The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism by Black David;

Author:Black, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

In the world theorized as the “Society of the Spectacle-Commodity,” Debord and Wolman argued (in 1956) that art could no longer be justified as a “superior activity” or as an honorable “activity of compensation.” In the new conditions of the culture industry only “extremist innovation” was “historically justified.” The “literary and artistic heritage of humanity” could however, still be used for “partisan propaganda” because its artifacts could be deflected or “détourned” from their “intended” purposes. In the history of the cinema, D. W. Griffith’s Hollywood blockbuster of 1915, Birth of a Nation, represented a “wealth of new contribution” but, as it was so despicably racist, it did not deserve to be shown in its original form. Debord and Wolman suggested however, that it might be possible to “détourne it as a whole, without necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war and of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, which are continuing in the United States even now.”[34] In Birth of a Nation there is a powerful “moonlight-ride” sequence which portrays the Klan as heroes riding to the rescue of the whites. Thirty years after Debord and Wolman’s article, Spike Lee actually did “détourne” the scene in Malcolm X, borrowing the images of the sequence, but turning its “intent” around, by showing the Klan from the point of view of the victims of its racist terrorism.

Asger Jorn, in an essay entitled “Détourned Painting," published in the Exhibition Catalogue of the Galerie Rive Gauche, Namur, in May, 1959, wrote,

Intended for the general public. Reads effortlessly.

Be modern,

collectors, museums.

If you have old paintings,

do not despair.

Retain your memories

but détourn them

so that they correspond with your era.

Why reject the old

if one can modernize it

with a few strokes of the brush?

This casts a bit of contemporaneity

on your old culture.

Be up to date,

and distinguished

at the same time.

Painting is over.

You might as well finish it off.

Détourn.

Long live painting.

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