some other such fate. At any rate, being reminded of them, I decided to seek out images of their early, SI-era work online. No quick task, as the group was -- I gather -- never widely known outside of Germany.

Comprised of painters Heimrad Prem, Helmut Sturm, Hanz-Peter Zimmer, and sculptor Lothar Fischer, the group came together in 1957 in the city of Munich. Their work during those years in many ways mirrors of number of postwar "art informel" avant-gardist tendencies of the era -- like a mishmash of COBRA-style taschism and art brut primitivism.

Heimrad Prem - Untitled, 1962

Lothar Fischer, title and date unknown

Helmut Sturm  "Paar", 1962

Hans-Peter Zimmer - Untitled, 1961

Lothar Fischer "Flucht aus dem Morgenland", 1959

Ceci n'est pas une pipe, pt. 118

From a recent discussion between Susanne von Falkenhausen and David Joselit, concerning the latter's curatorial hand in the Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age exhibition, via the German edition of Frieze mag:

SvF: So medium specificity – that’s the old spectre. And what does medium specificity, what does Clement Greenberg, have to do with Guy Debord? You would like to get painting out of the register of Greenberg and put it into a register of Debord?

DJ: I suppose it’s very hard to characterize a complex project in a slogan. But from my point of view, what painting really can do is represent, even theorize, the circulation of pictures – and by ‘pictures’ I mean commoditized images as they arise in mass media of all types ranging, in our period, from television to the internet. We know that appropriation was aimed at indexing the ‘life of pictures’. But it did so in a very severe way, which in fact made the displacement from one context to another – art to advertising, for instance – clean and unambiguous. Whereas in painting, what you see from Robert Rauschenberg to the present is that commoditized images are put into circulation in time and space, and move at different rates. Many of the questions animating conceptual art with regard to changing values of visual knowledge have been explored in painting, but I don’t think this has been sufficiently recognized. While it is a simplification that has many problems, for the sake of argument I think your characterization is largely correct: we are trying to take painting from Greenberg to Debord.

SvF: But Debord...

DJ: He would have hated the project.

SvF: Yes, I think so. He would have sent in some black paper or something like that.

DJ: Right, or a film. ...Obviously Debord did not and would not approve of painting.

Unless the painting in question were one by Asger Jorn (who's included in the exhibition). In which case, Debord was all to ready to accept it as a gift, which -- lore has it it -- he would turn around and sell, using the money from the transaction to fund the publishing of the next edition of the SI journal.

Negation and Postscript

"Although Debord never intended his writings to be dissected by the academy – The Society of the Spectacle (1967) was written as the theoretical accompaniment to an imminent conflagration, ...he certainly foresaw their recuperation. Displaying a vim seemingly absent in the opposing camp, the Situationists wrote, 'It is quite natural that our enemies succeed in partially using us. We are neither going to leave the present field of culture to them nor mix with them. [...] we must simply work to make any such exploitation entail the greatest possible risk for the exploiters'. But now, over forty years since the SI disbanded, it is hard to know what risks – beyond bad faith – the BnF or like institutions might run in approaching Debord’s archive. ‘50 years of recuperation’, in the words of McKenzie Wark, have seen the assimilation of avant-garde Situationist practices such as the dérive and détournement by everyone from anti-globalisation movements like Occupy Wall Street, to culture-jammers Adbusters, the Haçienda nightclub, and Benetton ad man Oliviero Toscani.

At the same time, despite a counter-insurgency led by luminaries including Régis Debray and Jean Baudrillard, the theories outlined in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle refuse to go away. Viewed as the handbook of May 1968, in later life it has been deployed in cultural theory as a vague synonym for the evils of mass media, or roped into conspiracy theories about an 'inside job' on 9/11. While pro-Situationist collectives may expend their energy sifting rightful heirs such as Julien Coupat from pretenders to the throne, in reality the BnF’s exhibition was less of an anachronism than a mirror to the SI’s widespread co-option. In fact, as Steve Shaviro depressingly notes, it is precisely the SI’s radical rejection of commercial culture that has made it 'one of the most commercially successful 'memes' or 'brands' of the late twentieth century'."

- Clodagh Kinsella, writing for Afterall, reviewing the exhibition "Guy Debord: An Art of War," recently hosted by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Godwin returns, in a hoodie and some purloined kicks...

"And isn’t modernity – by which I mean the ramified social and cultural forms taken on by capitalism as it became, through the centuries, profoundly a ‘form of life’ – isn’t modernity the life-form of permanent crisis? Doesn’t capitalism depend on – thrive on – moments of social overreach and massive destruction of its productive powers? And isn’t one main function of ‘modernity’ – again, meaning the whole battery of social and representational apparatuses whose job is to endlessly reinvent a subject-relation to risk and anomie and breakdown (a subjection to society in free flow) – isn’t the task of ‘modernity’ to make crisis livable? Make it a natural habitat? Make crisis the individual’s life-world? [. . .]"

"The term that still seems to me to sum up this tourniquet of image and ghost-existence is ‘the society of the spectacle’. And it is, I think, this model of sociality that the crisis will eventually test to the limits. So secondly, this. We are familiar with the notion that the dependence of capitalism on continual growth may already be hitting against the limits of what the actual planet can take. Some say the economic question is solvable, and they may be right; but behind it again is the question of life-world, of the sociality capitalism has made. The idea of a low-growth or no-growth economy, that is, may be sustainable; but the idea of a no-growth spectacle – an image-world starved of resources, frozen and deteriorating, in a state of perpetual un-fashion – seems to me profoundly a non-starter. It is a contradiction in terms."

-- T.J. Clark, "Things as They Are"

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One of Many Hobbies

An interesting riff from Simon Reynolds. Interesting because it squarely hits on some things I've had on my own mind for some time, and I'm intrigued to see that he more or less arrives at the same conclusion that I have. (And does so far more succinctly and eloquently, of course.)

Simon's responding to a happened-upon pair of posts (here and here), which caused him to share a few thoughts about the connection between politics, "digimodern" "pseudo-participations," and the shapings-up of contemporary cultural landscape. He also -- more specifically -- wonders if the blog author "is using the term 'spectacle' in the Guy Debord sense of the word or whether he's just fastened upon the word unawares of its applications."

I can definitely see why Simon would be curious, would wonder about a connection. At times, the phrasing at times ("The sign of ideology is the spectacle.") closely shadows that of Dubord & co., though I suspect it's by mere chance. I suspect the author of the posts in question just happened to chose that particular word to embody the concept he was crafting. After all, some have pointed out vague similarities between Debord's theory of the Spectacle and Daniel Boorstin's discussion (c. 1961) of "the Image." And my guess would be that what the blogger had in mind was probably more akin to the latter.

S.I. 101

Situationist theory for beginners, circa the early 1980s...




Images and text from Larry Law's series of homemade pamphlets, "Spectacular Times." [ # ] [ # ]