Office Love
A Love Story
Detournement: An artistic practice conceived by the Situationists for transforming artworks by creatively disfiguring them. In ‘A User’s Guide to Détournement’ (1956), Guy Debord, a key Situationist theorist, and Gil Wolman, argue that détournement has a double purpose: on the one hand, it must negate the ideological conditions of artistic production, the fact that all artworks are ultimately commodities; but on the other hand, it must negate this negation and produce something that is politically educative. It achieves negation in two main ways: either it adds details to existing works, thus revealing a previously obscured ambiguity, or it cuts up a range of works and recombines them in new and surprising ways. The enemy of this practice is, however, sheer novelty, and it is this that must be guarded against in producing the negation of the negation. The Situationists take the position that the literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for what they term partisan propaganda purposes, by which they mean the promotion of radical politics.
For this publication a Dover ‘ready to use’ office clip art book has been used to subvert the obscured ambiguity of normailty.
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Size: A5, folded to A6
Pages: 12
Edition: 30
Riso printed by Stencilwerck
