The Consul: Contributions to the History of the Situationist International and its Time, Volume 2: Conversations with Gerard Berreby with the Help of ... International and Its Time Vol II

by Ralph Rumney

Artist Ralph Rumney's (1934-2002) oral history The Consul is an important, if slight, document that makes an engaging addition to our knowledge about the avant-garde's most extreme faction (along with its companion volume Jean-Michel Mension's The Tribe). The Situationist International (SI) certainly needs contributions to its history that lie outside those carved by its dominating leading lights Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. Rumney, interviewed at length before (by Alan Woods) in the entertaining The Map Is Not the Territory, was a founding member, and the only British representative, of the SI (Andrew Hussey's flawed but competent biography of Debord, The Game of War, is probably the best place to start for an overview) and has spent a lifetime drinking and drifting, and rejecting the world, in the best psychogeographical fashion. The Consul, beautifully presented with host of photographs of Rumney, his art and his companions, is a languorous, absorbing and affecting ramble through Rumney's life, which, whilst hardly being ground-breaking, gives a further roundness and insight into a most invigorating, radical and challenging group of artists. --George Bowman

Genres: Biography, Art, Art History, Nonfiction

130 pages, Paperback

First published October 19, 1999

Reviews

[Stas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The contingency of fame. How intertwined are the establishment and the bohemia. How personal jokes and sloppy meanderings of a few eccentrics are reified into 'movements', 'doctrines', 'cultural capital'.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nice memoir of sorts of a very important time in post-war Europe.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apparently (according to letters from the early 1990s) Guy Debord held a strong grudge against G. Berréby, the publisher of Editions Allia, for an anthology book Berréby had published in 1985. After Debord's death in 1994 Editions Allia began to publish some new volumes focusing on early situationist figures and oral history interviews, of which this book is volume II. So one can't help but be grateful for Berréby's oral histories, whatever Debord might have thought of him.
This one is particularly interesting because Ralph Rumney is usually written out of S.I. history from the beginning, as he was kicked out of the group c. 1958 after missing a deadline for the first issue of the S.I. journal. Yet he was also the one who had taken the frequently reproduced photos of the 1957 founding meetings of the S.I. in Cosio di Arroscia, Italy — and only for that reason wasn't included in the photos. It was also Rumney's idea to use metallic covers for the S.I. journals (p. 40). He confides as well that the "London Psychogeographical Committee," often dutifully listed as a contributing group to the S.I.'s formation, was in reality just himself ("It was just me.…It was a pure invention, a mirage"). Although Rumney is British the interviews for this book were in French, so the text is translated back into English by Malcolm Imrie.
Apart from summarizing his overall life story, the book includes other interesting details: his happenstance teenage friendship with E. P. Thompson (who later, in 1963, would publish The Making of the English Working Class — "…a notorious communist, a man shunned by our village, who lived at the top of the hill behind our house. One day I went to see him.…"); his meetings with George Bataille ("He was a polite man, a little shy, I think"); as well as his ongoing feuds with Peggy Guggenheim, his first wife's mother. He subsequently married Michele Bernstein, Guy Debord's ex-wife, in the early 1970s and gives her credit for aspects of situationist strategy which are often attributed to Debord by default (for example, "…she was the one in Cosio [in 1957] who picked everyone up on the fact that one does not say 'Situationism' but 'Situationist,' because when it becomes an '-ism' chances are that it will turn into an ideology, a sect, a religion.…").
Ralph Rumney died just 2–3 years after the 1999 French edition of this book was published.

[Philippe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reminds me of something Andrei Tarkovsky once said:

Whatever it expresses -
even destruction and ruin -
the artistic image
is by definition an embodiment of hope.
It is inspired by faith.
Artistic creation
is by definition a denial of death.
Therefore it is optimistic
even if an ultimate sense the artist is tragic.
And so there can never be
optimistic artists and pessimistic artists.
There can only be talent and mediocrity.

I am sure Ralph Rumney would agree with all of that.

[Jeremy Jl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good insight into the mind of a psychogeographer.