Issue 09: The Leaning Towers of Venice
Ralph Rumney, Guy Debord, Lettrists, Pegeen & Peggy Guggenheim, Asger Jorn, CoBrA, Constant, Giorgio Agamben, Mark Wigley, Michèle Bernstein
The Unlikely Guide un-stacks the Venetian lagoon every week and celebrates it in all its complexity. It’s a declaration of love to the local people, to the fish, the artichokes, to the Lido, to Murano, to Sant’Erasmo, and to the mud. It is composed under various headlines and features science fiction, fiction, Biennale reports, and the History Channel with stories and myths from the lagoon.
Here we go, Number Nine:
The Leaning Towers of Venice
Today we're looking at protests. Or resistance. And we meet a wanderer who saw his life as a ‘constant adventure and endless experiment’: Ralph Rumney fled compulsory military service from London to Paris in 1956, where he joined the Lettrists, a group of artists that included Guy Debord. They developed the dérive (drift), which later became known through the Situationists. They also coined the term ‘psychogeography.’ With the Lettrists, everything still sounded poetic: they wandered for hours, sometimes days ‘like clouds through urban environments...’ while the Situationists took a more political approach. It was about social alienation and commodity fetishism, which were no longer limited to capitalist consumerism but had spread to all aspects of life and culture.
Ralph Rumney has just founded the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA), with him as the only member, when he meets Pegeen Guggenheim, Peggy's daughter, at the opening of a Francis Bacon show in 1957. Rumney is a painter himself. A New Realist. Pegeen is also a painter, her work combines surrealism and naïve art, and she just divorced her husband Jean Hélion. Also a painter! A leading modernist later a figurative painter.
And Pegeen is about to move to Venice with the youngest of her three sons to live with her mother. Peggy Guggenheim was here since 1946, after her divorce from Max Ernst. But Ernst, the surrealist superstar, is not Peegen's father, that is Laurence Vail, a Dadaist, poet, sculptor and… painter. A heavy drinker and Peggy's husband for eight years. Peggy has always been super-rich and in 1957, she is a famous art dealer and collector. Venice offered her the Greek Pavilion at the Biennale Giardini, which had been abandoned after the war, to show her collection. ‘I feel like a whole country,’ the queen of one liners says. We'll come back to Peggy in another substack or two.
When Ralph Rumney follows Pegeen to Venice, he plans to come up with a psychogeographical guide. A dérive. The art of losing the self in the city. The center of the newly formed Situationists is now Paris and the dominant personality Guy Debord, the former Lettrist. A filmmaker, writer, drinker and Marxist revolutionary who remains one of the most influential Parisian intellectuals of all time. (And there were many!) Another leader is Asger Jorn, the Danish artist from the CoBrA group, which also included the brilliant Constant (Nieuwenhuys). Constant refuses to join the SI at this time, as he believes that their own interests were more important than a common goal. Asger Jorn inspired this year's Dutch pavilion in the Giardini:
The Situationists mixed surrealism, Marxism and at times spectacular hedonism and shaped the May 1968 insurrections. Their central belief was that people were no longer participants in their own lives, but spectators. Reality was replaced by images in the ‘Society of the Spectacle’. Giorgio Agamben wrote in his 1990 Preface to the Italian edition of Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’:
Guy Debord's books constitute the clearest and most severe analysis of the miseries and slavery of a society that by now has extended its dominion over the whole planet––that is to say, the society of the spectacle in which we live.
Giorgio Agamben, Means without End, Notes on Politics, 2000
At the first meeting of the Situationist International in a bar in Cosio d'Arroscia, Rumney proposes the Venice guide. He also suggests dyeing the Lagoon a bright color… Haha, the guide is commissioned and Debord prepares an introduction.
…Ralph Rumney deliberately chose Venice from among so many other equally interesting zones of experimentation because of the sentimental resonance of the town that is tied to the most backward emotions of the old aesthetic. It is obvious that any intent to scandalize is foreign [to our motivations], and in the case of Venice we are only preoccupied with creating a contrast that is clearly instructive.
From the unpublished preface, Guy DebordIn November they write “Coming soon: Ralph Rumney, Psychogeographical Venice”, soon after, they sent out a letter: "You must quickly send us at least a few already written pages of Psychogeographical Venice…" March 1958:
We find you very sympathetic, of course, but you should know that it's not our custom to prolong negligence in certain matters in which you, like us, have chosen to be involved. So let's clear up any misunderstanding right away: Should you still wish to take part in what we're doing, all you have to do is send us the following before the end of March:…
Letter from Asger Jorn and Guy Debord to Ralph Rumney However, Rumney informs them that he cannot deliver the work as expected. He is expelled from the group, which was not unusual.
… It was to be expected that there would be casualties among the new researchers, explorers of social space and its ways of use. The pitfalls are of a different kind, just as the stakes are of a different nature: the aim is to achieve an exciting use of life. Naturally, we come up against all the defences of a world of boredom. Rumney has disappeared and his father has not yet set out to find him. The jungle of Venice has been the strongest, and now it is closing in on a young man, full of life and promise, who is now lost, dissolving among our many memories.
Internationale Situationniste #1Pegeen Guggenheim marries Rumney in 1958, and gives birth to her fourth son, Sandro. In 1959, the couple moves to Paris. Constant eventually joins the Situationists while Asger Jorn soon leaves the group. Too little art, too much politics. In November 1958, Constant and Debord write: "Unitary urbanism is a new form of urban life that envisioned the replacement of utilitarian urban planning by a new mobile urbanism of play.” In 1959, Constant organizes the first show of New Babylon.
"At the time it was done, it was halfway between science fiction and documentary. So it was unclear if it was about the future or the recent past. Now it looks like documentary," says Mark Wigley in a 2015, talk at Art Basel. It’s such a pleasure to see how Wigley repeatedly saves the great thinkers of architecture—such as Constant, or Buckminster Fuller, and Konrad Wachsmann—from being incorporated into the spectacle. "Today we live in a world that has very much the structure he (Constant) describes. But the world we live in is full of violence, full of exclusion.[…] We have to turn this new kind of connectivity into a new form of hospitality." Wigley has a large piece in this year's Biennale, to which we will soon devote more space here.
In 1967, Pegeen Guggenheim committs suicide. In 1974, Rumney marries Mr. Debord's former wife, Michèle Bernstein, despite Mr. Debord's disapproval. (What?) And at some point, Sandro Rumney sues the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation. He hates his grandmother. What a spectacle.
Rumney's guide can be found online at the Museo del Camminare.
Ciao ragazzi, a presto! Next # 10! In between we will follow up on this:
