Situationist International

Right.

So this is the system's neatest trick, the whole outline here.

There was a concept, Pete, from the Situationists, I guess like Guy Debord, a bunch of French postmodernists, basically, came out of the Marxist tradition.

They had an idea that was called recuperation.

And this was probably in the 30s or 40s, maybe even the 50s.

But before we get into the track, who actually is Malcolm McLaren? Before he became a solo artist, Malcolm McLaren was the ultimate professional provocateur.

Born in London in 1946, he spent his youth drifting through various art colleges, deeply influenced by the Situationist International, a group of radical artists and social theorists who believed in using absurdity and public disruption to critique consumer culture.

By 1971, McLaren turned his attention to fashion and music, opening a boutique at 430 Kings Road with his partner Vivienne Westwood.

The shop changed names and identities constantly, morphing from Let It Rock to Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, and eventually to Sex in 1974.

Protest marches, public speech and critique and discourse.

Situationists, Maoists, free speech movement, Stonewall, women's liberation, Black Panthers, up against the wall.

let a hundred flowers bloom squats and communes drags pubs after our clubs and other unpoliced spaces unpoliced states of being italian autonomia Projects undertaken by non-academic outsiders, uncredentialed researchers, small presses, autodidact waves, turbulence, Joseph Beuys Free University, Konrad Schnitzler and Hans Joachim Jodlis, Zodiac Free Arts Lab, Munich Action Theater, Anti-Theater.

This was the way back before everyone's headspace had been colonized by the media and we came to accept and even welcome the idea that media shapes all of our responses.

It was definitely on people's radar.

Now, the Situationist movement, as well as Frankfurt School-type people, which the Rotary Fraction were definitely acolytes of for limited purposes.

Gramsci and Adorno featured very large in their ideological horizon.

But anyway, Siegfried Hausner, he was part of what was called, translates to the Socialist Patients Collective, or the SPK.

You can see it in the latter half of the movie.

And then he founded an art movement, an art collective called Panic Movement, which sounds like a sort of revival of Guy Debord and the Situationist International.

Or

it sounds like a hardcore band from the late 90s and early

Where should we start with, with, with this? So we, we should probably just say a little bit about ...

People might not have any clue what the situ- who the Situationists were.

Uh, you know, what we're talking about.

So we should give a little just, like, you know, couple of sentence, uh, positioning statement perhaps.

Who wants to do that?

I mean, I can say something really briefly, which is, you know, there's one way of looking at it, which is that the Situationist International, I think we're going to, we're going to, uh, complexify that and explain that it's not necessarily the same thing as the Situationists or situationism.

But in a way it could be said that they emerged from the wreckage of Dada and Surrealism in a way, right? And so there's some kind of genealogy that you can see, genealogy that you can see there.

And another way of also describing them is this is a kind of small shifting group of avant-garde artists and theorists, right? About 1957, I think, to '72.

Yeah, that, that very well may have been what was inspiring some of that, uh, daring do or whatever.

Uh, but-- And later on, when I got, uh, exposed to, um, the Situationist International and started learning about Guy Debord and just the basic concept that art are, um, lived situations or moments, um, and not necessarily static objects or commodities.

Um, uh, I think that that really resonated with me because that's still kind of how I view my life and art, that, um, just creating, um, uh, or participating in interesting situations is what it's kind of all about for me.

So I'm continuously-- Even if I'm standing in line at the supermarket, you know, I might try to strike up a very spirited and strange conversation with someone just to see what happens, you know.

Um, like, you know, you can go back to the hippies, the beatniks, and take it all the way back to Mozart and these, these, um, outliers, these people in the margins.

Um, you know, um, it's-- this is probably an unpopular opinion, but considering I've lived outside of the United States and in places where there are no punks really, uh, the-- There is a punk band in Kenya, I think.

But, uh, anyway, by and large, you don't run across people who you can discuss the Situationist International with, uh, uh, around here.

Um, so I've almost thought that this is, uh, perhaps an ethnicity as much as it is a subculture or a genre or a scene and that, um... 'Cause I think the definition of, uh, ethnicity is a group of people who share common, uh, traits, uh, or, um, cultural traits, um, or share a common, uh, descent.

Bands like The Clash or The Ramones quickly adopted similar garish graphics for their releases, not because they were copying, but because it was a visual shorthand that said, we're anti-establishment.

Underneath all this rebellion lay a serious theoretical framework drawn from the Situationist International.

Their doctrine of detournement, taking an image from mainstream culture and turning it into a critique, became Reed's playbook.

He'd been reading Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle while editing a magazine spread on punk.