Situationists & Jack Daniels

For our contexts course this week, we were told to do a psycho-geographic assignment in line with the Situationist International creed. The SI was a group of Marxist artists in the late 50s/early 60s who aimed to create situations that forced the masses to realize their slavery to commodity, bring play back into everyday life, and generally re-imagine the modern world in a way that would appeal to human emotion and joy rather than blindly follow the dreary schedule of work-home-work-home. My kind of guys.

My project was inspired by Sophie Calle & Jenny Holzer's work, my two favorite artists who were post-Situationists that aimed to confront the reader to think about their environment, showing their works on a public scale rather than confining their work to galleries & museums. I posted these types of notes around Camden:



I loved doing this project, it was really enjoyable and made me able to connect to the reading much more than just reading in my room & trying to absorb it from there. And our professor loved everyone's responses to the assignment so he asked us to continue working on them and then we'll showcase them gallery-style somewhere on campus in a few months.

Then I went to work a few hours at the studio in Hackney, edited two chapters, and then headed back to Camden to meet up with Rebecca, Nate, Mark, & irish Claire for drinkin', which is appropriate in light of the lecture, I suppose, as most of the Situationists were massive alcoholics.
Nate, wondering whether to pay more attention to Rebecca's New Zealand bird thing or the bottle of Jack Daniels.




Claire & me. I think we may have scared her off with our American conversational skills.

"You don't talk about those sorts of things with your friends in Ireland, then?"
Wide-eyed head-shaking. "No, no, nevar...!"
And so our work of making these Northern European folk socially uncomfortable continues, one at a time.

It was a good night.