Lipstick Traces (22 page)

In 1967 the SI’s “On the Commune” were rich words to T. J. Clark, in 1984 Professor of Fine Art at Harvard University and author of
The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers.
In 1966, Clark joined the Situationist International; he was one of only seventy men and women, and only six from the U.K., to take the name in the fifteen years the group existed.

Unlike earlier books Clark wrote on art and politics,
The Painting of Modern Life
was explicitly situationist. He based much of it on the notion of spectacle—unlike most of those who were using the concept in 1984, he credited its theorist. “If once or twice,” Clark said, “my use of the word carries a faint whiff of Debord’s chiliastic serenity, I shall be satisfied.” Clark and Debord had been comrades once; excluded—expelled—from the group in 1967, Clark had not spoken to Debord for almost twenty years. Still, his book was a continuation of the work of a group that had effectively ceased to exist after the success and failure of May ’68, an event in which the group’s theories and prophecies were at once realized and dashed. Clark’s book was, as a fragment, a recovering of ideas twenty years gone, and yet as a work of history about a time a hundred and twenty years gone the distance of its subject often seemed merely formal. There was in the book a quiet sense of a trouble that could come at any time, as if the Sex Pistols had had their effect on Clark, as the SI had on the Sex Pistols. Transposed
as a negative, Clark’s judgments on the popular, on the popular artist, on the possibilities inherent in the performance of an 1860s cafe singer, can be read as a version of the ambitions that the Sex Pistols began taking into London nightclubs in late 1975. And then they are not only judgments: they are also a version of what actually happened.

Such a version of what actually happened can advance the cabaret as a place where the conviction that “I am nothing and I should be everything” takes shape—as a place where revolution is born. As a member of a society where the values I was raised to believe in, values that, as I learned to make my own choices, I came to cherish, are every day insulted, mocked, and scorned, and on the part of those in power are every day progressively destroyed (checking the day’s mail: a congressman, “serving,” he says, “under the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ,” calls for the defeat of another on the grounds that the latter “has voted against the traditional American values which have helped build this country into the evangelistic arm it has become . . . Send another Christian to Congress”)—as such a person, I am filled with despair and disgust, I am filled with murderous fantasies, whenever I permit myself to stop and think for more than a few minutes at a time. I suppose I am drawn to the performing space because I imagine that there I might find my own kind of insult, mockery, and scorn, because there I might find my murderous fantasies dramatized and affirmed. But I am also drawn to it because as a laboratory of change it seems as good as any other; because I have found out that what is said there is sometimes said with more clarity and more mystery than what is said anywhere else; because I know that one can leave a nightclub with the feeling that nothing can ever be the same. But as I move off to a long look at those things that were, for a short time now long past, brought to bear in a few performances, performances played out on small stages or in the pages of obscure publications, it is worth attending to a version of the performing space as a place where revolution goes to die, where its spirit, to use a favorite situationist word, is “recuperated”: where the shout of what should be is absorbed into the spectacle of what is, where the impossible demand is brought back into the fold of expectation and result, where the disease of collective vehemence is cured; where “revolution” means a moment in which people say no, enter into festival, are then in one way or another pushed out of history, their moment
dropped down into a footnote, or left to float free as an anarchist myth.

In February 1920, little more than a year after the November revolution of 1918, the Spartacist rising of 5 January 1919, and the murder ten days later of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, revolution reappeared in Berlin with Max Reinhardt’s staging of
Danton,
a play by Romain Rolland. The critic Kurt Tucholsky left the theater and wrote a poem, “Danton’s Death”:

Act Three was great in Reinhardt’s play—

Six hundred extras milling.

Listen to what the critics say!

All Berlin finds it thrilling.

But in the whole affair I see

A parable, if you ask me.

“Revolution!” the People howls and cries

“Freedom, that’s what we’re needing!”

We’ve needed it for centuries—

our arteries are bleeding.

The stage is shaking. The audience rock.

The whole thing is over by nine o’clock.

In December 1957, Guy-Ernest Debord, born in Paris on 28 December 1931, produced a book he called
Mémoires.
He didn’t write it. He cut scores of paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or sometimes single words out of books, magazines, and newspapers; these he scattered and smeared across some fifty pages that his friend Asger Jorn, a Danish painter, crossed and splattered with colored lines, blotches, spots, and drips. Here and there were photographs, advertisements, plans of buildings and cities, cartoons, comic-strip panels, reproductions of woodcuts and engravings, these too scavenged from libraries and newsstands, each piece as mute, all as estranged from any informing context, the whole as much like glossolalia, as the spectral text.