Stills from Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

Events and Détournments. Keith Sanborn came by and screened “Can Dialectics Break Bricks?” a classic Situationist film by René Viénet and one of the few extant examples of détourned film. Keith is a scholar, curator, artist, media-maker and translator and he was the translator of the film. A bit about the event can be found here. For those missed the screening, the film can be found online at UbuWeb.

I invited Keith to screen this film because there was a thread in the exhibition that owed a bit of debt to the strategy of Détournement or was a nod to the Situationists. Carrie Cooperider presented My Romance by Gordon Lish: A Contradiction, a work-in-progress that used an old German comic book as the underlying structure upon which she created a “Western” where the action and story arc centered around the library in town and employed all sorts of literary references including Proust. Some dialogue:

“It’s Jesse James!!”
“The other brother of … Henry James!!”

My Romance by Gordon Lish: A Contradiction by Carrie Cooperider

The Correct Sadist by Terence Sellers, Interactive Version by Angelo Pastormerlo

Angelo Pastormerlo’s book/sculpture loosely recalled the sandpaper-covered book, Mémoires by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn. His transgressive book not only didn’t play nice with other books on the shelves, but it was a trick just to place on the shelf without drawing a bit of blood. Entry number 2 from Angelo was his typewriter sculpture Qwertesean Typewriter (shown below), a writing device which emphatically enforces the constraint of left-handed typing.

Qwertesian Typewriter by Angelo Pastormerlo