‘HAVE THE SITUATIONISTS BEEN AN INFLUENCE ON YOU?’

12 May 2006

I took a sip from my fresh and very hot cup of tea. Looked out of the window. The students dressed up as doctors and nurses have disappeared to be replaced by the Newcastle University Women’s Rugby Team, dressed in full match kit and posing for a team photo. The cup of tea required another sip from it and then I began my answer. It’s not a one-worder.

When punk happened, certain British music journalists who took their craft seriously took to mentioning this thing called the Situationists when discussing the Sex Pistols and Malcolm McLaren in particular. I had no idea what the Situationists were or where they came from but after a while I became aware that they were from Paris and were a sort of 1950s thing. To quote my now-dated version of the history of art again, as far as I understood it the epicentre of Western art had moved from Paris to New York at some point in the late 1940s. Yes, there was Sartre and his Existentialism and yes, I was a big fan of Sartre’s books although I didn’t hold with all that ‘a universe without God’ bit. As far as I was concerned belief in a God was irrelevant. God was as real as the chair I am sitting in and the table I am writing on. God did not need my belief to exist. I would have found the question, ‘Does God believe in me?’ more interesting.

But anyway, Jean-Paul Sartre was not part of the history of art, not part of the canon as it has been constructed for us to consume.

It was not until about 1995, after Jimmy Cauty and I had done our stuff as the K Foundation, that I got to sort of know this bloke who knew all about the Situationists, but as far as he was concerned were the Lettristes who came before were more important than them. Like Joy Division before New Order or Dada before Surrealism or something. He went on about a thing called the dérive, where you just get up in the morning and wander about the city and explore a thing called the city’s psychogeography. This all sounded like an intellectual justification for what I had been doing most of my life. And if I had been doing it, then most of mankind had been doing it for as long as we have had cities to wander around and lose ourselves in and get in touch with something else.

Then he was telling us about Red Indians burning their wigwams in a war of competitive gift-giving with a rival tribe. He told us this was called potlatch and somehow potlatch was a big part of the Lettriste/Situationist thinking. He somehow thought our money-burning was a huge example of potlatch, writ large across the British public’s imagination.

He also went on about a thing called the spectacle, in this was all that was wrong with modern society. But I didn’t understand what he was on about. The only reason why I keep referring to him as ‘he’ is because I can’t remember his name and as I am writing this a couple of hundred miles from my workshop I don’t have access to my old diaries to check it.

Then around 2002 a biography of Guy Debord came out, who was perceived as the main mover and shaker in the Letterists and Situationists. After reading that and attempting to read Guy Debord’s masterwork Society of the Spectacle, I sort of understood what it was all about and understood why this bloke thought Jimmy Cauty and myself had been influenced by the Situationists. At some point in the book there was a reference to graffiti by Situationists, or at least those inspired by them, on the walls of Paris.

In Liverpool there is a wide tree-lined avenue called Princess Avenue. Well, one side is called Princess Avenue, the other is called Princess Road, but everybody calls it Prinny Ave. It cuts through Liverpool 8, a grand and fine boulevard worthy of a great Victoria city like Liverpool. The large town houses lining both sides of the avenue have long been split up into bedsits and student flats. At either end of Princess Avenue are a pair of statues mounted high on plinths. Who this particular pair of the great and good were, I have no idea.

In the mid 1970s I used to get the 82c bus into town every morning and back again every evening. I must have passed these statues without even noticing them a few hundred times. That is until one day somebody had sprayed a graffiti on the statue the bus passed on the way into town. It read ‘Never Work’. On the way back home I noticed that on the plinth for the other statue, in the same spray hand, were the words ‘Drift Around’.

Day after day I would notice these two examples of graffiti. They went around and around my head like a mantra. There was a strange poetry to it. It seemed so incongruous compared to all the other graffiti around the city by young lads wanting to make their mark. The novelty of ‘Never Work – Drift Around’ has yet to wear off.