Counterrevolution, the Spectacle, and the Situationist Avant-Garde

Abstract

national stands out with its persistent, grandiloquent claim to transcend art in a revolutionary act. The critical commitment of the Situationists has resulted in their omission from art history. Compared with other contemporary art groups like Nouveau Realisme, Pop Art, or Mnimalism, the Situationist International has been marginalized as a result of the group's continued adherence to a Marxist revolutionary perspective that most other groups and artistic practices have given up. Even though artists associated with conceptual art and minimalism, such as Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Robert Morris, and Carl Andre, all exercised a kind of self-critical praxis in which they addressed the development of advanced mass mediated capitalism, they were much more affirmative toward this development and the coming of the consumer society than were the Situationists, who after a few years excluded more or less all practicing artists from the group in the hope of releasing a post-artistic revolutionary praxis from the confines of the art institution. The Situationists rejected the art institution with militant fervor, and argued that the isolated work of art no longer possessed critical potential. Therefore, art had to die. The Situationists made short shrift of this: art was a thing of the past, and now it had to be realized in revolutionary praxis. The political commitment of the Situationists meant that the group did not fit into the overall picture of the development of art after World War II, when the original project of the avant-garde more or less disappeared or at least weakened considerably. The Situationist International was marginalized to such an extent that it was not even granted a place in the various art-historical and sociological accounts of the development of the avant-garde. The Situationist group does not appear in Peter B?rger's classic book from 1974, Theorie der Avantgarde, in which the distinction between modernism and avant-garde is drawn consistently for the first time. According to B?rger, the avant-garde was characterized by a critical attitude toward the relative independence that art had been permitted in bourgeois society and by an independence that made it possible for the individual artwork

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