ABSTRACT
The tale of the situationists is a complex, ripping yarn, full of acronyms and bad faith, whirlwind romances and intense com raderie , blood and tears, hope and glory,back-stabbing and ideological expulsions. As is so often the case in leftist history, everybody seems harder on themselves and their fellow travelers than they do on their ruling-class antagonists. Situationist prehistory involved several small, subversive avant-garde movements. First came the Lettrist International, an underground minimalist setup founded by Rumanian poet Isidore Isou in 1946, yet crystallizing around Debord, Michele Bernstein (Debord's wife), and Gil Wolman in the early 1950s. Next was COBRA, the Copenhagen. Brussels and Amsterdam surrealist and experimental design conglomerate, dominated by the Dutch utopian
94 architect and ex-Provo and anarchist Constant Nieuwenhuys-later abbreviated to the snappier "Constant." Then Asger lorn's brainchild, the Imaginist Bauhaus,
entered the fray, a Brussels-based crew with an abstract expressionist bent. London's Psychogeographical Association was in there somewhere , with Ralph Rumney, as was the so-called Congress of Free Artists . And, of course, godfather Henri Lefebvre loomed overhead.
