200 Books between performance aesthetics and social protest theatre. Harry J. Elam Jr.’s elegant prose, original narrative structure, and rigorous analysis of perfor- mance texts and their contexts make this book a compelling addition to studies on political theatre and the ideological nuances they bring to concepts of cul- tural identity and politics.

—Awam Amkpa

Awam Amkpa is an Associate Professor of Drama at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU and author of Theatre and Postcolonial Theatres (Routledge, 2003).

The Consul: Conversations with Ge´rard Berre´by with the Help of Giulio Minghini and Chantal Osterreicher. By Ralph Rumney. Trans- lated from the French by Malcom Imrie. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002; 124 pp. $12.95 paper.

To some observers, the Lincoln Center Festival 2003 flagship production The Angel Project, directed by Deborah Werner, might appear to be a brutal commercialization of the last pristine resort of live art. At $90 a ticket, solitary spectators were taken from Roosevelt Island to various environments in the midtown Manhattan, only slightly altered by the presence of art installations and immobile, silent actors. The concept of this project comes dangerously close to the Situationist practice of de´rive. More precisely, it approaches a cer- tain superficial notion of de´rive, excellently dispelled in this book of conver- sations between Ge´rard Berre´by and the British artist Ralph Rumney, The Consul (Contributions to the History of the Situationist International and Its Time, Vol. II). Together with de´tournement (textual or visual appropriation), de´rive (drift- ing) represents one of the most recognizable, and most performable, artistic practices devised by the Situationist International. Literary traces of a de´rive- like practice can be found in the Surrealist chronicles such as Andre Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Louis Arragon’s The Peasant (1926). In the 1950s, Let- terist and Situationist’s massive critiques of Dada and Surrealist practices in- volved the radical rejection of romantic and nostalgic literary recordings of de´rive. In what is often considered the founding document of SI, “Report on the Construction of Situations” (1958), Debord argued for the shift, through “ludic creations” such as de´rive, of political and artistic action from the imagi- nary battlefields of class struggle to everyday life. Rejecting narrativity, he wrote,

[W]e will have to introduce a system of notation whose accuracy will increase as experiments in construction [of situations] teach us more. We will have to find or confirm laws, like those that make Situationist emotion dependant upon an extreme concentration or an extreme dis- persion of acts (classical tragedy providing an approximate image of the first case, and de´rive of the second). (48)

This juxtaposition introduces de´rive directly into the domain of performance and theatre. The Consul is not an attempt to recant past de´rives, but to suggest the vast possibilities of the dispersion of action. Ge´rrard Berre´by has been close to SI since its inception. In the two books

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2004.48.4.200 by guest on 02 October 2021 Books 201 of his interviews with the former situationists (which Berre´by has published with the common subtitle, Contributions to the History of the Situationist Inter- national and Its Time) he limited his editorial interventions to the juxtaposition of documentary material with the text of the interviews. While the first vol- ume of Contributions, the book of conversations with Jean-Michel Mension entitled The Tribe (also published by City Lights Books) was somewhat disap- pointing; the second volume represents an important addition to existing ideas about SI artistic practices. If we return to de´rives (which is by no means the sole focus of Berre´by’s books), we will see that in Mension’s recollections they become easily reduced to drunken stumbling through the streets of Paris. Both Mension and Rumney espoused the avantgarde concept of the renunciation of art, exemplified by colorful personalities such as Jacques Vache´ and Marcel Duchamp. Unlike Vache´ and Mension, and like Duchamp, Rumney made art before he forsake it. Prior to his departure to the continent, he was one of the prominent young abstract artists on the British art scene. What followed was a twisted path that led him to, among other places, galleries and exhibition openings where he met his future wife, Pegeen Guggenheim; Parisian bistros frequented by the likes of Georges Bataille, Tristan Tzara, and Pierre Klos- sowski; and to the Italian village of Cosio d’Arroscia, where he participated in the foundation of the Situationist International, only to be expelled soon thereafter. The Consul, however, is not a book of biographical reminiscence. Truthful to the idea of de´rive, Berre´by and Rumney never allow nostalgia to creep into their inventory of the past proving that de´rive can also be a temporal dispersal of actions. Rumney’s encyclopedic life does not eclipse his erudition, humility, imag- inativeness, sheer guts, and a rare gift for vagueness. Citing Rumney’s insis- tence on the lack of the English counterpart for de´rive, his biographer, Alan Woods, finds an equivalent in the Italian word vago (vague). He writes that, “starting out from the original meaning of ‘wandering,’ the word vago still car- ries an idea of movement and mutability, which in Italian is associated both with uncertainty and indefiniteness and with gracefulness and pleasure” (Woods 2000:70). Rumney’s mutations from artist and craftsman, to abstract artist, to Situationist, to son-in-law of the celebrity art collector, to unwilling chronicler of the avantgarde, are marked by a great deal of uncertainty, indef- initeness, and, indeed, grace and pleasure. Toward the conclusion of the inter- views he emerges as an acute social critic. “Our hope was to change the world,” he says:

That pretension is now defunct. [...] It is rather the world which is go- ing to change man’s very nature, and the role of those who yesterday sought to change the world will become critical if humanity can come to want to survive fully and passionately the cataclysmic disintegration of the integrated spectacle. (118)

If this sounds like a summation of a life, it is. Rumney died in the year these words were published in English. The point of his prolonged de´rive is not re- ducible to this insight. It is much vaguer and more compelling. It is asking us to dig the libraries, to walk the streets, to go in unplanned directions, to enter restaurants not only to be fed but to be inconsistent and to create contradic- tions. It reminds us that freedom has to be perpetually rediscovered, rein- vented, and re-imagined. And that all of that work is art.

—Branislav Jakovljevic

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2004.48.4.200 by guest on 02 October 2021 202 Books References

Debord, Guy 2002 “Report on the Construction of Situations.” In and the Situation- ist International: Texts and Documents, edited by Tom McDonough. Cam- bridge: MIT Press. Woods, Alan 2000 The Map Is Not the Territory. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Branislav Jakovljevic is Assistant Professor at the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minneapolis in Minnesota, and specializes in modernist theatre and the avantgarde. He completed his undergraduate studies in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and his graduate studies at the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts/NYU, where he also taught in the Drama Department. His articles have been published in the United States in TDR, PAJ, and Theater, and abroad in Yugoslavia, Spain, and .

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