April 30, 2014

In this session Nadine Schwakopf, PhD candidate in the department of Germanic Language and Literature, and Caitlin Woolsey, PhD student in the department of History of Art, will explore the varied work of the experimental artist, poet, and editor Henri Chopin. Nadine will consider Chopin's radical investigations of sound poetry, focusing on the recordings as well as his typewriter poems. Caitlin will introduce a selection of visual collages, collectively titled the Milles Pensées, which incorporate typewriter poems and found objects; the collages were unknown until Chopin's death in 2008, when they were discovered under his bed.

April 4, 2014

In this session Bonny Wassing, Lecturer in the Dutch language program at Yale, gave a tour of the complex cultural-political landscape of Amsterdam in the ‘60s and ‘70s, grounded in hands-on exploration of original manifestos, posters, ‘zines, and more from the Dutch Counterculture collections at Beinecke. Even before the founding of the experimental CoBrA group, in 1948, Amsterdam was an important crossroads for avant-garde artists and activists in postwar Europe. By the early 1960s, Constant was projecting visions of his New Babylon onto its labyrinthine cityscape, where they blended with street actions of the nascent Happening movement, amorphous groups of disaffected anarchic youth culture, protests against the war in Vietnam, aspirations of pro- and ex-Situs (like Constant), exiled from the SI in Paris. Out of this maelstrom emerged the Provos, a movement that quickly took root not only in the Amsterdam City Council, but as far away as Milan, New York, and Los Angeles. The Kabouter and other groups picked up where the Provos left off, preserving the city’s place as mecca for the new transnational culture of protest, until the squatters, street artists, and musicians of Zebra House launched another new epoch: Dutch Punk.

February 14, 2014

Professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès of Stanford University led the PCWG's first foray into the recently-acquired Gianfranco Sanguinetti Papers, looking in particular at Sanguinetti’s voluminous and largely unpublished correspondence with Guy Debord, founder and leader of the Situationist International. A novelist, playwright, and critic, Professor Apostolidès teaches French literature and drama at Stanford and has written extensively on the Situationists over the years. He is currently nearing completion of a major critical biography of Debord to be published by Flammarion’s Grandes Biographies series.

Seed text:

Guy Debord, "Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms ofOrganization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency," trans. Tom McDonough, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002). Originally presented by Debord to the founding conference of the Situationist International at Cosio d’Arroscia,  July 1957.

January 24, 2014

Francesco Casetti, Professor of Film Studies and Humanities, Craig Buckley, Professor of History of Art, and Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Professor of Architecture, discussed different conceptions of mapping and psychogeography.

Seed texts:

Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science," in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1999).

Guy Debord, Theory of Dérive (Théorie de la dérive), trans. Ken Knabb, originally published in Les Lèvres Nues 9 (November 1956), reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958).

Guy Debord, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Period of Time, trans. Ken Knabb, originally published in conjunction with Dansk-Fransk Experimentalfilmskompagni (1959).

Abdelhafid Khatib, Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles (Essai de description psychogéographique des Halles Questionnaire), trans. Ken Knabb, originally published in Internationale Situationniste 2 (December 1958).

Atilla Kotányi, Gangland and Philosophy (Gangland et philosophie), trans. Ken Knabb, originally published in Internationale Situationniste 4 (June 1960).

December 6, 2013

Kevin Repp, curator of Modern European Books & Manuscripts at the Beinecke, presented a small archive of material from the artist and activist Pablo Echaurren. Painter, cartoonist for the radical leftist newspaper Lotta Continua, and a leading figure in the Indiani Metropolitani, Echaurren painted the walls of the occupied University of Rome (as well as his face, in the metropolitan Indian style) and squatted a house just off Piazza Navone, the “Casa del Desiderio,” which became a kind of headquarters for the movement and for the various underground ‘zines he published in 1977.

Seed texts:

Maurizio Torealta, “Painted Politics,” trans. Lawrence Venuti, in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles: SEMIOTEXT(E), 2007), 102-106.

Collective A/Traverso, “Radio Alice—Free Radio,” trans. Richard Gardner and Sybil Walker, in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles: SEMIOTEXT(E), 2007), 130-134.

November 4, 2013

Daniel Spaulding, PhD student, History of Art, Yale University, presented material related to artistic and left-wing movements in the Federal Republic of Germany dating roughly from the founding of Gruppe SPUR (for a time the German wing of the Situationist International) in 1957, through the "German Autumn" crisis two decades later, with an emphasis on periodicals of the counterculture and the New Left.

Seed texts:

Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” trans. Francis McDonagh, in New Left Review (Sept.-Dec. 1974): 75-90.

Andreas Huyssen, “The Cultural Politics of Pop: Reception and Critique of US Pop Art in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in New German Critique no. 4 (Winter 1975): 77-97.

Ulrike Meinhof, “From Protest to Resistance” (1968).

Gruppe SPUR Manifesto.

October 18, 2013

Umberto Eco discussed his role in the Italian neo-avantgarde movement Gruppo 63, and talked through some original material from that period from the Beinecke’s holdings, as well as from his personal library.

Seed texts:

Umberto Eco, “The New Forms of Expression” (1973), in Apocalypse Postponed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 129-147.

Umberto Eco, “Chance and Plot: Television and Aesthetics,”  “Form as Social Commitment,” and “The Death of the Gruppo 63,” in The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 105-122, 123-157, 236-250.