(text read at La Plaque Tournante, Berlin, june 2015, for the Broutin's retrospective)
(manifestants, Nantes, avril 2016)
Lettrist
movement remains as the most controversial and the most underated avant-garde
of the twentieth century. Even if some of his early members have known a
brilliant literary career as Guy Debord, many of them are still considered as
minor figures of modern art ; Guy Debord finally gave up the project of a
daily life and poetical revolution, and
he’s now a classic of the critical literature, his later writings offer an
amazing and misanthropic dismissal of the modern world, from a moral and
aestetic point of view ; this negative beauty is now totally recognised by
he cultural institutions ; counter-culture engages with the mainstream
culture ; that mortal and ultimate accolade of the opponent came in 2013
when the French National Library decided to buy his complete archives. It seems
obvious that the post-modern context neutralises the most subversive aspects of
the latest avant-gardes coming in the post World War II period and offers a patrimonial consecration which
is more or less a way to express the ending story ; the anti-art, the non-art,
are now considered as classics of the mainstream culture.
As
it happens for the studies of the French political collaboration during World War
II and the Vichy government with the historian Paxton, some incredible light
went from the United-States with the publication of the now classical Lipstick
Traces of Greil Marcuse in 1989; this book reveals the outsiders of official
History ; Greil Marcuse has a truly strange point of view, he sees radical
minorities as the manifestation of a theological and mystical spirit, from time
to time some heroes start again the secular struggle against the mainstream
culture ; below the official institutions History is made by thoses
underground figures who leave for a moment their native underground to change
society ; it was at this time quite
new to give such attention to the lettrist group because in France lettrism was
seen as a preamble of the International Situationnist, the situationnists were viewed
as the ultimate avant-garde who remained the major key to understand the
events of May 68 and the conflictual relationships between art and politics
from Dada to the sixties, Lettrism seemed to be too interested in art, and not enough
in politics in a marxist way ; in the french academic context Lettism group
was voluntary ignored because lettrist artists defend aestetical and political
point of view breaking with the surrealist and dadaist heritage in a time where
the marxist was as said Sartre the « unsurpassable horizon » ; there was no alternative to the marxist
hegemony in the leftist cultural area. The dadaïst position of the Proletarian kunst manifesto (the german
dadaist action with Hausmann and Hulsenbeck) was mainly a call to overcome and
refuse the «serious culture » considered as an element of the class
domination. In a way Fluxus and the International Situationnist resumed and developped
in the sixties the dadaïst anti-art position which was first marginalised by
the triumph of the surrealism and his more academic topics (paintings and
poetry) during the thirties. The most radical artists in the post world war
period were more interested in destroying the artistic justification of the
class domination instead of taking part in it, by bringing some new works and
creating with a new modernism the newest illusion of the never ending art
history. In Potlach number 22 Guy Debord and Gil Wolman revisited their participation
to the lettrist movement and the split that ended the case
« chaplin » in 1952 :
« The
tendency still in the majority saw the creation of new forms as the highest
value of all human activity. This belief in formal evolution without cause or
end, other than in-itself, is the basis of bourgeois idealism in the arts. (The
imbecilic belief in immutable conceptual categories lead some ex-members of the
group to an Americanized mysticism.) Drawing conclusions that an idiot such as
Malraux didn't dare or know how to draw from essentially similar premises, the
Lettrists' rigorous application of the benefits of experience brought about the
definitive collapse of this formalist demeanor by taking it to its limit, the
giddy acceleration of evolution around emptiness, in a clear break from all
human needs. »
The
artistic activity was condemned because instead of overcoming the aestetic and
social domination of a class, it increases the power of this class and its values
against the working class and a universal emancipation : the artistic act
is often viewed as a superior use of time meanwhile the rest of society is
submitted to the obligation of production, the creative act is considered by artists as
orginal and unique against the products of the advanced capitalism that
contributes to the misery of daily life…
both Situationism and post dada Fluxus artists tried to escape from the
trap of recuperation refusing to produce works that could take place in the
museum and the decorum of the an unchanged society. The promotion of traditional
culture by Henry Flint, the utopia of an artistic situation outside the world
and the language of the modern art wanted to realize a kind of cultural communism
by rejecting the heroic and epic figure of the modern artist, who criticizes by
his controversial works the social order but takes advantage and benefits of
this trangressive position which is the most valorised position in the later
capitalism and his fetitchism of the new (« always new » as a law and
tradition following Rosenberg) and the subversion.
The
main interest of the lettrism in the mid
of the twentieth century was that he claimed to break with this marxist
heritage and defend the autonomy of the cutlure and artist area againt the
marxist reduction ; When Isou arrived in Paris in 1945 , he wanted to be
published by the famous editor Gallimard, literature and arts remain as
important as they obey to the principle of creation, he pretended to open a new
historical age, he had a clear understanding of general depletion of the
occidental and cultural system ; in his programmatic autobiography Agregation of a name and a messiah, he
developped largely his view about the ethic of creation and defined for the new
generation an ideal of existence and the utopia or fa new society emancipated
form the old world and his misery : abundance and joy. The creative act
enables a chance to escape from the dailylife misery, it increases the quantum
of satisfaction for the artist but also for the whole society, in the isou’s
conception the solitatry and creative act must become by subversion or tactical
inflitration a social and collective recognised value. That’s why breaking with
the marxist heritage, isou’system never considered art as an illusion,
alienation or mystification but as a way to join partly a possible paradisiac
experience, he insisted often in his polemic texts against the situationnists
on the anthropological necessity of aestectic experience. The superiority of
the new against the old, a traditional « marker » of modernity, takes
with Isou a more theological dimension, the culture shaft needs all its branches,
from philosphy, theology until art, sciences and techniques, and each branche
has its avant-guarde that goes beyond the limits and broadens the scope of knowledge
and practices.
Accordingly
as an ultimate and total avant-garde lettrism via his visionnary theoritician
pretends to revolutionize each cultural branch ; politically Isou didn’t
wait to constitute the lettrist movement to have a political and formative experience ;
the sources of his massive Uprising of
the youth (three volumes, first published in 1949, second and third 1972
without considering the three supplements and the numerous tracts) come from a
critical reading of marxism and liberalism, their historical failure to end
social antagonisms but also from his own experience in Romania as member of a sionist
left group first, and after as member of a youth communist organisation. Isou as
jew saw in the world War Two II the
triumph of fascist organizations, many of them attracted an important part of
the youth. His political and economical views bring out the presence of a non-class
of individuals, without any status inside the economic circuit. In the early
fifties this analysis was a real anticipation of the demographic transformation
during the sixties and the seventies of the occidental society with the development
of a new class of age : Youth as radical outsider. Isou confirms the presence of an antagonism but deeper and
larger than the class warfare from Marx : the outsiders, without rent,
political reconnaissance or juridical status, want to be integrated and
accepted in the mainstream fields, they aspire to a better place and fight for
the right to existence with the insiders who want to keep their place safe ;
the insiders want to keep rights, rents, symbolic or material advantages,
create barriers to avoid the negative effect of this concurence ; the
progressist left saw the extension of mass scholarship (Loi Langevin-Vallon) as
a consecration of a right to education meanwhile Isou criticised this
obligation as an alienation : instead of creating and producing as free
economic actors, the youth lose their best time in new jails called schools,
high-schools and universities. The insiders by this way keep them far away from the better places.
Isou assures that a good education reform could give to the students the best
of each cultural branch in a short time, to help them to create the best
conditions for their social intergration. In his Uprising of the youth isou, - another real anticipation on the
sixties -, shows the symbolic violence of an institution that keeps bodies and
minds forced to adapt and to wait for a place whereas the youth explore, aspire
to new values and a new way of life ; the violence in social conflicts
shows above all the violent answer from the outsiders and the way to transform
the economic circuit and the social organisation to gain at least a place which
was denied to them. The description of social organisation as a field within
which conflicts and oppositions construct individual position if now a
classical scheme of sociology, especially developped by Pierre Bourdieu to
descibe the litterary institution ; it was peviously used as a seminal
concept to understand the structure and the nature of employment or in the
social sciences (Outsiders by Howar
beckman) but in the French post war context dominated by holist and classist
analysis, the isou’s formulation (externs versus interns) was too individualist
for the left and too interventionalist for the right ; isou was more
reformist than revolutionary, he regarded the marxist and fachist revolutions
as a social and economical regression for the nations and their populations,
but he offered a new explanation ;
he wanted to prevent social disorder by giving the best diagnostic and
the exact therapy to avoid violence in history ; as long as society admits
its externality, violent uprising, revolution, disorder and delinquency will
represent the negative way of affirmation for the outsiders ; Isou doesn’t
limit the concept of outsider to describe the social structures of society, he
quantifies economicallly the losses and the gains of all those social
dysfunctions : the outsiders bring both negativity and creativity
following the opportunites given or refused by the insiders ; the
counter-culture of the sixites and the seventies represent a good illustration
of isou’s theories : the youth of
the proletarian class find in punk culture a way of life, a culture that
responds to their aspiration, they organised themselves, created their own
marginal economy (label, records, concerts, fanzines) and ended totally integrated into the
mainstream business that first rejected all of them. Their success contributes
to transform the culture more effectively than the communist programme and his
proletarian struggle. Isou thought against
radical romantism (situationnist and surrealist), he argued that the success of
the outsiders was a gain for the whole society ; in today’s policitical
rhetoric the lettrist programme promoted some inclusive reforms that included
to reduce the time of studies, to give to the youth the right to vote at 18 (21
at that time), a capital to start economic activities… Isou was right when he sublined the conservatism of both left and right regarding to the youth ascending, he tried to value the dynamic brought by the youth meanwhile
the insiders are more submitted to routine and accomodation with their situation ;
those who have nothing have nothing to lose ! in the fifties such point
of view could only be received as a joke ! The lettrist group tries to promote
their programme and ideas through two newspapers The uprising of the youth (1952/1954 founded by Marc O and Yolande
de Luart) and the Youth Front (founded by Maurice Lemaitre) but Communist
party was in France the first political party and the emancipation of the youth
wasn’t at all their priority ; the
french tradition of the left refers above all to collective concepts as
republican values or class revendications opposite to the individual self affirmation
suspected of introducing liberal evil in their collectivist catechism. At last,
Isou refused the division between left and right, this cleavage has strongly
structured the French political life since the revolution of 1789 ; Isou
showed how the outsiders without any attachment, outside the classes, far away
from the social center and its norms could follow any movement that enables
them to escape from non existence and gives them a future : in the Front de la jeunesse (1950) was
published an article that asked the liberation of militiamen who collaborate in
France with nazi troops against the resistance ; the collaboration or the
resistance has represented two ways for the externs and the youth to exist as
historical subjects and gain a social integration that was materialised by
superior level of existence ; each party pretended to represent the only
way to satisfy the aspiration of this turbulent and unstable mass who wants to
go beyond the limits, to conquer a place left upset by the established order. Surely
they fought to maintain old ideas and old people at the same place. Wether the
petainist national revolution or the resistance, the youth had always been
enlisted by the insiders to their exlusive benefits ; the lettrists called
the youth to fight for their own interests : liberation from familial,
social, and scholar slavery, and solidarity between all the youth beyond the
factual situation of each other. Consequently despite their low audience, the
lettrists have always hoped and resaerched to have an influence on the academic
world (correspondence wih the demograph Alfred Sauvy) and the political staff
(numerous letters to personnalities for exemple to the challenger of François Mitterand,
Michel Rocard), they finally participed in elections as Maurice Lemaître, the
most implicated in the promotion of the uprisng
of the youth, who applies for legislative in 1967 with a reformist programme
that clearly announced the events of may
68. The students disturbances and university strikes from students realised the
worrying prophecies made by isou’s manifesto, The paradox was that students
were explaining their revolt in a marxist paradigm whereas their acts truly
illustrated an insurrection totally new in its forms. For those from the left
who were dreaming about a permanent revolution the myth of the youth and its
values (the opening to the future, the liberty, the availability due to a
floating social position…) have now become ideas strongly defended by the insiders as the
ideal way of life. The perpetual youth is more or less an obligation ; the
true outsiders and youth see as in France their economics and social conditions
deteriorate and at the same time the insiders who represent the older part of
the society, and the more favorised from an economic point of view, are talking
about adventure and future ! Jean Pierre Legoff confirms the Isou’s view
when in his book Mai 68 the impossible
heritage, he notes the importance of the demographic criteria : the
sociology of the country radically changed in less than two decades and all the
social institutions should have been reformed to avoid a generational clash.
Beyond
the idea of youth, the concept of externity can represent an comprehension to
the marginalised and dissident individuals, the diversity of ways outsiders
follow to affirm their minority status, in opposition to the social norm.
Michel Lancelot considered in early seventies lettrists as the father of the counter-culture :
the lettrists have always been organised as an active minority, with an
organisation (self-edition, non-official and alternative events and
manifestations, micro-economical logistic, home-made newspapers, tracts and
scandals…) ; there were absolute outsiders, there was no market for the
works they proposed, no place for the lettrist poetry on National radio or
museum to expose hypergraphic paintings… « condamned » to a
clandestine activity looking for handovers and connections with academic area
(Paulhan, Michel Tapié…). Very early Isou adopted a tatic of conquest, he would
bring the political and revolutionary language in the artistic insitutions, to
carry out a new form of beauty and install new artists as tomorrow’s classics.
Each outsider, without any romantism, hopes to penetrate the market, his institutions,
and change his life by transforming the social organisation, by the reforms or
the revolution and redistribuate as a consequence places, pensions and
distinctions. With the youth and the avant-garde, the future is the ultimate
and decisive social legitimation, that contests the present and its figures
devoted in the name of a future that comes as their absolute denial. As the « globalisation »
is destroying the previous social structures, the delicate balance negociated
after the World War II is now over : in the today capitalism the term of
externalisation (outsourcing) is required to designate the new conditions of
fragmented labour market between insiders and outsiders ; the urban
condition shows similar splits between « territories » mainly
gentrified and the perpipheric suburbs where people remain in every sense of
the term far away for the best opportunities (work, flat, social services…).
The revendication of the outsiders are necessarily more critical than the
claims of the insiders, and from this point of view the left political
organization has difficulties to relay the aspiration and the urgency of the outsiders
because to a certain extent they claim for radical reforms while the insiders
are more preoccupied with maintening their standards of living even it leads to
exclusion. For exemple many books will be published probably in septembre about
the tragic terrorist attack of january in Paris ; Emmanuel todd recently
caused great emotion in France when he explainded in his book Who is Charly ? (four journalists
of this satiric leftist newspapers were killed during the attack) because
everyone wasn’t really Charly ; in fact the charly’s supporters were
mainly upper middle class and probably mainly white and urban : in the
poorest suburbs many students refused to respect the minute of silence, they
contested the right of joking about god, some of them even considered
terrorists as heros in order to provoke, immigrant youth didn’t seem concerned
by national mourning. The governement adopted typical and conservative reading
of the events and political solution : surveillance, restriction of
freedoms, tougher juridical sanctions… the government talked about creeping
threats, young misfits under bad influence in quasi psychatric terms, they
didn’t consider terrorist violence at all and the empathy for it as a political
affirmation, a radical opposition and critic coming from the margins against
society ; it was a sheer paradox to see the Prime minister, the most
neoconservative of the socialist party, getting out of the Hotel Matignon showing
the satiric newspaper as a new national flag ; the satiric newspaper,
child of the liberterian spirit of may 68, is now an element of the political
power and its neoconservative choices : surely Todd is right when he
claimed that the insiders were massively Charly’s supporters and that the
outsiders were not. The Uprising of the
youth is still, and in more effencient way than the hypothesis of a clash
civilisation or class warfare, a good paradigm to understand the new radicalities
coming from the far right (the national revival in a part of a French youth and
in Europa) and the lost territories of the French republic (the transgressive
ascending of islamist utopia). It represents also as isou esablished the
economical cost of non-inclusive politics, a way to transform society and to
constitute a new progressist party.
Broutin
joined the lettrist group in 1968, it was a surprise for him to read theories
that explained the actual students actions in a book published in 1949. Broutin
as an artist did a remarkable series of paintings which consists in
transcription in his own and typical alphabet of significative passages of
homonym and hard to find last volume of the economical Treaty of Isou, Le désir paradiaque et l’externité.
Broutin was a representative artist of a new generation that joined the group in
the late sixites (Poyet, Gillard, Curtay), typically «externs » without
any connexion with the artistic area, they all developped their own artistic
identity basing their work on the lettrist concepts and surely receptive to the
youth movements of that period ; New artistic horizons needed new artists,
each singular style confirms the efficiency and the validity of the theory,
Broutin quickly found his way (the meticisation
act) ; Broutin has been involved in many actions of the group (publishing,
events) he has recently given a more political orientation to his work, in
opposition to the conservative reactions in France against the gay civil
rights ; his conceptual work Les
habitants de new york shows the connections with the contemporary art,
considering people living in New-York City as a part of a « living
sculpture » ; even if lettrist
artists are above all connected with historical avant-gardes, it’s obious that
a part important of their works have much to do (and to propose) with contemporary
art.
