Outcasts, Dropouts, and Provocateurs: Nonconformists Prepare the Terrain

02-Horn-Chap01.qxd 16/10/06 9:14 PM Page 5 1 Outcasts, Dropouts, and Provocateurs: Nonconformists Prepare the Terrain 1. THE FIRST WORLD CONGRESS OF FREE ARTISTS It was the very beginning of September 1956. The setting? A provincial town in Piedmont, Italy, located 35 kilometres south-east of Turin: Alba. The administra- tive centre of the bucolic, wine-growing Langhe region, Alba’s most famous son is Beppe Fenoglio, a partisan in the Second World War, author of Johnny the Partisan, a semi-autobiographical account of antifascist guerrilla warfare in the Langhe, including the temporary liberation of his native Alba in October 1944.¹ The second most famous son of Alba is Pinot Gallizio. The local pharmacist had likewise taken part in the antifascist underground and had been a member of the Langhe area National Liberation Committee (CLN). Immediately after liberation he became a municipal councillor on the CLN ticket; subsequently he was elected to the municipal government of Alba on an independent ticket linked to Christian Democracy. From 1951 to 1960 he served as a municipal councillor as an independent running on various left-wing tickets. A gregarious, vivacious man with a distinct sense of humour and a penchant for the unusual, Pinot Gallizio by the mid-1950s began to make a name for himself as a modernist, experimental painter.² Connections to other artists were quickly established, including to Asger Jorn. Jorn, like many other Danish artists, had been a member of the Danish Communist Party in the Second World War underground, and he was one of the activists responsible for the printing of the illegal party newspaper. In the immediate post-war years, he became a leading member of the avant-garde art movement COBRA, together with Constant Nieuwenhuys, Christian Dotremont, and others. By the mid-1950s, Jorn had moved to Albisola on the Ligurian coast, a bit more than a hundred kilometres from Alba. In August 1955, in Albisola, Gallizio and Jorn met by chance.³ Further connections were made to like-minded artists and intellectuals, and plans got under way to gather the handful of interested parties around one table to discuss their ideas, share their experiences and to map out future endeavours. Alba soon emerged as the most convenient venue for this 02-Horn-Chap01.qxd 16/10/06 9:14 PM Page 6 6 Outcasts, Dropouts, and Provocateurs meeting of unusual minds, for Gallizio offered his home town as the meeting place where, as a town councillor, he was well-placed to facilitate the provision of the necessary infrastructure. Negotiations were entered into with the municipal administration for financial and logistical support to what was billed as the First World Congress of Free Artists. Panels and speeches were planned to be held over a period of seven days, from 2 to 8 September 1956. Two exhibitions were announced, one of futurist ceramics, the other of contemporary works by the visiting artists themselves. The town fathers looked forward to this extraordinary event, a unique chance for this sleepy provincial town to bask in the limelight of an unexpected international gathering.⁴ The day of the arrival of the high-calibre international conference team arrived. The city arranged for musicians to greet the dignitaries upon arrival at the Alba train station. The atmosphere was dignified but relaxed. Maurizio Corgnati describes the scene: Musicians wearing the ceremonial galloon hats stand in formation in two rows inside the station building. Three municipal councillors; the secretary responsible for tourism; the chief accountant of the Banca Popolare as the official delegate from the school for viticulture; the director of the local post office, the correspondent of the provincial newspaper; together with Pinot Gallizio, they all chat about the progress of the vintage. Three flags are leaning against the wall; the flag of Saint Cecilia, the flag of the merchant guild, and the flag of the Alba Sports Association. The welcoming committee is prepared. The assembled crowd expects that honourable gentlemen would step from the train— the first class carriage, of course—serious, their temples marked with the symbol of wisdom, sprinkled with grey, orderly clothing, perhaps not exactly in dress-coats, but in darkly colored attire. When the moment comes, in fact only one person steps out of the first class carriage whose comportment comes close to the idealized portrait in the minds of the waiting small crowd. If the band did not begin to play the chosen march, that was solely because there was only one such gentleman. This was most fortunate, as it turned out that he was a traveling salesman of chocolate and other sweets.... Maurizio Corgnati continues: While standing there with disappointment written on their faces, pensively, suddenly their gaze caught hold of a group of young people, dressed in impossible outfits, who were probably imagining Alba to be a giant campground. The committee was beginning to think of a mix-up, that this was after all not the appointed date, that the conference participants were perhaps sitting in the wrong train, or that they had accidentally left the train too early, in Fossano or Cuneo, this would be the most likely possibility..., but then the realization suddenly dawned on them that the international conference dele- gates were precisely this colorful, odd assortment of campers. ‘Furious, the town council elder read his welcoming speech, paused when he shouldn’t have, and reading rapidly without a pause when he should have stopped.’ When he had finished, one member of the motley group of visitors ‘stepped forward in order to make a speech in reply, then changed his mind and limited himself to the single word—in Italian—of grazie’.⁵ Apparently, however, the 02-Horn-Chap01.qxd 16/10/06 9:14 PM Page 7 Outcasts, Dropouts, and Provocateurs 7 council members’ anger soon abated, as a photograph of the subsequent conference proceedings in the Alba City Hall shows some of the ‘Free Artists’ gathered around a varnished rectangular table, together with three councillors, snacks, half-empty glasses and bottles in front of them, everyone appearing rather laid back and good-humoured.⁶ The members of the Alba City Council could be forgiven for their guarded initial reaction to this ‘handful of desperados’ invading their town.⁷ None of them were well-known figures then to anyone but a tiny group of aficionados in European art circles. Some of them would later on gain a certain notoriety and even a degree of fame. All of them, however, by virtue of being present at this act of civic generosity put on by the Alba political elite, participated in the launch of an intellectual, artistic, and political movement which exemplified the spirit of 1968 better than any other grouping, leaving their imprint on the radical decade at the centre of this book. For the First World Congress of Free Artists turned out to be the preparatory conference, the launching pad for the Situationist International. 2. FROM LETTRISM TO SITUATIONISM Officially, this movement got under way at a gathering in an even smaller Italian provincial location, the village of Cosio d’Arroscio, located on the edge of the Italian Alps, in a hillside village not too far from the Ligurian coast. But it was the Alba gathering which set in motion this talented, iconoclastic group. The actual founding of the International in late July 1957 merely ratified the existence of this association of free-thinking revolutionaries.⁸ Who were some other figures in this group? All three figureheads of the short-lived COBRA current (1948–51) were officially invited to the Alba gathering. The Belgian Christian Dotremont had been chosen to preside over the proceedings, but he had to cancel for health reasons.⁹ The Dutch Constant Nieuwenhuys made it to Alba and soon became a leading light within the organization. It was Asger Jorn, the Danish co-founder of COBRA, however, who had made the necessary connections with Italian co-thinkers, and by the time of the festivities in Alba he, together with the Milanese Enrico Baj and others, had founded a successor organization to COBRA, the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus.¹⁰ Baj, in turn, put Jorn in touch with the small group of young activists in the Lettrist International.¹¹ There is no need to detail the chronology of the lifespan of the Lettrist International, another tiny group of intellectual bohemians, which, to make things worse, in turn emerged from a split of the original Lettrists, around Isidore Isou. A few hints may suffice at the genealogy and spirit of these Lettrist groups. Isou, of Jewish descent, precisely (and therefore symptomatically) in the darkest moment of the Second World War, in 1942, living in Bucharest, had begun work on a manuscript which he brought along to Paris in 1945 and which was 02-Horn-Chap01.qxd 16/10/06 9:14 PM Page 8 8 Outcasts, Dropouts, and Provocateurs published by Gallimard, entitled Introduction to a New Poetry and a New Music. In some respects not too dissimilar from Dadaist precepts emerging out of the horrors of an earlier world war, Lettrist performance art soon became a regular feature of certain existentialist jazz cellars and hang-outs in Paris. Designed to confuse, shock, and create hilarity and outrage, Isou attracted a group of followers.¹² Prescient publications, like the 1949 Manifesto for an Uprising of Young People, make clear that Isou meant to revolutionize more than just the Parisian Left Bank coffee-house culture.¹³ Prefiguring the events of 1968, almost twenty years earlier Lettrist activists covered the walls of the Paris Latin Quarter with posters proclaiming ‘12,000,000 Young People Will Take to the Streets to Make the Lettrist Revolution.’¹⁴ Outrageous public happenings avant la lettre, soon catapulted this tiny handful of cultural rebels into the public’s view.

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