Situationist Graphics

シチュアシオニスト・グラフィックス / 1957–1972 / Layout / Printmaking and Social Movements

The practice of détournement: hijacking existing images from advertising, comics and film, and swapping only the speech-balloon text to invert their meaning. Its knack for betraying dominant imagery from the inside, at no production cost, runs in a straight line to later culture jamming and internet memes.

Situationist Graphics — Internationale situationniste magazine, no. 1, 1958 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain — Internationale situationniste magazine, no. 1, 1958 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Situationist Graphics — Ivan Chtcheglov, Portrait of Michèle Bernstein, metagraphy, 1963 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 — Ivan Chtcheglov, Portrait of Michèle Bernstein, metagraphy, 1963 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0

At a glance

Visual cues

Appropriated images with replaced text
Comic panels and speech balloons
Long theoretical captions
The grain of rough reproduction

Best used for

Protest graphics and zines that turn corporate imagery against itself
Campaign teasers that hijack familiar visual clichés with rewritten captions

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Dictionary entry

Type: Typewriter text pasted into the balloons over found imagery, the seam left visible
Composition: Keep recycled comic panels and film stills in sequence, running long theoretical notes into the margins
Material: Degraded photocopy halftones on cheap paper, short runs, at most one crude spot colour
Caution: If the reader does not know whose claim the original image makes, the inversion fails and it reads as random collage. Polishing the production restores the authority the détournement should betray.
Further study: The definition of détournement / The journal Internationale situationniste / The inheritance passed on to culture jamming

Related entries

Atelier Populaire (アトリエ・ポピュレール)Same Printmaking and Social Movements lineage.Compare Situationist Graphics and Atelier Populaire
Punk (パンク)Shared effects: Rebellion.Compare Situationist Graphics and Punk

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