International Movement vs. Organization: The Situationist Times and the Situationist International (1962-1967)

Resumo

The Situationist International was a radical artistic organization that existed from 1957 to 1972, and whose internationalism was modeled on the avant-garde attempt to transform the world’s conditions. Though based in France, it sought and had adherents in diverse countries across Europe and even the US, but, like Surrealism before it, the organization became notorious for its exclusions. The first collective expulsion was in 1962, when Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong created an alternative form of the Situationist International with its “exiles” under the banner of the magazine The Situationist Times. In a manifesto-styled inaugural text, de Jong emphasized the width of the situationist project, calling it a “movement” based on the heterogeneous nature of transnational cooperation. This essay will compare the internationalisms of both groups, taking as vantage point the difference between “movement” and “organization”, which configures the manners in which artists and writers from different countries participated in each. Thus, the networks they established framed the form and content of their respective journals; The Situationist Times, for example, was a multilingual, labyrinthine production anarchically directed by de Jong, whereas Internationale Situationniste was monolingual and programmatically structured by the SI’s Central Committee.