My collection is now available on Public Collectors: http://www.publiccollectors.org/SituationnisteCollection.html

There, you will find a listing of my key holdings, as well as instructions on how to access the collection. I will continue making detailed posts on this blog, but this is a good place to start if you’d like to know what I own (and, thus, what I can provide information on).

Vienet, Rene. To Objekter Praesenteret af Rene Vienet. n.p.

For once, I would like to solicit the help of my readers with this particular piece of Situationist ephemera. Written in Danish, this leaflet that is unaccounted for: it is not to be found in any of the SI bibliographies (Gonzalvez, Berreby, Raspaud & Voyer), at any dealers, or in in OCLC. Information about the episode discussed is available here https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1886/05/decazeville.htm

The item came folded inside NY-Irrealisme, a catalogue for a second ‘manifestation of the Situationist International’ held at Gallery Vestergade and featuring the work of J.V.Martin, Michele Bernstein, Rene Vienet and Guy Debord.

The English translation reads as follows – this is a Google translation, so I encourage my Danish readers to offer a better translation.

TWO OBJECTS PRESENTED BY RENE VIENET

Musee National d’Art Moderne 14 731. A. Giacometti – Criticism as a weapon can not be separated from criticism by means of weapons and criticism of the weapons themselves. (This – unsigned – draft was intended as a “Tribute to Nestor Makhno.” The final monument was to be 8 meters long)

Collection Vaneigem. Musee Carnavalet. Discharging War, used for the execution of engineer Watrin (in short, he was thrown out the window) Donated by a group of miners from Aveyron (1895)
*Nestor Makhno: famous anarchist who radicalized Ukraine in the 20s.
*Carnavalet Museum is a Parisian museum that specializes in social history
*The execution of engineer Watrin is a well-known episode from the social struggle in France: the striking miners in Aveyron, mad with fury, occupied the boardroom and threw an engineer who was there out the window(Aveyron is a department in the South of France)

Debord, Guy. Rapport sur la Construction des Situations et sur Les Conditions de l’Organization et de l’Action dans la Tendance Situationniste Internationale. n.p. [Brussells]: Internationale Situationniste, n.d. [June 1957]. 20p.; 21.5 x 15 cm.; red wrappers with text in black

Printed in Belgium by Marcel Marien in Belgium in 1000 copies, this text was used the chief preparatory element of the founding conference of the ‘Internationale Situationniste’ in July 1957 in Cosio d’Arroscia. It delineates the views of the founders of the IS, more particularly Jorn, Debord, Pinot-Gallizio and Korun. The new movement’s revolutionary aims are clearly expressed: “First, we believe that the world must be changed. We desire the most liberatory possible change of the society and the life in which we find ourselves confined. We know that such change is possible by means of pertinent actions”

The Rapport is one the most critical texts of the Internationale Situationniste. While it was printed in 1000 copies, it was never meant to be sold, and many copies were never distributed. It is thus rather scarce. Copies in the trade fetch over $1,000, while OCLC only finds five copies (MOMA, Yale, Getty, IISG, Amsterdam)

For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_on_the_Construction_of_Situations

An English translation can be found at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/report.htm

Jorn, Asger. Guldhorn og Lykkehjul. Copenhagen: Eget Forlag, n.d. [1957]. 108 p.; ill.; 25 x 19 cm.; ill. covers with a Jorn litograph, text in brown

Richly illustrated publisher’s pictorial boards with a Jorn litograph. A fascinating read. With a French translation “La roue de la fortune. Méthodologie des cultes” by Matie van Damselaer and Michel Ragon

Uncommon, with two copies in the trade and a dozen on OCLC.

Debord, Guy. Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels. Wien (Austria): Revolutionsbrauhof, 1999. 90 p.; 21 x 14.5 cm.; yellow wrappers with text in black

Debord’s seminal text. Pirate Austrian edition, under the auspices of a local Anarchist bookstore (Revolutionsbrauhof, Anarchistische Buchhandlung, 1090 Wien, Hahngasse 15). This is the text of the Projektgruppe Gegengesellschaft (1974, revised 1999). Revolutionsbrauhof published other Debord titles in translation.

While otherwise unremarkable, this edition is unaccounted for and very scarce. The only other copy we could find is at at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. In addition, and to our knowledge, this may be the only Austrian edition.

Vaneigem, Raoul. Desolation Row. n.p. [New York, NY]: Come!Unity Press, n.d. [1970s]. 4 p. (one 21 x 36 cm. sheet folded once); ill.; blue type on white paper.

A hodge-podge English-language leaflet that reproduces a “freely translated excerpt from Raoul Vaneigem’s Traite de Savoir-vire a l’usage des jeune generations, 1967″ (p.4), along with quotes from a Jack-the-Ripper letter, a brief excerpt from En Avant Dada by Richard Huelsenbeck, and graffiti from “France, May 68”.

This leaflet is published by Come!Unity Press, which guilt-trips readers into making donations (“Two years of printing only movement materials that do not deny access to those without money thru prices or copyrights will end unless C!UP receives $650 monthly in donations our only funding. Is this our last month? Your Movement”), but also carries the stamp of Upshot at their P.O. Box in San Francisco, CA.

This leaflet is unusual; it is not referenced in Ford or the Bibliography of American Pro-Situationists. The only copy we know of is at the University of Michigan’s Labadie library, and does not include the “Upshot” stamp on page 1 (see below)

Berkeley Barb Vol. 6 No. 16 Issue 140 (April 19-25 1968). [San Francisco, US]: Liberation News Service, 1968. 24 p.; ill.; 45 x 29cm; white self-wraps with image printed in red (continued in black on inside page).

A previous post featured the cover of International Times #28 which had a Situationist poster (announcing the publication of Internationale Situationniste #11) as it’s front cover. This edition of the Berkeley Barb features the second poster produced to promote IS #11 – again in (quite loose) English translation. This poster was designed by André Bertrand with text by Raoul Vaneigem, and was originally issued in French in October 1967.

Interestingly, even though it was printed in an American paper, the reference to the “Roundhouse” (an underground music venue in London) strongly suggests that this translation was produced by the English section of the SI (possibly before it was excluded in December 1967).

The translation omits the last part of the original poster, which references the publication of IS#11:

“Camarades, ceci n’est qu’un commencement. Pour en savoir plus long sur vous-mêmes, pour reconnaître rapidement vos possibilitiés, lisez la revue ‘Internationale Situationniste’. Le numéro 11 vient de paraitre. Boite postale 307 03 Paris”

(”Comrades, this is only the beginning. To find out a lot more about yourselves, and to quickly identify your options, read ‘Internationale Situationiste’. Issue no. 11 is just out. PO Box 30703 Paris”)

Debord, Guy. La Société du Spectacle et Refutation de tous les jugements…plus ‘Guy Debord, son Art et son Temps’ avec Brigitte Cornand [FILM].

The film version of the Society of the Spectacle was released in 1973, six years after the eponymous book and a year after the dissolution of the SI. Following Gerard Lebovici’s assassination in 1984, and in response to the press’ accusations that he may have killed his friend and publisher, Debord took his films out of circulation until after his death. While his films were shown on French television immediately following Debord’s suicide in 1994, it wasn’t until 2005 that they were officially re-released to the public in a DVD box set titled Guy Debord: Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes.

Between 1984 and 2005 – when Debord’s films were difficult to get a hold off – bootleg VHS tapes and DVDs flourished, some astronomically priced. The item below offers a glimpse of such items, and was likely released sometime in the mid to late 1990s.

Not found in the trade, with a single OCLC copy (Nanterre BDIC)

Internationale Situationniste. Das Unbehagen in Der Kultur (A Propos de la Condamnation du Situationniste Uwe Lausen). Paris: Internationale Situationniste, 16 July 1962. 1 p. leaflet (single-sided); black type on white paper.

Leaflet in French, signed by Debord and Vaneigem and illustrated by a photography of the young Uwe Lausen, a member of the German section of the Internationale Situationniste. This leaflet denounces the sentencing of Uwe to a year-long prison term for his involvement with the periodical SPUR. It comes as a follow-up to Declaration sur les Proces contre l’Internationale Situationniste en Allemagne Federale, issued on June 25, 1962, and which protested the trial of Uwe Lausen in Munich. Das Unbehagen in Der Kultur is reproduced in Situationist Times 2 (September 1962) and Situationistisk Revolution 1 (October 1962).

Found in Raspaud 114 and Gonzalvez 118. Rare in the trade, with no copies currently available. OCLC lists a single copy at the Getty, but we know that the BNF, the Centre Pompidou and Yale also have copies of their own.