Philobiblon talk on collecting the Internationale Situationniste (Dec. 8)

Dear readers,

Please excuse the shameless self-promotion, but for those of you living in (or traveling through) the Philadelphia area, please come and listen to me talk about my collection around the Internationale Situationniste and its aftermath. Please leave me a note if you’d like to attend.

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THE PHILOBIBLON CLUB OF PHILADELPHIA

Collecting the “Spectacular-commodity:” the Internationale Situationniste and its Aftermath

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Founded in 1957, the Internationale Situationniste was one of the foremost Post-war European avant-gardes. Its leader, Guy Debord, posited that “in modern societies… everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” In a sense, the opening sentence of the Society of the Spectacle (1967) – Debord’s magnum opus and the movement’s key theoretical foundation – encapsulates the Situationsists’ unique take on traditional Marxo-Hegelianism. According to Debord, alienation does not lie in workers’ lack of agency (as Marx believed) but – and this is a simplification – in the fact that, in modern societies, social interactions are mediated by (distorted) images.

Collecting the Internationale Situationniste is, in many ways, a duplicitous, even counter-revolutionary, act. The Situationist movement rejected the accumulation of material goods and attacked the concept of copyrights, viewing the former as a noxious byproduct of the “spectacular-commodity” economy and the latter as a means to constrain ideas within controlled, commercialized distribution channels. Unsurprisingly, then, the group’s eponymous journal opens with a statement that “all texts published in Internationale Situationniste may be reproduced, translated, or adapted without indication of origin”.  Many took the Situs to their word – their writings can be purchased for a small price at most anarchist bookstores or downloaded free of charge from the internet.

This talk will provide an introduction to the Internationale Situationniste through the prism of book collecting. It will also address some of the joys and challenges of acquiring material whose materiality actively rejects its collectible status (e.g., endless pirate reprints, no imprint information, unknown run, poor quality paper, etc.).

More about the collection can be found on Public Collectors, a project to make public “cultural artifacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible” (http://publiccollectors.org/SituationnisteCollection.html). Unique or otherwise unusual items from the collection are shared on a regular basis through a dedicated blog (https://situationnisteblog.wordpress.com/).

Fin de Copenhague [1957]

Jorn, Asger and Debord, Guy. Fin de Copenhague. Copenhagen: Bauhaus Imaginiste , May 1957. n.p. [36 pp.]; ill.; 24.5 x 17 cm.; ill. blue-gray publisher bindings impressed with a page “liberated” from the Danish newspaper Politiken (each copy was made with a different page, and is thus unique). Color reproduction of text and picture collages.

Our copy is among a handful of unnumbered copies reserved for the artists beyond the commercial run of two-hundred numbered and signed copies. This presentation copy was personally gifted to Ole Jorn by his father,Asger Jorn,  who warmly inscribed it as such (“To Ole, from Papa”).  An extraordinary provenance indeed.

Fin de Copenhague is the product of a collaboration between Guy Debord and Asger Jorn immediately preceding the foundation of the Situationist International. “The book was printed within 24 hours as an artistic experiment. Having just arrived in Copenhagen, Jorn and Debord rushed into a newsagents, stole a huge amount of magazines and newspapers, and spent a drunken afternoon collaging elements together. The next day they arrived at the printer with 32 collages, which were transferred to lithographic plates. Jorn then sat at the top of a ladder over the zinc plates, dropping cup after cup of Indian ink onto them. The plates were then etched and printed over the black texts and images.” (Bruun Rasmussen). The book was produced by legendary printer of avant-garde movements Permild & Rosengreen, whom Jorn and other COBRA artists had trusted with several of their works.

Since its original publication in 200 copies, Fin de Copenhague was reprinted a few times. It was first included in Documents Relatifs a la Fondation de l’Internationale Situationniste, pp. 553-592 (Paris: Allia, 1985), which is now out of print. A standalone facsimile was released by Allia in 1986, and reissued in September 2001 (under the collection “Contributions a l’Histoire de l’Internationale Situationniste et son Temps”) with a preface by Gerard Berreby. Finally, It is now available over the internet; a full PDF facsimile of the first edition can be found online at  http://monoskop.org/images/7/75/Jorn_Asger_Fin_de_Copenhague.pdf

We locate 13 OCLC copies: 6 in Europe (Danish Union Catalogue and National Library, State and University Library in Aarhus, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Bibliotheque Nordique, Bibliotheque Litteraire Jacques Doucet) and 7 in the United States (Berkeley, Getty, MIT, Northwestern, Stony Brook, Yale, Columbia).

Gonzalvez 84. Hansen 166.

Sincere thanks to Tommy K. for his help in securing this exceptional copy

Further reading:

Nolle, Christian. Books of Warfare: The Collaboration between Guy Debord & Asger Jorn from 1957-1959.http://virose.pt/vector/b_13/nolle.html

Poynor, Rick. On my Shelf: Fin de Copenhague.  http://designobserver.com/article.php?id=37720