Meme: Situation & Place
City Plaza, Burnett Lane, Ulster Walk and CARe Carpark, Brisbane

by Robert Lort

Inspired by Situationist ideas, the Meme collective (Robert Davidson, Linda Dennis, Tamsin McGuin, Scotia Monkivitch, Takefumi Nagamura, Tam Patton, Ronelle Reid, Brenda Runnegar, Ian Thompson, Craig Walsh) sought to intensify and reconstruct our daily encountering with the city. The Situationist Movement rose to prominence from the seething hot bed of political ideologies that, in May '68 brought France to a stand still on the verge of revolution. A sudden madness had swept across, making possible what was unenvisionable days before. French students crowded onto the streets, hundreds of factories were occupied, the National Theatre overrun and rioters clashed with police. May '68 came to signify the collapse of the old ideologies and the emergence of the new. The events have become significant for its synergy, combining art and politics, students and workers, militants and bystanders as well as the integration and extension of the left into issues of feminism, racism, prisons, sexuality and social architecture. A raging questioning of all aspects of life was set in motion. Felix Guattari, although not a Situationist, related how in May '68, "the local and specific demonstrations of the desire of small groups found its echo in a multiplicity of desires that had been repressed, isolated from one another, and crushed by the then dominant modes of expression and representation. The situation was not one in which an ideal unity represented and interpreted multiple interests, but one in which the development of a many-voiced multiplicity of desires produced its own guidelines and organization."¹ The Situationist Movement, lead by Guy Debord, has become almost mythological in proportion, simultaneously present and absent, glorified and doomed. Debord's most popular thesis, Society of the Spectacle, a virulent attack on consumerist culture, declared that, "The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation... The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image."² For the Situationists commodities = banality, capitalism = alienation, art = life and revolution = the infinite multiplication of desires. The aesthetic and political ideas of the movement have become simultaneously utopian and nihilistic, simplistic and complex.

The performance component of Situation & Place commenced with Linda Dennis's Tailor Mades: upturned trousers mimicking the pigeon deterrent spikes in City Plaza and followed with offering lit cigarettes to the audience, extemporised music made with hose, pipe, thong and metal, inserting eggs into the mouths of audience members, handing out clear plastic raincoats which we willingly put on, a historical dérive (drift) through the city, being swarmed by humming chaotic sounds of ghetto blasters, offered glasses of grass, images projected on walls and grass floating through the air. The Situationist concept of dérive employed here, implies to drift in rapid aimless wanderings. Burnett Lane became a crack propagating fissures throughout the city. The Lane became intensified with different imaginary segmentations of speed and slowness, danger and freedom, emptiness and suffusion. The performance awakened our passive participation, to encounter a spatial poetics, to abandon one's sense of place, to disorientate oneself, and thus transform the banal and common place into intensive milieus of new experiences. To experience it, is to relocate one's psychogeographical make-up, dynamically linking ones changing environment with who one is. It invites us to let go, relinquish control and indulge in the random free play, to rupture senses and transform. Here, the Situationist process of détournement implies semantic diversions, the conversion of existing aesthetic materials, into others, having similarities to both deconstruction and appropriation. In the Ulster Walk, Ian Thompson's Room of Desire contrasted the commodified dreams mediated by lotto, junk mail and TV advertisements with the reality for those destitute. Robert Davidson's Tittytainment, a room full of pink balloons, fish net and the sound of a baby crying alluded to erotic sensations. For A Rebours (the wrong way), Tam Patton carpeted a room with real turf, depositioning the external space of a park into the internal milieu of a room and in the CARe Carpark, Takefumi Nagamura built a floating mobile of the city from street photographs.

Notes

1. Felix Guattari, The Micro-Politics of Fascism in Molecular Revolution, Psychiatry and Politics, New York, Penguin, 1984, P. 220
2. Guy Debord, Separation Perfected in Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, 1994, first published 1967.

Copyright © 1999 Robert Lort. All rights reserved