The Situationist International argued that everyday spaces, subsumed by capitalism and urbanism, required genuine revolution. Through their method of “détournement - rerouting or hijacking”, they sought to subvert the grammar of the existing system. However, their revolution failed due to two major factors: internal divisions caused by dogmatisation, and the fact that their resistant images were re-spectacularised, reabsorbed into the system, and consumed. Examples include punk, such as the Sex Pistols, and the radical chic style in fashion. While working within the image-making industry, I witnessed the phenomenon of resistant imagery being sold or propagated. The message of being “different from others” was being sold not only in the fashion industry but across all domains. 

Having returned to school after childhood resentment towards the institutional art and labour experience within the image industry, the questions left by the Situationist International felt urgent to me. I did field research inside the museum, observing situations in it, especially how spectators interact with the space and with the works. As a method for this research, I have devised two approaches. The first involves directly appropriating the strategy brands use to categorise people by age, gender, and so forth. The second entails visualising visitors within the structural form of the museum building through diagrammatic schematics.

However, sitting in the corner of the ABN AMRO gallery observing visitors, I realised: I had absolutely no idea what they were thinking! It was as if, on this day, I had been suffering from a severe neck pain for about a week, yet no one had noticed my neck pain. Perhaps that person also has a neck pain? Or is their right ankle uncomfortable? Or are they colour blind? Their consciousness was entirely invisible, and we merely existed in the same space for a brief moment, by chance. So instead of the two methods I had initially planned — categorization and diagramming which is the tactics of commercial brands and S.I. — I began recording what experiences were shared between me and the visitors, and what experiences were not shared.

While conducting research on S.I. and the grammar of museums, I focused on the politics of purity. Purity is an economical and systematic language. Purity is exclusionary because it involves a process of selecting what is valuable. This pure image also helps us endure present difficulties by enabling us to dream. Melancholy for purity exists everywhere, and is found within myself too. Yet if this politics of purity becomes dogma rather than practice, it generates another form of power exercise. This was a major factor in the divisions within S.I.

But is poetry truly pure? Maurice Blanchot suggests that language (or any utterance) can't clearly explain something. Instead, it brushes against something outside of words — something that cannot be fully captured. On the other hand, structuralist linguistics said that words only have meaning within a system. Poetry seems to live in the in-between moments where meaning has not yet settled into something fixed. Still, those gaps can only exist because the system of language is already there. Poetry may try to transcend beyond the system, but it can never fully leave it.

So perhaps poetry is not some perfectly pure space outside everything. It seems quite liminal inside language where meaning slips, shifts, and becomes slightly unstable.

Within the world of representation, slippage, and the process of contact, appropriation functions as a fundamental act of participation. As previously stated, an essential tension exists between indeterminate language and structuralist linguistic systems. Appropriation is less a mere exercise of negative ownership than an attempt to alleviate this tension, a kind of survival mechanism. Much like how young children put unfamiliar words in their mouths, suck on them, and utter them aloud. If we understand appropriation as an attempt to expand the concept and engage with the external world, Debord's critique of the audience's passivity transforms into a question of the politics of the image: who decides what can be seen and heard, and who possesses the right to speak and feel?

A confined space and time of unknown duration, a bed frame without a mattress. On the empty headboard, the word “Culture” is inscribed in beautiful cursive. This scene might be the landscape within the locker each of us has been assigned. Yet these lockers do not open. Suddenly, the sound of a call bell rings out from somewhere. The consciousness within the locker begins to perceive its interior. The intermittent vibration may be more potent than a herald's trumpet from a distant utopia. For we have already experienced eating food, wiping our mouths, sucking our fingers. Amidst the call bell's ringing, our locked lockers brush against each other. Between our vulnerabilities and the slippery world, love resides amidst those ceaseless attempts.

Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London Continuum, 2008.

Rancière, Jacques. The emancipated spectator. Londen Verso 2008

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit Black & Red 2010

de Jong, Jacqueline. "Critic on the Political Practice of Détournement." Stedelijk Museum, 1962

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, Translated by Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.