INTERVIEWS WITH HEADLESS MANNEQUINS
Further content always-already pending ...
"The headless mannequin is an odd creature, void of personality except for body attitude. Many seen in display windows today are even void of that, very wooden in attitude with abstract shapes. As I travel from the California Coast on through Europe I see that Headless Mannequins are a major trend in Beverly Hills, Zurich, Munich and Prague. Wherever I go there are mannequins with stubs of necks sticking up from their fiberglass or fabric covered bodies." from "Cloning of Mannequins in the Year 2000" (Fashion Windows)Pending elaboration of the above precis, YOU MUST READ THESE TWO BOOKS: Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Hans Richter (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997); Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary by Hugo Ball, edited by John Elderfield (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996)
SITUATIONISME, POST-SITUATIONISME, & NEO-POST-SITUATIONISME
Head start here ... or here ...Review of new biography of Guy Debord (The Economist, 08/16/01)
Commentary on the Society of the Spectacle c.1988 (Not Bored) / Films of Guy Debord (UbuWeb)
Raoul Vaneigem's The Book of Pleasures - "Illicit pleasures are banned until they become profitable. Capitalism's need to expand has transformed the world into one gigantic market in which every one of life's myriad manifestations is reduced to just another sales pitch. In so doing, capitalism grows but digs its own grave by killing off the producers who make the expansion possible."
Situationist International (Nothingness) - "Texts by and pertaining to the Situationist International have been entered into a database, and are available at the Text Library by clicking the link on the left. The library is fully searchable, and features more texts than ever before. Information on related articles are linked from each text, and biographical blurbs about the authors are just a click away [...]"
"Originally published in Paris in 1967 as La Societé du spectacle, Debord's text, a collection of 221 brief theses organized into nine chapters, is a Marxian aphoristic analysis of the conditions of life in the modern, industrialized world. Here 'spectacular society' is arraigned in terms that are simultaneously poetic and precise: deceit, false consciousness, separation, unreality. Debord's influence today is beyond dispute." Cyberspace and the Lonely Crowd (Nothingness)
MIXED READINGS - The only apparent attempt to embody the situationist anti-ideal in an urban plan was Constant's New Babylon (1974). Otherwise, the situationist agenda was quite simply to overtly co-opt the spectacle of the capitalist city by staging anti-spectacle and negotiating or subverting the "delirious" internecine chaos of the modern metropolis. - More New Babylon - Zeitung Web (TU Graz) - International Psychogeographical Society - The Situationist City (bibliography) - Raoul Vaneigem, post-situationist/ author of Movement of the Free Spirit (New York: Zone Books, 1994) - Sadie Plant, author of The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International and After (London: Routledge, 1992), "Tracing the history, ideas and influences of the Situationist International, from dada to postmodernism, this book illustrates how situationist ideas continue to inform political events, cultural movements and theoretical debate." - Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User's Guide (Black Dog: London, 2004) - Paper, 208 pages, 210 b/w and colour illustrations, ISBN 1-904-77205-6
"H.L.: The Situationists ... it's a delicate subject, one I care deeply about. It touches me in some ways very intimately because I knew them very well. I was close friends with them. The friendship lasted from 1957 to 1961 or '62, which is to say about five years. And then we had a quarrel that got worse and worse in conditions I don't understand too well myself, but which I could describe to you. In the end, it was a love story that ended badly, very badly. There are love stories that begin well and end badly. And this was one of them." Henri Lefebvre on the Situationist International, Interview conducted and translated 1983 by Kristen Ross, first published in October 79, Winter 1997 (Not Bored) ...
See Mecano's (Amsterdam) appropriations of Situationism, and its cousins, applied to the wild world of new media ...
"The Society of the Spectacle accurately foretold the capitulation of the 'Russian bureaucracy' and presented a penetrating critique of globalisation long before the term had even been coined. Debord's conception of the 'spectacle' as a self-perpetuating delusional system, implicit in the commodification of human experience, transmitted by the market, and powered by a senseless alliance between 'profit' and 'progress', was framed as a politico-philosophic theory. But in its manic manichaeism, and its natty nihilism, its true lineaments owed more to abstract art than academic abstraction." --Will Self, Living With Dead Time (The New Statesman, 08/27/01)
MARX, DEBORD (& BOPS) - Karl Marx (Korsch) / Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Marx) / A Non-Dogmatic Approach to Marxism (Korsch) / The Great Utopia (Josef Weber) / The Problem of Social Consciousness in Our Time (Weber) / The Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord) / Marx and the Communist Manifesto (Rexroth) / Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (Rexroth) / The Joy of Revolution" (Ken Knabb) ...
NEW-ISH TITLES
Guy Debord, Panegyric, Vol 1 & 2, trans. James Brooks (London: Verso, 2004) - Cloth, 192 pages, ISBN 1-859-84665-3"The practice of quotation, which Debord announces he will adopt in this text [Panegyric], is, he tells us, 'useful' in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs,' like the present. Allusion, he tells us, 'should be reserved for times richer in minds capable of recognizing the original phrase and the distance its new application has introduced.' Nonetheless, while the disclosure of his sources does technically transform those allusions into citations, thus removing one level of difficulty for the curious, those who have not partaken of his world will remain adrift within it [...] To distinguish the mindless repetition of received ideas from their radical subversion, one must be possessed of a sense of history." Keith Sanborn, "Drunken Master", Artforum (April 2005), p. 39
Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents, trans. Ken Knapp (San Francisco: AK Press, 2005) - Paper, 270 pages, ISBN 1-902-59383-9
"THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING, OR ROBIN HOOD RIDES AGAIN" - "This 1968 pamphlet by Robert Chasse was the first extensive situationist analysis of the New Left. Chasse's remarks on SDS, Black Power, and the various types of bureaucratic leftist manipulation were strikingly confirmed by the crises and collapse of the movement during the following years. His pamphlet is also noteworthy for its still very valid discussion of the nature of genuinely revolutionary organizations." (BOP) - Cliquez ici ... / For a "revised and expanded version of the Situationist International Anthology (edited and translated by Ken Knabb, originally published in 1981)", cliquez ici (BOP) ...
YET MORE - Catherine de Zegher, Mark Wigley (eds.), The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) - Cloth, 152 pages, ISBN 0-262-04191-X
Apropos de rien (No Stress, No Stress, 04/01/05) ...
DETOUR - Artaud and Schwitters ...The Editors
"It is better to do nothing than to work officially in the visibility of what the West declares to exist." Alain Badiou
"But if it's so good being free / Would you mind telling me / Why I don't know what to do with myself?" --Emiliana Torrini, "To Be Free", Love in the Time of Science (1999)
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