http://whitneyannetrettien.com/thesis/
Situationist Aesthetics: The SI, Now
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK – Friday 8th June 2012
Since the beginning of the movement there has been a problem as to what to call artistic works by members of the SI. It was understood that none of them was a situationist production, but what to call them? I propose a very simple rule: to call them ‘antisituationist.’ We are against the dominant conditions of artistic inauthenticity. I don’t mean that anyone should stop painting, writing, etc. I don’t mean that that has no value. I don’t mean that we could continue to exist without doing that. But at the same time we know that such works will be coopted by society and used against us. Our impact lies in the elaboration of certain truths which have an explosive power whenever people are ready to struggle for them. At the present stage the movement is only in its infancy regarding the elaboration of these essential points.
- Attila Kotányi at the Fifth Conference of the SI, 1961
The SI located itself within but against culture. This symposium asks whether such a position is tenable, and what possibility might there be for Situationist aesthetics after all. Do cultural phenomena such as punk, or the current psychogeography industry, for example, work as or against Situationist aesthetics? Is it possible to identify art works and/or practices indebted to the SI that do not recuperate its politics but fortify and develop them?
Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
· the work of Guy Debord and other members of the Situationist International
· the work of artists, writers, thinkers or film-makers proximate to or influenced by the SI
· critiques of the SI
· (post-)Situationist theory now
· détournement, plagiarism, and recuperation
· spectacular and anti-spectacular aesthetics
· the uses and abuses of psychogeography
· punk and art writing
Please submit proposals of no more than 250 words for papers or presentations of 20 minutes to Sam Cooper at situ.aesthetics@gmail.com by 16th March 2012. For further information: situationist-aesthetics.blogspot.com.