In writing 03 - April - The most radical gesture

I've been studying the situationist movement again by re-reading the earliest publications of their magazine Internationale Situationiste. (on line version) The vision of the SI is still so far out that it is beyond art as we know it today.

Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Piero Simondo, Elena Verrone, Michèle Bernstein, Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, Walter Olmo.
Dutch members not on picture were: Constant Nieuwenhuijs, Jacqueline de Jong, and Armando

 

The SI wants to complete the liberation struggles of all the Avant-Gardes that set art free and proved every rule in art to be wrong. Through the ages the Avant-Gardes broke with all limitations of shape, form, sound, composition or material. The SI wanted to take the ultimate consequence of this struggle and strive for total dissolution of any boundary of art.

According to the SI this would have to mean an irreversible merge of art and every day life. Therefore artists had to leave the production of artifacts and performances behind and would have to focus on the construction of situations.

Prime theorist of the SI Guy Debord writes in "Report on the Construction of Situations":

"A 'constructed situation' is not limited to an integrated use of artistic means to create an ambiance, however great the force or spatio-temporal extent of that ambiance might be. A situation is also an integrated ensemble of behavior in time. It is composed of actions contained in a transitory décor. These actions are the product of the décor and of themselves, and they in their turn produce other décor's and other actions.  (…) It could be said that the construction of situations will replace theatre in the same sense that the real construction of life has increasingly tended to replace religion."

But Debord took it even further and wanted the artists to make the "most radical gesture"; they would have to stop being artists! In the same manifesto Debod writes:

"A constructed situation must be collectively prepared and developed. It would seem, however, that at least during the initial period of rough experiments, a situation requires one individual to play a sort of 'director' role. (…) This relation between the director and the 'livers' of the situation must naturally never become a permanent specialization."

But this is just a glimpse of the great thoughts of this movement. All contemporary critique on media, urbanism, capitalism and institutionlized art has had it's prelude with the situationists. So please read some more.

see also: Guy Debord "The society of the spectacle" 
and: Sadie Plant "The most radical gesture"