The situationists landed in high school, in the middle of the GA. Their leader, a tall, magnificent guy, took the floor to say that the situs supported the strike on the condition that it be the strike for the strike, without demands, and without a vote: death to democracy! School is dead! Long live anarchy! Long live the Situationist International! It got me so excited that I too took the floor to explain that the third-grade students, of which I was a part, were prisoners in their class and that they had to be freed. I had just created the MLE, Children’s Liberation Movement, with Jean and Pascal, we marched against I don’t know what education reform, with a sign: “Teachers are a dirty race.” Big success in the middle of the demonstration.
At the GA, when I launched my appeal, as the guys were tired of voting, most followed me. We opened all the classes: “It’s the strike! The end of school.” Seeing the kids tumble into the GA, the leader of the situs really laughed, he came to congratulate me: I had succeeded in ridiculing the trade union movement and creating a situation. I adored him, he really was a hell of a guy. He got me into the Communist League when I was 13 and a half, and got me out the following year, believing that I had better things to do than hand out Red at the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis metro exit.
“What for example ?
– Kiss.”
Too bad I can’t remember his name. He may be at the Council of State today. In any case, if he is still alive, he has surely already visited the exhibition entitled Guy-Ernest Debord & Gil Joseph Wolman – one does not exclude the other which is held at the Loeve & Co Marais gallery, 16, rue de Montmorency (Paris IIIe).
For those who don’t yet know what Guy Debord’s situationism consists of, I’ll sum it up: to be at the head of the avant-garde of art until you surpass it. At the head, that is to say at the very top of a pyramid of devotees ready for all humiliations to be able to say that they are part of it. The exhibition tells how, five years after their departure from the Lettrist International, and a few months before the formal creation, in July 1957, of the Situationist International, Guy Debord excluded his closest friend and accomplice Gil Joseph Wolman from it for ” ridiculous way of life” (Wolman had just had a child, a prohibitive thing in the eyes of the master).
“One does not exclude the other”
But contrary to what generally happens among crypto-Bolshevik plotters, Wolman refuses this exclusion, and signifies his refusal with this sentence: “One does not exclude the other.” What he means by this is that it is excluded to exclude not only persons, but also concepts. According to him, the “surpassing of art” does not exclude continuing to do so. You can be both a situationist and an artist. Everything becomes clearer when we know that Wolman is an artist and cannot stop being one, when Debord has never been an artist and neither has the desire nor the ability to become one.
If the intellectual Debord made art believing he had surpassed it (his printed slogans which appear in the exhibition attest to this), how can the value of the work of the artist Wolman be estimated?
First, it’s beautiful. A word liable to immediate exclusion for ridiculous emotionalism. Nevertheless, beauty, with Wolman, engages the intelligence of the man, always accompanies his inventiveness. He is both precursor and spiritual. Master of the separation of things and of their joining together, Wolman had built his freedom by launching a Gallery Official. The manna represented by this free advertising weekly allowed him to create works without having to sell them. Art for art’s sake, in short. A collection of texts by this immense artist, who died in 1995, was published by Allia in 2001, under the title of Don’t die.
* Christophe Donner is a writer