Category Archives: situationist

On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time

Edited by Elizabeth Sussman (1989)
These photographs, essays, drawings, and original texts document the rich agit-art legacy of the Situationist International, a group of European artists and writers who emerged from such avant-garde movements as COBRA, Lettrisme, and the Imaginary Bauhaus and from the breakup of surrealism to launch a strategy of art as cultural critique.

Posted in art, history, situationist, theory

T.A.Z. the Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism

By Hakim Bey (1985)
The underground cult bestseller! Essays that redefine the psychogeographical nooks of autonomy. Recipes for poetic terror, anarcho black magic, post-situ psychotropic surgery, denunciations of spiritual addictions to vapid infotainment cults this is the bastard classic, the watermark impressed upon our minds. Where conscience informs praxis, and action infects consciousness, T.A.Z. is beginning to worm its way into above-ground culture.

Posted in counterculture, culture, situationist, theory

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century

By Greil Marcus (1989)
Acclaimed rock reviewer/author Marcus offers up a fascinating thesis: that modern consciousness is to a great extent shaped by events or documents “insignificant” of themselves but collectively very important indeed, perhaps even definitive. While spending much of its time on the impact of the Sex Pistols, this is not purely a “rock-music” book–along the way one encounters various ranters, Dadaists, nihilists, whatever–even Theodore Dreiser. If it lacks the rigor demanded of academic historiography, Marcus’s book is still great popular culture, and academic historians would do well to be interested. Meanwhile, the cross-referential treatment gives a seeming (at least) validity that sheer facts wouldn’t to the idea of a “secret history” that permeates unobtrusively and yields more meaning than many would like to believe.