COUNCIL FOR LIBERATION OF IMAGINATION. [I have been a PL member for a month now…]. n.p. [Cambridge, MA?]: Council for Liberation of Imagination, n.d. [1969?]. 1 p.; ill.; 21 x 29.5 cm.; black ink on white stock
Leaflet published by a mysterious “Council for the Liberation of Imagination”, likely an offshoot of the Council for Conscious Existence (itself an offshoot of Radical Action Cooperative when its members moved to Harvard — more details here) that Hannah Ziegellaub (who was one of the translators of the first English language edition of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spetacle — more details here) was a member of. There were many such, often ephemeral “Council” groups in the late 1960s: the Council for the Liberation of Daily Life, the Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous, the Council for Conscious Existence, etc.
Very Situ inspired: “Due to your insufficient critique of your daily life and its poverty, you continue to participate in the spectacular commodity system. Capitalist society creates the illusion of participation. And it learned from Eastern bureaucracies how to organize the illusion of participation…”
We do not locate any information or holdings about the Council for the Liberation of Imagination in the trade or on OCLC.
[DEBORD, GUY]. Nous rions mais jamais en meme temps que vous. Paris: Edition privée hors commerce, 2020. 15 x10.5 cm.; ill. color postcard.
A postcard released as an homage to Guy Debord. The slogan was originally released as a header for the text “Position du continent Contrescarpe” in Lèvres nues, no 9, p. 38, novembre 1956 (see below). Also accounted for in Guy Debord, Correspondance volume 0, p. 126 and Lettres à Marcel Mariën, p. 72.
Copies of the detourned postcard can be obtained free of charge from Edition privée hors commerce (see PDF linked)
[DEBORD, GUY]. Ne télétravaillez jamais! . Paris: Edition privée hors commerce, 2020. 15 x10.5 cm.; ill. color postcard.
A detournement of the original French postcard (designed by Louis Buffier) featuring a colorized photograph of the famous “Ne travaillez jamais” (Never Work) graffito, for which Debord claims ownership. This was released on the occasion of COVID-19 and the shift to remote work during the pandemic.
More details on the original postcard can be found on the blog here
Copies of the detourned postcard can be obtained free of charge from Edition privée hors commerce
Anonymous [Debord, Guy]. Les Cahiers de l’Encyclopedie du Monde Actuel no. 35. Le Surréalisme, une révolution de l’irrationnel. Lausanne: Rencontres, September 1968. 32 p.; ill.; 14 x 20 cm.; ill. B&W wrappers with pictures of surrealist books and leaflets.
Text attributed to Guy Debord, which features a brief history of the Surrealist movement.
Gerard Berreby, who spoke to Donald Nicholson-Smith, Mustapha Khayati, and a few others explains the genesis of the Situationists’ participation to the Encyclopedie du Monde Actuel: “The participation of the “situationist group” in the Encyclopédie du monde actuel [EDMA] wasn’t official. There were a few small-paying jobs to which some members of the SI devoted themselves. The work consisted in drafting “EDMA cards” and, eventually, monthly booklets. (Each perforated card included a 500-word-long text; each booklet contained around 30 illustrated pages.) At the start, in 1966, it was my wife, Cathy Pozzo di Borgo, and I who began to produce, on a freelance basis, this type of card under the direction of André Fougerousse – Cathy’s stepfather – for publication by Editions Rencontre in Lausanne. Along with Charles-Henri Favrod, Fougerousse had been (in 1962) one of the founders of this editorial project. Later on, we passed the cards “to be done” to friends, including Mustapha and Raoul [Vaneigem]…The members of the SI, no doubt with Raoul at the head, had, for the most part, continued to contribute to EDMA more or less until 1974. In this way, many of the booklets were written by situationists or ex-situs – even after the dissolution of the movement in 1972. Guy Debord drafted Le Surréalisme in September 1968. ” (translation by NotBored!; emphasis is mine).
Uncommon, with a single copy on OCLC and none in the trade.
We reproduce the text in full below as we do not believe it is available anywhere online
GUY, Emmanuel. Le Jeu de la guerre de Guy Debord: l’émancipation comme projet [2020]. Paris: Editions B42, October 2020. 192 p.; ill.; 16.5 x 23.5 cm. Ill. black cover with text in white and purple.
Situationist scholar Emmanuel Guy graces us with the first book-length analysis of the Jeu de la Guerre and, more broadly, of Guy Debord as a strategist. Guy had already written on the topic (see, for instance, here). He also wrote the preface toStrategie , a compendium of Guy Debord’s extensive reading notes on the topic (these notes, which were organized by Debord himself prior to his passing, are all preserved in the manuscript department of the French National Library).
Below is the editor’s presentation of the book.
“On connaît Guy Debord pour avoir été poète, cinéaste, artiste, théoricien révolutionnaire, directeur de revue et fondateur de mouvements d’avant-garde. Mais il a surtout été stratège. Qu’entend-on par là ? Qu’il a utilisé la poésie, le cinéma, la théorie et l’avant-garde dans le cadre d’un conflit avec la société de son temps. Un objet en particulier dans la production de Guy Debord répond de cet objectif : le Jeu de la guerre, qui avait pour vocation d’aiguiser le sens stratégique et la conscience d’une lutte à mener. Au milieu des années 1950, Debord conçoit un jeu constitué d’un plateau quadrillé et de pions représentant les diverses unités d’une armée. En tant que modélisation de la guerre, ce jeu participe des recherches situationnistes sur l’environnement construit, la vie aliénée et les moyens de s’en émanciper. À l’heure où le design tend à envahir les discours et à englober de plus en plus de champs de l’activité créative, technique, sociale et économique, et alors que l’art ne cesse de repenser les conditions de sa validité critique, Emmanuel Guy propose ici une réflexion sur le rôle de la stratégie dans tout projet d’émancipation.”
Translation: “Guy Debord is known for having been a poet, filmmaker, artist, revolutionary theorist, magazine editor, and founder of avant-garde movements. But above all, he was a strategist. What do we mean by that? That he used poetry, film, theory and the avant-garde as part of his fight against the society of his time. One thing in Guy Debord’s production best speaks to this : the Game of War, which was intended to sharpen the strategic sense and the awareness of a struggle to be waged. In the mid-1950s, Debord designed a game consisting of a board and game pieces representing different army units. As a representation of war, this game is a contribution to situationist research on the constructed environment, alienated life and the means to emancipate oneself from it. At a time when design tends to invade discourse and encompass more and more fields of creative, technical, social and economic activity, and while art continues to rethink the conditions of its critical validity, Emmanuel Guy offers here a reflection on the role of strategy in emancipation projects. “
Copies can be obtained from the editor here or online.
SAME PLAYERS SHOOT AGAIN : JACQUELINE DE JONG & THE SITUATIONIST TIMES
Oct 31 – Nov 29 2020 Opening day, Oct 31, 2-8pm
Treize 24 rue Moret 75011 Paris
On September 18th 2016, while visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, Dutch painter Jacqueline de Jong (b. 1939) came across the Digi-Comp II, an educational toy presenting the basics of computational logic using beads, a ramp and a series of separators. This chance encounter brought back the memory of another – far more ludic – machine which De Jong had enjoyed in her youth: the pinball machine. In the early 1970s, she had even planned to dedicate the seventh issue of her magazine The Situationist Times to the game.
Co-produced with designer and gallerist Hans Brinkmann, this Pinball issue eventually went unpublished. The preparatory documents that remained – photographs, letters, press clippings and various printed matter – were stored in a box in the artist’s house in Amsterdam and eventually forgotten .
These archives have since been reactivated through the publishing and curatorial project “These Are Situationist Times”, which Norwegian researcher Ellef Prestæter and the publisher and Torpedo Press (Oslo) have developed in close collaboration with De Jong. These documents will soon join the Jacqueline de Jong Papers of the Beinecke Library, Yale University. “Same Players Shoot Again” is the Parisian instalment of an exhibition which has been presented on several occasions since 2018 and which features a book and a digital interface produced by Torpedo Press and theInstitute for Computational Vandalism.
A topological manifesto, political bulletin and visual encyclopedia, The Situationist Times (1962-1967) – which De Jong launched right after being excluded from the Situationist International – has its roots in vernacular culture, the history of games, and non-euclidean mathematics. The exhibition presents the archives of the unpublished final issue of this landmark of post-war artists’ magazines alongside art and graphic works by De Jong from the same period. Like a pinball, the exhibition traces a dérive, a knot, an underground web of relations, a hazardous curve, or a dissident trajectory across the artistic and political avant-garde movements of its time.
An exhibition developed by Jacqueline de Jong and Ellef Prestæter, in collaboration with Juliette Pollet, Gallien Déjean, Emmanuel Guy & Fanny Schulmann.
Programming: November 28th, afternoon, Kandinsky Library, Centre Pompidou: presentation of Ellef Prestæter’s book These Are Situationist Times ! An Inventory of Reproductions, Deformations, Modifications, Derivations, and Transformations (Torpedo Press, 2019), and Gallien Déjean’s book of interviews with Jacqueline de Jong (Manuella Editions/AWARE, 2020). With Jacqueline de Jong (TBC), Gallien Déjean, Juliette Pollet, Emmanuel Guy and Fanny Schulmann.In partnership with AWARE (Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibition).
The exhibition and programming benefited from the support of the Embassy of the Netherlands, the Embassy of Norway and AWARE (Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibition).
UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHERFUCKER. We Propose a Culture Exchange (garbage for garbage). n.p. [New York]: Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, n.d. [1968]. 1 p. (two sided); ill.; 21 x 29.5 cm.; black ink on white stock. Text on rector, photomontage on verso.
Leaflet by UAW-MF promoting what is perhaps its most famous and successful intervention. On February 12, 1968, a group of radicals leby by Ben Morea collected garbage on the lower east side, trucked it, then dumped it in front of the Lincoln Center on a gala night. The event coincided with a NYC garbage strike and was meant to express both the group’s contempt for the bourgeois establishment and its support of the strikers.
DEL BALDO, Luca (b. 1969). Guy Debord. 2020. Oil and acrylic on wood. 30 x 20 cm
Original portrait of Guy Debord by Italian painter Luca Del Baldo.
Born in 1969, Del Baldo resides in Cantu (Como), Italy. Operating outside the institutional art world, Del Baldo spent the last ten years working on the “The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality (De Gruyter, 2020). As part of this project, the artist “asked famous art critics, art historians, and philosophers for headshot photographs of themselves, which he used to make paintings. He then shared the paintings with his subjects and told them to comment on the results. His goal was thus not simply to make a portrait, but to establish a relationship with his subject; how that person responds is revealing” (source). Featured art historians and scholars includes WJT Mitchell, Jacques Ranciere, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Onfray, Slavoj Zizek, Zigmunt Bauman, George Steiner, Stephen Greenblatt, and many others. Del Baldo is also known for his painting of a dead Gaddafi (see below)
[STRARAM, Patrick]. [ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPH] Take it All (A Tout Prendre). n.p.: n.p. [Canada], n.d. [1963]. 1 p.; 20.5 x 25.40 cm.; black ink on white photography stock.
Stunning portrait of a young (29-year old) Patrick Straram, from the film À tout prendre (released as All Things Considered in English Canada and as Take It All in the United States).
Born in Paris in 1934, Patrick Straram was a member of the Internationale Lettriste and a close (and early) friend of Guy Debord. He left the I.L. in 1954 when he fled to Canada to avoid military conscription He remained close to Debord for several, as attested by their warm letters. Straram released the Cahier pour un Paysage a Inventer in 1960, including both articles from the Situationist International and poems and critical texts by Quebec writers (Gaston Miron, Marie-France O’Leary, Paul-Marie Lapointe, Gilles Hénault, Serge Garant, Marcel Dubé…). He ultimately became an iconic figure of Quebec’s counterculture scene.
À tout prendre was a “semi-autobiographical portrait of Claude Jutra’s own life focusing on his romantic relationship with actress and model Johanne Harrelle, and his struggle to accept his own homosexuality”. More broadly speaking, the film offers a portrait of the young intellectual and artistic scene of early 1960s Montreal. Staram played the role of Nicholas, Harelle’s former husband. A tout prendre was well-received by critics and is considered a classic of Quebecois cinema. The film ends with an image of wall graffiti: “Quebec Libre”
MEESSEN, Vincent and KAMBALU, Samsom. History Without a Past. Ostend (Belgium): Mu.Zee Ostend, 2020. 36 p.; ill.; 10 x 15 cm.; ill. Green wrappers with text in black.
Booklet published on the occasion of Vincent Meessen and Samson Kambalu’s exhibition at the Mu.Zee in Ostend from 01/02/2020 to 17/05/2020. Features short biosketches of the artists, and short presentation of the art pieces, including
Sanguinetti Breakout Area : a sheet-by-sheet reproduction of Sanguinetti’s archive, which was first exhibited in Venice in 2015. This led Sanguinetti to sue Kambalu for copyright infringement, with Kambalu ultimately prevailing in court.
Game of War : Kambalu’s reinterpretation / detournement/ homage to Guy Debord’s “Jeu de la Guerre”
Quinconce : a collection of five silk prints by Meessen that contextualize the story of Senegalese revolutionary Omar Blondin Diop
Quelle que soit la longueur de la nuit…le soleil finit toujours par se lever : a film by Meessen that serves as an homage to Diop, who was captured and believe to have been murdered by the Senegalese government
Les Cinq Politiques : Meessen’s detournement of Jean Luc Goard’s instructions for the smoothing running of a location shoot for La Chinoise)
Chaosmos : a neon installation inspired by OK Jazz, the house orchestra at Kinshasa’s legendary colonial era club, Un Deux Trois!
One.Two.Three : a video installation about an unpublished protest song by Congolese student Joseph Mbelolo ya Mpiku in May 1968. Meessen found the lyrics in the archive of Raoul Vaneigem
and many others.
Contemporary artist Vincent Meessen and Samsom Kambalu engage in a thoughtful re-writing of Situationist history. Meessen has focused on surfacing the oft-neglected African and Carribbean dimension of the movement. See for instance Blues Klair (Toronto, The Power Plant, 2019). More about Meessen here and about Kambalu here and here
Situationniste Blog 