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Johan Kugelberg

Autore di True Norwegian Black Metal

23 opere 251 membri 3 recensioni

Opere di Johan Kugelberg

Etichette

Informazioni generali

Data di nascita
1965
Sesso
male
Nazionalità
Sweden
Nazione (per mappa)
Sweden
Luogo di nascita
Helsingborg, Sweden
Luogo di residenza
New York, New York, USA

Utenti

Recensioni

Jacqueline de Jong published the first issue of The Situationist Times in August 1962, a few months after leaving the Situationist International. That year saw the escalation of the longstanding friction between the artistic and political factions of the Situationists, resulting in the expulsion of the former. As de Jong remained impartial, key contributors to The Situationist Times included Debord, Asger Jorn, Gruppe SPUR and others from both sides of the skirmish. De Jong was determined to produce a completely free magazine. The six issues of The Situationist Times published between 1962–1967 are an extraordinary marriage of political polemic and visual art. The first two issues were coedited by Noël Arnaud, editor of the solitary issue of Surrealiste Revolutionnaire. The second issue saw the first experiments with typography and multiple-colored paper stocks. Issue three was the first produced with de Jong solely at the helm. Her editorial style produced a range of contributors, from architects (Aldo Van Eyck, David Georges Emmerich) to an art historian (Hans Jaffe) to astrophysicists (Jayant Narlikar, Fred Hoyle) to a composer (Peter Schat). As the publication went on, the emphasis became more visual (issue three had “situlogical” patterns, issue four had labyrinths, issue five featured topology). The set also includes a seventh volume with commentary, essays, photography and ephemera.… (altro)
 
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petervanbeveren | 1 altra recensione | Jan 29, 2024 |
This has some interesting essays in it about musical counter culture, in particular Punk, but there's a lot of repetition, particularly using the same quotes from Guy Debord (on the commodification of culture) and Asger Jorn (on Avant Gardes dying without knowing their successors). The author has pet themes but doesn't do much to vary his angle on them. He's writing for a particular audience, making presumptions about the gender of his readership, and I was left feeling that I wasn't part of his target audience.… (altro)
 
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missizicks | Jan 22, 2018 |
It was the best of Situationist Times, it was the worst of Situationist Times. Unfortunately, these are not the Situationist Times you are looking for.

The Situationist political and philosophical movement was an important organization from the sixties. They inspired the student and union rebellion in '68 in France. As esoteric as they were, the students carried placards with Situationist declarations and sayings as they marched, struck, and fought the police in the streets. Guy Debord was the lead thinker of the Situationist movement and a brilliant political philosopher. I highly recommend [b:The Society of the Spectacle|381440|The Society of the Spectacle|Guy Debord|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1370746722s/381440.jpg|371226] and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, which I reviewed. Both provide trenchant critique of our media-obsessed, Capitalist-controlled culture in an almost poetic fashion. The style does ask you to think more than you will be spoon-fed and that makes it all the more valuable. It's the media that spoon-feeds us lies and brainwashing, so asking a reader to think is tantamount to revolution. It points you in a direction and encourages you to figure it out yourself.

This collection includes the complete seven issue run of The Situationist Times in a lovely boxed set. When I picked this up from my local bookseller, I expected an elaborate, complex, confusing and sometimes brilliantly enlightening collection of radical political essays. I was wrong. At the time this early "zine" was released (at a print run of 1000 copies per issue), there were two other Situationist magazines in distribution, however they were in French and German. This particular magazine was supposedly intended as an English-language Situationist magazine, however there are a few things that derail this production from being that.

1. Only about 10% of this collection, at best, is in English. Much of it is in German or French, and I'm not sure it's intended to be read so much as viewed aesthetically.
2. This zine was far more interested in aesthetic issues than political ones. The Situations Times was edited by Jacqueline de Jong, a Dutch artist and member of the Situationist organizing commitee, and de Jong was more interested in applying Situation ideas to artistic and aesthetic challenges than she was in political critique.

According to one of the essays that is in English in this collection (and according to the introduction), there was a schism within the Situationist movement. A group that included de Jong and her lover Asger Jorn and several German committee members were interested in focusing on art within a political context, but Guy Debord led a contingent that rejected the focus on art as a sideshow/side-issue and wished to keep the focus exclusively on political action (praxis) and political theory. Debord organized an expulsion of the art-minded Situationists and de Jong either resigned from the committee with them or was also booted.

On one hand, after trying to comprehend the rather obscure artistic curation within this book, I couldn't help but think that Debord was correct to force them out. The Situationist Times felt only modestly political. I gleaned a few tidbits from it that were intriguing--most of them I quoted as updates as I went through--but overall I found it rather tedious, pointless, and irrelevant to the political value I find in some art today. And the political analysis herein was minimal. Whereas Debord's cultural critique is still incredibly potent and sharp when applied to civilization today.

On the other hand, the split in the Situationist movement reminded me of numerous experiences I had with progressive, activist groups: how personal obsessions, neuroses and egos can destroy group cohesion, weaken the focus, and eventually contribute to the demise of the particular organization. You can see some aspects of this in the collapse of the Occupy movement. For me personally, it came up when I was a member of a local chapter of Amnesty International. I was elected as head of the chapter and tried to take the group in a more activist direction, organizing a protest, for example, on Michigan Avenue (in Chicago) again torture. (This was soon after the first CIA black sites were outed in progressive news outlets, but long before they were covered in the mainstream media.) However, other members were very cozy sitting every week in our meeting space (a church basement) and writing letters to government officials (usually in foreign countries like Syria) and demanding the freedom of political prisoners. Nothing wrong with that, but I felt the effect was much weaker than direct action and doing both was really what was called for. There was a bit of sabotage that went on and several clashes that led to me eventually resigning and quitting the group six months after having been asked and elected to run it.

On another occasion, when I was not involved as a leader, I saw a group fall apart over the course of several years due to lack of focus and competing agendas. I was a founding member of a group called The Alliance for Democracy, whose stated purpose was to end the corporation as a legal and political entity. Not reform it, but destroy it. In some ways, we were an early pre-cursor to Occupy. I still remember a highly dramatic moment at the first convention, which I helped plan, where two women took the podium and insisted passionately that the group should do NOTHING and had no right to do ANYTHING until more people of color were represented in the organization. I agreed with them in spirit but not in practice. You can only work with what you have and at that time, a meeting of 75 activists from across the country, there were only a handful who weren't Caucasion. Corporations are happy to let us squabble among ourselves and not take action. But regardless, despite the fact that their suggestion was ignored and the group grew to several hundred members the following year, by the third year it began to dwindle. Local Chicago meetings fell from a high of around 40 to around five. The primary reason was that no one could figure out what to focus on to chip away at the corporate beast. Was it corporate control over our food? GMO? Was it the military-industrial complex? Was it nuclear power? Was it publicizing the fact that corporations have the same legal rights as people but could never die? Was it around corporate contributions to politicians? Was it around global warming? What was the hook that everyone would rally around? Everyone had a different idea what the focus should be.

Reading about the schism within the Situations movement brought back all these thoughts, how competing agendas and personal egos can so easily get in the way of clear and powerful action. I'm certainly proud of what Occupy did. But a few years later, they've been broken by the system and have fallen back to where they were. At least, I hope, if a few people read Debord and other thinkers like Howard Zinn and John Zerzan, they will eventually reignite the passion to change the world and save our species before it's too late.
… (altro)
 
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David_David_Katzman | 1 altra recensione | Nov 26, 2013 |

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Statistiche

Opere
23
Utenti
251
Popolarità
#91,086
Voto
3.9
Recensioni
3
ISBN
17
Lingue
1

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