Tea House

A tea house made out of paper and cardboard,
designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, 2008

The Revolution Holding the Head of Error and Striding over the Cadaver of Monarchy

Alexandre Falguiere. The Revolution Holding the Head of Error and Striding
over the Cadaver of Monarchy. c.1893.Bronze

The Story of O-Tei

A long time ago, in the town of Niigata, in the province of Echizen, there
lived a man called Nagao Chosei.

Nagao was the son of a physician, and was educated for his father's
profession. At an early age he had been betrothed to a girl called O-Tei,
the daughter of one of his father's friends; and both families had agreed
that the wedding should take place as soon as Nagao had finished his
studies. But the health of O-Tei proved to be weak; and in her fifteenth
year she was attacked by a fatal consumption. When she became aware that
she must die, she sent for Nagao to bid him farewell.

As he knelt at her bedside, she said to him:--

"Nagao-Sama, (1) my betrothed, we were promised to each other from the
time of our childhood; and we were to have been married at the end of this
year. But now I am goingto die; -- the gods know what is best for us. If I
were able to live for some years longer, I could only continue to be a
cause of trouble and grief for others. With this frail body, I could not be
a good wife; and therefore even to wish to live, for your sake, would be a
very selfish wish. I am quite resigned to die; and I want you to promise
that you will not grieve... Besides, I want to tell you that I think we
shall meet again."...

"Indeed we shall meet again," Nagao answered earnestly. "And in that Pure
Land (2) there will be no pain of separation."
"Nay, nay!" she responded softly, "I meant not the Pure Land. I believe
that we are destined to meet again in this world,-- although I shall be
buried to-morrow."

Nagao looked at her wonderingly, and saw her smile at his wonder. She
continued, in her gentle, dreamy voice,--

"Yes, I mean in this world,-- in your own present life, Nagao-Sama...
Providing, indeed, that you wish it. Only, for this thing to happen, I must
again be born a girl, and grow up to womanhood. So you would have to wait.
Fifteen -- sixteen years: that is a long time... But, my promised husband,
you are now only nineteen years old."...

Eager to soothe her dying moments, he answered tenderly:--

"To wait for you, my betrothed, were no less a joy than a duty. We are
pledged to each other for the time of seven existences."

"But you doubt?" she questioned, watching his face.

"My dear one," he answered, "I doubt whether I should be able to know you
in another body, under another name,-- unless you can tell me of a sign or
token."

"That I cannot do," she said. "Only the Gods and the Buddhas know how and
where we shall meet. But I am sure -- very, very sure -- that, if you be
not unwilling to receive me, I shall be able to come back to you...
Remember these words of mine."...

She ceased to speak; and her eyes closed. She was dead.

* * *

Nagao had been sincerely attached to O-Tei; and his grief was deep. He had
a mortuary tablet made, inscribed with her zokumyo; [1] and he placed the
tablet in his butsudan, [2] and every day set offerings before it. He
thought a great deal about the strange things that O-Tei had said to him
just before her death; and, in the hope of pleasing her spirit, he wrote a
solemn promise to wed her if she could ever return to him in another body.
This written promise he sealed with his seal, and placed in the butsudan
beside the mortuary tablet of O-Tei.

Nevertheless, as Nagao was an only son, it was necessary that he should
marry. He soon found himself obliged to yield to the wishes of his family,
and to accept a wife of his father's choosing. After his marriage he
continued to set offerings before the tablet of O-Tei; and he never failed
to remember her with affection. But by degrees her image became dim in his
memory,-- like a dream that is hard to recall. And the years went by.

During those years many misfortunes came upon him. He lost his parents by
death,-- then his wife and his only child. So that he found himself alone
in the world. He abandoned his desolate home, and set out upon a long
journey in the hope of forgetting his sorrows.

One day, in the course of his travels, he arrived at Ikao,-- a
mountain-village still famed for its thermal springs, and for the beautiful
scenery of its neighborhood. In the village-inn at which he stopped, a
young girl came to wait upon him; and, at the first sight of her face, he
felt his heart leap as it had never leaped before. So strangely did she
resemble O-Tei that he pinched himself to make sure that he was not
dreaming. As she went and came,-- bringing fire and food, or arranging the
chamber of the guest,-- her every attitude and motion revived in him some
gracious memory of the girl to whom he had been pledged in his youth. He
spoke to her; and she responded in a soft, clear voice of which the
sweetness saddened him with a sadness of other days.

Then, in great wonder, he questioned her, saying:--

"Elder Sister (3), so much do you look like a person whom I knew long ago,
that I was startled when you first entered this room. Pardon me, therefore,
for asking what is your native place, and what is your name?"

Immediately,-- and in the unforgotten voice of the dead,-- she thus made
answer:--

"My name is O-Tei; and you are Nagao Chosei of Echigo, my promised
husband. Seventeen years ago, I died in Niigata: then you made in writing a
promise to marry me if ever I could come back to this world in the body of
a woman; -- and you sealed that written promise with your seal, and put it
in the butsudan, beside the tablet inscribed with my name. And therefore I
came back."...
As she uttered these last words, she fell unconscious.

Nagao married her; and the marriage was a happy one. But at no time
afterwards could she remember what she had told him in answer to his
question at Ikao: neither could she remember anything of her previous
existence. The recollection of the former birth,-- mysteriously kindled in
the moment of that meeting,-- had again become obscured, and so thereafter
remained.

By Lafcadio Hearn
From Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Lit-cage et son paravent

Max Ernst Lit-cage et son paravent, 1974

Rooms of recovery

Newly arrived in Hackney in the late 60s, I worked through a bitter winter of improvised fires made in oil drums with broken palette boards, out by the railway yards in Stratford East, a site known as Chobham Farm. Loading and unloading containers of sheep casings and other noxious cargoes, I was tempted indoors. I hammered out applications and soon found myself in the Courtauld Institute, near Manchester Square, being interviewed by Alan Bowness, a well-connected art politician. It was a civilised conversation - high-ceilinged office, leafy views - followed by the production, more of a social gambit than a challenge, of a series of picture postcards. The kind of ephemera Bowness might well have brought back as souvenirs of a European culture tour.
I managed the Giotto, the Mantegna, the Poussin. Then I was shown an elegant scoop of doorway. A strangely familiar arts and crafts entrance to some public building. Was it Berlin? Vienna? I didn't know. "Sorry." Bowness smiled. He wouldn't hold it against me that I couldn't identify the Whitechapel Gallery on Whitechapel High Street. That marvel of inspired patronage, by Canon Barnett and his wife Henrietta, was designed by Charles Harrison Townsend and built in 1901. Barnett believed that exposure to fine art would help to eradicate the local viruses of poverty and ignorance. Coming off the seething street, into this challenging space, would inculcate a sense of civic responsibility and inspire the adoption of values of the other world. With an obvious but unspoken subtext: move on, move out.
The formal balance, the managed volume, that understated decorative band, holds such promise. Vegetative detail is a subtle link with the adjacent library. The Passmore Edwards Library was designed in 1892 by Potts, Sulman and Hennings. The entrance hall featured a panelled remembrance of the hay market, wagons trundling into town by way of Whitechapel High Street. Pastoral emblems invoked a romantic notion of place, the passage of hops to thriving breweries.
Angela Carter has described the disturbing strangeness of finding herself on the north side of the Thames, as she stepped out from Aldgate East station, with its memories of blitz-era sleepers. "Everything was different ... sharp, hard-nosed, far more urban ... People spoke differently, an accent with clatter and spikes to it ... The streets were different - wide, handsome boulevards, juxtaposed against bleak, mean, treacherous lanes and alleys ... I was scared shitless the first time I went to the East End."
The Whitechapel Gallery has always drawn culture speculators into territory where they are tempted, in a fashion as blinkered as my own failure to recognise a much-loved landmark, to patronise the aspirations of the place to which they have ventured. Michael Holroyd, writing about Mark Gertler - one of the artists featured in The Whitechapel Boys, a launch exhibition for the renovated gallery, which has expanded into the old library - restates the established Bloomsbury position when faced with unmapped eastern parts (anywhere on the wrong side of Grays Inn Road). "Gertler spent a miserable childhood in the slums of Whitechapel." The now demolished Spital Square was no slum, and properties in Elder Street where Gertler also lived and worked are, even now, worth a million or more. Gertler's mother proudly pinned to the wall of her kitchen the letter of encouragement sent to her precocious son by Sir William Rothenstein. The child artist had the support of his family; the bite of poverty didn't devour him until he came into contact, after the Slade School of Art, with comfortable Bloomsbury bohemia, its effortless malice and reflex snobbery.

Racehorses (1913) by David Bomberg

Banknotes in the post, or penitential weekends in the country, were another kind of venom, a method for asserting social superiority. Lytton Strachey, the elongated and stork-like object of obsession for Gertler's lover Dora Carrington, was prepared to buy paintings for which he did not care: as a way of asserting the privilege of being able to do it. "You are an artist," he wrote to the handsome East End boy, "and being that is worth more than all the balances at all the banks in London." Wyndham Lewis, unpersuaded by such sophistry, reviewed Gertler's memorial exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in July 1949. He regretted the location, reading this homecoming as an eviction from the hub of metropolitan culture. Was it not a crime to show important work "where few people will see it"? Few of the right people, obviously. Gertler, according to Lewis, "gassed himself, quite simply because no one would buy his pictures, and he had no money".
Bitterness festered among many of the heroically self-regarding, undervalued and slighted Whitechapel painters. They were not a manifesto group, though many of them were friends, fellow walkers who welcomed their neighbourhood gallery as a site in which to promote their own undoubted genius. David Bomberg, an inspiration to Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, was just 24 when he selected the Jewish section of a substantial Whitechapel Gallery survey called Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements in 1914. As the art historian Juliet Steyn has pointed out, making race a category now looks like a device for sanitising a ghetto within the ghetto. The fracture of modernism was foreign to the English temperament; it was hysterical, perverse, psychotic in form and colour. A Jewish conspiracy in which these Whitechapel Jews colluded. If Bomberg's work was "tainted" by abstraction and the kind of ground-breaking attack that drew the attention of Lewis and the vorticists, he repudiated any such alliance.
While the Whitechapel Gallery fulfilled its mission statement, and brought in nervous socialites from elsewhere, the Passmore Edwards Library was celebrated as "the university of the ghetto". A myth that should be treated with caution. As Arnold Wesker, who grew up in neighbouring Fashion Street, said: "It's a trap the East End, to be sentimental and full of cosy longing for 'the good old days' ... hoarding the past as though it were food for a time of famine." The history of longing projected into the dark recesses of the library was too much of a burden for the building to sustain. The secular synagogue where Isaac Rosenberg rubbed shoulders with Gertler, and the poet John Rodker plotted bombshell books alongside Jacob Bronowski and the Yiddish visionary Avram Stencl, is the best kind of fable. It's true where it needs to be. Argument between study partners was an orthodox Jewish tradition, the business of library rooms where poets met and tested passionate alliances and strategic friendships. Image-making for the adjoining gallery was unorthodox, heretical, a passport of difference. Not all the potential writers from the warren were as elevated in their interests. Emanuel Litvinoff recalls, in Journey Through a Small Planet, how, aged 15, he was sacked from his job and spent his days "in the public library reading detective stories".
The body of this building, its dark hallway, the magnificent staircase with decorative iron balustrade, composed its own fictions. The latest of which, The Whitechapel Boys, lays out a coherent and attractive memory map. The "rescued" room in which this happens seems to bask in its recovery from somewhere worse than death: disregard, irrelevance. The heritage treacle of festering nostalgia and bureaucratic neglect. Now, thanks to the £13.5m development package, and the good will and good offices of a team of curators, architects, imaginers and technicians, the light of the real pours in through restored windows. The dimensions of the archival gallery are properly modest. The long Victorian library tables, admired by Rachel Lichtenstein in her fond survey On Brick Lane, have been retained. The walls of "a sickly lime-yellow colour with bits of grey concrete peering through in diseased patches" have been improved and given a contemporary radiance. Research materials sit on unthreatening shelves in a glass-screened area that encourages the student to cast a relieving gaze at the artworks exhibited on the far wall.
The curator, Nayia Yiakoumaki, offers a group of drawings with a narrow tonal range - old tobacco, dead-photograph sepia, foxed paper - to invoke the spirit of the lost library. A ghostly response to an overwhelming density of cloth and leather and dust: the dispersed language hoard. These images float, unshelved, a history of words and ideas that have decided not to congeal into books. The processional robed figures in Jacob Kramer's Day of Atonement (1919) appear, from the distance of the research room, to be wrapped books, spectral volumes stacked together like the reversed library of Rachel Whiteread's Judenplatz memorial. Kramer has moved the realism of Rothenstein's paintings of the Spitalfields Synagogue, such as Kissing the Law (1906), towards hieratic abstraction. Rothenstein's son, John, was to accuse another Whitechapel Boy, Gertler, of betraying his Jewish roots and inspiration and thereby succumbing to "tortured self-doubt and ultimate suicide".
The Gertler chosen by Yiakoumaki fits the muted colour scheme of the frieze of drawings that represent the "people of the book". Rabbi and the Ribbintzin (1914) is sombre, sculptural in its modelling, domestic: on the edge of modernism, but still within a kitchen consciousness, human shapes echoing teapots and loaves of bread. Gertler gestured towards his inheritance in a way that his Bloomsbury patrons could still approve. There was enough of the mediated primitivism, but none of the savage, gypsy abandon over which they would later tut in their teacups. They required him to look like a curly-headed, impetuous pirate, but not to paint like one. Even DH Lawrence, excited by Gertler's Merry-Go-Round (1916), called it "terrifying" and "obscene".
Yiakoumaki's fastidious hang catches a significant moment, as her Whitechapel Boys (joined on this occasion by Clare Winsten, née Clara Birnberg) evolve from traditional to modernist, from representation to abstraction. The artists are all Jewish; a number of them featured in Bomberg's selection at the Twentieth Century Art show. There are unemphatic correspondences and collisions: the theatrical groupings of Winsten's Attack (1910) carrying through to the weightless "flow of form" in Bomberg's Racehorses (1913). A tangled geometry of rearing beasts who seem to have been startled by the noise of Jacob Epstein's vorticist Study for The Rock Drill. (Epstein was included in the Twentieth Century Art exhibition, but was not placed in the Jewish section.)
Linking word and image, library and gallery, Yiakoumaki uses a limited number of display cases to present treasures to make any book dealer go weak at the knees: manuscripts, letters, drawings casually stored by surviving relatives of the artists. Here is a copy of Rosenberg's self-published booklet of poems from 1915, Youth, with a pencilled dedication to Gertler. Here is the much-amended typescript of Winsten's unreliable memoir, in which the Whitechapel Boys circle around her in hypnotised fascination.
It all began on the wide pavements, with the famous Saturday-night "monkey parade", when buffed and polished gaggles of youths and young women sauntered and gossiped, flirted and disputed. The drift was west towards the City and the Bank of England, down to the river, to Tower Bridge, and back like newly arrived "greeners" to Whitechapel. There were darker expeditions, too: Wilfred Owen came like a sleepwalker, shortly before leaving for France for the last time, to find Rosenberg on his own turf. The smell of the bodies, the coffee stalls, the open-doored public houses, alarmed and aroused him.
When Angela Carter travelled across the river, it was to visit the Freedom Bookshop in Angel Alley, a beacon of anarchism. I remember one night in the late 60s bringing a Dutch Provo here and discovering, on the other side of the yard, where the new Whitechapel Gallery has its smart café, a warehouse space in which packed bodies, lit by lamps and candles, slept on mattresses. The performance artist Brian Catling staged his first shamanic manifestation in the same space, a "Miltonic Ghost Dance" in which wax dripped from treated light bulbs on to open books.
The reimagined gallery and library shame the monolithic and self-serving developments that are currently invading east London in advance of the 2012 Olympics. There is a respect for memory, for the skein of historic narrative that is unbroken, as well as a necessary opening out of space, new windows on the surrounding panorama of corporate greed and reefs of threatened ghetto. It is astonishing, but true, that a pair of forcibly conjoined buildings can live up to all their PR boasts. "The century-old institution is the artists' gallery for everyone," claims Iwona Blazwick, the gallery's director. In the early 70s, I worked with Catling in the ullage cellars of Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. We strolled in off the street and asked if we could have a room in which to show our work, as local poets, painters, myth-makers. "Why not?" they said. The small gallery where Albion Island Vortex was exhibited no longer exists. It was the space given to Bomberg's Jewish section for the Twentieth Century Art survey in 1914.

Text by Iain Sinclair for the "Whitechapel Boys" exhibition at Whitechapel gallery,
Curated by Nayia Yiakoumaki
The Guardian, Saturday 18 April 2009

Kunsthalle Athena

Mirror Vodka
alcohol is deeper connection to the I
My Earthly twin Ylva Ogland
am I real now
My Armour Bearer Johan Hjerpe
where is the entrance
My Questioner Marina Fokidis
where is the art
My Keeper Rodrigo Mallea Lira
where is the Acropolis Stone
My Oracle
the stone is for connecting to all times
My Money Bearer Angelo
future past and present and beyond that to the other side
My Copper Distillery
mirror reality
My world is the other side of the mirror
welcome to enter through this liquid
Kunsthalle Athena

YLVA OGLAND shows Snöfrid under the shadow of Athena
the Oracle said: the body is the shelter
In collaboration with the Keeper/Rodrigo Mallea Lira & Snöfrid's Armor bearer Johan Hjerpe, featuring artist ANGELO PLESSAS

Curator Marina Fokidis,
assistant curator Sofia Mavroudis

Drink Snöfrid's own acropolitic mirror Vodka and reveal a secret in an open Celebration until last person leaves.

ReMap2
Open Air Screening Room,
8 Iassonos Street Metaxourgio, Athens
Wed 17- Thu 18 June 2009

The Rival

Ceramic figure from a Danish captain's household in Seeland

Magnanimous

Scene from the Magnanimous Cuckold's play, produced by meierkhold, Moscow, 1922. the actors are wearing costumes designed by Popova and utilizing the actus apparatus she designed.

Heaven

The 2nd Athens Biennale 2009 HEAVEN is conceived as a multifaceted contemporary art festival that extends along the coastline of Athens, in the central areas of Palaio Faliro and Kallithea. XYZ, the founders and artistic directors of the Athens Biennale have invited a select group of curators to contemplate Heaven, in a time that arguably is one of disappointment and conflict. The six exhibitions of the 2nd Athens Biennale 2009, designed by architect Andreas Angelidakis, take the form of autonomous approaches to this broad subject, that nevertheless communicate creatively and claim a degree of narrative cohesion. These six exhibitions are complemented by a series of performative events lasting all through the summer.

"Live"
curated by Dimitris Papaioannou & Ζafos Xagoraris

Temporary installations form successive theatrical scenes, screens and floating stages, while the spectators and the spectacle interchange, as residents and users of the aquatic limit are invited to attend actively in the configuration of communal spaces. New uses of the spaces are triggered, under the surface of the sea, in the street or in the roofs of neighboring buildings, without impeding the ones already existing.

Artists: An Architektur, Νikos Arvanitis, Barking Dogs, Broadcast Group, Eloisa Cartonera, Centre for Research Architecture - Goldsmiths College, Cesare Pietroiusti & Matteo Fraterno, Collective Actions, Coti K. , The Errands , Filopappou Group, Tadeusz Kantor, Reijo Kela, Antti Laitinen, Tea Mäkipää, Jennifer Nelson & Dimitris Kotsaras, NSK, Lucy & Jorge Orta, Anna Ostoya, Palaio Faliro artists group, Superflex, Water Girls, Water Boys [Jili Traganou & Eleni Tzirtzilaki], Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ykon.


"World Question Center"
curated by Chus Martinez

The departure point of Chus Martínez's exhibition is to expand the limits of know through the development of working hypothesis; it will be entirely dedicated to the radical importance of questions. Heaven could be understood as a space for mere speculation. It seems easy but is not. Nothing is more difficult nowadays than to escape the logic of the 'what for'. The logic of the show is simple: every one of the artists is requested to submit a work, a question, a thinking hypothesis in their own terms. Nonetheless, the show should be here conceived not from the artistic response to a topic, but as an assemblage of very different thinking logics. Logics that hopefully will help the viewer, but also the artists to develop further different interpretations of the near future.


Artists: Alexis Akrithakis, Michel Auder, Thomas Bayrle, Erick Beltran, The Callas, Jef Cornelis, Roberto Cuoghi, Marianna Castillo Deball, Luke Fowler, Dora García, Andrea Geyer, André Guedes, Dorothy Iannone, Ferdinand Kriwet, Maria Loboda, Babette Mangolte, Rosalind Nashashibi & Lucy Skaer, Maria Pask, Lisi Raskin, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Lasse Schmidt Hansen, Sue Tompkins, Kostis Velonis.



Dorothy Iannone, The next great moment in History is ours, 1971


"For the Straight Way is Lost"
curated by Diana Baldon

Diana Baldon's exhibition is arranged around a framing device represented by the eight circles of the anti-chamber of heaven: the purgatory. According to Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, a mountain brings souls to heaven through a series of tests visualised in "gironi". Beyond being a geographically situated place, purgatory is a human condition, a process of purification or temporary punishment where souls of those who die depend on self-achievement, compassion and imagination to be prepared for redemption. However, her concept distances itself from Dante's epic poem simply using its structure as a tool to organise works inside what we could imagine is a horizontal representation Mount Purgatory, that is a vessel, or Nautilus shell that gets smaller and smaller as it grows to end up in a rabbit hole, which could stand for the Pearly Gate.

Artists: Mark Aerial Waller, Athanasios Argianas, Athanasios Argianas & Nick Laessing, Adam Chodzko, The Errorists, Anja Kirschner, Domenico Mangano, Tom McCarthy, Christoph Schlingensief, Carolee Schneemann, Michael Stevenson.


"Splendid Isolation, Athens"
curated by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz

As one of the curators invited to contemplate the subject of Heaven, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz oriented her approach to this immeasurably broad topic by naming her exhibition Splendid Isolation, Athens. Guided by an immersive approach rather than a topical or thematic one, her selection and presentation let the viewer ponder if and how creative activity, social practices, and aesthetic experience may be directed. Splendid Isolation, Athens includes a number of art works that employ some formal or structural principle, whether it be as rigid as scaffolding, as symbolic as a monetary exchange, as modular as blocks, or as flexible as narrative. For many artists in the show, some existent form—be it physical or immaterial, biographical or contrived, religious or scientific—offers a means by which to re-consider, re-form, re-imagine or even re-structure a momentary or lifelong place of inspiration.

Artists: Lara Almarcegui, Anastasia Douka, Michael Gibson, Benita-Immanuel Grosser, Hsuan Hsuan Wu, Em Kei, Kalup Linzy, Miltos Manetas, Ryan McNamara, Malcolm McLaren, Martin Oppel, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Mai-Thu Perret, Angelo Plessas, Ry Rocklen, Willem de Rooij, Ettore Sottsass, Adrian Williams.


"Hotel Paradies"
curated by Nadja Argyropoulou

Between the only common certainty that is death and the endless possibility that is after-life, there is a kind of terrible tension, the very spark of everything that is: Desire. In this light, Paradise can be understood as "Desire unleashed". Not as an idyllic place (island, garden, Arcadia) of bliss and innocence regained. As a monument constantly rising towards its ruination, as something equally rooted in and free of the land, as a paradox that punctures time, the Hotel Paradies is such a lair of Desire. The name derives from a rather common language corruption; one which serves as a starting and end point for the conceptual references of this exhibition. Paradies: This which lies next to and beyond death. It is therefore a name that invokes an era when no names existed.

Artists: Kenneth Anger, Apophenia, Daniel Arsham, Zoe Beloff, Manfredi Beninati, Paul Chan, Savvas Christodoulides, EVP, Zoi Gaitanidou, Yiannoulis Halepas, Infinite Library (Harris Epaminonda & Daniel Gustav Cramer), International Necronautical Society (INS), Vassilis Karouk, Dionisis Kavallieratos, Joachim Koester, Sandra Kranich, Robert Kuśmirowski, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Paul Noble, Saskia Olde Wolbers, Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis, Saprophytes, Markus Selg, Robert Smithson, Christiana Soulou, Jan Švankmajer, Alexandros Tzannis, Unknown Artist, Marie Wilson Valaoritis & Nanos Valaoritis
Jakub Julian Ziolkowski.


"How many Angels can Dance on the Head of a Pin?
curated by Christopher Marinos

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? is one of the six curatorial projects of the 2nd Athens Biennial. The exhibition traces the spiritual meaning of paradise more as a 'possibility' or 'promise' within the daily spectre of life and less as a redemptive phenomenon located in an afterlife. Divided into three sections, the exhibition features works which together explore the idea of a domesticated heaven: The first section is equivalent to reality enforcement and the way one remembers Paradise through a glass darkly; in stark contrast, the second section corresponds to psychedelic journeys, decadent dreams, theatrical gestures and utopian constellations; while the last one is symbolized by an overwhelming feeling of loneliness, a sense of foreboding melancholy as well as an irrepressible impulse of repetition.

Artists: Bruce Baillie, Mieke Bal, Lydia Dampassina, Dora Economou, Angus Fairhurst, Harun Farocki, Leon Frantzis, Lothar Hempel, Andreas Kassapis, Panayiotis Loukas, Ursula Mayer, Kris Martin, Marc Nagtzaam, OMIO, Adrian Paci, Nina Papaconstantinou, Angelos Papadimitriou, Société Réaliste, Kostas Roussakis, Yannis Skourletis, Christian Tomaszewski, Mark Wallinger.


Popova's dream is Klucis' Nightmare
2009

2nd Athens Biennale 2009
HEAVEN
15 June - 4 October 2009

Trinity Lutheran Church

In Iowa, we follow the remarkable cross-country trek of Trinity Lutheran Church.
Over years, the church’s congregation had shrunk from 250 to just 13.
The parishioners decided to disband the church but save the building.
Topped with a 100ft steeple, we follow Ron Holland haul the pristine structure twelve miles across rolling hills to the town of Manning.

Ningbo Historic Museum

Architect : Wang Shu
Office : Amateur Architecture Studio
Location : Ningbo, China 09

A kitchen cat speaks

Wie würden Sie sich verhalten?
Eine Küchenkatze spricht

For more than a year Gillick has been travelling, researching and developing his project in continuous dialogue with curator Nicolaus Schafhausen. Making extensive use of computer modeling of the existing German Pavilion and following a long period of work on site in Venice the final questions for Gillick circle around models of social behaviour and the problem of how to create new forms of address within loaded ideological sites.

Crucial components of the exhibition were determined during the final installation days. However, the first step of the process was the fabrication of an edition in the form of a model of Arnold Bode’s 1957 proposal for a new German Pavilion.

For the final work, the pavilion is not obscured or hidden. Both the inside and outside of the building can be seen and examined. It has recently been painted white, as part of the general maintenance of the building and Gillick has left it this way. A simple table and bench designed by the artist are sited outside for use by the pavilion team. Every room of the building is open. No part of the pavilion has been closed off or used for storage.

Strips of plastic, like the blinds used to keep flies out of a room, mark the entrance and two emergency exits of the pavilion. Inside, a kitchen-like structure has been constructed from simple pine wood. Lacking in appliances the “kitchen” exists as a diagram of aspiration, function and an echo of applied modernism that resonates in opposition to the corrupted grandeur of the pavilion, which was designed without lavatories, kitchen or any area to rest. The cabinets puncture the doorways leading to the side rooms. The kitchen is in tension with the logic of the building. You could even say it is a legacy of functional modernism that exists to work against the ideology of the pavilion architecture.

Gillick has transferred his own daily working environment – his kitchen used as an improvised studio – to the German Pavilion. Sitting for months in his kitchen with his son’s cat he considered the question “Who speaks? To whom and with what authority?” while the cat tried to disrupt his work. After re-visiting the replica of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen at the Museum of Applied Art in Vienna – which has long been an important marker of applied modernism within Gillick’s practice – he looked for a solution as to who should occupy his Venice kitchen.

For the final work Gillick – with his studio team in Berlin led by Thomas Huesmann – has created an animatronic cat that sits on top of one of the kitchen cabinets. The cat fights against the echo in the building and tells us a circular story of misrepresentation, misunderstanding and desire.



With this in mind the pavilion becomes a site for a self-conscious circling story that never ends. The cat is in the kitchen, the children are in the kitchen.

“I don’t like it,” the boy will say.

“I don’t like it,” the girl will say.

“I don’t like you,” the cat will think.

Venice Biennial, Deutscher Pavillon 2009

Land of Promise
Curated by iLiana Fokianaki
Artists : Keren Cytter, Doug Fishbone, Alla Georgieva, Pravdoljub Ivanov, Dan Perjovschi, Angelo Plessas, Kostis Velonis
Leonidou 38, Hotel Galini

Situation

Situation—a unique set of conditions produced in both space and time and ranging across material, social, political, and economic relations—has become a key concept in twenty-first-century art. Rooted in artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of situation has evolved and transcended these in the current context of globalization. This anthology offers key writings on areas of art practice and theory related to situation, including notions of the site specific, the artist as ethnographer or fieldworker, the relation between action and public space, the meaning of place and locality, and the crucial role of the curator in recent situation specific art.

In North America and Europe, the site-specific is often viewed in terms of resistance to art's commoditization, while elsewhere situation-specific practices have defied institutions of authority. The contributors discuss these recent tendencies in the context of proliferating international biennial exhibitions, curatorial place-bound projects, and strategies by which artists increasingly unsettle the definition and legitimation of situation-based art.

Artists surveyed include: Vito Acconci, Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Carl Andre, Artist Placement Group, Michael Asher, Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Bik Van der Pol, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Janet Cardiff, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Adam Chodzko, Collective Actions, Tacita Dean, Elmgreen & Dragset, Andrea Fraser, Hamish Fulton, Dan Graham, Liam Gillick, Renée Green, Group Material, Douglas Huebler, Bethan Huws, Pierre Huyghe, Robert Irwin, Emily Jacir, Ilya Kabakov, Leopold Kessler, Július Koller, Langlands & Bell, Ligna, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Graeme Miller, Jonathan Monk, Robert Morris, Gabriel Orozco, Walid Ra’ad, Raqs Media Collective, Paul Rooney, Martha Rosler, Allen Ruppersberg, Richard Serra, Situationist International, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Vivan Sundaram, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Rachel Whiteread, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Qiu Zhijie

Writers include: Arjun Appaduri, Marc Augé, Wim Beeren, Josephine Berry Slater, Daniel Birnbaum, Ava Bromberg, Susan Buck-Morss, Michel de Certeau, Douglas Crimp, Gilles Deleuze, T. J. Demos, Rosalyn Deutsche, Thierry de Duve, Charles Esche, Graeme Evans, Patricia Falguières, Marina Fokidis, Hal Foster, Hou Hanrou, Brian Holmes, Mary Jane Jacob, Vasif Kortun, Miwon Kwon, Lu Jie, Doreen Massey, James Meyer, Ivo Mesquita, Brian O’Doherty, Craig Owens, Irit Rogoff, Peter Weibel

Edited by Claire Doherty
Documents of Contemporary Arts series, MIT Press
Copublished with Whitechapel Gallery, London

Source: mitpress.mit.edu

Model for Apartment

Marepe
Embutidinho Reconcavo
(model for apartment), 2003
Wood, hinches, metal drain and wheels
26 x 26 x 26 in

Your Life

Japanese Ningyo Johruri Bunraku Puppet Theatre

Poems on Traveling

I.
When you're travelling,
The stars talk to you.
What they say
Is often sad.

II.
The song one whistles
While drunk in the evenings
Is merry,
But the same song
From inside of a train window
Isn't.

Orhan Veli
Translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat, 1989

Odol

Odol. advertisement published in Jugend, no 51, 1903

Rumours

...floating in Venice i ve noticed Socratis Socratous sculptural performance for Cyprus pavilion (Palazzo Malipiero) for this year's Venice Biennale, curated by Sophie Duplaix.

Two figures

Caspar David Friedrich
Junge auf einem Felsen sitzend darunter sitzender Soldat, rechts daneben
stehende mannliche Gestalt Bezeichnet unten : den 23 t juli 1801

Two in One

Ann Demeester, director of De Appel and Nicolaus Schafhausen, director of Witte de With jointly present, in collaboration with Christie's Amsterdam: Two in One a benefit auction of more than 100 works by internationally acclaimed contemporary artists to benefit new projects.

The collaboration between de Appel, Witte de With and Christie's is unique within the Netherlands. In addition to the need to keep the institutions vital in a changing socio-economic landscape, it is just as much a call to shake hands at the institutional level on a regular basis.

Moreover, this benefit auction offers a rare retrospective view of Witte de With's and de Appel's ongoing commitment to contemporary art, as the list of artists involved traces the rich, international networks and trajectories forged by both institutions for over three decades.

Both institutions thus take this opportunity to thank the following artists who have shown their trust in their programming by so generously donating unique works of art for this fundraising initiative:

Marina Abramović, Lara Almarcegui, Carlos Amorales, Tiong Ang, Atelier van Lieshout, Sven Augustijnen, John Baldessari, Stephan Balkenhol, Thomas Bayrle, Charif Benhelima, Michael Beutler, Guillaume Bijl, Marc Bijl, Pierre Bismuth, Henning Bohl, Tobias Buche, Yael Davids, Mariana Castillo Deball, Edith Dekyndt, Honoré d'O, Elspeth Diederix, Stan Douglas, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Elmgreen & Dragset, Marius Engh, Jan Fabre, Geoffrey Farmer, Ian Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Michel François, Peter Friedl, Meschac Gaba, Dora García, Isa Genzken, Jef Geys, Liam Gillick, David Goldblatt, Tue Greenfort, Katharina Grosse, Andreas Gursky, Sascha Hahn, Ni Haifeng, Henrik Håkansson, Jeanne van Heeswijk & Martin Winters, Pieter Hugo, William Hunt, Runa Islam, Christian Jankowski, Gerald van der Kaap, Ilya / Emilia Kabakov, Annette Kelm, Joachim Koester, Terence Koh, Joseph Kosuth, Zofia Kulik, Louise Lawler, Henrietta Lehtonen, Gabriel Lester, Erik van Lieshout, David Lieske, Rudy Luijters, Ken Lum, Jill Magid, David Maljkovic, Mark Manders, Jonathan Meese, Bjarne Melgaard, Alberto de Michele, Gareth Moore, Damian Moppett, Sarah Morris, Carsten Nicolaï, Willem Oorebeek, Ulrike Ottinger, Vanessa Jane Phaff, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Bik Van der Pol, Ulay, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Hannah Rickards, De Rijke/ De Rooij, Martha Rosler, Jan Rothuizen, Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Julião Sarmento, Markus Schinwald, Carolee Schneemann, Gregor Schneider, Efrat Shvily, Nedko Solakov, Matt Stokes, An Te Liu, Jennifer Tee, Grazia Toderi, Salla Tykka, Kostis Velonis, Francesco Vezzoli, Barbara Visser, Silke Wagner, Richard T. Walker, Ian Wallace, Lawrence Weiner, Tobias Zielony.



Take the Money and Run
At the location where Wies Smals initiated de Appel in 1974, thirty artists are reflecting within the context of the auction, upon the relationship between the economic and the symbolic value of art. The artists have been invited to make a new work on A4, in which the changed value system within the art world in these times of financial crisis is being brought up for discussion. After being exhibited, the conceptual works, texts, drawings, promises, understatements, ideas, visions and performances will be part of the Two in One auction. The project is an empathetic critique from within, in which de Appel and the artists assume the simultaneous role of contemporary collaborator and critical inquirer.

Participating artists: Sven Augustijnen, Maria Barnas, Erick Beltrán, Barbara Bloom, Monica Bonvicini, Daniel Buren, Maurizio Cattelan, Marlene Dumas, Coleen Fitzgibbon and Robin Winters, Claire Fontaine, Meschac Gaba, Dora García, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Jens Haaning, Christian Jankowski, Job Koelewijn, Harrie de Kroon, Louise Lawler, Ahmet Ögüt, Roman Ondák, Tomo Savić-Gecan, Sean Snyder, Nedko Solakov, Mladen Stilinović, Apolonija Šušteršić, Lawrence Weiner, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES.

Curators: Danila Cahen, Nell Donkers and Edna van Duyn i.c.w. Ann Demeester

Source: http://www.deappel.nl, http://www.wdw.nl, http://www.christies.com

Wood Makes People Big as Cars

The Austrian civil engineer Hermann Knoflacher developed the Gehzeug, or walkmobile, in 1975 to allow a pedestrian to approximate the amount of space taken by a motorist. It is ideal for protesting against the primacy given to automobiles in the city, or just taking a walk in traffic. Knoflacher’s experiment has been repeated in cities from Austria to Thailand, illustrating the spatial possibilities of urban areas without automobiles.
Hermann Knoflacher is a transportation engineer in Vienna. He has been the director of the Institute for Transport Planning and Traffic Engineering at the Technical University of Vienna since 1985.

Actors: Hermann Knoflacher
Location: Vienna
Tools: Wooden frame, rope, and safety tape

Source:cca-actions.org

Shining Armour

Myrto Apostolidis/Μυρτώ Αποστολίδου
"Shining Armour" series , 2007-08

Models

Ζωη Κοκκωνη

Τρυφωνας Δημητρακοπουλος

Βασιλικη Μπερμπεριδου

Αννα Αραμπατζη

Ελενη μαρια Φωτοπουλου

Βασιλης Μπλουκας

Χρυσαυγη Ισμηνη

Αρχοντη Ιωαννου


Αλικη Σκιαδα

Στεφανος Παπαθανασοπουλος

Μαριος Παπαδακης

Στεφανος Φιλιπας

Joel von Trapp


Αλκηστις Πιτσικαλη


Κωνσταντινος Στεργιοπουλος


Θανος Χολεβας


Ορφεας Νικόλας Χαιρετης


Μαριος Λιαριος


Μαρια Καραμανου


Ιωαννα Κουτσοβασιλη


Μαρια θεοδώρα Πυρογιαννη

Εικαστικές Τέχνες
(Βελώνης, Γκουτενσβάγκερ, Μπομπός, Μ. Παπαδημητρίου)
Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλίας

Vlassis Caniaris. In Contrapunto

The show turns around the work of Vlassis Caniaris, not as an exhaustive retrospective nor as a solo show but as a comprehensive presentation that will be augmented by works of international artists from the younger generation. As such, it will provide a wider context for Caniaris’ oeuvre and simultaneously indicate the way to the future, as a continuation of the issues that occupied him. The exhibition will include works from the different periods of his artistic life, primarily dated between the 50s and 90s. It will be built up around two charts: one following the changes in material, texture, and form that Caniaris worked on as an artistic process, the other underlining the love, passion, and concern Caniaris shows towards humanity and the human condition. The artist starts out from the city of Athens during WWII, the occupation and the civil war, the texture of the city, its walls and facades that become painterly surfaces that in turn pose artistic questions. Surfaces become reliefs, break out of the frames, take their place into space, become sculptural, and eventually develop into fully fledged installations. Underlying are political and social issues, from the nostalgia for one’s own country and city to the feeling of displacement and alienation shared by all emigrants.

Works by:
Nikos Charalambidis, Francis Alijs, Kai Althoff,
John Bock, Tony Cragg, Helmut Middendorf,
Christopher Wool, Jimmie Durham, Michael Bevilacqua, Franz West, Georg Herold, Isa Genzken,
Angus Fairhurst, Santiago Sierra, Annette Messager, Miroslaw Balka, Kostis Velonis, Adam Chodzko,
Dryden Goodwin, Georgia Sagri

Exhibition Concept and Co-Ordination: Els Hanappe
Exhibition in cooperation with MIET, National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation.
The National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation
Eynard Mansion
13 May - 19 July 2009

The Kiss

Ivan Razumov. Revolutionary Situation Has Matured After the Drawing Made in 1999, 2007. Acrylic on canvas.

Crack Open the Shells

Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-60) by Guy Debord, translated by Stuart Kendall and John McHale

Inspired provocateurs during May 1968 in Paris, the Situationists are now the stuff of legend: one of those rare avant-gardes whose art and politics were not only radical but also forged together in radical fashion. Yet, as these early letters of the young Guy Debord, the leader of the group, make clear, they were the stuff of legend from the start. In late July 1957, in a little town in the Ligurian Alps called Cosio d’Arroscia, Debord met with a motley crew of seven other alienated souls – including two artists, the Dane Asger Jorn and the Italian Giuseppe Gallizio (aka Pinot), the core of a momentary movement called the Imaginist Bauhaus – in order to found the Situationist International (SI), a grand name for such a small gathering in such a remote place. Even the vote to start it up was not overwhelming: a surviving scrap of paper shows a tally of five in favour – Debord, Michèle Bernstein (his first wife), Jorn, Ralph Rumney (an English ‘psychogeographer’ who soon goes missing) and Walter Olmo (an experimental composer whose name is followed by a question mark) – with one opposed and two abstaining (including Pinot). Yet, schooled in the history of avant-gardes, Debord seized on this occasion as the requisite origin-myth: ‘We should present the “Cosio conference” as a point of departure,’ he writes to Jorn a month later, ‘and, from now on, move quickly (a new legend must be created immediately around us).’
The first of seven volumes of letters, this translation covers the period from the founding of the SI through to the resignation of Constant Nieuwenhuys, the Dutch painter turned visionary urbanist, who, like Jorn, was a central figure in Cobra, a collective of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam that was another key predecessor of Situationism. Although Debord later referred to this stage of the SI as ‘the supersession of art’ – it concluded in 1962 with the purging of all such practitioners – his chief interlocutors here are three artists: Pinot, who is most often addressed in 1957 and 1958; Constant, who is a principal recipient of letters in 1959 and 1960; and Jorn, who appears intermittently throughout. Affectively, intellectually and financially, Debord is closest to Jorn; with a market established for his paintings by the late 1950s, Jorn was able to bankroll many Situ projects, including the two short films made by Debord during that period. It is with real regret that Debord watches him recede from SI activities (he withdraws in April 1961), whereas Pinot is purged for art-world opportunism on 31 May 1960 (after copious letters in which Debord addresses him as ‘grande e nobile amico’), and Constant resigns a day later (though Debord entreats him to return to the fold several times). For a stage dedicated to its supersession, then, art is a persistent subject: there is much ado about how to stage a first exhibition of ‘industrial paintings’ by Pinot in Paris – he ‘has found an excellent formula,’ Debord writes as the show approaches, ‘to cover the entire gallery (the walls, the ceiling, the floor) with 200 metres of painting’ – and a survey of Cobra and Situationist manifestations at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (after long and testy negotiations, it is finally abandoned); and also much ado about how to attract artist-collaborators (such as the Spur Group in Germany), how to keep them in line and ultimately how to ditch them. Commentators on the SI, it is often charged, play down its politics in favour of its art and its biographies, and this is true enough; the problem here is that this is what the correspondence is mostly about.
Debord launched his letters like directives, if not missiles. Amazingly, he is only 25 years old when this period begins; already a veteran of the Lettrist movement, another obscure predecessor of the SI, his voice is almost preternaturally cool and in control, except when he is provoked by the cerebral Constant, searches for the peripatetic Jorn (who roams in a near continual dérive or drift between Denmark, Alba and Paris), or flames the odd enemy or unsuspecting bureaucrat. At the same time, as Debord pulls together, among a myriad other projects, additional SI conferences in Paris (January 1958) and Munich (April 1959), with a fourth meeting in London on the horizon (September 1960), his letters are often animated by impassioned entreaties, instructions and calls to action (they sometimes serve as sketches for later texts). A few missives are intimate, though none is addressed to the person nearest Debord at this time, Bernstein, who refused her letters to the editor of the volume, Debord’s second wife, Alice Becker-Ho.
As McKenzie Wark suggests in his helpful introduction, Debord serves as ‘secretary’ of the SI in the sense of both party head and general assistant: philosopher and disciplinarian, he is also publicist and agent, debating with collaborators and tracking strays, promoting events and arranging rendezvous, sometimes at a clip of a couple of letters a day. Yet his own preferred designation, ‘strategist’, is also appropriate: the letters are laced with the rhetoric of battle (Debord was a devoted reader of Clausewitz, and with Becker-Ho he later devised a board game called Game of War). ‘Strategist’ has the right ambiguity, too, for the lines between actual politics, group positioning and individual posturing are not always clear to a reader now – were they, one wonders, to Debord then? What is clear, however, is his keen sense of how to make a movement that was more than an artistic ‘ism’; the SI might be the last avant-garde in Europe with a real claim to be an avant-garde at all – that is, again, one that articulated artistic and political revolt together, the one whetting the other (if momentarily so).
At the same time the SI could not but emerge in a field defined by artistic groups, and Debord is not above old art-world tricks. ‘The paintings must be the most stunning, the most shocking possible,’ he tells Pinot in January 1958 in the long run-up to his Paris première; only ‘show the paintings in which the search for new materials has been pushed farthest,’ and ensure they are ‘very different from each other’. So, too, he is not reluctant to pit Situationism against other avant-gardes. First in this order come the historical precedents of Dada and Surrealism, to which the SI had a split Oedipal relationship, as Bernstein once remarked: ‘There was the father we hated, Surrealism. And there was the father we loved, Dada.’ For Debord both fathers, ideological complements, had failed, and Situationism was born to overcome them dialectically, as he puts it later in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): ‘Dadaism sought to abolish art without realising it; Surrealism sought to realise art without abolishing it. The critical position since developed by the Situationists demonstrates that the abolition and the realisation of art are inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.’ Less distant from the Situs, given the presence of Jorn and Constant among them, was ‘St Cobra’ (as Debord calls it in one letter), which he values for its commitment to ‘experimental research’ (its journal was punctuated by explorations of prehistoric art, folk motifs and universal forms like the spiral), but questions for its tendency to formalist ‘neoprimitivism’ (like other avant-gardes before it, Cobra emulated the impulsive picture-making of children and naifs). In the end Debord views St Cobra as a forerunner, an artistic St John to the political SI, a pivot to launch Situationism, which should be presented, he writes early on to Jorn, as ‘the necessary transcendence of that era’.
However, Situationism as such does not emerge very distinctly in these letters, largely because, in these early years, its definition was at once unstable for insiders and hermetic for outsiders. The primary thing to know, Debord writes in late summer 1957, is that ‘Situationism, as a body of doctrine, does not exist and must not exist.’ In part this occlusion was protective: ‘Yesterday, the police questioned me at length,’ he writes a year later; they ‘want to regard the SI as an association in order to set about its dissolution in France. I protested then and there . . . Not being declared, the SI cannot be officially dissolved.’ Yet this stance was also philosophical, in keeping with the Situ desire to be alert to the radical possibilities in any conjuncture. ‘Of course, never any doctrine,’ Debord reiterates in late autumn 1958; only ‘perspectives. A solidarity around these perspectives.’ This is inspiring, but how can solidarity be achieved with points of view that often shift and rarely intersect? Centrifugal in spirit, the SI was centripetal in design, and the letters show Debord struggling to inhabit – to embody – this centre. Only eight months into the SI he has begun to insist, ‘We should emphasise the centralised aspect of the movement,’ and by the time Constant resigns in summer 1960, Debord is defensive (albeit defiantly so) about his treatment of comrades (he has just expelled two Dutch architects for designing, of all things, a church): ‘I am with the SI and, as long as I am in it, I will keep a minimum of discipline that precludes all collaboration with uncontrollable elements.’ This prompts the question: if there was no doctrine, why so many apostates?
In these moments Debord the swashbuckler, the romantic hero of art schools to this day, comes centre-stage, and the letters are a fine study in the art of enmity. With a near aristocratic touch Debord sprinkles ridicule liberally on his pages, but at times he goes low and nasty. ‘Small-time hoodlum,’ he addresses one miscreant, and telegrams another, a journal editor who had sent him a token fee for an article: ‘save your nine florins imbecile it was a gift!’ For pseudo avant-gardists and rogue associates alike, Debord insists on ‘a clear attitude of insult and contempt’, and as the letters pile up, so do the bodies. At one point or another he deems such critics and artists as Michel Tapié, Georges Mathieu, Yves Klein and Simon Hantaï, not to mention all the Angry Young Men, ‘apolitical and fascistic’, and even the once- recruited Spur artists are soon dismissed as ‘ridiculous’. Sentiments like this one – ‘we already have amongst us too many young artistic elderly who have missed out on their own 19th century’ – also anticipate the purge of artists to come. That even a close ally like Jorn could feel the heat is evidenced by one letter included in the notes: ‘The economic surplus that my social situation as a painter offers me finds its best place in the situationist movement,’ Jorn writes in a self-critique of masochistic generosity, ‘even if the same movement is obliged to attack me so as to attack a situation from which I cannot escape, but which disrupts the movement.’
Yet Debord is hardly the show-trialling and Gulag-sentencing Situ-Stalinist that his detractors make him out to be. Nearly all of the ruptures remarked in his letters serve to clarify what is at stake in the SI – and to clarify the SI itself as a stake. This is true, for example, when Debord responds to Constant after his resignation, which followed hard on the purging of Pinot and the Dutch architects. ‘Let’s clearly distinguish the manner of the break,’ Debord writes.
I am sure that, here, we had reached the point where the SI had to make an instant choice (or had to be abandoned). Because you know well that I have always thought that ‘there are moments at which it is necessary to know how to choose’; that you don’t have to teach me this; and that, if there has been a certain opportunism in the SI, I have been among those (you, too) who have counterbalanced it.
‘What primarily constitutes the SI,’ Debord concludes, ‘is this group control, expressed by expulsion – or, more rarely, resignation.’ Sadly, Debord might be right here – ‘what is revolutionary organisation?’ is an implicit question throughout this volume – but so too is Constant in his reply: ‘In what presently remains of the SI, it would be too ridiculous to speak of expulsion or of resignation.’ In its 15 years of life – the SI dissolved in 1972 – it had a grand total of 72 members.
The pathos of these letters is that Situationism is falling apart even as it is coming together, and that, in the complicated machinations of his scattered group, Debord is able to perform as many acts of friendship as he does of malice. To borrow the title of the film he made in 1959 about his Lettrist friends, the letters trace a ‘passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time’, a tracing again triangulated by three comrades above all – Pinot, Jorn and Constant. Along with Debord’s own essay-films, in which he montages found images and hidden citations with home movies and pithy aphorisms, these three figures also represent key practices of the SI in this period.
Both the ‘industrial paintings’ by Pinot and the ‘modifications’ of found paintings by Jorn came to a head in May 1959 when the two had shows in Paris. Pinot covered the Galerie René Drouin with rolls of canvas painted in lurid colours as if automatically; he then added lights, mirrors, sounds and smells to create a total environment. A ‘shrewd mix of chance and mechanics’, as Bernstein once described it, ‘industrial painting’ was intended to prefigure a world of play that automation, once diverted from capitalism, would allow; at the same time it parodied the current world of capitalist production and consumption, for not only were the canvases made on a mock assembly line with paint machines and spray-guns, but they could also be cut up and sold by the metre. The Jorn ‘modifications’ bear the stigmata of capitalism in another way. The source pictures were kitschy landscapes and city views, produced for petit-bourgeois decoration, that he scavenged in flea markets and painted over with primitivist figures and abstract gestures à la Cobra. ‘Painting is over,’ Jorn writes in a statement for the 1959 show. ‘You might as well finish it off. Détourn. Long live painting.’ Like kingship, Jorn suggests, painting is dead, but it might live again in a new guise: ‘Our past is full of becoming,’ he concludes, ‘one needs only to crack open the shells.’ Finally, the ‘unitary urbanism’ advanced by Constant developed two practices dear to the Lettrists and the Situationists alike: the dérive, defined in the SI journal as ‘a transient passage through varied ambiances’; and ‘psychogeography’, defined as ‘the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment’. In effect, ‘universal urbanism’ was a radical proposal for new modes of collective experience in metropolitan space, as exemplified by the ‘New Babylon’ project in which Constant models the future city of automation as a stage for nomadic movement and mass play, with high-tech elements refitted by residents like giant toys. Ultimately, all these practices were specific variations on the Situationist theme of détournement, or ‘the integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu’. Derived from avant-garde models of collage and montage, détournement extended from the refashioning of individual words and images to the reimagining of entire cities; it was a general theory of radical culture that anyone might practise.
These techniques were never ends for Debord. ‘If we fail to effectively use the new experimental conceptions that we have already defined,’ he warns one comrade in early summer 1958, ‘we will always fall back into the art market, yet another pseudo-school of the same outdated artistic kind.’ In the same vein, he writes to Constant in early autumn the same year, ‘if the artistic present does manage to make some of its values prevail within the SI, the true cultural experiences of the period will be undertaken elsewhere.’ So it is that Debord cast the SI as ‘a total project’, not in the old Modernist sense of a Gesamtkunstwerk, but as a movement that transcends art altogether so to intervene in the social world at large. ‘Our necessary activity is dominated by the question of the totality,’ he cautions Constant in spring 1959. ‘Take note of it.’ A Hegelian Marxist in the line of Georg Lukács, Debord looked for art to be superseded not by philosophy but into praxis. ‘Nothing has ever interested me beyond a certain practice of life,’ he comments more than once in these letters, and clearly he does not mean at the level of individual or group alone. ‘When one feels powerless about other things,’ Debord writes in an implicit critique of existentialism and phenomenology, ‘there is a tendency to remain on a level of a discourse on experience.’ This discourse was obviously insufficient for him: first and last, ‘a practice of life’ involved political practice. ‘What can intellectuals do without ties to an enterprise that brings comprehensive change to social relations?’ he asks Constant.
‘The SI,’ Debord writes towards the end of this volume, ‘possesses nothing – except its demand for totality.’ Philosophically as well as politically, Debord made his greatest contribution here, but in a way that has attracted the criticism of others on the left (Althusserians, Foucauldians, feminists, neo-Gramscians) ever since. I mean his theory of ‘spectacle’, which recovers Lukács on ‘the riddle of the commodity-structure’ in History and Class Consciousness (1923), first translated into French in full in 1960. ‘The problem of commodities,’ Lukács writes early in his essay, is ‘the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them.’ Debord agreed, but he also understood that in consumer capitalism ‘the phantom objectivity’ of the commodity had grown exponentially, and that it had effectively merged with media-forms in such a way as to produce a world of spectacle, which he defines in his 1967 text as ‘capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image’. This commodity-image had also proliferated like mad, colonising once protected areas of social life, and it was in these fields that the SI took up the fight – in ‘the battle for leisure’, above all – using strategies first sketched in these letters. The Situationists, Debord writes in June 1958, must indicate ‘the transition between the artistic commodity-object of today and the free experimental activity in a new dimension of culture’. But how to do so? Here as elsewhere Debord tended to swing between calls for immediate action – ‘a direct construction of a liberated, affective and practical existence’, as he puts it in On the Passage of a Few People . . . – and hopes for dialectical magic: ‘the alienating satisfactions of the spectacle can at the same time be outlines, in negative, for a planned development of affective life.’
Sometimes in these letters Debord seems overwhelmed by the very totalisation that he otherwise seeks to achieve, in a way that produces blockages that he then blames on the ‘non-achievement’ of the age at large; here his critics on the left have what salience they do. At these moments a note of resignation sounds in his letters, and it is heard intermittently from On the Passage of a Few People . . . (evoked here as a ‘realistic description of a way of life devoid of coherence and importance’) through his ‘anti-memoir’ Panegyric (1989/97) until his suicide, after a difficult illness, on 30 November 1994. A telling scene in All the King’s Horses, a roman à clef about this period written by Bernstein in 1960 to make money for the SI (it has also been newly translated into English), captures this feeling of futility, leavened a little by a sense of absurdity.[*] In the scene, the mistress Carole enters the lair of Gilles, the protagonist modelled on Debord, for the first time; the narrator, based on Bernstein, is also present. Carole begins the conversation:
‘What are you working on, exactly? I have no idea.’
‘Reification,’ he answered.
‘It’s an important job,’ I added.
‘Yes, it is,’ he said.
‘I see,’ Carole observed with admiration. ‘Serious work, at a huge desk cluttered with thick books and papers.’
‘No,’ said Gilles. ‘I walk. Mainly I walk.’
Of course not all was resignation in the SI, certainly not in the early days chronicled in these letters. ‘Neither Paradise, nor the end of history,’ Debord writes in December 1958. ‘We will have other misfortunes (and other pleasures), that’s all.’ And again in June 1959: ‘Life in France is still heading in a very unpleasant direction. But we have our fun too.’ At one moment in May 1960 Debord has to rebut a charge levelled by Henri Lefebvre that the SI indulges in ‘revolutionary romanticism’. Surely some of us today remain interested in the SI for its critique – after all, if spectacle is alive and well, its diagnosis must be too – but there is romance here as well, and in part it is one of failure. Early in Lipstick Traces (1989), his ‘secret history of the 20th century’ in which the Situationists figure centrally, Greil Marcus limns a phantom community in the shadows:
Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured – new institutions, new maps, new rulers, new winners and losers – or is it also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language?
In this sense the SI is not finished.
Then, too, there is the move, sometimes made by Debord and associates, whereby failure is recouped as success, as, for example, in the ‘Thesis on the Paris Commune’, published in 1962: ‘Theoreticians who examine the history of this movement from a divinely omniscient viewpoint (like that found in classical novels) can easily prove that the Commune was objectively doomed to failure and could not have been successfully consummated. They forget that for those who really lived it, the consummation was already there.’ This seems to hold for Debord and company too. Yet even here there is a fatalism that contradicts the Situ language of ‘situation’ and ‘construction’. This fatalism is voiced most vividly in a scene from the movie Mr Arkadin (1955), which Debord would use to conclude his own film version of The Society of the Spectacle (1973). Played by Orson Welles, the lordly Arkadin tells his guests at a ball in his castle the parable of the scorpion who asks a frog to carry him across a river. ‘Why should I risk it?’ the frog replies. ‘You’ll sting me.’ The scorpion responds that all logic would prevent such an outcome, for he too would then perish with his partner. Convinced, the frog agrees to assist the scorpion, but midway across he feels a deadly sting. Arkadin takes over from here: ‘“Logic?” cried the dying frog as he started pulling the scorpion down with him. “Where is the logic in this?” “I know,” said the scorpion, “but I can’t help it, it’s my character.”’ ‘Let’s drink to character!’ Arkadin cries, while on the screen Debord shows us found footage of a doomed cavalry charge. In these letters Debord is sometimes the scorpion and sometimes the frog – and always the cavalry charge.
* All the King’s Horses by Michele Bernstein, translated by John Kelsey (Semiotext(e), 128 pp., £9.95, October 2008, 978 1 58435 065 1).

Text by Hal Foster
London Review of Books, 12 march