Tom McDonough | Unrepresentable Enemies: Reassessing the Legacy of the Situationist International

Where does the heritage of the Situationist International (1957-72) lay? To begin to articulate an answer this that question we must return to the late 1980s, and to the conjunction of two events that seemed to pose radically different responses to the problem of legacy: on one hand, the touring exhibition of 1989, the first to display the history of the group to a broad public, which reconstructed the SI as a predecessor to the appropriation practices of the 1980s; and on the other hand, the publication in Paris late in 1988 of Guy Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, a book that was regarded derisively as evidence of the senescence of its author and his model of critical thought. Perhaps we can locate a legacy precisely in the non-recognition of these two moments, which mutually open out onto the panorama of Situationist-inspired practices that have flourished over the past decade.

Tom McDonough is Associate Professor of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where he teaches the history and theory of contemporary art. His most recent book is the anthology The Situationists and the City (Verso, 2009); other publications include "The Beautiful Language of My Century": Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968 (MIT Press, "OCTOBER Books," 2007), and the anthology Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (MIT Press, "OCTOBER Books," 2002). He has published regularly in journals such as Art in America , Artforum , Documents , Grey Room , OCTOBER , and Texte zur Kunst . McDonough has been a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, and a recipient of an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation. He is an editor at Grey Room .