Response to a Questionnaire
from the
Center for Socio-Experimental Art
1. Why are the masses not concerned with art? Why does art remain the privilege of certain educated sectors of the bourgeois class?
The importance of the theme of the present questionnaire and the limited space allotted
for answers oblige us to be somewhat schematic. The situationists’ positions on these
topics have been elaborated in more detail in the SI’s journals (Internationale
Situationniste, Der Deutsche Gedanke, and Situationistisk Revolution)(1)
and in the catalog published on the occasion of the “Destruction of RSG 6”
demonstration in Denmark last June [The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in
Politics and Art].
The masses, i.e. the nonruling classes, have no
reason to feel concerned with any aspects of a culture or an organization of social life
that have not only been developed without their participation or their control, but that
have in fact been deliberately designed to prevent such participation and control. They
are concerned (illusorily) only with the by-products specifically produced for their
consumption: the diverse forms of spectacular publicity and propaganda in favor of various
products or role models.
This does not mean, however, that art subsists
merely as a “privilege” of the bourgeois class. In the past every dominant class
had its own art — for the same reasons that a classless society will have
none, will be beyond artistic practice. But the historical conditions of our time,
associated with a major breakthrough in humanity’s appropriation of nature and thus
bearing the concrete project of a classless society, are such that major art in this
period has necessarily been revolutionary. What has been called modern art, from its
origins in the nineteenth century to its full development in the first third of the
twentieth, has been an anti-bourgeois art. The present crisis of art is linked to
the crisis of the workers movement since the defeat of the Russian revolution and the
modernization of capitalism.
Today a fake continuation of modern
art (formal repetitions attractively packaged and publicized, completely divorced from the
original combativeness of their models) along with a voracious consumption of bits and
pieces of previous cultures completely divorced from their real meaning (Malraux,(2)
previously their most ludicrous salesman in the realm of “theory,” is now
exhibiting them in his “Culture Centers”) are what actually constitute the
dubious “privilege” of the new stratum of intellectual workers that proliferates
with the development of the “tertiary sector” of the economy. This sector is
closely connected to that of the social spectacle: this intellectual stratum (the
requirements of whose training and employment explain both the quantitative extension of
education and its qualitative degradation) is both the most direct producer of the
spectacle and the most direct consumer of its specifically cultural elements.
Two tendencies seem to us to typify the
contemporary cultural consumption offered to this public of alienated intellectual
workers:
On one hand, endeavors such as the “Visual
Art Research Group” clearly tend toward the integration of the population into the
dominant socioeconomic system, along the lines currently being worked out by repressive
urbanism and the theorists of cybernetic control. Through a veritable parody of the
revolutionary theses on putting an end to the passivity of separated spectators through
the construction of situations, this “Visual Art” group strives to make
the spectators participate in their own impoverishment — taking its lack of dialectics to the
point of “liberating” the spectator by announcing that it is “forbidden not to
participate” (tract at the Third Paris Biennial).
On the other hand, “New Realism,”
drawing heavily on the form of dadaism (but not its spirit), is an apologetic
junk art. It fits quite well into the margin of pseudofreedom offered by a society of
gadgets and waste.
But the importance of such artists remains very
secondary, even in comparison with advertising. Thus, paradoxically, the “Socialist
Realism” of the Eastern bloc, which is not art at all, nevertheless has a more
decisive social function. This is because in the East power is maintained primarily by
selling ideology (i.e. mystifying justifications), while in the West it is maintained by
selling consumer goods. The fact that the Eastern bureaucracy has proved incapable of
developing its own art, and has been forced to adapt the forms of the pseudoartistic
vision of petty-bourgeois conformists of the last century (in spite of the inherent
ineffectuality of those forms), confirms the present impossibility of any art as a
ruling-class “privilege.”
Nevertheless, all art is “social” in
the sense that it has its roots in a given society and even despite itself must have some
relation to the prevailing conditions, or to their negation. Former moments of opposition
survive fragmentarily and lose their artistic (or postartistic) value to the
precise extent they have lost their oppositional core. With their loss of this
core they
have also lost any reference to the mass of postartistic acts (of revolt and of free
reconstruction of life) that already exist in the world and that are tending to replace
art. This fragmentary opposition can then only withdraw to an aesthetic position and
harden rapidly into a dated and ineffectual aesthetic in a world where it is already
too late for aesthetics — as has happened with surrealism, for example. Other
movements are typical of degraded bourgeois mysticism (art as substitute for religion).
They reproduce — but only in the form of solitary fantasy or idealist pretension
— the forces that dominate present social life both officially and in fact:
noncommunication, bluff, frantic desire for novelty as such, for the rapid turnover of
arbitrary and uninteresting gadgets — lettrism, for example, on which subject we
remarked that “Isou, product of an era of unconsumable art, has suppressed the very
idea of its consumption” and that he has “proposed the first art of
solipsism” (Internationale Situationniste #4).
Finally, the very proliferation of would-be
artistic movements that are essentially indistinguishable from one another can be seen as
an application of the modern sales technique of marketing the same product under rival
trademarks.
2. How can art be really “social”?
The time for art is over. The point now is to realize art, to really create on every level of life everything that hitherto could only be an artistic memory or an illusion, dreamed and preserved unilaterally. Art can be realized only by being suppressed. However, in contrast to the present society, which suppresses art by replacing it with the automatic functioning of an even more passive and hierarchical spectacle, we maintain that art can really be suppressed only by being realized.
2. (cont.) Does the political society in which you live encourage or discourage your
social function as an artist?
This society has suppressed what you call the social function of the artist.
If this question refers to the function of
employees in the reigning spectacle, it is obvious that the number of jobs to be
had there expands as the spectacle does. The situationists, however, do not find this
employment opportunity the least bit attractive.
If, on the other hand, we take this question as
referring to the inheriting of previous art through new types of activity,
beginning with contestation of the whole society, the society in question naturally
discourages such a practice.
3. Do you think your aesthetics would be different if you lived in a socially, politically,
or economically different society?
Certainly. When our perspectives are realized, aesthetics (as well as its negation)
will be superseded.
If we were presently living in an
underdeveloped country or in a country subjected to archaic forms of domination (colonialism or
a Franco-type dictatorship), we would agree that artists can to a certain extent
participate as such in popular struggles. In a context of general social and cultural
backwardness the social function of the artist still retains a certain significance, and a
not entirely sham communication is still possible within the traditional forms.
If we were living in a country governed by a
“socialist” bureaucracy, where information about cultural and other
experimentation in the advanced industrialized countries over the last fifty years is
systematically suppressed, we would certainly support the minimum demand for dissemination
of truth, including the truth about contemporary Western art. We would do this despite the
inevitable ambiguity of such a demand, since the history of modern art, though already
accessible and even glorified in the West, is nonetheless still profoundly falsified; and
its importation into the Eastern bloc would first of all be exploited by hacks like
Yevtushenko in their modernization of official art.
4. Do you participate in politics or not? Why?
Yes, but in only one kind: together with various other forces in the world, we are
working toward the linking up and the theoretical and practical organization of a new
revolutionary movement.
All the considerations we are developing here
simultaneously demonstrate the need to go beyond the failures of previous specialized
politics.
5. Does an association of artists seem necessary to you? What would be its objectives?
There are already numerous associations of artists, either without principles or based
on one or another extravagant absurdity — mutual aid unions, mutual congratulation
societies, alliances for collective careerism. Works that on the slightest pretext are
proclaimed “collective projects” are fashionable at the moment, and are even put
in the limelight at the pitiful Paris biennials, thus diverting attention from the real
problems of the supersession of art. We regard all these associations with equal contempt
and accept no contact whatsoever with this milieu.
We do believe that a coherent and disciplined
association for the realization of a common program is possible on the bases worked out by
the Situationist International, provided that the participants are so rigorously selected
that they all demonstrate a high degree of creative originality, and that in a sense they
cease to be “artists” or to consider themselves as artists in the old sense of
the word.
It could in fact be questioned whether the
situationists are artists at all, even avant-garde ones. Not only because almost everyone
in the cultural scene resists acknowledging them as such (at least once the whole of the
situationist program is involved) or because their interests extend far beyond the former
scope of art. Their nature as artists is even more problematic on the socioeconomic level.
Many situationists support themselves by rather dubious methods, ranging from historical
research to poker, from bartending to running puppet theaters. It is striking that of the
28 members of the Situationist International whom we have had to exclude so far, 23
personally had a socially recognized and increasingly profitable role as artists: they
were known as artists despite their membership in the SI. But as such they were tending to
reinforce the position of our enemies, who want to invent a “situationism” so as
to finish with us by integrating us into the spectacle as just one more doomsday
aesthetic. Yet while doing this, these artists wanted to remain in the SI. This was
unacceptable for us. The figures speak for themselves.
It goes without saying that any other
“objectives” of any association of artists are of no interest to us, since we
regard them as no longer having any point whatsoever.
6. How is the work you are presenting here related to these statements?
The enclosed work obviously cannot represent a “situationist art.” Under the
present distinctly antisituationist cultural conditions we have to resort to
“communication containing its own critique,” which we have experimented with in
every accessible medium, from film to writing, and which we have theorized under the name
of détournement. Since the Center for Socio-Experimental Art has limited its
survey to the plastic arts, we have selected, from among the numerous possibilities of
détournement as a means of agitation, Michèle Bernstein’s antipainting Victory
of the Bonnot Gang.(3) It forms part of a series including Victory of the Paris
Commune, Victory of the Great Jacquerie of 1358, Victory of the Spanish Republicans,
Victory of the Workers Councils of Budapest and several other victories. Such
paintings attempt to negate “Pop Art” (which is materially and
“ideologically” characterized by indifference and dull complacency) by
incorporating only toy objects and by making them meaningful in as heavy-handed a
way as possible. In a sense this series carries on the tradition of the painting of
battles; and also rectifies the history of revolts (which is not over) in a way that
pleases us. It seems that each new attempt to transform the world is forced to start out
with the appearance of a new unrealism.
We hope that our remarks here, both humorous
and serious, will help to clarify our position on the present relationship between art and
society.
For the Situationist International:
J.V. MARTIN, JAN STRIJBOSCH, RAOUL VANEIGEM, RENÉ VIÉNET
6 December 1963
[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]
1. Der Deutsche Gedanke: German-language journal: the only issue (1963) consisted mostly of translations of French SI articles. Situationistisk Revolution: Danish journal edited by J.V. Martin.
2. André Malraux: French novelist and critic who became Minister of Culture under de Gaulle.
3. Bonnot Gang: French anarchist bandit gang (1911-1912).
“Réponse à une enquête du Centre d’Art Socio-Expérimental”
appeared in Internationale Situationniste #9 (Paris, August 1964). This
translation by Ken Knabb is from the
Situationist
International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, PM Press, 2024). No copyright.