ABSTRACT
The evolving cluster of artistic and cultural-political movements identified with the names Lettrism and Situationism created few artistic works of enduring value, either aesthetically or as collectibles in the commodified world of galleries, museums, and patrons. Their marginal status, extreme oppositional posture, anti-monumental practices, and, in their later phases, programmatically anti-art and anti-aesthetic orientation precluded a major contribution to “art” as institutionally understood. Long after their moment of contemporaneity, however, the movements’ theories and overall radical stance continued to have a transformative impact on subsequent artistic and political currents. Arguably, in fact, the groups’ fluctuating forms, their ensemble of playful and exploratory activities, and their experience in passing time together constituted their artistic “praxis” (as much in Aristotle’s sense of an activity with its end in itself as in the Marxist sense of the term). Collective experience was the complex, distributed object of their artistry and hence their most signal artistic “work.” However, one would have to immediately add the proviso that this entails a work that is not a “work” at all, but rather a playful process, a species of intransitive artistry no longer readily identifiable as “art,” and thus only discernible in the limited traces of “iterated modes of group self-organization,” as Astrid Vicas has described the Situationists’ favored medium of activity (Vicas 1998: 381). Accordingly, the most important legacy of Lettrism and Situationism does not appear solely through the poems, visual art works, performances, and films created under these names – although these do offer significant indices of lettrist-situationist theory and practice at particular moments of the movements’ development. Rather, we must also consider theoretical writings and exemplifications of technical procedures such as the refunctioning of existing texts and images (détournement) as possessing an “artistic” status at least equaling, if not exceeding those works that relate to recognizable artistic categories such as poetry or film, in however unconventional a fashion.
