Decolonise Art/Decolonising the avant-garde: Difference between revisions

Collaborative Open Source text by [[Tae Ateh]]

 

 

==Decolonising Situationism==

The Situationists favoured psychogeography but here it was the only non European section – the Algerian section that was to be the last to use this as an organised Stuationist methodology (Andrea Gibbons 2017). While [[psychogeography]] also became an established literary trope through the 90s and 00s, Asger Jorn's concept of situgraphy and the more obscure Letterist practices of Hypergraphy and [[Metagraphy]] were not known about at all. There is still scant literature on Letterism and these techniques in English outside of works about Debord (eg on Debord/ Wolman's metagraphy (Wark), or on Debord/ Jorn's metagraphy (Nolle). And some work on Letterist cinema. There is some in French but little translated into English, on hypergraphy and also many of Isou's and other Letterists and Situationists original texts. There are, however, none on Metagraphy or sStuography and certainly none that chart the interrelation between these different groups and movements. almost nothing written on more obscure groups and artists such as the 2nd Letterist International or the Ultra Letterists (although they went on the join Yves Klein's New Realists, and some academic work on this group exists.) There is nothing in English on Metagraphy and little in French either.

 

 

To what extent is this eurocentrism (a Western Europe Paris centrism) in the avant garde a result of the artists and their circles and how much is down to academic historification? The little on Isou in the English language looks at isolated parts of his output – on cinema (Cabañas 2015) and his poetry and Jewish mysticism (Sjoberg, 2010). the Judaic mystical aspect in particular provides a connection ot the sufi school of Hurufiya. The other major figure Asger Jorn is also elements of nationalist mysticism (Shields 1998) and its easy to see how this sits uneasily with european histories of art and modernism. the little writing there is in English on both of these is is as part of works centred on Guy Debord of which there are many. Indeed Debord's relationshp with the Scandinavian or the Algerian sections of the Situationist International can be compared to o9ther examples in the historic avant-garde eg Carl Einstein and the Cubist use of African Art or Andre Breton and the Surrealists relation to Negritude and and the so-called Black Surrealists.