SITUATIONISM

 We are continuing the evolution of art. The ideas are irrefutable. They exist as seeds within the social
fabric, awaiting expression by artists and thinkers. LF 1946
 Mankind is passing through the most profound crisis in its history. An old world is dying; a new one is
being born.
 Capitalist civilization, which has dominated the economic, political and cultural life of continents, is in
the process of decay. It is now breeding new and devastating wars. At this very moment the Far East
seethes with military conflicts and preparations which will have far-reaching consequences for the
whole of humanity.
 In the meantime, the prevailing economic crisis is placing greater and greater burdens upon the mass of
the world’s population, upon those who work with hand or brain.
 The present crisis has stripped capitalism naked.
 It stands more revealed than ever as a system of robbery and fraud, unemployment and terror,
starvation and war.
 The general crisis of capitalism is reflected in its culture. The economic and political machinery of the
bourgeoisie is in decay, its philosophy, its literature and its art are bankrupt. The bourgeoisie is no
longer a progressive class, and its ideas are no longer progressive ideas.
 On the contrary: as the bourgeois world moves toward the abyss, it reverts to the mysticism of the
Middle Ages. Fascism in politics is accompanied by neo-Catholicism in thinking. JRC 1932
 Modern art, suffering from a permanent tendency to the constructive, an obsession with objectivity,
stands isolated and powerless in a society which seems bent on its own destruction. Western art, once
the celebrator for emperors and popes, is becoming an instrument of the glorification of bourgeois
ideals.
 Now that these ideals have become a fiction with the disappearance of their economic base, a new era
is upon us, in which the whole matrix of cultural conventions loses its significance.
 But, just as with a social revolution, this spiritual revolution cannot be enacted without conflict.
 In this period of change, the role of the artist can only be that of the revolutionary: it is his duty to
destroy the last remnants of an empty, irksome aesthetic, arousing the creative instincts still slumbering
unconscious in the human mind.
 Our art is the art of a revolutionary period, simultaneously the reaction of a world going under and the
herald of a new era. CN 1948
 We glorify the revolution aloud as the only engine of life. We glorify the vibrations of the inventors.
Young and strong, we march with the flaming torches of the revolution.
 This is the place – for the rebellious spirit. The petty and materialistic – be off with you! AR 1919
 We call upon all honest intellectuals, all writers and artists, to abandon decisively the treacherous
illusion hat art can exist for art’s sake, or that the artist can remain remote from the historic conflicts in
which all men must take sides. We call upon them to break with bourgeois ideas which seek to conceal
the violence and fraud, the corruption and decay of capitalist society. We urge them to forge a new art
that shall be a weapon in the battle for a new and superior world. JRC 1932
 Against the spectacle, our culture introduces total participation.
 Against preserved art, it is the organization of the directly lived moment.

 Against particularized art, it will be a global collective practice.
 This culture would not be dominated by the need to leave traces.
 A revolution in behaviour capable of extension to the entire planet, and of being further extensible to
all habitable planets.
 To those who don’t understand us properly, we say with an irreducible scorn: ‘We, of whom you
believe yourselves to be the judges, we will one day judge you!’ GD 1960
QUOTED MANIFESTOS LF 1946 ~ Lucio Fontana, White Manifesto JRC 1932 ~ John Reed Club of New York, Draft Manifesto CN
1948 ~ Constant Nieuwenhuys, Manifesto AR 1919 ~ Aleksandr Rodchenko, Manifesto of Suprematists and Non-Objective Painters GD
1960 ~ Guy Debord, Situationist Manifesto
Taken from: https://www.hollandfestival.nl/media/4366708/manifesto-manifesten-engels.pdf