Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere

by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jakob Jakobsen (Editor)

This is the first ever English-language anthology collecting texts and documents from the still little-known Scandinavian part of the Situationist movement. The book covers over three decades of writing, from Asger Jorn's Luck and Chance published in 1953, to the statements of the Situationist Antinational set up by Jens Jørgen Thorsen and J.V. Martin in 1974. The writings collected gravitate around the year 1962 when the Situationist movement went through it s most dynamic and critical moments, and the disagreements about the relationship between art and politics came to a culmination, resulting in exclusions and the split of the Situationist International. The Situationists did not win, and the almost forgotten Scandinavian fractions even less so. The book broadens the understanding of the Situationist movement by bringing into view the wild and unruly activities of the Scandinavian fractions of the organisation and the more artistic, experimental, and actionist attitude that characterised them. They did, nevertheless, constitute a decisive break with the ruling socio-economic order through their project of bringing into being new forms of life. Only an analysis of the multifaceted and often contradictory Situationist revolution will allow us to break away from the dull contemplation of yet another document of Debord s archive or yet another drawing by Jorn. There is a lot to be learned from the history of revolutionary failure. It is along these lines that this book points forward beyond the crisis-ridden capitalist order that survives today. Texts Asger Jorn, Jørgen Nash, Jens Jørgen Thorsen, Bauhaus Situationniste, Jacqueline de Jong, Gordon Fazakerley, Gruppe SPUR, Dieter Kunzelman, J.V. Martin, and Guy Debord. Translated Peter Shield, James Manley, Anja Buchele, Matthew Hyland, Fabian Tompsett, and Jakob Jakobsen.

304 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2015

About the author

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is an art historian and theorists working on the politics and history of the avant-garde, the politics of contemporary art and the revolutionary tradition. He is associate professor at the University of Copenhagen.

Reviews

[6655321 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Time to be real: i think everyone has a really strong Situationist phase because Society of the Spectacle and the Revolution of Everyday Life are such strong pieces (and can be read in a short period of time and have pretty good ideas), which glosses over that: a lot of the SI was dross, mutual recrimination, weird paranoia and art (which i cannot evaluate because it is supposed to exist in a moment shattering the distance between producer and consumer and y'know it's 2016, also i fundamentally don't *get* a lot of art). In some ways, I just want this sort of publication to be the juicy gossip, have the personal correspondence and broadsides about how people hate each other, air out the dirty laundry and also (and this is something this text desperately lacks) GIVE US SOME FUCKING CONTEXT. It's great to present translated works (although some are sort of recursive and sample a lot of text from each other) but even with the introduction there is little indication of *why* this piece was written or *how* it is to fit into the situation it was written in but rather the reader is left to puzzle it out which *isn't exactly my idea of a good time when it comes to B-Sides from a revolutionary movement i may very well like but which is overwhelmingly defined by 2 contributors.* The text *feels* really solid, it just needs some fleshing out to make these publications *feel* more vibrant so a reader doesn't feel bored and listless working through them.

[Mehdi · Rating 4 out of 5]

At long last, many of the texts of the Second Situationist are available in English!