Internationale Situationniste no. 7, April, Paris

The metallic, colored covers of the Internationale Situationniste (IS) were the journal's most sensuous and expensive feature; at first glance an odd choice given the radical critique of post-war spectacular culture articulated within its pages. Commonly omitted from the many re-printings and translations of the journal's texts, it serves as a reminder that the IS' critique of post-war consumer culture was not ascetic but often emphasized hyperbolization and excess expenditure. Edited by a constantly changing roster – including Michele Bernstein, Guy Debord, Theo Frey, Asger Jorn, Mustapha Kayati, Attila Kotanyi, Constant Nieuwenhuis, and Raoul Vaneigem, among others – from its first issue in 1958 to its last in 1969, questions of contemporary architecture and urbanism would be a recurring preoccupation for the magazine. The IS' theorization of détournement, the critical re-use and circulation of images and texts, aggressively and influentially reanimated strategies inherited from pre-war avant-garde publications. In this issue, Debord's “Geopolitics of Hibernation” - an ideological analysis of the Cold War paradox of nuclear escalation as strategic deterrence - punctuates itself with publicity images taken from American bomb shelter manufacturers such the Peace O'Mind Shelter Company and the American Survival Products Corporation. If the image of such “megatons of architecture” proved fascinating, Debord described the theoretical task of the IS as nothing less than the overturning contemporary world's “cohabitation with the negative.” In a letter to the recently excommunicated IS member Constant, Debord fleetingly describes the materiality of the magazine's cover: “For the cover: it is in the line followed until now -- the material is called lumaline… It is a metallic cover that has the effect of a deforming mirror.” CB

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