Desire

Sensation

Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue:
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien:
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature, - heureux comme avec une femme.


Sensation
Arthur RIMBAUD
(1854-1891)

These things are things that now must be no more

And the day seemed a night

(...)

The boy lay dead, and the day seemed a night
Outside. The rain fell like a sick affright
Of Nature at her work in killing him.
Memory of what he was gave no delight,
Delight at what he was was dead and dim.

(...)

Antinous
Fernando Pessoa
1918

The boy lay dead

Hadrian’s soul

The rain outside was cold in Hadrian’s soul.

The boy lay dead On the low couch, on whose denuded whole,
To Hadrian’s eyes, whose sorrow was a dread,
The shadowy light of Death’s eclipse was shed.

(...)


Antinous
Fernando Pessoa
1918

Some facts never exist

The time and place and manner of my death are three facts that don’t exist yet

The time and place and manner of my death are three facts that don’t exist yet.

Facts exist for whole centuries and then suddenly cease.

Pluto used to be a planet and now it is a chunk of debris, number 1341340.

My grandmother’s house stands on the hill above the sea where she left it.

When I come back to visit I discover a crater in its place.

This room is full of facts.

All day I let the cat out, let it in, then let it back out again.

I mean this metaphorically.

Some facts never exist.

It is winter. It is summer.

All night the branches tap at the glass.

- Trans - Neptunian Object by Suzanne Buffam.

An Essay (on colour)

No Turning Back

Separation

The separation and hostility between the "world" of art and the "world" of everyday life finally exploded in Dada. "Life and art are One," proclaimed Tzara; "the modern artist does not paint, he creates directly." But this upsurge of real, direct creativity had its own contradictions. All the real creative possibilities of the time were dependent on the free use of its real productive forces, on the free use of its technology, from which the Dadaists, like everyone else, were excluded. Only the possibility of total revolution could have liberated Dada. Without it, Dada was condemned to vandalism and, ultimately, to nihilism -- unable to get past the stage of denouncing an alienated culture and the self-sacrificial forms of expression which it imposed on its artists and their audience alike. (...) In Berlin, where its expression was most coherent, Dada offered a brief glimpse of a new praxis beyond both art and politics: the revolution of everyday life. - [The Revolution of Modern Artand the Modern Art of Revolution]

Rumours

Psychogeographical Maps

The production of psychogeographical maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but total insubordination to habitual influences (influences generally categorized as tourism, that popular drug as repugnant as sports or buying on credit). [Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, GUY DEBORD, 1955]

Alien Monkeys

Untitled

In all that has happened over the last twenty years, the most important change lies in the very continuity of the spectacle. What is significant is not the refinements of the spectacle’s media instrumentation, which had already attained a highly advanced stage of development; it is quite simply that spectacular domination has succeeded in raising an entire generation molded to its laws. . . . Spectacular domination’s first priority was to eradicate historical knowledge in general, beginning with virtually all information and rational commentary on the most recent past. . . . The spectacle makes sure that people are unaware of what is happening, or at least that they quickly forget whatever they may have become aware of. The more important something is, the more it is hidden. [In, Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988)]

Details (Box 1, 2009)

See the sunset with no sleep

I've been thinking too much about you
See the sunset with no sleep at all
Constantly thinking about you
And i can't get through this at all

Trentemoller, Moan

The construction of situations is the creation of real time and space

It is not enough to burn the museums...

It is not enough to burn the museums. They must also be sacked. Past creativity must be freed from the forms into which it has been ossified and brought back to life. Everything of value in art has always cried aloud to be made real and to be lived. This 'subversion' of traditional art is, obviously, merely part of the whole art of subversion we must master (cf. Ten Days That Shook the University). Creativity, since Dada, has not been a matter of producing anything more but of learning to use what has already been produced.

- idem, ibidem.

Human life?

In the end

In the end, for all its fury (and Symbolists and Anarchists worked side-by-side in the 1890s) revolutionary art was caught in contradictions. It could not or would not break free of the forms of bourgeois culture as a whole. Its content and method could become transformations of the world but, while art remained imprisoned within the social spectacle, its transformations remained imaginary. Rather than enter into direct social conflict with the reality it criticized, it transferred the whole problem into an abstract and inoffensive sphere where it functioned objectively as a force consolidating all it wanted to destroy. Revolt against reality became the evasion of reality. Marx's original critique of the genesis of religious myth and ideology applies word-for-word to the rebellion of bourgeois art: it too "is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. It is the sigh of the oppresses creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people" [Marx, Contribution to the critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"].

- The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution, written by Tim Clark, Christopher Gray, Charles Radcliffe and Donald Nicholson-Smith.

Note: mistakenly described as a "manifesto" by Chronos Publications, which published it as a pamphlet in October 1994, this text was never published by either the English section of the Situationist International nor by the SI as a whole. It appears to have circulated as a "confidential" manuscript.