Ken Knabb (ed.): Situationist International Anthology (1981/2006)

“In 1957 a few experimental European groups stemming from the radical tradition of dadaism and surrealism, but seeking to avoid the cooption to which those movements succumbed, came together to form the Situationist International. The name came from their aim of liberating everyday life through the creation of open-ended, participatory “situations” (as opposed to fixed works of art) — an aim which naturally ran up against the whole range of material and mental obstacles produced by the present social order. Over the next decade the situationists developed an increasingly incisive critique of the global ‘spectacle-commodity system’ and of its bureaucratic leftist pseudo-opposition, and their new methods of agitation helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France. Since then — although the SI itself was dissolved in 1972 — situationist theories and tactics have continued to inspire radical currents in dozens of countries all over the world.

The SI Anthology, generally recognized as the most comprehensive and accurately translated collection of situationist writings in English, presents a chronological survey of the group’s activities and development as reflected in articles from its French journal and in a variety of leaflets, pamphlets, filmscripts and internal documents, ranging from their early experiments in urban “psychogeography” and cultural subversion to their lucid analyses of the Watts riot, the Vietnam war, the Prague Spring, the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” and other crises and upheavals of the sixties.

A greatly revised, and expanded edition, with over 100 pages of new material.”

First published in 1981
Translated by Ken Knabb
Publisher Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, CA, 2006
No copyright. Any of the texts in this book may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without mentioning the source.
ISBN 0939682044, 9780939682041
532 pages
via quackalist

Reviews: Libero Andreotti (J Architectural Education, 1996), Not Bored! (2007).

Publisher
Distributor

HTML (from the publisher)
PDF (7 MB, added on 2019-11-13)
EPUB (updated on 2019-11-13)

Kandinsky, Franz Marc (eds.): Der Blaue Reiter (1912–) [DE, RU, EN]

Der Blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider] was initiated in 1911 by the young painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and was active until 1914. Conceived in June 1911 and published in Munich in May 1912, Der Blaue Reiter (Almanach) [The Blue Rider Almanac] presented their synthesis of international culture to the European avant-garde at large.

The Almanac was published in an edition of 1100 copies. Its costs were underwritten by the industrialist and art collector Bernhard Koehler, a relative of August Macke. It contained reproductions of more than 140 artworks, and 14 major articles. A second volume was planned, but the start of World War I prevented it. Instead, a second edition of the original was printed in 1914.

The contents of the Almanac included:
* Marc’s essay “Spiritual Treasures,” illustrated with children’s drawings, German woodcuts, Chinese paintings, and Pablo Picasso’s Woman with Mandolin at the Piano
* an article by French critic Roger Allard on Cubism
* Arnold Schönberg’s article “The Relationship to the Text”, and a facsimile of his song “Herzgewächse”
* facsimiles of song settings by Alban Berg and Anton Webern
* Thomas de Hartmann’s essay “Anarchy in Music”
* an article about Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus: The Poem of Fire
* an article by Erwin von Busse on Robert Delaunay, illustrated with a print of his The Window on the City
* Macke’s essay “Masks”
* Nikolai Kulbin’s essay “Free Music”
* Kandinsky’s essay “On the Question of Form”
* Kandinsky’s “On Stage Composition”
* Kandinsky’s The Yellow Sound.

The art reproduced in the Almanac marked a dramatic turn away from a Eurocentric and conventional orientation. The selection was dominated by primitive, folk, and children’s art, with pieces from the South Pacific and Africa, Japanese drawings, medieval German woodcuts and sculpture, Egyptian puppets, Russian folk art, and Bavarian religious art painted on glass. The five works by Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin were outnumbered by seven from Henri Rousseau and thirteen from child artists. (from Wikipedia)

Second Edition
With two Forewords by Kandinsky and Franz Marc
Publisher Piper, Munich, 1914
140 pages
via Archive.org

Wikipedia (German)

Der Blaue Reiter (German, 1914, PDF converted from Archive.org’s JP2 scans, w/o blank pages, 43 MB, no OCR, multiple formats)
Siniy vsadnik (Russian, trans. Z.S. Pyshnovskaya, 1996, added on 2018-7-15)
English translation of the Forewords

Listen to Arnold Schönberg’s Herzgewächse (Audio)

Bruno Jasieński: I Burn Paris (1928–) [PL, EN, ES]

I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland’s most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization by Henri Barbusse in 1928 in L’Humanité (for which Jasieński was deported for disseminating subversive literature). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris’s water supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, embittered Russian émigrés, French communards and royalists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris is brought to ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world, mixing strains of “The Internationale” with a broadcast of popular music.

With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have turned just about everyone into a prostitute. Yet rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, there is an immediacy to the writing, and the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic at its core.

This English translation of I Burn Paris fills a major gap in the availability of works from the interwar Polish avant-garde, an artistic phenomenon receiving growing attention with recent publications such as Caviar and Ashes.

First serialized in French as “Je brûle Paris” in L’Humanité in 1928.

Polish edition
Publisher Towarzystwo Wydawnicze “Rój”, Warsaw, 1929

English edition
Translated by Soren A. Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski
With an Afterword by Soren Gauger
Publisher Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, 2012
ISBN 9788086264370
309 pages

Review (Benjamin Noys, Mute)
Review (M.A.Orthofer, The Complete Review)
Review (Isla Badenoch, Article Magazine)
Commentary (Nina Kolesnikoff, 1982)
Wikipedia (in Polish)

Publisher (EN)
Google books (EN)

Palę Paryż (Polish, 1929, HTML), Alt link
I Burn Paris (English, 2012, EPUB, removed on 2015-1-15 upon request of the publisher)
Anatol Stern’s 1957 preface (Polish), English translation (Issuu.com)
Voy a meterle fuego a París (Spanish, trans. Jorge Segovia and Violetta Beck, 2013, added on 2014-2-2)