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.
Appropriated images with replaced text / Comic panels and speech balloons / Long theoretical captions / The grain of rough reproduction
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Protest graphics and zines that turn corporate imagery against itself · Campaign teasers that hijack familiar visual clichés with rewritten captions
- Type
- Typewriter text and pasted-in balloon lettering over found imagery
- Composition
- Recycled comic panels and film stills in sequence, with the captions doing the subversion
- Material
- Cheap photocopy grain, degraded halftones, black-and-white with occasional crude spot colour
- Caution
- Avoid polishing the production—slick execution restores the authority of the very images the détournement is meant to betray.
- Further study
- The definition of détournement / The journal Internationale situationniste / The inheritance passed on to culture jamming