The Cavern of Antimatter: Giuseppe "Pinot" Gallizio and the Technological Imaginary of the Early Situationist International

Abstract

During its formative years (1957–1960), the Situationist International (SI) charted a paradoxical relationship between an enthusiasm for a technological future and a surrealist longing for the premodern. In the first installments of the Internationale situationniste, alongside articles by Asger Jorn, Giuseppe “Pinot” Gallizio, and others are several unsigned articles, most of which were written by the editor, Guy-Ernest Debord, advocating the “destruction of the subject” and the use of contemporary machines to systematize and consciously organize “what the Surrealists had still experienced as random, as the marvelous.”1 According to Debord, the surrealists originally provided useful insights in their indictment of bourgeois society but soon regressed into an occultist movement that failed to recognize the potential of modern “conditioning techniques.”2 As a response to such a deterioration of surrealism’s subversive potential and its cooptation by commercial interests, Gallizio’s “industrial paintings” were championed by Debord as a new technological form of creativity that would bring a fatal blow to the outdated avant-garde and that could be used to create liberating, transitory “situations” signaling the emergence of a revolutionary movement.3 By using “industrial painting”—as well as détournement and several other technological and scientific metaphors—Debord attempted to work through the influential practices of André Breton’s group, which still occupied a prominent role in postwar Europe.