18.3. Situationists and Art - and the assignment for Constructing situations

"There can be no situationist art, only situationist use of art."

"In a classless society there will no longer be "painters", but only situationists who also paint."

"We are only artists to the extent we are not artists anymore. We realize art."

International Situationists is the last historical avant-garde of the 1900ies.
IS is at the outset an artistic movement, but it's fundamental aim is to "overcome art", overcome in the sense of being both a critique and negation and taking it to a higher level, enlarge art.

Constructed situation = A moment of life, concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of unitary environment and free play of events.

A constructed situation cannot be sought privately, it requires total transformation of conditions of existence.
Overcoming art manifests vital energies, inseparable from their immediate consumption; vital energies that cannot be reified, objectified, conserved in commodity form.
Not repeatable or unrepeatable.
Happening at the level of everyday life.

Assignment: construct a situation!

To note when constructing situations:

The work must be changed.
Passions (feelings) have been interpreted, now we must discover new ones.
Aim to enlarge life, not merely explain or express it.
Attack misery on every front.
Find elements for superior construction of environment, and new conditions of behavior - construct new ambiences.
Revolutionize everyday life.

Make practical use of everyday processes and cultural forms that exist, seize culture - to negate/ overcome it.

Note also what Kari reminded: constructed situations should begin from small things, details, which acquire new and disturbing meaning, overcome the establishment.

The constructed situation can be a situation that happened - or a plan or scenario for one.

Text assignment 17.3.

For the task: Choose one or a few paragraphs from "The Society of the Spectacle". Read them. Write a short paragraph in some way based on the text, thinking about your own lived life and experience.

This is not intended to be an academic article, but an experimental text.

We will meet at 14 - 16 in 245 and hear and discuss the texts.

16.3. The Society of the Spectacle

Karl Marx: The Capital, Chapter 1., Section 1.

"The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity."

Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle

1. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

4. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

33. Separated from his product, man himself produces all the details of his world with ever increasing power, and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life.

34. The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.

204. Critical theory must be communicated in its own language. It is the language of contradiction, which must be dialectical in form as it is in content. It is critique of the totality and historical critique. It is not “the nadir of writing” but its inversion. It is not a negation of style, but the style of negation.