Detournement

Detournment; "short for: detournment of pre-existing aesthetic elements. The integration of past or present artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no Situationist painting or music, but only a Situationist use of these means.", Internationale Situationiste issue 1, June 1958.

Detournment could be said to be the opposite side of the coin to 'recuperation' (where radical ideas and images are made safe and commodified), in that images produced by the spectacle are altered and subverted so that rather than supporting the status quo, their meaning is changed in order to put across a more radical or oppositionist message. Such a pro-situ technique can be seen in action in the present day when looking at the work of Culture Jammers including Ad Busters 1 (http://www.adbusters.org/), whose 'subvertisements' 'detourn' Nike adverts, for example. In this case the original advertisement's imagery is altered in order to draw attention to said company's policy of shifting their production base to cheap labour cost third world 'Free trade Zones[?]'.

However, it can be a thin (or at least very fuzzy) line between 'recuperation' and 'detournment' at times, as Naomi Klein points out in her book No Logo. Here she details how Culture Jammers and Ad Busters have been approached (sometimes successfully) by corporations such as Nike, Pepsi or Deisel and offered lucrative contracts in return for partaking in 'ironic' promotional campaigns. She points up further irony by drawing attention to merchandising produced in order to promote Ad Busters' Buy Nothing day, an example of the recuperation of detournment (or of culture eating itself) if ever there was one.

(Excerpt from: Situationist International)

External Links

• sniggle.net: The Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia (http://www.sniggle.net/)