Mikkel Bolt, Jakob Jakobsen (eds.): Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (2015)

“This is the first ever English-language anthology collecting texts and documents from the still little-known Scandinavian part of the Situationist movement.

The book covers over three decades of writing, from Asger Jorn’s Luck and Chance published in 1953, to the statements of the Situationist Antinational set up by Jens Jørgen Thorsen and J.V. Martin in 1974. The writings collected gravitate around the year 1962 when the Situationist movement went through it’s most dynamic and critical moments, and the disagreements about the relationship between art and politics came to a culmination, resulting in exclusions and the split of the Situationist International.

The Situationists did not win, and the almost forgotten Scandinavian fractions even less so. The book broadens the understanding of the Situationist movement by bringing into view the wild and unruly activities of the Scandinavian fractions of the organisation and the more artistic, experimental, and actionist attitude that characterised them. They did, nevertheless, constitute a decisive break with the ruling socio-economic order through their project of bringing into being new forms of life. Only an analysis of the multifaceted and often contradictory Situationist revolution will allow us to break away from the dull contemplation of yet another document of Debord’s archive or yet another drawing by Jorn.

There is a lot to be learned from the history of revolutionary failure. It is along these lines that this book points forward beyond the crisis-ridden capitalist order that survives today.”

Texts by Asger Jorn, Jørgen Nash, Jens Jørgen Thorsen, Bauhaus Situationniste, Jacqueline de Jong, Gordon Fazakerley, Gruppe SPUR, Dieter Kunzelman, J.V. Martin, and Guy Debord.

Translated by Peter Shield, James Manley, Anja Buchele, Matthew Hyland, Fabian Tompsett, and Jakob Jakobsen
Publisher Nebula, Copenhagen, in association with Autonomedia, New York, May 2015
This book can be freely pirated and quoted except for the texts covered by copyrights.
ISBN 9788799365180 (Nebula), 9781570273049 (Autonomedia)
304 pages

Publisher (Nebula)
Distributor (Minor Compositions)

PDF, PDF, PDF (2 MB)
Scribd

See also Bolt, Jakobsen (eds.), Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere, 2011.
More on Situationists

Jimmie Durham: A Certain Lack of Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics (1993)

A collection of writings by the American Indian Movement activist, poet and contemporary artist.

“In 50 articles, reviews, polemics and poems, Durham attacks the bases of the US nation-state, its cowboys’n’indians foundation myths, its commercialisation of Indian wisdom, and the very impossibility of speaking about the Indian experience in English. For a people so massively colonised, victims of an ongoing genocide, art is no luxury. It is the necessarily tricky, duplicitous practice of the Coyote, revealing over and over again the ignorance of power and celebrating its own escapades and escapes.” (from a review by Sean Cubitt, Frieze, 1994)

Edited by Jean Fisher
Publisher Kala Press, London, 1993
ISBN 0947753044, 9780947753047
255 pages
via x

Review: Tony Godfrey (Art Book 1994).

WorldCat

PDF (15 MB, no OCR)
ARG

Lee Baxandall, Stefan Morawski (eds.): Marx & Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings (1973)

A concise compilation of texts divided into nine sections with a judicious introductory essay by Morawski.

Translations and selections by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski
Introduction by Stefan Morawski
Publisher Telos Press, St. Louis/MI, 1973
ISBN 0914386026
175 pages
via Charles, in the Unlimited Edition

Review: M. L. Raina (Minnesota Review, 1975)
Marxist aesthetics on Monoskop wiki

PDF (5 MB, updated to an OCR’d version via Marcell Mars)

See also Margaret A. Rose’s Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts, 1984.