“The art itself, from a curatorial and artistic standpoint, offers varied approaches to its historical inheritance to psychogeography, a lineage often claimed by the artists themselves, and not without attendant charges of avoiding the socio-political analyses and practices of the SI that abhor the seductions of spectacle – notably technology. The curatorial hypothesis of the project was to explore exactly this region of how artists who consider themselves practicing variants of psychogeography (or even as psychogeographers) do so in the 21C. Under these conditions locative technology offers a way to address the condition of the connected, the online (the ‘virtual’ in the popular sense) within the matrix of spectacle (and thus artistic détournement). This is an inclusion that simply wasn’t possible during the heyday of Debord, the SI, COBRA et al. and which speaks to not only a virtual condition ‘in general’ but of the Net’s virtuality insofar as it ‘grounds itself’ in locative and increasingly embedded technospheres. Whether this remains exclusive from or applicable to Debord’s analysis of spectacle – in itself a détournement of Marx and Lukács among others – remains to be seen and can only be charted in its actual complexity by mapping the interaction between virtual netspace and the world as it exists in 2005, a cartographic intervention increasingly interwoven through and through by, in Debord’s terms, the machinations of a society of spectacle where, and we must put it all in brackets, ‘even’ the ‘real’ is ‘produced’ as ‘media’.”
Culture is dead, by Jean Degottex, 1968
Perhaps, truly, even claiming that artistic production is more highly implicated now than the ‘60s is already rejecting Debord’s radical negation of the artistic project as-such, and insofar as I was interested in seeking artists who might go so far as to negate their practice in favour of the political force of psychogeography, I have yet to find anyone committed to such a level (or, to détourn-ing détournement as a suitable response – the dialectic en proces). Rather, or at least prima facie, psychogeography in the 21C remains a set of practices to be explored under a rubric of art that sees only minor border skirmishes within its discipline rather than the kind of overarching if not atom-bomb like critique launched by Debord with his black-out of cinema, initiated by the inflammatory showing of Howlings for de Sade at Cannes in 1952, prefaced by his claim that ‘There’s no film. Cinema is dead. There can’t be film any more. If you want, let’s have a discussion’.”
Text from Tobias van Veen’s reflections in Ghosts of Geography and the Montreal Wireless at Reading Montreal. Poster from Icôns de la Révolution / Icons of the Revolution (via).
One Comment
Perhaps, as I noted here, we need to adopt “neogeography” to address this sort of thing.