situationist map of denmark

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http://www.copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk/sikortuk.html

Text by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen.Illustrations from Mikkel Bolt

Rasmussen'sarchive supplemented with

material from the archive of theCopenhagen Free

University. The text has alsobeen published as a booklet(CFU#9) including additional

documents.

Situationist Map of DenmarkNotes on the Situationist International in Denmark

While the actions and writings of the French, Italian and Germansituationists have received quite a lot of attention during the last 10 to 15years, the actions of the Danish section remain largely unevaluated. This ispeculiar since a number of Danish artists like Asger Jorn, Jrgen Nash, J.V. Martin and Peter Laugesen were members of this artistic-politicalorganisation, which devoted its existence to the realisation of nothing lessthan a mental revolution. When the Situationist International was foundedin 1957 on the ruins of former avant-garde groups like COBRA and thelettrists, the situationists gave themselves the assignment to accelerate thecultural dissolution of the present society. The artists in the group had tosupersede the artistic scandals of the interwar avant-garde using thetechnique of dtournement. Confronted with the consumer culture of thepost-war era, the integration of the artistic avant-garde into the institution ofart, and the return of civil war (Algeria), scandal was only the first negation.Now, art must be abolished through the realisation of concrete subversionsin everyday life.

According to the situationists the methods developed by the interwarartistic and political avant-garde were insufficient as they were not equal to

the historical situation. If artists were to be revolutionary, they shouldappropriate the products and representations of society and use theserepresentations for specific propagandist purposes. Real class warfareshould be fought in the realm of ideology through a critique of the sparklingrepresentations post-war society sold as replacements for the absent,authentic imagination. As the situationists explained in theircharacteristically sharp, empty and totalistic rhetoric: We are only artistsinsofar as we are no longer artists: we want to realise art. Even though acritique of representations remained of pivotal importance throughout theexistence of the Situationist International, the massive exclusions of theyears 1961 and 1962 caused the group to concentrate on the developmentof a radical and all-inclusive theory on the alienating society of thespectacle and its destruction.

During the first period of the group's existence, when the development ofan anti-art was still on the agenda, Asger Jorn played an important role.Through him several Scandinavian artists became members of thesituationist group. The majority of these among them Jorns brotherJrgen Nash were excluded during discussions about art's role in thecritique of the society of the spectacle. At that time, in 1962, Jorn hadhimself already left the group, not wanting to compromise the situationistorganisation through his growing success as an artist and his contact tothe established art world. Nevertheless, Jorn kept on financing the journalInternational Situationniste and became a secret member of the situationistgroup under the name of George Keller. The complex disagreements thatled to the split of the group in 1962 had to do with the question of whetherartistic activity could produce anything other than a consolidation of the

ruling order and its values. During these discussions two fractions becamevisible: on the one hand a mainly French and Belgian group around GuyDebord and Raoul Vaneigem, demanding that the use of art was describedas anti-situationist and on the other a group of mostly Scandinavian andGerman artists, led by Nash, wanting to keep open the possibility of artplaying a role in the service of the revolution. The composition of the twofractions was unclear at first and at a conference in Gteborg in 1961 anagreement was reached which supported the French position. According toan account of the meeting published in Internationale situationniste, onlyNash objected. This agreement only lasted briefly however and when theGerman section Gruppe Spur published their journal without seekingpermission from the newly created central committee, the ensuing conflictculminated in the exclusion of not only the Germans but also more or lessall Scandinavian members.
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After the break in 1962, it was left to J. V. Martin to run the Scandinaviansection of the Situationist International. Based in the city of Randers Martinspent the following years organising a campaign against the nashistfraction. He also managed to publish the journal Situationistisk Revolutionand arranged actions directed against instantiations of authority such asthe Danish Monarchy and NATO. Martin remained a member of thesituationist group until 1972 when, to his disappointment, Debord andGianfranco Sanguinetti dissolved the group.

Together with the other excluded Scandinavian members, Nash createdthe 2. Situationist International in 1962. Through a number of spectacularactions this group initiated, Nash and his comrade in spirit Jens-JrgenThorsen were able to leave their mark on the Danish cultural life of the1960s. Most famous among the actions was the decapitation ofCopenhagens little mermaid statue. Nash and Thorsen tried to use thecreativity which normally remained concealed within the artistic spheredirectly in society they wanted to activate the traditionally passivespectator and turn him/her into an active co-creator of concrete situationsof play.

The following text is composed around four Danish city names, whichfunction as headlines to situationists activity in Denmark. This subject hasbeen largely neglected and needs to be included both in Danish art historyand the history of the Situationist International. The text is intended as atemporary map. I have limited the cities to four all of which provided abackdrop for significant situationist events: Odense, Silkeborg, Randersand Copenhagen.

Odense

In the newly established Galleri Exi, the manifestation Destruction ofRSG-6 opened on the 22nd of June 1963. The gallery was situated in thebasement of the first collective in Denmark, which was run by Mogens

Amdi Pedersen, the subsequently notorious leader of the Danishpedagogical experiment Tvind. The manifestation was created by theSituationist International. They turned the first room of the gallery into ashelter with sirens, stretchers and corpses. In the next room pictures ofcontemporary politicians like president Kennedy, Khrushchev, de Gaulleand the Danish foreign minister Per Hkkerup had been mounted on the

wall as targets. The audience were told to use a rifle and shoot at them. Ifthey managed to hit a politicians eye they would obtain a free copy of thecatalogue. Adjacent to the targets hung a series of Debords so-calleddirectives. These were white canvases on which Debord had writtenslogans like: Abolition du travail alin (Abolition of alienated labour). Inthe next room J. V. Martin showed his thermonuclear maps. These werelarge paintings depicting the world after the outbreak of the third world war.Michele Bernsteins plaster tableaux with plastic soldiers were placed nextto Martins maps. The tableaux showed the history of the proletariatscontinued defeats transformed into victories: Victoire de la Commune deParis (Victory of the Commune in Paris).

The manifestation was conceived as a continuation of the actionundertaken two months prior by a group of British activists calling
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themselves Spies for Peace. The British activists had broken into a secretReading bomb shelter called RSG-6 where the British government hadplanned to hide in case of a nuclear attack. Following their discovery of thegovernment's secret plans the activists had printed a small pamphlet inwhich they made public the plans as well as the existence of secretshelters reserved for politicians and civil service personnel. The pamphletspublication caused a scandal in Britain and attracted considerableattention. The Danish situationists were not slow to respond.

The political culture of the early 1960s continued to be marked by thenihilistic crisis, which followed the self-destruction of nazism and thepolarisation of the globe into the East/West oppositions of the cold war.

Although a politically conservative culture was slowly being replaced by themore optimistic one fostered by the expanding economies of the Westerncountries, events like the erection of the Berlin Wall ensured this changewas short lived. The year before the manifestation took place in Odense,the world had been brought to the brink of nuclear war when Americanaircraft discovered that the Soviet Union was preparing to install earth-to-earth missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy briefed the American public onthe matter in a nation-wide TV-speech on the 22nd of October when helaunched a blockade against Cuba. At that moment Soviet ships carryingmissiles were already on their way across the Atlantic Ocean to Cuba.Several hair-raising days followed, during which the Soviet ships continuedtheir course and the armies of the two superpowers were put on a state of

high alert. The risk of nuclear war seemed immanent but in the final hourthe Soviet ships were called back.

The events of the Cold War and the threat of mutually assured destructioncontributed to the creation of the protest movement, of which the Spies forPeace group formed a part. In accordance with their theories theSituationist International regarded themselves as the brain of this growingprotest movement. In so far as they were the avant-garde of the avant-garde the situationists had developed an adequate revolutionary theoryuniting the destruction of art with contemporary political struggle. Theaction in England was to be put into a proper historical and theoreticalsetting by the situationists who presented the Odense manifestation as itscontinuation and as an extension of the battle against the ruling powers.The manifestation was intended to widen the perspective, fusing isolated

and concrete phenomena (such as Spies for Peace) into a total situationistcritique. The destruction of art and political revolution were two sides of thesame coin. Therefore the situationists attempted to stage a kind of totalcontext-text, in which revolutionary consciousness and artistic critiquewere united. In so far as art was trapped in a dialectical position betweensubversion and subvention of dominant values, the manifestation inOdense (including Martins cartographies and Debords directives) had toproduce both a critique of modern art and, in the negative, refer to theauthenticity art had possessed before it was recuperated by spectacularmarket society. Destruction of RSG-6 was thus an attempt to challengethe occupation of art by the spectacle. Debords directives, Martins mapsand Bernsteins victories were all examples of a situationist use of art inwhich an anti-ideological communication was supposed to appear throughthe critique and stultification of modern art. In Martins maps it was abstractexpressionism that was ridiculed and turned upside down. In Bernsteinsvictories it was both monochrome painting and the nouveaux ralistes.

According to the situationists all these contemporary artistic practices wereexamples of how the spectacle had reduced art to the aestheticpreservation of alienation and separation. The artists performed a fullyideological task. The role of the work of art in the society of the spectaclewas to affirm the alienation of that which, in art, caused revolt and critiqueagainst insensitivity and conformism.

The manifestation in Odense received quite a lot of attention in the Danishnewspapers but failed to generate many dedicated reviews. In mostcontemporary writing on Destruction of RSG-6 it was presented as a
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comical incident, with one particularly telling headline describing it as Acracking painting show. In the only real review published in the Danishdaily Politiken, the critic Pierre Lbecker expressed his doubts as towhether the manifestation was an art exhibition at all. He finished hisreview by writing: It is of course against the war itself and the totalitarianstate power that they [the situationists] object and they will probablyinterpret it as a compliment when it is said that they dont do it with artisticmeans. But it is not intended as such by yours truly.

The situationists themselves were not content with the course of eventsand on the 4th of July Danish SI members J. V. Martin, Peter Laugesenand Hervard Merved demanded the manifestation to be terminated.

According to the situationists Galleri Exi had closed the first room, theshelter, and allowed the audience to make their way directly to the targetsand anti-works. This was unacceptable to the situationists. Tom Lindhardt,the owner of the gallery, responded that the situationists exaggerateddemands were impossible to satisfy. When it was closed down, there wereonly a few days left of the manifestations scheduled period. Both theclosure and subsequent fuss in the press were probably planned inadvance, since the situationists wanted to confirm their anti-artistic stanceand gain as much attention as possible for their theories. In retrospect thecourse of events in Odense appear as a desperate attempt to have it bothways: use art in a situationist way while rejecting art and its infrastructure.The situationists were caught between on the one hand the need for

publicity and recognition and on the other the belief that any attention orrecognition would damage and compromise their entire project, ultimatelypreventing the advent of the much desired revolution. Because thesituationists tended to reject the possibility of authentic artisticcommunication, there was little they could do apart from abandon art anddisappear. On the one hand it was necessary for the situationists to keep acertain distance from the modern world of the spectacle whose offer of aplace in the spotlight constituted an attempt to neutralise them. On theother it was necessary to challenge the spectacular market society hereand now with a concrete and topical project. Acuity, secrecy and teleologyfused in the obscure situationist mixture. It became extremely difficult tolocate the difference between a critique of institutions and incorporationinto them between appropriation and recuperation. The situationists werebeing pulled apart by the suffocating tension between this world and the

one they desired between what was and what ought to be. Caught in thislimbo the situationists went on, blind to themselves. This ignorancedevoured them: like all true avant-gardes the situationists were first andforemost a vanguard for themselves. That is why they persecutedthemselves, and forced a constant rejection of their rearguard. They werethe present seen from the future.

Silkeborg

After Asger Jorn had donated a large amount of art works by artists likeDubuffet, Henri Michaux and Roberto Matta to the museum in Silkeborg in1950s, in 1960 it was decided to set up a situationist library at themuseum. This decision coincided with a visit by Jorn and Debord who,when they came to Silkeborg, also went to visit the old syndicalist ChristianChristensen, who had introduced Jorn to alternative Marxism in his youth.The library was to be set up according to a scheme that Debord drew upduring their stay in Silkeborg. It was to be divided into four differentsections. The first of these was to contain pre-situationist material and hadfour subcategories: A) COBRA (with a section on the origins of COBRAand Surralisme Rvolutionnaire), B) lettrism (with a section on IsidoreIsous lettrism after 1952), C) The Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, D)the international lettrists. The second section was supposed to containsituationist material: journals, leaflets, posters and other printed matter.
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The third was the so-called historical section and contained material aboutthe situationists authored by others. The last section was the copy-section,which was to present examples of works imitating the situationists. In asmall notice in the fifth issue of Internationale situationniste it was the lastsection that was singled out as being most important. The fact that thesituationist followers had just copied and thereby falsified the situationistproject made it all the easier to condemn their practices. The last sectionwas also supposed to hold a number of different diagrams depicting thehistorical development of the avant-garde. They were supposed to showthat the Situationist International was the only authentic contemporaryavant-garde, an avant-garde true to the project of the interwar dada andsurrealist experiments. As the organisation of the library makes clear, themost important creation of the situationists were themselves. In a contra-revolutionary moment, the self-realisation of the avant-garde was both themost difficult and important task an avant-garde could set itself. Thisrealisation was however complicated by the fact that the spectacle soughtto recuperate the avant-garde by any means necessary. The avant-gardeshould therefore shun any contact with the cultural establishment it mustrefuse containment by the pacifying representations of the spectacle,representations that reduced people to the stale identities of artist,politician, revolutionary, writer, filmmaker, etc. These identities nowprevented people from performing activities once prescribed by theseterms. The avant-garde faced the problem that any realisation, any createdwork, was a concession to the ruling powers and to the banality of the old

culture. Therefore the situationists had to conceal every finished object,mask themselves and realise their actions in a hurry without leaving traces.If the institutions of the spectacle spotted the avant-garde and its possiblerealisations they would suck up and tame the avant-garde and use it tokeep intact the deceitful world of the spectacular commodity. If the avant-garde was to succeed it should cancel its own conditions of existence andbecome invisible. The avant-garde should work towards its own abolition:The situationist library in Silkeborg was never realised.

Randers

After Jrgen Nash and the other Scandinavian members of the SituationistInternational had been excluded in 1962, it was up to the painter J. V.

Martin to lead the Scandinavian section. Martins hometown, Randers inJutland, subsequently became the centre for situationist activities inDenmark. During the next decade Martin more or less single-handedlyorganised a range of events, which caused small scandals in Denmark.Following the founding of the 2. Situationist International by Nash and hiscompatriots, Martin directed a series of attacks against Nash and the otherrenegades. In the eyes of the original situationists, like Debord, Martinand the others, the Nashists falsely presented themselves as situationiststo a Scandinavian public. In articles and interviews Martin objected toNashs misuse of the situationists theories and vocabulary and describedhim as a parasite. The 2. Situationist International was nothing but ababy soothing, court jesting and peasant girlish romantic escape fromreality. Martin and the situationists presented the exclusions as simply aquestion of the proper understanding of situationist ideas. The exclusionswere a necessary condition for the revolutionary clarity the situationistavant-garde should express. If situationist ideas were used as legitimationfor different artistic or semi-artistic activities, the institution would swallowthe revolutionary avant-garde. Fellow travellers were not accepted.

Martins staging of the manifestation Destruction of RSG-6 functionedboth as a critique of the threat of nuclear war and a response to theNashist exhibition Seven Rebels the year before in Odense. But Martinreally became the man of the moment in December 1964, when heproduced and distributed two postcards with anti-royal content. Thepostcards, which were produced in a run of 2000, each showed a nakedwoman with text bubbles attached. In one a girl, stripped to the waist, lay ina wicker chair saying: The liberation of the working class is its own work!
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On the other, a well known photo of the British prostitute Christine Keelerwas reproduced. She says, As the Situationist International says: It ismore honourable to be a prostitute like me than marry a Fascist likeKonstantin. Keeler had been involved in a big scandal the year before: theso-called Profumo-affair hinged on Keeler having an affair with the Britishminister of defence while simultaneously sleeping with a Soviet navalofficer. The postcards most provocative element was nevertheless the textbubble in which the recently celebrated marriage between Danish Princess

Anne-Marie and the Greek King Konstantin was commented on in termswhich left little doubt as to the situationist attitude towards the politicalsituation in Greece. The combination of the naked British prostitute and thetext bubble proved too much for Inge Hansen, the chairman of religiousand anticommunist organisation Moralsk Oprustning (Moral Rearmament).She reported Martin to the police and accused him of lese-majesty. Thecase was dropped, according to the situationists because the police andthe Danish government wanted to avoid further scandal.

The postcards are a good example of the activity the situationistsundertook after they left the art world behind. When they practised theirinterventions into the social imagery, they of course used insights andpractices from dada and surrealism. Despite this, the situationists did notconsider their actions as art in a traditional sense. They looked uponthemselves as a revolutionary groupuscule that had understood that artwas a thing of the past and of no use to present critical tasks. Instead of

creating works of art, the situationist avant-garde occupied itself with thetheoretical organisation of resistance against the spectacle. Art created apassive spectacular relationship. All artistic media, including visual art,literature and cinema, were one-sided spectacular expressions which thesituationists sought to dominate or interrupt.

That the Situationist International constituted a real danger to the society ofthe spectacle was, according to them, confirmed in 1965 when a bombexploded in Martins house in Randers during a demonstration againstNATO. Sren Kanstrup, a former East German spy who took part in therally, had brought a bomb to Randers from Copenhagen. The bombexploded in mysterious circumstances in Martins house, destroying theinterior and more or less his entire archive. Kanstrup was arrested but the

case was never solved. The situationists never had any doubt thatKanstrup was an agent provocateur for the police and the DanishCommunist Party, DKP. According to the situationists, the forces of lawand order and the Stalinists had joined forces to counteract the SituationistInternational and the growing protest movement. The incident in Randersconfirmed this self-conception and revolutionary propaganda wasintensified.

Copenhagen

One of the most important situationist documents was created during 24
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hours in 1957 in Copenhagen. The book Fin de Copenhague was made byJorn and Debord at the printing house Permild & Rosengren after a singlevisit to the local news stall. The book was composed using the techniqueof dtournement and consisted of fragments snatched from other booksand magazines: photographs, comics, advertisements, maps from travelbooks, photos of naked ladies from pornographic magazines, etc. Eachpage was made up of a collage of these elements, linked by the colourfulsplashes Jorn added. Standing on top of a three-meter high ladder, Jornhad poured lithographical ink onto the print plates. The resulting stainsmimicked the filtered colour threads of action painters and mediated theattached text- and image elements. In so far as Jorns colour stains wereprinted and reproduced, they twisted the expressiveness of the thendominant abstract painting. The personal gesture was erased throughreproduction and lost its intimate human dimension because it had beenperformed at a distance of three meters. In accordance with thesituationist analysis of modern art art has been seized by the spectacleand needs to be abandoned Jorn parodied the expressiveness of actionpainting. He reduced action paintings gestures to an existence as meresocial representations, in line with the advertisements and nude photosspread throughout Fin de Copenhague. Jorn feigned expression: thedripping of action painting was demystified and reduced to a technique, astyle you could reproduce even outside art. Expressiveness was onlypresent in the negative.

The prefabricated texts and images in the book, which Debord had helpedJorn arrange in his capacity as Conseiller technique pour le dtournement,formed a regular catalogue of the reduced communication in the society ofthe spectacle. The authentic poetry of language had been reduced to thevulgar prose of information. The spectacular-market society hadexpropriated not only the productive capacity of man but also hiscommunicatory ability. The possibility of human welfare had beendestroyed as a consequence of this expropriation and man was nowalienated to a completely new degree. In the society of the spectaclelanguage had no other function than to communicate the messages of thesociety of the spectacle. Language functioned as a material support for theideology of power language was the cement that glued together thespectacles ideological scraps. That language could be somethingcompletely different, that it could be a reservoir in which one was

hospitable to both one's kin and the other i.e. in which people could besomething different than the identities the spectacle sold to them thenthis was something the spectacle did its best to conceal. According to thespectacle, language was just information and as all communication passedthrough its cybernetic machines, people no longer communicated ratherperforming tasks prescribed from above. Communication was a commodityon a par with cars, washing machines and bed lamps. It was mass-produced and distributed by the society of the spectacle. The placement ofdifferent advertisements made visible the infinite selection of identicalcommodities authoritatively instructing the subject to exist in a way thatwas favourable to the spectacle. As it said on one page in the book: Whatdo you want? [] Lots of new clothes? A dream home with all the latestcomforts and labour-saving devices? A new car a motor-launcha lightaircraft of your own? Whatever you want, its coming your way plusgreater leisure for enjoying it all. With electronics, automation and nuclearenergy, we are entering the new Industrial Revolution which will supply ourevery need, easily quickly cheaply abundantly. The naiveconsumptive desire of the spectacle was made explicit in the juxtapositionof this advertisement text with a comic depicting a young woman, herboyfriend and her lover. In the same way that the boyfriend justdisappeared (He just vanished, the young woman says) and therebymade it possible for the young woman to be with her lover, all problemsapparently vanished with the purchase of a new commodity. On a laterpage in the book the ones excluded from this purified commodity paradisebecame visible: a turban wearing, swarthy man who was being harassedby a soldier. On the same page the only handwritten text of thepublication appeared: VIVE LALGRIE LIBRE.
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As the title indicates Fin de Copenhague bore witness to the urbannightmare into which functionalism was slowly transforming Europeancities. The juxtaposition of phrases snatched from advertisements (leproblme est rsolu) with different diagrams mocked the functionalistreduction of the city. The dtournement of the different textual and visualfragments in the book testified to the situationists' desire to transform theworld. The book documented the missing conditions for authenticcommunication. The history it was also supposed to tell about how thesituationists wanted to revolutionize Copenhagen and transform the cityinto a psychogeographical experiment remained cacophonic. Like thesituationists themselves, Fin de Copenhague oscillated almost manic-depressively between a stout and indomitable Hegelian optimism andmelancholic elegy. The book was incoherent and stuffed with detached bitsand pieces because the world, which spectacular-capitalism had created,was like that too. The book was incoherent because the world wasincoherent. But in the negative it kept alive the promise of another worldnot yet realised.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen 2003

situationist map of denmark

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